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Hyperspace Beacon: SWTOR's tools of the raid
I've mentioned that I don't like the idea of judging other players by arbitrary numbers. It annoys me when a person is included or excluded from an event or guild simply based on something like gearscore or pure DPS numbers. However, the importance of these numbers shouldn't be undervalued in a game like Star Wars: The Old Republic. A couple of weeks back, I wrote an article about how the gear grind is "unfun." I don't like the grind, but I do like building good gear. I hate to admit it, but there is a little bit of min-maxer in me (just a little!). With SWTOR turning nine months old, many news and guide sites have settled into a routine. Surprisingly, the sites that I visited pre-launch are not the sites that I visit now. Now I am interested in the more granular sites that help me with very specific tasks of the game. Granted, I still visit Darth Hater and TORWars when I'm looking for news, but I have a completely different set of sites and tools for character building. These are the three sites I use almost daily.
The Light and How to Swing It: New tools for evaluating holy paladins
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. DPS classes have it easy. Their only goal is to deal more damage than the other guys. Their existence revolves around a single, immutable metric: DPS. There's no ambiguity when comparing two damage classes, as their DPS speaks for itself. As a DPS player's gear and skill improve, it directly increases their damage done, allowing them to evaluate their performance clearly and instantly. Evaluating a healer is much more difficult. As their group's damage and skill improve, their healing numbers will actually go down. Healers are relied on the most when a raid is attempting a new encounter and gradually become marginalized as the fight moves toward farm status. As a healer, your best HPS performance might be the very first time you down an encounter. If you're killing heroic Ultraxion in four minutes, your raid simply isn't taking enough damage for you to parse highly. In order to properly evaluate a holy paladin's play, you have to dig deeper.
