Dispelling

I’ve been having a look back over my posts over the last few weeks and it struck me I’ve not mentioned my primary topic; priests, nothing, nada, not a drop.  Possibly something to do with priestly ways being done to death by the blogsphere until the next patch drops, and possibly something to do with me playing alts more, and being generally slack…. so in an attempt to redress the balance a little, here we go, a post on dispelling for Shadow (and any other) Priests.

Dispelling (and decursing or curing poison etc. I’ve decided I’m going to use dispel from now on to cover every generic kind of ‘remove something’ simply for my sanity, don’t come whining to me ok… deal with it) like interrupts have made a bit of a resurgence since Cata, yes they were used in previous versions of WOW, but I can’t ever remember an occasion when they were needed so heavily.  Yes, back in the days of Molten Core and Lucifron as a mage(which I was at the time) you’d find yourself decursing 40 people.  Back when decursive was ‘legal’ you simply mashed the button 40 times and carried on.  Then it was outlawed and there was uproar; dispelling classes would have to do more than just mash keys, oh the pain!! to placate people (I assume, or perhapse they realised that, actually, selectively dispelling tens of people was quite hard, and actually VERY dull).  Blizzard introduced mass descurse/spell/poison Prior to Cata there was the occasional boss fight which required this, but it was occasional, and it was generally restricted to raids, not 5 mans, and you’d generally have a designated mass dispeller who did nothing but dispel.  In Cata, as a healing priest, I constantly find myself dispelling nasty crap, even on trash, to mitigate healing needs, there’s some quite nasty stuff which gets thrown about.  In Grim Batol, Throngus really needs to be dispelled, the end boss, Asaad, in Vortex Pinacle is one example who requires the use of mass dispel, and a whole host of others.

Gone are the days when dispelling was the sole responsibility of one unfortunate in a raid, and gone are the days when only the healers are responsible for dispelling.  I still occasionally see the ‘we always used to do it that way’ from the DPS, but I’ve found more and more that when I’m shadow, I need to dispel to help my healer out.  It’s quite polarising actually, the good DPS players tend to be those ones who know how to use their classes secondary abilities like interrupt, dispel, and to some extent crowd control (though most classes have had some form of crowd control for years so are generally quite comfortable with it).

I use healbot when I’m healing, binding my most used healing spells to direct mouse clicks, my lesser used spells with a shift-click and my dispel abilities an alt-click.  I replicate this across my alts, so on my druid my most usual heal is the left click, my ‘panic’ heal is shift right click, my dispel mechanic is alt-click and so on, this really helps (I find) with the muscle memory.  I used to disable healbot when I was playing DPS to give me more screen space, but recently I’ve kept it active so I can see when people need dispelling; if the healer is doing it (and not struggling) I’ll ignore them and melt away.  If we’re having problems then theres an easy indication both because the debuffs are highlighted and I can see peoples health bars more clearly. 
I’ve actually since re-skinned healbot so it’s not so big when I’m playing DPS, I still have all of the same keys bound so I can not only dispel, but also drop out of shadow form and start healing if I’m needed.
More generally, I’m not a big fan of mass dispel (in heroics) there’s for the bosses like Asad in Vortex Pinnacle where several classes can get out themselves, and anyone with any nouse is able to jump to avoid the debuff in the first place so dispel is simply used to pick up the stragglers.  In most other scenarios its simply a case of knowing the debufs that mobs dish out on knowing whether they’re worth getting rid of; for instance a melee speed debuf on a caster can be left.  This has got me wondering if there's any intelligence built in to healbot (or any other mod) or any other add to tell you if you really need to dispel someone.  I’ll have to break Google out when I get home.  Clearly in raids it’s a different story, its a case of choosing the most efficient method, be it mass or point dispelling. 

I think my point is, as a class who can dispel, you should always look to dispel, if possible, (and beneficial) whether you’re the healer or DPS; don’t assume someone else will do it, they’re probably assuming you will.  Know your debuffs too! know what might be coming, and be ready to deal with it.  Oh and when some muppet spams the DPS meter at you, spam the interrupt / dispel count back at them.

GTFO! nub.

I got summoned into a guild 25 man last week, they were a touch short again, and in a clearly desperate attempt to scrape the bottom of the reservist barrel they asked me along.  Cho’gall was the foe, a boss that has eluded the guild for longer than it should have done.  This is a completely new fight to me, I’d not even read the strategy, other than a cursory glance over the BoT boss list a while ago, as I hadn’t planned on being here any time soon.  I’d learnt from my previous mistake of unpreparedness, and had a stock of flasks, food and assorted other niff-naff to aid my performance.  A quick run through the strategy text on the guild website and a few pointers from the raid leader over vent (fortunately we were waiting for one of the raid to reboot from a crash so I didn’t waste anyone's time) and we were off.

I’ve, on several occasions in this blog, referred to my basic cookie cutter heroic strategy:

"don't stand in the crap on the floor or you'll die"

"sometimes the crap on the floor will keep you alive, stand in it"

"kill the adds please"

"if you can't kill it, kite it"

Cho’gall, conforms nicely to these rules, with one slight addition on positioning; when there are no adds you need to stand RIGHT UP his chuff, I mean really close, the whole raid; this is for interrupting the worship ability.  When the corrupting adherent add is summoned the raid disperses, nukes it and then forms back on the afore mentioned bosses chuff, burning down the rather nasty blood of the old gods adds which spawn from the corpse of the first add.

This quite often leads to a smear of raid members behind the boss, rather than a nice close group.  This makes interrupting rather difficult, but also means it’s particularly difficult to spot the assortment of nasty crap on the floor.  there’s also an abundance of crap spawning as you move to kill the adds, and move back the the boss which must be avoided; given the speed movement must be complete to be in position, this is quite difficult, especially when you have a high “i don’t know what I’m doing coefficient” multiplier…

After a couple of attempts, I was surviving till the wipe, or there about, but it was pointed out that I was getting hit by a bit too much of the crap on the floor, when one of the raid members pipes up “have you got GTFO?” I didn’t, nor did I even know what it was. turning to my trusty laptop I quickly looked it up, and decided it was something that I should definitely have a look at.  A quick download and relog and I was up and running.

GTFO is a very simple mod, if you’re familiar with the acronym, you’ll be able to guess what it’s about;  very basically it’s an idiot saver… If you’ve not noticed you’re standing in crap, it alerts you to the fact that you need to move with a rather loud klaxon.  Whether you’re the day dreamer type or the flustered not got a clue what's going on type being new to an encounter, or just need something as a backup just in case you miss some floor-crap GTFO is brilliant.

Not only can it give you an audible alert, if you use power auras, you can get further visible “GET OUT” messages.   And that's not all! as if that weren’t enough, it not only tells tells you that you’re in crap and need to move, it tells you if you’ve moved out of good crap and need to move back!  It EVEN lets you configure it to give different audible warnings for must move now type AOE, or low priority, finish your cast and then move type damage. 

Pure, pure, genius, I don’t know how I ever managed without it.  Clearly last week, my games room office was lit up with the sound of alarm bells which we more akin to what you’d expect to hear in a burning building; on my return last night, where I’d had time to digest what was going on and what I was doing, and compare that to what the strategy says, I was far better at avoiding the crap – I was generally in the right place at the right time, but even then there were a couple of reminder bells which saved our healers mana.  The icing on the cake was downing Cho’gall, a guild first (and my second guild first boss kill) not bad for a slacker casual who ‘doesn’t raid’…. ahem

SimulationCraft: What does it all mean??

It's been a pretty busy week on my blog, the busiest one traffic wise since I started spewing my ramblings onto paper (well electronic paper). My post on SimulationCraft seems to have struck a few chords so in an attempt to aimlessly chase ratings expand on my success I thought I'd have a stab at explaining what the actual results mean in plain English.

So you've read the idiots guide, you've ballsed up at least 5 attempts at simulating your characters DPS, you've gone back and read the guide again, read the official help files a bit, scratched your head a bit, and finally got some figures that look like what you've been reading on the interweb. Brilliant! You've got a page of completely incomprehensible maths, statistics and pretty graphs that'd look more at home on a PowerPoint at that next dull management meeting you were trying to avoid…

There are some figures that (may) make sense to you instantly; there are others that are best when compared to an average, or a target of where you want to be. If you're comparing something you need a baseline, for this example that's you! (or me as the case may be). For the record, I've run 5 different simulations; one with the ultimate tier 11, 25 man gear, with all the raid buffs and trimmings; one with the equivalent 10 man gear and the same buffs; one with my crappy heroic gear with all the same buffs and trimmings; one with (a slightly unrealistic) all the buffs and trimmings but with the target_level override set to 87 (i.e. a heroic boss), you'd NEVER get this amount of buffs in a 5 man as you simply wouldn't have the classes there required (you're pushing it for a 10 man); and then finally, a far more realistic 5 man scenario with just plain old Fort, Int, and MOTW (a reasonable assembly of buffs in my view), oh and replenishment as you'll be keeping that up at all times (WONT YOU?!?) as it's one of your main sources of DPS. The baseline scenario will be the final, and probably worst DPS(it's chugging away as we speak, so we'll see if my prediction shows me up to be the eejit you suspect me to be).

I'm setting the fight length to 350 seconds (nearly 6 minutes), 2 adds, Patchwerk style fight, and assuming you're the best of the best when it comes to mashing keys and given you (well me) an elite skill level – the trick is to only change one variable (or set of variables) at a time so the comparison has some meaning. As homework, I'll leave you to run your own simulation, with your gear, with a realistic skill level and fight scenario, I can't stress highly enough that stat weightings will vary massively depending on your ability (or lack of it), your gear, the number of adds, the type of fight, and a whole host of other variables, what is certain is the figures are a model (a model, by definition is an approximation, and only an approximation) of reality. Go read about statistical modelling in a text book or here on Wikipedia or somewhere else where stats geeks lurk.

Lecture over, and here we are, remember I'm using me as the baseline, the links to the full reports are at the end, I'll reference sections only, for comparison in the main text to keep my ramblings to sub War and Peace word count.

First of all, and the thing you're almost all certainally here for, the scale factors, or stat weighting s as they're sometimes known. You'll notice two values, a scale factor and a normalised value; the latter is the one you want, it simply skews everything so that it's a direct comparison to your best stat (Int) to make it easy(er) to compare one stat to another when you come to chosing your gear. I'll be posting some specific analysis on stat weights in my next blog so if you're still confused check back and I'll endeavour to confuse you more.

Int will always be best, if haste comes in at 0.5 and Crit at 0.25 it means that Int is twice as good as Haste, and Haste is twice as good as Crit (and thus Int is 4 times better than Crit). Put simply, if given those weights, you have a simple choice of a tunic with 100 Int and 150 Haste, you'd always chose the first one (but it's never that simple is it?).

Next you're at the charts, the damage per execute is a telling chart, if interpreted correctly; it's basically saying for the amount of time you spend casting these are the spells which do the most damage – i.e. devouring plague is an instant cast spell so does the most damage per cast.

Next is the damage source pie chart, you'll notice that mind flay is near the top in all, which seems counter intuitive given the last statement. But think about it for a second, mind flay is your filler when all of the other spells are on cooldown or waiting for procs, you're casting it for the most time, so it does lots of DPS, but bang for buck its lower than the others.

The other thing to note in these early graphs is the mana timeline graph, if you're going oom regularly, you're doing something wrong (or something right, i.e. emergency healing which is saving the wipe), I've heard a few Shadow Priests complain about mana issues, this should never be the case with any level of gear.

The most important graph in my opinion is the DPS scaling at the end, this basically says if you add 100(for the sake of argument, you could use any figure) of any given stat, what is the expected DPS increase? You'll notice for me Haste Crit and Mastery all look pretty much the same, crossing once or twice; for the best spec there's a far bigger difference as you follow the graph up with Haste becoming the worst and then the best and then the worst etc. as you go up. This is because of a whole heap of internal metrics (some of which we know about or can approximate, some which Blizzard keep close to their chests).

Notice on the t11 graph, Hit and Spirit have a scale factor up to 0 (i.e. if your gear was worse) and then abruptly stop giving a dps boost – this is the hit cap. Also notice for me, it's pretty much horizontal (at target_level 87) which means I'm over my hit cap for heroics (naughty me, I'll be remedying this immediately).You'll also notice, if you look at the 3rd scenario that my dps drops, even though I've got massive buffs, this is purely because of the hit cap dynamic, and is a good reminder to follow the basic principles that have been with us for all (well almost if you forget the last 3 months) of WOW - get hit capped first!

That's it for the basics, there's loads (and loads and loads) more, have a read, if there's anything you want me to explain (or make up on the spot) leave a comment, or email, tweet, or send a carrier pigeon. I'll be posting an additional blog on the differences of the stat weightings specifically tomorrow.



Report Download

Scenario 1 – best T11 25 man gear, all buffs, raid boss

Scenario 2 – T11 10 man gear, all buffs, raid boss

Scenario 3 – my crappy gear, all buffs, raid boss

Scenario 4 - my crappy gear, all buffs, heroic boss

Scenario 5 - my crappy gear, sensible buffs, heroic boss



 

Where do you get yours?

Whether you're new to WOW, been milling around Azeroth off and on for years, or a hardcore lunatic, there's one thing that's pretty much certain you'll have in common; at some stage (I'd guess pretty frequently) you'll need someone else's help or advice on something. This could be anything from not knowing there's an auto-run button, to working out where a quest item drops to finding the best in slot piece of gear for your class, and which mob drops it. Back 'in the day' of Vanilla WOW, you got a dauntingly thick 'manual' which was already 3 patches out of date and after a cursory glance was swiftly consigned to the back of the drawer (I know this because I've just binned mine after an office clean-out during a particularly dull conference call). Back when WOW was new there wasn't much in the way of internet information to be had, everyone was still learning the ropes and it was quite common to see questions in general chat asking questions which would have red hot scorn poured all over them nowadays should an unsuspecting newbie be silly enough to ask. The fact that people now (generally) know the game better, there's a lot more information available on the interweb, and the complexity of the questions mean that they're not as simple as the "where's Wailing Caverns?" you'd see in Barrens chat at least twice a minute. Trying to glean the finer points of DPS rotations from general chat is simply impossible.

I've (obviously) come back to the game and been playing for three months (is it really that long??) and am at a stage now where I'm comfortable, but don't claim to know everything that's gone on since I left and the thing that strikes me is the complete dearth of good information that's out there. Now I'm not saying there's no information, in fact, there's loads of it, my issue is that much of it is out of date, and not only out of date, but now completely wrong and misleading due to patch changes, some of it was never right in the first place, either just because it was incomplete, or a completely incorrect interpretation from the original author. It was pretty daunting for me as a priest, who'd kept an eye on developments, returning to the game to work out what was going on, for someone new to the game it must be near impossible, the learning curve is so steep I'd imagine a lot of players give up before getting anywhere near 85. Let me give an example, over the weekend I started mucking around with my Death Knight, I'd already fumbled my way to level 82 with him, in something akin to a spotty teenager fumbling with a bra strap in the dark, in order to do some mining for my priests Jewel Crafting habit. But I'd decided to give it a proper go, so first up I Google for "death knight levelling spec" which brings me to a site which states categorically that unholy is the way forward, I looked around a little more and found nothing to dispel this, so off I went looking for "unholy dps rotation" and various other connotations, which took bleeding ages. After a bit of messing around I decided that I wanted to do a few instances and I wasn't particularly enamoured with the potential 13 hour wait time as DPS so I collared the one of the guilds raiding DK's who'd just logged on and pumped him thoroughly for information. Turns out all three specs are equally as viable for DPS, the Frost spec that I'd read as being 'the only one' for tanking claim was complete arse, and I set off copying his tanking build from the armoury (after a quick lesson on ability priorities, apparently DK tanks don't do rotations, they have priorities – it looks like a rotation to me…I think they just want to be special). It turns out that most of the sites I'd visited were completely out of date, even though some of the (the tykes) had 4.0.6 in the keywords, it looks like these are auto generated to boost traffic.

So my question to you is how do you get your information?

My first point of call for simple information, the type that has a definite answer is friends or guildies, I'm not too bothered about looking like a nub, so I'm happy to ask in guild chat if necessary. That is providing it's not something you can get from wowhead, I'd be first to mock a "where's the Hyjal Guardians Quartermaster" as it's a simple search, but something more along the lines of "where in the interface do I change the contrast" which isn't such an easy question to Google is fine.

I use wowhead extensively for all quest, NPC and related information

Wow wiki for boss strategies, although I've been incredibly disappointed by how out of date, and badly edited / written, some of the pages are, even to the extent of having to edit them myself.

For the more 'fluid' questions of stat priorities playing styles and similar questions which don't have a 'binary' right or wrong answer it's a lot harder. Shadow priest.com used to get a lot of my time, it was always a bit of a jumble, but recently it's been horrendous, trying to work out what's relevant to 4.0.6 and what's now, whilst wading through threads of several hundred replies is painful. Tankspot and elitist jerks have filled a little of the hole left by shadowpriest.com, whilst they're not focussed entirely on Shadow Priests, they're generally pretty tidy and hold good information.

The official forums or right out, they tend to be full of guff; people who don't really know what they're talking about spouting their opinions as if they were fact. When someone who does know what they're talking about comes along they're drowned out by all the drivel.

And then there be blogs, since starting this blog I've got to grips with the blogsphere, I never really read too many WOW blogs before coming out of retirement, other than the trusty WOW Insider which was a daily haunt of mine, it took a little bit of getting used to, and I still don't feel totally 'there' but I'm slowly building up a list of authors who I 'trust' because of the continuing quality of their posts, I'm starting to feel I can take what they say as gospel (not that I ever would totally take something on board without checking, but that's just me). And even with these blogs, if you do a simple web search you can quite easily end up at an old post that is out of date (and now incorrect) with no way of telling whether it's correct or not.

All in all its rather difficult to find concise information which you can have confidence in nowadays, I have to say I've been quite disappointed with the amount of erroneous information that's out there, especially the occasional sites which are pulling nasty tricks with keywords to get hits; as a result I've made sure my tags are all up to date, and the permanent information pages which I'm writing (watch this space) to supplement the blog musings will be kept up to date (or at the very least marked as out of date).

Just what makes you tick?

As an ex guild leader, recruitment officer, raid leader, website admin, raider, and now just plain old run of the mill casual I've seen what goes on in a guild at pretty much every level, both publically and behind the scenes. Over the past three years or so I've been studying an MBA which looks at all aspects of business. This has been sponsored by my employer and has an obvious tie in with my day to day work but I've often considered that a typical guild structure mimics that of a corporation, not only that but the types of character, and more specifically leader match the people you meet in industry and the types of characteristics you find in people which makes companies or teams more likely to succeed, or fail, are almost identical to those you find in WOW.

I'm going to talk a little here about leadership characteristics (I don't necessarily mean an appointed leader, anyone can 'lead' something in a given situation) which make for success in any organisation (including guilds). It's important first to understand what the objectives are of an organisation; you may assume all commercial organisations exist solely for profit, and that may be true, to an extent, for some. But profit for who? The owners? The shareholders? What about the workers? They make a 'profit' of sorts in their pay packet every month. Even customers make a 'profit', when looked at in these terms, they are gaining some sort of benefit from being a customer there is value in this benefit to them (the reason they derive value doesn't matter, it just matters that they do). Charitable organisations aren't really interested in profit in normal terms; they are mainly focussed on helping their target area. Even culturally company's outlooks differ, Japanese corporations, for example often regard future growth as highly, if not higher, as current profit, whereas western organisations tend to focus heavily on the short term here and now, often to the detriment of longer term stability (incidentally one of the contributing factors of the current global recession). So actually when you look under the hood of what makes an organisation tick, it differs wildly. Being very generalistic about the objectives, you could say that any objective of an organisation is to give value to its respective stakeholders. Stakeholders are anyone who has a vested interest in that organisation, no matter what it is; value is whatever benefit they derive from being a stakeholder. For a shareholder in a big company it might be the yearly dividend they receive, it may however be the opportunity they get to turn up each year at the AGM and shout at the CEO, my point is it's down do the individual; as a WOW player, in a raiding guild, it might be the shiny purples, it might be the experience of raiding, it might be the social scene, it might be the fear of not playing (addiction) or a whole range of other reasons unique to the individual. As a leader, it is important to understand what makes the stakeholders tick (and it may change from minute to minute or year to year).

Once you understand what makes people tick (or at the very least what makes others tick is not necessarily the same as you), a leader can set about trying to lead. I'm going to draw heavily from a text book which I read cover to cover for my first ever MBA module, "Reframing organizations: artistry, choice, and leadership" by Bolman and Deal, it's a great read (if you make it through the first two chapters which are truly awful), if you're actually interested I'll link this and any other reference material at the end.

So, you know what makes people in your guild tick, you understand people have different outlooks on life, and you know these differing views will inevitably cause friction at some point, how do you go about setting up your organisation (guild, raid or even 5-man party) to succeed? Firstly ask yourself what does success look like, if it's a heroic party, it might be clearing the instance; it may however be simply completing the daily heroic requirement, skipping everything that isn't necessary, it may simply be the first boss because the party's been set up to get a particular piece of loot. It may be a combination of all three (and any number of other) reasons for each of the members, already you have a possible 15 permutations (from 3 'success' criteria and 5 members) for a simple 5-man, it's a wonder any part s ever successful! For a guild it's much, much, more complicated! Hopefully you're starting to see there is no one correct answer which suits everyone, and even if it did, it would change so frequently you'd tear your hair out. All you can hope to do is abstract a set of principles or goals which mean success and apply a general framework to achieving that. By abstraction I mean Bob wants epics, lots of epixxxes; Fred wants to be the highest DPS in the guild; Clare whose sole aim in life is to wear the Mantle of Nefarius can all be abstracted to complete Blackwing Decent 25-man by x date. The framework is the tricky part, how do you as a leader best lead? This is where I'm going to reference Messer's Bolman and Deal, they refer to "four frames" of which a leader can use to lead; structural, human resource, political and symbolic. Each of the four frames is better suited to some leaders personalities than other, each has its place and depending on the situation will become more important than others.

I'll describe the four frames briefly, but if you're interested go read the book referenced at the end (it's available to view, in part, on Google Scholar)

• Structural: the most obvious, it's about the organisational boundaries, chain of command and process, there being a set list or blueprint for getting things done. A good example of where this works is an army, in the heat of battle soldiers, no matter the rank, fall back on their highly structured, highly disciplined training.
  
• Human Resource: sounds a bit corporate dunnit? Not really, the HR frame focuses on how characteristics of organisations and people shape what they do. It's the 'most important asset are our people' mentality, whereas a structural organisation will have people doing things because "that's how it's done" a HR focused organisation will more likely have people doing things "for the love of the organisation" (i.e. their derived value is more than just the pay check at the end of the month).
  
• Political: it's not a dirty word, don't assume it's the negative aspects of spin and self-interest you see in the media. Viewing an organisation from the political frame simply means you're making decisions to achieve set goals whilst taking account of scarce resources and diverged interests. It's a balancing act of trying to satisfy the most people possible in pursuit of achieving your goals.
  
• Symbolic: this is often one of the most powerful (and possibly destructive) a symbolic leader can be extremely powerful in terms of motivating people, think Ghandi or Martin Luther King, people we willing to die for their cause. Symbolic gestures too are extremely powerful, I remember a story of a Chief Executive and Chairman (possibly Ikea, I can't remember the exact details) who would share a hotel room whenever they were away on business "to save money" now in the context of a multi-billion pound company, a £100 a night saving isn't great, but the symbolism of the gesture is immense. Similarly adverse symbolic gestures can be hugely detrimental, think about the bad press city bankers have been getting lately for taking huge bonuses when the tax payers across the world have paid Billions to bail them out.
  

No do something for me, try and think of one example of each of these frames have been applied in your guild, by design, or by accident – is it the structure of officers and raid leaders, the selfless help offered in gearing a member up to raid who's taken some time off or the GM benching himself for a raid because there are more people wanting to raid than there is space? Actually, I've only given positive examples, try and think of one positive, and one negative, and then try and decide whether the person(s) involved acted without knowing the consequences, or whether (in your opinion) they'd weighed up the pro's and con's and taken the course of action with full awareness of the consequences (probably best to keep your findings private, you might upset people if you post your examples on the guild forum – political frame and all that… :-)

If you're an experienced GM, raid leader, manager, or have had any other reason to 'lead' a group of people you've almost certainly recognised yourself in what I've said, perhaps more by accident than design you'll have done things which could be construed as fitting into one of the four frames. Whether you're a GM, raid leader, or just a standard player, take some time to think about what you and your 'colleagues' want from the game in any given circumstance, and try to work out the best way to achieve 'success' whatever success may be.

WOW is a strange animal, it thrusts people into situations, which in the real world they'd never dream of, yet they survive, and not only that, excel! How many people have managed a team of 40+ people? Not many, I've had a reasonably long career in industry, managing a variety of teams, and approached that number in a couple of occasions, but think back to Vanilla WOW I was regularly organising and running 40 man raids, as were thousands of others across WOW. Leadership, more importantly good leadership isn't about being the boss, or necessarily the one who gets all the credit, it's about getting more out of others than they thought they were capable of in pursuit of achieving the organisational goals.

Even as an individual raider in a group of 25 you can have a positive impact on the group as a whole, think about the symbolic gesture of passing on a bit of loot, even though you're top of the DKP tree, for a newer raider who's gear is far worse – the total improvement to the organisation is far larger, but the symbolism of you looking after the interest of the whole guild or raid won't be lost, others will take the example and act in a similar way.



Now the reference – the link to Google Scholar http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tsFj7wgczvYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=reframing+organisations&hl=en&ei=C9NbTdePMJKShAfJ7OXuDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA

Or the proper Harvard style reference for you more studious types:

Bolman L.G. and T.E. Deal (2003). Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass

Prime Position

One of the main aspects of learning to do heroics and rad in Cata is players' awareness of their surroundings and their positional play (i.e. not standing in crap). Now I'm the first to admit my positional play hasn't always been that good, not bad, but not as good as it should be, and I've made a concerted effort since I came back to sort it out. Those of you reading my last blog entry will know that I've rolled a druid alt for a bit of fun; now originally I went balance and restro for my specs as I've never really got on with melee classes, but last night I decided that balance wasn't the easiest way to roll a druid so gave it a go.

The first thing which struck me about running instances with a melee class (ok, I was supposed to be healing…) is that you instantly look up from your cast bars / healing addon, stop playing whack-a-mole and start to take notice of the world around you. I think there are two reasons for this; firstly, as melee, you're position for DPS / survival is far more important, you're far more likely to get tail-swiped, flame-breathed, or a multitude of other nasty's. You obviously need to stay in melee range, obviously, which is more difficult than staying in casting range, and your abilities may also depend on you being positioned behind the mob. Secondly, most of the main melee abilities (certainly of a druid, and a number of the other melee classes I've dabbled with) don't have cooldowns, there's a set priority of abilities to use, all of which I've been using in auto-pilot mode from keybinds, yes there are some big DPS boosts from abilities with longer cooldowns, but by definition, you're not looking down at your cast bar to find them that often.

Contrast this with my priest, firstly as a healer. First and foremost (in a heroic 5-man) I'm looking at the health of the tank, is it high enough, does he have a renew active, do I need to cast a direct heal to refresh it? Are the other party members healthy, if not can I heal them without killing the tank? Have I got Chakra up? Which Chakra state do I need next? Does anyone need decursing? WILL YOU PLEASE CLICK THE LIGHTWELL, which is the best healing spell, or combination of spells from the choice of 50-odd I have to use next? Hang on, why is my health bar dropping faster than Andy Gray's popularity with the ladies? Oh shit, I'm stood in crap….

With the shadow priest it's not quite as difficult, but still demanding, is SW:P up, does it need a MF to refresh it, what about DP and VT, do I have an Orb up to cast MB, is the mob below 25% health for a bit of SW:D lovin? Plus the numerous cooldowns that are crucial to maintaining DPS – I'm generally thinking at least two or three spells ahead at any one time.

Probably wrongly, traditionally the last thing on my mind has been movement. I put this down in some part to my past raiding experience back in the day; yes you occasionally needed to move to get in range, but it's rare as a ranged caster that I'd have been standing in crap, or had to move quickly, in any of the Vanilla WoW raid instances.

Where is this all going I hear you ask, well here it is, I've spent a couple of hours playing a melee druid in instances, and already I've noticed a marked improvement to my positional play and awareness of what's going on around me. I've only managed one heroic since then but even there I noticed my reaction times with the movement keys was a lot sharper. The moral of the story, well, if you're struggling with avoiding crap, or just general awareness of the world around you, why not roll yourself a melee class and see how the other side lives. It won't instantly make you pro, but it can't hurt? Can it?

Dispersing the Pain

After 4 days on the beer in Amsterdam my liver's about to give up and I'm sat on the ferry home feeling slightly worse for wear trying to pass the time with another blog entry to post when I get home and struggling for inspiration... dispersion would seem topical as I'd quite like the alcohol content still in my blood to do the same.

Dispersion is a funny kind of talent which is almost unique in the game, I say almost because there are a few others which have some similar uses; the mage ice block springs to mind, however, for me the ice block isn't anywhere near as versatile. Ice block is a pure 'oh shit' spell; you're about to die, or take some serious damage, and you hit it. Dispersion has this ability, and whilst it doesn't quite absorb all damage (only 90%) and doesn't remove DoTs, I'm struggling to think of a time when using it as a last resort hasn't worked. You might still take damage or have DoTs active but by the time its finished you should have been able to move to relative safety, something a frozen mage can't do, and got ready to heal or shield yourself if the party healer is otherwise engaged (assuming you're not healing).

The main drawback to dispersion is that you are almost entirely inactive for its duration, I say almost because you can do some useful things; as mentioned you can move to safety, or into position to continue DPSing or healing once the effect ends, you can also click a lightwell, or drink potions which may be the thing that keeps you alive.

One of the secondary benefits, after staying alive is the mana regen. Now as you can't heal or DPS, it's not your primary mana regen tool, but if you're in a fight where you know you're going to be scraping the bottom of the mana barrel and there's a phase where you'll need to move or you can't DPS, then it's the perfect opportunity to utilise it. If you think you might need it as a life saver then it's probably best to forget the mana regen and save it just in case; a dead priest is less use than an OOM priest.

The cooldown is pretty forgiving, so on longer fights you may get the chance to use it twice, in which case you're into the Dark Evangelism type dilemma of whether to use it early; I really doubt there's any place in the 5 man content where you should need to do this.

The final use, which I have to say is my most used, is mana regen between trash. It's a great way of minimalising downtime between trash, IF you're not within the cooldown timer of the next boss, and IF you're not struggling on the trash (if you need a full mana bar, or have been slapped by trash in previous pulls I'd keep it I'm reserve), and IF the other mana drinkers aren't sitting down to drink (no point using the cooldown if you're then stood waiting for others). If you chose to glyph dispersion you'll reduce the cooldown yet further and increase its potential use – as a shadow priest you definitely don't want to glyph this as it'll remove one of your dps increasing glyphs, as a healer you may want to consider it depending on your playing style.

As with almost every other spell in the priests armoury, it's all down to judgement, get it right and you'll improve your total DPS or healing, get it wrong and you'll lose DPS, or worse if you're healing let others die. On that note it might me an idea to announce via a macro that people won't be getting healed for 6 seconds if you are the designated healer so they can start thinking about keeping themselves up for the duration you're dispersed.

And there you have it, dispersion; from a ferry in the middle of the Channel, written on a HTC Desire (although edited at my desk before work), with a hangover.

Every Little Counts

When you know you're going to be tight on mana for a boss fight either because you're still improving your gear or the guys you're healing aren't capable of not standing in the crap, there are a few things you can do to help yourself out.

Making sure you have mana potions handy is the first thing to look at, there are a number of different favours useable depending on the situation allowing you to instantly recoup 10k mana with a Mythical Mana Potion, or 22k with a Potion of concentration providing you can spare 10 seconds to use it.

Look at the makeup of your group, a warlock has health stones which are a must, someone healing themselves is a mana saving for you. A shadow priest can help out with shielding and is far better equipped to regen the mana than you, arcane mages can buff your crit rating with Focus Magic etc. Aim to know the details of all of the other classes in the game and work out how you complement each other.

One thing which may not be so obvious for a healer is first aid, if you need a heal, but you're not desperate, then a bandage is a far more efficient way of doing it. Common sense needs to be employed, but there's definitely a time and place for bandages.

Now we come to pre-casting spells, I regularly do this and it can save around 10% of your mana bar. Lightwell is the obvious one, get this down before the fight and make sure it's well positioned. I generally follow this with a Renew on the tank, Chakra, Heal, Prayer of Mending and a power word shield for good measure. You can then sit down and drink as the tank pulls and be full mana before he takes any damage, it also gives you a little grace to get into position before the tank gets squashed. A word of warning, if it's a PUG, whisper your tank and explain what you're doing, there's no point doing all of this if the tank instantly charges in or sits there waiting for the spell effects to wear off.

None of this replaces players ability, and those players who don't take damage by doing silly things will always be easier to heal. As my year has got better I've found I need to do this less and less, but it's good to have it in your locker.

Cool(downs) and the gang

I've been putting together a compendium of all things shadoo over the last few days for a standalone page on the blog, which has taken far more time than I thought so rather than neglect the blog, I thought I'd plagiarise a section from it on proper use of cooldowns. There is no absolute answer here, use your common sense, for some fights where there is an enrage or similar, but for 'normal' circumstances this is the general guidance:

Dark Archangel gives a dps boost as well as mana, the timing of its use is entirely situation dependant. If there is no danger of you running out of mana, pop it as soon as you have five stacks of Dark Evangelism and reuse it immediately it comes off cooldown. If you are in danger of mana depletion, use this at around 80%

Shadow Fiend similarly to Dark Evangelism, this gives a reasonable DPS boost, and should be used as soon as possible providing you do not need the mana, should you need to extend your mana casting it at around 80% (not at the same time as Dark Evangelism)will ensure you don't waste any regen.

Mind Blast has been relegated to a buffing spell since 4.0 it doesn't do enough pure DPS to warrant normal rotational use, it does however provide you with a nice buff, Empowered Shadow, giving you 15% extra shadow damage, you should use MB whenever you have one or more shadow orbs up and the buss has, or is about to expire.

Dispersion is primarily a panic button spell, use it to stay alive. It also returns mana with the drawback of rendering you incapable of doing any damage for its duration, if you have to use it for mana, try and make sure all of your DoTs are renewed before casting it.

Shadow Word: Death makes it into this section because it has an artificial cooldown of sorts, you should only use it in normal rotation if you're running low on mana and its glyphed (it should be). Else it should only be used on a mob under 25% health, and not if it'll kill you.

Hymn of Hope & Divine Hymn should be used sparingly, if at all, they have long cooldowns and are purely situational, have them on the cast bar, but only use them if your party is in dire straits on the health or mana front

Class specific cooldowns (beserking for trolls) give a big boost, in my case haste and should not be ignored, usual rules apply on the situation, else it's as early as possible, try to combine beserking with other damage buffs as the increased haste gives a good multiplier.

WARNING ahead be beasties!

A funny thing happened to me last night, I decided pratting around on a low level alt was preferable to grinding herbs while watching the footy, and after a few quests I found myself in the dungeon finder for a low level dungeon. After about three seconds I was healing in Gnomeragon; my low level equivalent to Grim Batol, I remember many an evening wasted in this horrible place. As with all the low level dungeons it's a damn site easier than it used to be and we set of killing things.

About 5 minutes in we were jumping down to ground level to get to the first boss, if you know the place you'll know where I mean, when the shadow priest in our group hurtled past me and face planted into the ground. We pressed on to the first boss, without her as it's so easy, midway through the fight I noticed the same happened again. Third time lucky with the boss dead and we set off on trash towards the next boss where I noticed a funny noise… it was the sound of a wand being fired!! Looking round in amazement I saw a shadow priest with full mana waving their wand about! I have to admit, my mouse cursor hovered over the vote kick button momentarily, but then I stopped, and I'm glad I did; it's not like me to be quite so trigger happy so after having a word with myself I politely whispered the priest "can I ask why you're using your wand?" I was half expecting a "BECAUSE I R L33T" type answer followed by a torrent of abuse, but to my surprise her response was along the lines of "because I have one, is it wrong?" so a brief conversation later and she was sticking DoTs up properly and Mind Flaying away. We ended up chatting all the way through the instance where I found she was new to WoW (to the tune of 2 or 3 days), having moved from another MMO with her husband, both seemed to be struggling to get to grips with the deluge of information and things to learn.

This struck a few cords with me having recently returning to the game after a long absence, I felt overwhelmed at times, even finding where my mounts had gone, or where the guild roster had gone was a problem (why the hell was that ever moved of the social panel??? Nonsensical!). I still remember wandering round Silverpine Forest after I followed a friend to my first instance, not having a clue where I was or how to get home(no it wasn't last month).

We ended up staying in the same party (she was from a different server) and chatting some more and, I hopefully, gave her some pointers to getting to grips with the game, and I said I'd post a few pointers here as it'll help her out, and double my readership in one swoop, everybody's happy! I'm going to focus on priests, but I guess most of what I write will be applicable to all, here goes:

Starting Areas

When you first create your character you'll find yourself in a starting zone, this is a 'safe' area with low level mobs where you'll be drip fed your first few spells and abilities to help you learn the ropes. Depending on the race you choose you'll start in different areas so if you want to start with a fellow 'Newbie' from the very start make sure you choose players from the same race; if you're the same faction you'll be able to meet up later, but if one choses horde and one alliance you'll never be able to play together.

Zones

As a troll priest (hadn't you guessed by now?) I started in Durotar which has Orgrimmar, the main Horde city in the game to the North, if you start here you'll quickly progress to the Northern Barrens where the main town is the Cross Roads you will generally meet other Taurens. If you chose one of the other races, undead for example, you'll find yourself on another continent, it used to be the case that the quest chains naturally took you to the Cross Roads, but nowadays you'll get so much experience so quickly it'll be possible to skip the Northern Barrens all together.

Travel

You can get about the world in a number of ways, it's improved vastly from Vanilla Wow back in the old days, you can walk (clearly) or at level 20 (it used to be level 40) buy a mount to speed things along. Pretty much every outpost also now has a windrider which, once discovered, allows you to fly from point to point more quickly. There's also a Zeppelin (and sometimes boat) system at most of the major cities and ports which will let you move between the continents, generally the questing system will introduce you to these gradually, but I've found my level getting so far ahead of the quests I'm having to skip whole zones.

Levelling

You can gain experience (XP) to increase your level in a number of ways, the two main ones are questing and in instances (you'll also get quests to go to instances which give you additional benefit). You'll also get an XP boost from things like herb gathering, mining, exploring new zones and a number of other things, but I'd stick to questing and instances.

For quests stick to stuff which appear as green or yellow in your log, anything that's grey is too easy and will glean too little XP, anything which is red will be far too difficult. As a rule of thumb, if you can't kill three mobs simultaneously (from full mana and health) then you're probably in a zone which is too hard. If you're finding most of the quests are grey, look to move on to a harder zone.

Talent Spec

Specs have got a bit easier in my opinion since WoW, once you stick one point in one of the three trees available you're locked to that tree until you've spent 31 points. You'll get a new point every other level, or there abouts for the first few levels then you'll start picking up a point every level, you'll nicely get told of the new spells and talents available to you as you hit each new level.

The only real choice for levelling is shadow (you're not suck with this, and you can change at any time, plus you'll get dual specs which allow you to easily change between roles at later levels but we won't worry about that now).

There are a few mandatory choices in shadow, (actually there's a lot of mandatory talents), as a rule go for things which will improve the amount of damage you're going to do, some are obvious, some are not.

The main thing to aim for is shadow form, but before you can get that you need to open up the higher tiers by picking lower ranked talents.

I'd go for improved shadow word pain 2/2,

then Darkness 3/3, this will open the second tier,

next Twisted faith 2/2 this increases your damage and also converts spirit to hit. I won't go into the full reasons for needing hit here, but basically if you don't hit you don't do damage, there's little or no hit gear at low levels hence this is an excellent levelling talent.

Then improved devouring plague 2/2, this is a big source of damage and is important to have

You'll now have 1 point left to open shadow form, I'd go for improved mind blast
1/1, it's not a great damage spell any more, but it's useful for a buff it gives you when combined with shadow orbs (again more advanced than we really need to be going here)

This will give you shadow form with your next point, and you should have a tree something like this http://www.wowhead.com/talent#bZZG0Rd I'll leave the rest to you, the 'cookie cutter' DPS build for all shadow priests is http://www.wowhead.com/talent#bcZZGbGdMzrd0fo and if you follow this you won't go far wrong for levelling. There's a good guide to levelling builds and other stuff here http://www.wowwiki.com/Priest_builds if you want to read more

Spells and how to use them.

Make sure you always have Power Word: Fortitude and Inner Fire cast on yourself, for damage your main go-to spells for levelling at low levels should be Shadow Word: Pain, then Mind Flay – just repeat Mind Flay till the mob dies. At level 28 you'll get Devouring Plague, use this as your second spell in addition to the two above. You'll then get Shadow Word: Death at 31, use this to 'execute' mobs when they're low on health – be careful, if you use this and it doesn't kill the mob it will damage you too! When you get to 20 points in the shadow tree, you'll also be able to get Vampiric Touch, get it! This is another DoT and should be cast before Mind Flay as it does a lot of damage.

Stats

You'll notice the gear you pick up has different stats on it, some stats are better than others and some are no use to you what so ever, this differs from class to class, and spec to spec. As a Shadow Priest aim to get gear with intelligence, spell power (there isn't many items with spell power on any more), haste, crit and then spirit (in order of priority). Intellect is roughly twice as important as haste and crit.

You may notice that on your character pane you can expand the tab to till you your hit crit and haste percentages along with a whole host of other stats. You'll also notice that if you find an item at level 1 (for example here) with +10 crit on it it will make a huge difference to your crit percentage, the same item at level 85 would hardly be noticeable. This is called scalling as you go up through the levels you'll need more and more of a particular stat to keep the same percentage – don't worry to much about this for the moment, just try and get as much Int and Haste as you can

Tank? Healer? DPS? WHAT???

If you've ventured into an instance by now, chances are you'll know the difference, if not, you may not have a clue. Basically, there are three broad types of role for characters to play in WoW, all classes can be DPS foucssed, some can heal as well, some can 'tank' as well, some (Druids and Paladins) can do all three. This all depends on your choice of talents, and as a priest you have a choice of DPS or Healing. Now you've obviously been paying attention and have specced shadow haven't you? Good. This means you're DPS, at low levels you can still heal (yourself and in instances) but this will become less and less viable as you move up the levels. Tanks are there to stop us cloth wearers being squashed, if you're in an instance and you keep getting squashed, you either need to google "aggro management" or your tank is crap (or both). The healer is there to apply the magic ointment and tell you you're a brave soldier.

Monsters (mobs) and Elites

there are loads of mobs across WoW, keep an eye on their level (the number next to their picture which appears when you click them), in the same way as quests grey is too easy, and gleans no xp, green and yellow are killable, red is hard, a skull means you'll get murdered.

Look out for a metallic dragon round the picture, this means they're elite (much harder) there are different breeds of elite, bronze, silver and gold, each being harder to kill.

Guilds

Guilds are like minded group of people generally set up with a purpose in mind, some are real life friends, others objective is high end raiding, others levelling or more casual. Look on your realm forums, find one with an ethos which suits your objectives and apply to join, you'll get a wealth of information and knowledge from other players

Other Players

Thankfully I can say the majority of the WoW population are nice, friendly, people. Some however are, how shall we put this? well, arseholes. Because WoW is quite a mature game, most players know it inside out and true 'Newbies' are rare on established realms, this is one of the reasons Blizzard sets up new realms occasionally for new players, the dungeon finder circumvents this so you'll come across players on their sixth alt who expect everyone to be the same and won be very forgiving of mistakes. Generally if you explain you're new to the game, and need a little guidance they'll be fine and help out, occasionally you'll encounter idiots who'll be abusive. Remind them, they were there once, it's just like learning to drive…. It's easy once you know how. Forget about them and move on.

Trade Skills

You can do a whole host of secondary 'stuff' in WoW, if you're out to get involved in everything then trade skills are the thing for you (you can have two primary proffessions), some go well together like herbalism and alchemy, others like enchanting are stand alone. You can level without these and pick them up later, or you can start early. Read up on them before making the choice, some of the assumptions you might make about certain skills will be incorrect. http://www.wowwiki.com/Profession is a good place to start.

Addons

Addons are a big part of WoW, Blizzard has now incorporated most of the good functionality into its standard UI, given how much you need to learn, I'd ignore addons completely until you reach a higher level. Curse gaming (wow.curse.com) and wowinterface (wowinterface.com are the two main sites.



Further reading and searching

http://www.wowwiki.com/Newbie_guide

http://www.wowwiki.com/Starting_a_priest

are both good links to read

WoW Insider is an excellent blog site for everything WoW http://wow.joystiq.com

www.shadowpriest.com is for higher levels and is very in depth

www.elitistjerks.com is another good one for all classes

if you're struggling just head over to google and stick in a search, be careful of the crap from previous releases which are out of date, I tend to start all of my searches "wow cata 4.0" and then whatever I'm searching for, for this reason.



And that's it, I've intentionally skirted over lots of stuff so as not to (overly) confuse, there's lots more to learn than I could ever hope to write here, use your initiative and take time to read around areas and ask friendly players who you've met on the way – they don't bite. If you've found this useful, have questions, or would like to see more detail on anything please leave a comment or tweet me @wow_PFtT. Above all, Have Fun!

Suicidal Tendencies

Spirit of Redemption is a strange talent, I'm not aware of any other talent in any tree of any other class which is similar. It gives you 15 seconds of unlimited healing upon your death (21 glyphed). Why would anyone in their right mind spend a precious point on a talent which is only useable when you're dead? Well I did! And here's why:





In my view there are two reasons why you would spec SoR

1. You're general awareness is pants
   
2. You're general awareness is excellent
   

Now the more mathematically inclined amongst you (possibly statisticians, I don't know) may point out to me that my two reasons encompass all players, not so. The middle ground of not being pants, but not realising quite how SoR could be employed exists, here's a nifty little diagram to summarise my thoughts.

It's not so cut-and-dry, I suppose what I'm saying is all pants players will need it lots, because they've done something silly which has killed them, generally this will result in a wipe, but sometimes it'll be just enough healing to let the group kill whatever needs to be killed. Average players, where most of us sit, will drop the ball occasionally and do silly things too; the more you progress towards the middle ground the less you die, the less you need it? True. And the same has happened to me over the past few weeks, I've considered dropping SoR, but then a funny thing happened to me, we were Fighting Lord Walden in SFK, and I was completely out of mana, all my cooldowns were gone and I'd even popped my mana pot (can you tell the fight was going well?). Four of five of the party were alive and Walden was sub 5 % health, as were most of the party, when the green Toxic Coagulant debuff pops up. Veterans of SFK will know this means move around quickly or die (in fact I quite expect to get several comments of purely qqqqqqqeeeeeeeqqqqqqq just from the natural reaction to strafe at the mention of the green nastiness). Instead of my natural reaction to move immediately, my hand froze; I'm not sure this was intentional at this point or just an admission of defeat, moments later I was in SoR form and healing away again the part were back up to fullish health and Walden was as dead as a manic depressive Warlock with a haste buff. The logic is quite simple, commit Hari-Kari, incur a repair bill and have a chance of killing the boss, or don't do it, definitely incur a repair bill and wipe the party. If I haven't upset those statisticians too much to have left by now, they'll point out that this is simple game theory, which can be explained by a two by two matrix (the MBA graduates weapon of choice)

	Best Case	Worst Case
Suicide	Death & repair bill + loot	Death + Infinite repair bills (more subsequent wipes)
Don't Suicide	Death & repair bill + loot (kill it next time)	Death + Infinite repair bills (more subsequent wipes)

Admittedly you might wipe, reform, and kill the boss next time, but chances are you'll have at least a couple of attempts before succeeding, or calling it a night. Worst case scenario is no worse than not trying it. So in my view, it's worth a shot. I've employed this tactic on two or three occasions since to good success, there's a time and a place for it and it won't always work, but what have you got to lose? That's right, nothing. There are plenty of bosses in Cata which give you the opportunity to do this, so bare it in mind as a last resort. Don't expect to get thanks for doing it, people will just assume you died, so make sure to brag about being better than them if it comes off, or alternatively just keep quiet and sit back with a smug smile on your face knowing that you rock.

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?