wow-raid-guide
Latest
Raid Rx: Shaking the bad healer label
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand pooh-bah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. Not getting the respect you feel you deserve? Pickup raids passing on your skills and services? You ever wonder why that is? Even though healers are typically one of the most sought-after classes, it is incredibly easy to completely shoot yourself in the foot and get looked over. How exactly does a healer get labeled as a "bad" healer? A better question would be, how would a healer get un-labeled as one?
Raid Rx: Healing indecision
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand pooh-bah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. Heal the raid. How many times have you been instructed to do that by your raid leaders? What does that even entail doing? It seems like such a monstrous task to keep everyone alive. Especially for first time healers, it certainly is an overwhelming responsibility. I did write a similar piece several weeks ago that detailed what things to consider when healing. That was more of a micro-level analysis of my own personal decision-making when I was healing. One of the complaints was that it was still a little too advanced even for the entry level healer. I'll try to simplify it further by tackling a slightly related topic, which I call "healing paralysis."
WoW.com's Guide to Professor Putricide
Professor Putricide is the final boss in the Plagueworks. He's kind of the R&D guy for the Lich King's slime armies. If you recall from fighting Rotface, Putricide is the guy who's constantly screaming about what good news it is that the slime is working again. Frankly, I'm mostly motivated to kill the guy to get him to shut up about the slime. Putricide is a movement fight. There are a lot of mechanics that will require your raid to rapidly swap targets (to kill adds) and then not stand in stuff (most of the stuff you'll not be standing in is one variety of slime or another). It's not really much of a coordination fight, per se, because your tanks are probably pretty well-versed in swapping aggro back and forth. However, Putricide is going to put to the test your raid's ability to get on an add quickly. And not stand in stuff. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to Precious and Stinky
As you cruise to lay the smackdown on Professor Putricide and company, you will encounter two giant dogs. Yup, they look just like Gluth. These guys don't drop emblems, they don't have heroic modes, but they're difficult enough for many raids that they're worth a quick shout-out. We'll keep this guide short, though -- they're not terribly difficult. They just require a bit of management. Table of Contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to Valithria Dreamwalker
Valithria Dreamwalker is the easiest fight to DPS. No, really, it's amazing. Unfortunately, your success with Dreamwalker has almost nothing to do with your DPS. The basic premise of the Valithria Dreamwalker encounter is thus: She is being held captive by the bad guys. She's more than capable of getting herself free ... if only she weren't damaged. So your job is to heal her to full. But that's a lot of health, so she opens portals into the Emerald Dream so that your healers can juice up their own healing. Then, they heal her. Meanwhile, the rest of your raid kills a bunch of adds. Table of contents Composition General strategy Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to Blood-Queen Lana'thel
Get bitten. Savor the succulent flavor of your raid friends once every 50 seconds. Do crazy, sick DPS. Oh, and stay alive, 'cause this lady's got a lot of health. The Blood-Queen is a fairly unique encounter. The gimmick here is that Lana'thel will bite one of your raid members seconds after the fight begins. Doing so will turn that player into a vampire. Before too much longer, that person will feed on another, and then that person will need to feed. This horrible pattern of events will continue until everyone's a vampire. Like many other boss fights, Blood-Queen Lana'thel has an attack that can cause you to damage nearby allies. The range for this fight is 6 yards, but doing a range check for 10 yards is a good way to be safe -- there's plenty of room. Because of the need for distance, the best positioning for a caster is somewhere in the outer circle of the room. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to the Gunship Battle
Here's the quick summary of the Gunship Battle in Icecrown Citadel. You run onto the boats and grab your backpacks from the goblin. You put that in your shirt slot right away. (If you wait until you're in combat, you'll find yourself unable to put on the vital piece of equipment.) Some of your raid will get inside the guns on deck. And then the people in the guns blow up the enemy boat. A tank on your home ship tanks adds as they appear. When guns get frozen, an "away" team consisting of a tank, a healer and some DPS shoot over to the other ship. The tank tanks the enemy faction boss, the DPS kills the mage and the healer keeps them all alive. Rinse and repeat. Now, we will go into more detail. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to Lady Deathwhisper
Lady Deathwhisper is a two-phase fight. When you approach her in her throne room, you'll immediately note that she is standing on a stage. She's surrounded by a big mana shield. In order to get to her, you have to beat down that mana shield. When you get all the way through the shield, she immediately becomes mobile and starts to fight you. Of course, you don't get to remain unmolested when you're trying to storm her castle. As you damage down the mana shields, adds will be summoned on each side of the room. They need to tanked and killed in very specific ways, or else the adds will swam and destroy your raid. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to Sindragosa
The second you kill the two ice dragons after Dreamwalker, Sindragosa will immediately fly down into the pit to start the encounter. You don't have real long to set up your raid, so have your buffs, pots and order of operations all well laid out as soon as you approach these dragons. Sindragosa shares a similar feel to fighting Sapphiron back in Naxxramas, which is appropriate since they're both ice skeleton dragon wyrm things. Table of contents Composition General strategy Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to the Lich King
The Lich King is not only the titular character of this expansion, but is the ultimate raid boss in the Icecrown Citadel. Finally, after two years, members of the Horde and Alliance will have the opportunity to settle up their scores with Arthas. Befitting the final boss of the expansion's raiding progress Table of Contents Composition General strategy Abilities Other Resources
WoW.com's Guide to Deathbringer Saurfang
Saurfang is (more or less) a single-phase fight with only a couple of twists. Since Saurfang is a death knight, the encounter is flavored with lots of "close to death knight" abilities. One of these abilities are blood points. The more that Saurfang succeeds at certain abilities, the more he gains blood points. When he has 100 blood points, he gets to do special tricks. We'll go into more detail, but this introduction is a high-level overview. The other thing to keep an eye out for are Blood Beasts. These adds spawn periodically through the fight. They don't hit hard, really. However, each time they do manage to land a blow, Saurfang gets blood points. This is the fastest way for Saurfang to ramp up from "relatively weaksauce batting average" to "hits like a tanker truck on jet fuel." In order to handle Blood Beasts, you need to ranged kite them and focus-fire kill them as quickly as possible. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to Festergut
Now that you've conquered the tragic hero-turned-evil Deathbringer Saurfang, the path is clear for you to go into the Plagueworks. This is where some of the slimy, funky, icky creatures serving Arthas keep their truly hideous and nasty creatures. "Slimy" really is the word here, as the whole area just seems ... moist. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to Blood Prince Council
The Blood Princes can be a difficult fight for many raids, forcing folks to move, react and adapt throughout the entire fight. The issue with the Blood Princes isn't that the individual parts are so difficult. The challenge is that the Council is actually three different fights that swap phases according to which of the San'layn is empowered at the time. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to Marrowgar
If ever there were a boss just begging to be turned into a totally Camaro-awesome tattoo, it's Lord Marrowgar. Like an epic, multi-skulled skeleton made of bone and skulls and spikes, Marrowgar is hands down one of the coolest-looking mobs in the game. While the sophomoric "Dude, he's a bone guy with a bone axe!" revelation has me only a little ashamed, I nonetheless get a certain thrill up my spine each time I see him. Don't let Marrowgar's heroic mode intimidate you. Once you can master the Boned achievement, you are probably ready to handle his heroic mode. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to Rotface
Rotface manages to be both a DPS check and a coordination check in a single fight. This is because Rotface does things to your raid. The longer you let Rotface stack up these things, the more difficult Rotface becomes. The issue isn't necessarily that the damage increases the longer the fight goes on. The issue is more that the likelihood that something will go wrong increases the longer you have to endure the battle. It's therefore best to burn him down as quickly as possible, even while trying to handle the coordination elements of the fight. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
Spiritual Guidance: Shadow priest tips for killing the Lich King
Every Wednesday, Fox Van Allen locks the well-meaning but misguided Dawn Moore in his basement so he can once again take control of Spiritual Guidance. It's hard work undoing all the "good" that Dawn inflicted on his poor readers the weekend before, but he sure does his best. Hugs and sunshine are out. Plague and pestilence are in. Let's face it: We've all got Cataclysm fever. We've seen the images from the alpha. We've Googled it. We've YouTubed it. We already have the name of our worgen picked out. We want to live it. I'll be damned if this stupid Lich King isn't still in the way, though. We can't move on to Cataclysm until we beat Wrath of the Lich King, right? It'd be like trying to watch American Ninja 4 without seeing the ending to American Ninja 3 -- how in the heck are you going to be able to follow what's going on? So yeah, OK, you could maybe just click the fountain in Dalaran for the epic retelling of the story that Bolvar Fordragon asked never be retold, but we're shadow priests, dammit. We're going to do this thing right: through epic-scale face melting.
Raid Rx: The healing lead's check list
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. There have been moments in the past when I forgot to hand out crucial instructions. Several of these moments could easily have been the difference between a 2% wipe and a kill on a progression boss. Personally, I feel that I'm under extra pressure compared to other healers because not only do I need to look after my targets, I need to make sure the other healers have the right ones. Not only that, I have to come up with a variety of solutions against different boss attacks or phase changes to ensure things go as smoothly as possible. Too bad it doesn't always happen. Farm bosses that are taken down routinely can sometimes be challenging, especially when I forget to tell someone what to do. Granted, I normally expect healers to already know what their tasks are. What happens if I have new healers or someone in a different role? I need to make sure all the bases are covered.
Raid Rx: Are we focused on the right things?
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. The other evening, I had a conversation with a healing priest. She expressed some slight concern over the gems she was using. Turns out she wasn't happy with the current setup and wanted to tinker with it a bit more until she hit the right balance of stats. She ended up asking me how I gemmed my priest. I have to confess that I predominantly stick to intellect. Right when I said that, I immediately warned her that it may not be the best thing for her to do. Different healers are wired separately. There are advantages and disadvantages for leaning towards different stats. Last thing I mentioned was that stats wasn't the only aspect of a healer that needed to be focused upon. For whatever reason though, I kept replaying that conversation in my mind. When conversing with other healers in game or around the community, I notice that things like augments (gems and enchants) as well as glyphs are the most important things that healers are evaluated on. Applicants to a guild are scrutinized based on their choice of gear, gems and so forth. I can't seem to help feeling that something isn't right here. What is it that really matters?
Raid Rx: Fun Cataclysm healing talents added
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. Some interesting information has come to light over the past few hours. The one that caught my eye? Some new talents have been added and others have been removed. Chakra, one of the new talents that was mentioned during the priest preview has been included. I did manage to figure out what the talent was designed to do. When I read the talent, I began to really understand the ramifications of the talent. There are going to be some upcoming Cataclysm spoilers in the post. If you do not wish to be spoiled, then you'll want to stop reading.
Raid Rx: Bored of healing
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. Don't get freaked out just yet! I'm not actually bored of healing on my priest. But in the last week, I've tried to do a little bit of healing on my shaman and my paladin. The last time I tried to do it, I felt drowsy and nearly fell asleep during a raid. Unfortunately, these recent attempts proved no different. The Cataclysm changes can't come soon enough. While we're on the topic of healer boredom, Ghostcrawler (lead system designer or otherwise known as the guy who has the power to nerf and buff classes at will) happened to shed a bit of light on healing philosophy. It was about cooldowns and finding ways to make healing just a little more interesting. At first glance, how would you feel if Circle of Healing or Wild Growth had the internal cooldown extended to 8 seconds?
