Little Black Book

I've been running heroics now for a good few weeks with more and more success, still having great fun, and getting up there on the gear stakes, yet there's still something still bothering me; I can't for the life of me remember strategies for bosses. This isn't so bad when I'm with guildies and it's a simple case of asking for a reminder on vent, generally I'll have recalled the strategy by the end of the first sentence and we'll be off. With PUGs however it's a different matter, it's far slower explaining strategies using text, and I feel a bit slack having been to a place several times before and still not remembering how to do things. I generally have a second computer on the desk next to my gaming pc (I work from home now and then the study doubles as a games room and office) so this has led to me scanning through wowwiki as the party approaches a boss. Not a great issue you might think, but it still leaves me feeling I'm not exactly pulling my weight on the trash, especially as some of the strategies on there are not exactly to the point, or even correct in some instances (I know, I know, it's a wiki, I can edit it… I'm lazy, deal with it )

Back in the day (I'm in danger of getting nostalgic all over again…) when we were running Molten Core, I never had this problem, I'd know exactly what each class should be doing for every boss at any given moment, not a small feat when you consider there were 40 players, so why's it such a trouble now. I'm the first to admit, my short term memory is abysmal and was chatting about it with one of the guildies on vent one evening as I was kicking back and relaxing levelling an alt. He piped up that he used a little roller-deck next to his PC with prompts for each boss. After the initial mocking from all and sundry listening in died down, I realised that this was pure genius, it also struck me why I used to know each MC boss off by heart; I used to write the boss strategies, in conjunction with one or two others, for our guild website. First think I was taught at Uni was writing notes helps commit things to memory, even if you never look at those notes again.

Out comes the A4 notebook, with a double page assigned to each instance, and separate columns for dps healing, and plenty of space left over for alts, each time I've been to a boss since I've added the strategy in troll-short-hand along the lines of "don't stand in blue fire" "move out of laser beam" and "big AOE heals at start of phase 2" etc. Anyone else reading it might think its utter gibberish, but the very act of writing it means I hardly ever now have to even look at my own notes, and when I do it's a 5 second job as we recoup mana and buff up.

Such a simple method and so successful, I'd be interested to know if anyone else suffers the same affliction, and how you deal with it?