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1. Just stop healing. This may sound silly, but in my time in the Raid Finder on my hunter, I’ve seen a number of restoration shaman just set Healing Rain and then not cast another spell for the entire duration of the spell. You have a healing arsenal for a reason. Chain Heal, Riptide, Greater Healing Wave are all there to be used, not to just look pretty. If you want your group to survive an encounter and not just be so much adventuring good on the ground, please just heal.

Nothing makes you look like you don’t know what you’re doing more than sitting there doing nothing at all. It also makes it very likely that if there is a wipe or a lack of healing, you’re going to get called out on it. Logs that show up on World of Logs, death reports from addons like Death Note, and other sources can very quickly identify when you’ve been sleeping on the job.

2. Pull bosses and trash before the group is ready. This is something I’ve noticed a lot of random restoration shaman doing in the Raid Finder lately. Yes, we are capable of casting Lightning Bolt even when in healing spec, and sure, we use it to regenerate mana with Telluric Currents — but not when your group isn’t ready. Attacking mobs, bosses, or otherwise engaging an encounter is just a big no-go.

Be patient! Wait until your group and especially the tanks are ready to start the fight. You may be ready to go, but what do you think takes longer? Waiting to pull the boss or recovering from a wipe when you pull too soon? Like I said, I know it sounds like a no-brainer, but I’ve seen it happen way too frequently as of late.

3. Stand in the bad. Again, something one would normally consider a normal thing that everyone does, but I’ve seen a lot of restoration shaman lately just sort of sit in bad stuff in the Raid Finder. I see them focus healing themselves to survive damage, but it’s still something you shouldn’t do. While you may survive, there are damage mechanics that do things like up boss damage, heal the boss, or can cause spillover damage to the rest of your group. Sure, it’s an easy way to pad your own numbers, but for every heal you dump onto yourself, you take one away from the rest of the group. It’s a needless waste of mana and a needless way to risk your own life.

If that weren’t enough, I’ve seen these very same people yell at other people in their group not to stand in the bad. Sure, no one should stand in damage effects unless the fight specifically calls for it, but yelling at other people when you’re doing it yourself is just bad form.

Cataclysm: The age of integration

Death knights, to put it lightly, didn’t have a huge part in Cataclysm itself. For the most part, we may be able to assume that most death knights stayed in Northrend to help with containment and cleanup of the last of the Scourge, but of course, we don’t see any of that. We have been told that the Ebon Blade, along with the Argent Crusade, is keeping an eye on Sylvanas, but unfortunately, they don’t take much direct action as a group.

Luckily, we’re not left bereft of any death knight development. Two of the more prominent death knights, Thassarian and Koltira, are now generals in their respective factions’ armies and have come to clash at Andorhal. This, at least, implies a certain few things about the status of death knights in Horde and Alliance society.

It is certainly true that death knights were noted as barely trusted in the Wrath era, but in Cataclysm, we see two death knights as generals at the heads of rather important armies at Andorhal in Western Plaguelands, and there’s no sign of dissension or distrust in their ranks. While there’s always the chance of small pockets of people who still hate the death knights for their ties to the Scourge, the death knights’ actions in Northrend seem to have essentially earned us some amount of respect and trust among our faction.

Lich Queen Rising: Death knights vs. Sylvanas

Of course, possibly the biggest story hook for death knights comes at the end of the Andorhal quest line. Thassarian and Koltira, acting in remembrance of their brotherhood as members of the Knights of the Ebon Blade, have been trading truces and peace agreements to allow each other to rest up, fight fresh, and fight fair.

Sylvanas, as one might expect, is having none of that, and captures Koltira in some kind of controlling spell, prompting Thassarian to vow to rescue him. This, of course, brings up quite a few questions. Will Thassarian be joined by others of the Ebon Blade? Will there a split between the Horde and Alliance death knights, in which the question of whether death knights are ultimately more loyal to the Ebon Blade or their own factions is called into question?

Pretty much no weapon model in the history of World of Warcraft has affected me like Ashkandi, Greatsword of the Brotherhood has. To me, it’s emblematic of all that I love about Warcraft’s model design — excessive, bold, imaginative and evocative.

From the moment my guild first started running Blackwing Lair, I wanted one. I ended up getting a Sulfuras instead, which is certainly a fine weapon in its own right, but as much as I liked Sulfuras, I always knew I was making the logical decision (take the one that drops first) over the one my heart wanted (wait for Ashkandi). Years passed. We moved out of BWL and into AQ, then Naxx, and then The Burning Crusade launched. No model could replace Ashkandi in my heart. The Gladiator sword, Despair, Cataclysm’s Edge, Apolyon, The Lionheart Executioner — all fine models, all solid weapons. None could take its place.

Ashkandi became more than a weapon to me, a symbol for the game itself. The impracticality of the model only endeared it to me more, the narrow blade exploding outward past the ridiculously elaborate hilt. When Cataclysm launched and I heard that Nefarian would return and he would have a Reclaimed Ashkandi on his loot table, I was at first ecstatic and then demoralized. The Reclaimed is, well, far more practical. The blade isn’t so ludicrously broad and long, the hilt looks strong enough to take the stress of use. In general, although you can clearly trace the line of descent between the weapons, the new Ashkandi didn’t reach me. And so I returned again and again and again to Blackwing Lair over the course of the years I’ve played it, seeking Ashkandi.

Some people collect pets or mounts or both. Some love achievements or holidays and world events. Some people hoard all their old armor sets or weapons. For me, it’s always been swords. I keep other weapon models, but I love swords, and for me, Ashkandi is the sword in World of Warcraft. Sure, there are other awesome swords, other swords with amazing lore, epic quest lines and big chunks of WoW history, and I love all those swords too. I kept my Quel’Serrar and still have it in my bank, not Void Storage, so I can take it out and use it whenever I want. I’ve got a Jin’rokh, an original OEB, a King’s Defender and a Spiteblade, and countless other swords I love and use.

But for me, all these swords are like the knights in a king’s court, there to provide context and reflected glory for the king. And the king is Ashkandi, and it always will be. Because I still remember the first time I saw it and said wow without a trace of self awareness or irony. I still remember that fresh wonder, reading the flavor text and realizing that this was Anduin Lothar’s sword. The Brotherhood in question is the Brotherhood of the Horse.

I wouldn’t be writing lore articles for this site if not for the interest in finding out who these people were that Ashkandi gave to me. It’s more than a weapon to me. It is World of Warcraft. I don’t know if anything has given me greater satisfaction in-game than being able to use this model, and frankly it’s made transmogrification my favorite feature of the game, because I will be able to use Ashkandi forever. This sword deserves to be gripped in a fist, not dusty in a bank somewhere. As crazy as it sounds, this mass of pixels that anyone who kills Nefarian enough time can pick up is strangely personal to me. It’s not a legendary, but that just makes it better in my eyes.

When I moved in with my father, part of it was a genuine interest in reconnecting with him, and part of it was a keen desire to help around the house and simply keep him company. My dad turns 83 this year, although you couldn’t really tell that from looking at him or talking to him. He grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere, worked for Dow Chemical for an extraordinary number of years, retired, and somewhere in between had two marriages and five children. (I’m one of the products of the second marriage.)

He has seen quite a lot in his life. He saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarves when it premiered in theaters in 1937. His first car was a Model-T that he dug out of a neighbor’s manure pile and inexplicably got running again when he was 14. He served in the military as a paratrooper, worked with some of the first computers in existence, and can fix just about anything I bring to him, regardless of how technologically advanced the thing is. He hasn’t grown old so much as he’s watched the world get older around him and adapted to it as time goes on.

And yet I still have this terrible reticence about trying to explain to him exactly what it is I do on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday evenings, and what I do for a living.

A Sunnier Bear had an absolutely lovely post about this in which she talked about her own experiences explaining WoW to her family, who not only follow her progress but follow her on Twitter as well. While her family doesn’t quite get all the nuances of playing the game, they know enough to ask her questions and they actively try to understand what she does with her free time. And that? That is a pretty cool thing to have, right there.

In contrast, I don’t talk about my gaming with my family too much. They have a brief understanding of what I do, but I don’t go into details all that much. I believe I coined the term Computer Thing for raiding with my Dad; when I moved in, I explained that I had things I did on certain nights, and when he asked for clarification, I said I was doing computer things with friends. As time went on, I explained a bit more about what I was doing, how it was a game, but a game with 24 other people all working together. He thought it was a neat idea but left it at that.

When I got the job here at WoW Insider, it required another explanation of sorts. This time, I explained that the computer things that I did three times a week with friends involved a game with a big old, huge story and a lot of books behind it, and I was going to be writing about that story. On the internet. For people to read. I don’t know if he got it at the time, but he was delighted that I was writing and getting paychecks for doing so, as he used to write when he was younger (when he wasn’t digging old cars out of manure piles).

My brother and my sister don’t quite get what I do, either. They understand I write about video games, but neither of them play, really. My sister has a family of her own with four boys to take care of, so there’s little time for video games. My brother works long hours at a job that pays relatively well, and he doesn’t really feel the need to play games like WoW when he’s done at work. Usually he just watches movies or something along those lines.

All classes have their secrets — their little tricks of the trade that are passed from player to player in the hidden hangouts of the class. I can imagine the warlocks in their lush boudoirs explaining to eager-faced new ‘locks about the real benefits to the succubus. Or mages in their mirrored enclaves admiring dresses and explaining to stricken young mages the real benefits to sheep.

Hunters are no different. When we gather in the wild, high places of Azeroth, we pass our own tricks around the campfire, the secrets that let us survive to see another boss.

Many of these tips are not specific to hunters, and every class could benefit from what we have learned the hard way. These are deeper truths and mechanical tips we’ve learned through the specific roles hunters often fill or through the hardships of our class design. In the interest of inter-class cooperation, we now share five of these secrets with you.

1. Kiting
Pro Tip: Just run away.

Since the vanilla days of General Drakkisath, hunters have been the go-to class for kiting situations, and we have perfected this delicate art. To be sure, we have some tools to enhance our ability. We have a slow trap and a slow shot that works on most non-boss mobs. We have a speed boost that dazes us if we take a single point of damage and thus is usually impractical.

But here’s a secret to hunter kiting: Most of the time, all we do is run away from the bad buy. Really. We’re flattered that you always ask us to do it, but really, in most cases anyone could manage it. We don’t really understand why you don’t feel like you can do it yourself. Just keep some DoTs up on the target or fire off an instant or two while you’re running (jump-shot is also just as simple as it sounds), and run away from the bad guy.

2. Damage reduction
Pro Tip: Use the secret damage reduction ability with no cooldown.

When it comes to damage reduction in raids and dungeons, common wisdom holds that hunters have the worst damage reduction abilities. This is not true. In point of fact, we have access to the very best one.

On the surface, it looks like the only damage reduction ability we have is Deterrence, and half the raid damage mechanics these days just ignore Deterrence. But we actually have become incredibly skilled at using a much better ability that has no cooldown at all: the movement button.

Whether it’s your mouse or the keyboard of a voice-activated “GTFO of the fire!” command, the most powerful damage reduction ability in the game is to suck it up and just move out of the way, even if that means interrupting a cast (which, admittedly, we don’t have to do — ever).

Certainly there is unavoidable damage, and we’re jealous as all heck about all of your awesome damage reduction talents and abilities that actually work — but we think that too often you lean on those abilities when you really should be using the move-out-of-the-way ability instead. When the basics are all you got, you learn to appreciate them a lot more.

Who are the “greens,” the shining emerald jewels of the posting community on the official World of Warcraft community forums? How does one go from being, say, Eldacar the PvP enthusiast to Eldacar the forums MVP, who recently unleashed a volley of questions on the current state of WoW PvP that gathered a virtual storm of opinions and insights on the official PvP forums? Who is this guy, and why is everything he posts on the forums in bright green letters? Here’s your answer — the scoop on a green straight from one of the blues, Blizzard Community Manager Jonathan “Zarhym” Brown:

“Eldacar’s posting style and contributions to the community first crossed my radar during Cataclysm beta,” Zarhym explains. “He had created some very useful guides on the beta forums detailing good feedback and bug reporting etiquette. I stickied his information and had brief contact with him via email and in the beta around that time.

“In the fall of 2011, once the community team solidified plans for expanding the MVP program, his name popped back up in part because of some PvP-related posts he was working on,” he continues. “I really make an effort to try and hang onto the names of constructive, eloquent posters — whether or not they’re critical of some of Blizzard’s decisions. The MVP program is really meant to be a reflection of the diversity within our community. Its members are just a collection of folks from the community who are embraced by their peers for their knowledge and personality, to the extent that we want to give them official recognition. I think Eldacar’s a damn fine example of this.”

A “damn fine example”? Frankly, we’re with Zarhym — Eldacar’s thoughtful approach and obvious passion for his subject matter made trumpeting his recent call to arms for player feedback a no-brainer. So who is this guy? And how’d he get so damn fine, anyway?

Main character Eldacar
Guild Martha Stewart
Realm Boulderfist (US)

WoW Insider: Are you an old hand in Azeroth, Eldacar, or is your forum MVP status riding on a wave of a more recent involvement with the game?

Eldacar: I have been playing WoW continuously since a few months after launch, although I did take a five-month break during The Burning Crusade while I was deployed to Iraq. [My guild] is a small, PVP-focused guild that has been around on my server since vanilla. I actually became friends with the guild and its members by fighting against them back at level 60 (I was Alliance at the time) and developing a relationship of mutual respect with them.

It is hard to say what led to me being invited to the MVP program; only Blizzard can really answer that. [Editor's note: Psst, Eldacar -- according to our intro here, Blizzard's done exactly that.] However, I have always tried to be a constructive and helpful forum poster. I maintained two sticky threads during the Cataclysm beta test in the general discussion forum; one was a list of all the content that was currently available for players to test, and the other was unofficial patch notes, which I did my best to update with each of the 30+ patches. Both of those took a lot of work to maintain throughout the course of the beta.

In the last year, I have spend a lot of time writing PvP-related guides and other informational posts such a guide to how resilience scales, a breakdown of all the currently announced PvP content coming in Mists, and an FAQ for the season 10-to-11 transition. Most of my recent work can be found on my website, which is a WoW PvP blog I made primarily as a repository for all of this stuff I was already writing.

World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music, fan fiction and more. Sample the whole spectrum on our Arts and Crafts in WoW page.

I love putting out a call for submissions because I get bombarded with some of the coolest stuff in response! It seems that dolls and plush toys are in abundance this season, including the sweet duo pictured above, created by Layla Rei. Layla’s no stranger to creating dolls; her deviantART gallery has dozens upon dozens of delightful, whimsical creations.

It’s the tiny little details that makes them so utterly charming. The button eyes remind me of Coraline, and come on — how could you not love that goblin and those goggles? But here’s the kicker behind all of this: Leyla doesn’t play WoW. Instead, she created these dolls and others for her sister who does play. For someone who doesn’t play the game, Leyla’s got a wonderful grasp of the whimsical feel of Warcraft … and she was more than happy to sit down and chat with us about her delightful creations.

World of WarCrafts: Hi, Layla! Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started with crafting.

Layla Rei: Well, my name is Julianne Taylor, but my gaming/online persona is Layla Rei. I was brought up with games and art/crafts, so of course I would grow up making gaming-inspired crafts. I come from two very artistic and supportive parents. Really, my whole family has an artistic flair about them. I tend to love to try new types of crafts, which makes me a jack of all trades … but a master of none. I use to go through cycles where one month I might be into drawing/painting … then sewing … then maybe chain mail, but lately I’ve stuck to making dolls.

I use to make costume wings for adults for cosplay, and I’ve made costumes for cons I’ve gone to and even for a lot of the people that attended my pirate wedding! I’ve done a little bit of art in college but most of what I do is self-taught. I’ve always have been making something — some of my early memories are of my dad teaching me how to do watercolor trees and thinking back I was a little young to be trying to make skillful trees like he wanted!

You’ve said that you don’t play WoW — so how did you get the idea for the dolls?

As a gamer, you make this character and you play it through it levels and you get attached to it. You think of a story that goes with it. You might draw it or commission someone to draw it for you. It becomes a hero, maybe. I started out with making my Layla Rei doll — though in the MMO that I play, she wears more clothes!

My mom is one of my biggest fans and loves little Layla and suggested I make my sister her character for a gift. Since then, every gift to my sister has been a WoW doll because she loves them. I have a list of her characters, and when it’s time for a present, I pick off that list. I’m one of those people that rather make presents then buy them for people, because that just makes it unique and what better gift than to make my sister’s character come to life.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

I love fury. I raided in vanilla WoW with a two-handed fury DPS spec and also tanked, because everyone who played a warrior tanked back then. I tanked with a fury spec that worked very well for threat generation, but I eventually switched to an arms/prot spec for the Mortal Strike debuff.

When Titan’s Grip was announced for Wrath of the Lich King, everyone who knew me knew what my reaction would be. TG fury became my DPS spec of choice until I became a main tank for my Wrath guild, and it has stayed my favorite spec throughout the talent’s existence. Even now that I raid as arms DPS, fury is technically my main spec and arms my secondary. I even applauded when Single-Minded Fury was announced for Cata because I knew a lot of fury warriors missed the one-handed weapon playstyle.

At present, this is all moot. Both SMF fury and TG fury lag well behind arms as a DPS spec. Neither can match either the AoE potential of a Blood and Thunder build or sustain the rage for a single-target fight, with the exception of Ultraxion. Fury suffers for a variety of reasons, which we’ll go into as we discuss the spec. I don’t currently have BiS SMF weapons, so my SMF sims/testing and runs produced artificially low results. It is my belief that fury warriors who prefer SMF to TG would be better off considering a No’Kaled despite the agility, as the proc on the weapon is superior for DPS than Souldrinker. I’m sure a lot of shaman hate me now. (Remember, the Raid Finder version of No’Kaled is unavailable to you warriors.)

Cooldowns and survival

There are some positives to a fury DPS build in Dragon Soul.

Fury can be the more survivable option. With proper glyphing and talents, a fury warrior can increase his self-healing options, useful for fights like heroic Zon’ozz where there’s a lot of raid damage going around. Since there’s not a ton of AoE to be done in this fight and there’s incoming damage to increase your rage generation, fury also has higher DPS than normal in these situations. Making healing easier while putting out respectable numbers is a good option to have.
Fury is competitive on DPS check fights. The biggest DPS check in the instance is Ultraxion, and due to the high incoming raid damage, fury can usually ensure its proper rotation and put out competitive if not chart-topping DPS. The survivability from the above point should be kept in mind.
Fury has more cooldowns for burn phase fights. Being able to use Reck, Death Wish, and a combination of two-piece T12 and T13 lined up at the proper time can give fury a surprisingly high burst potential. Doing 55k to 60k DPS on Yor’sahj is fun as arms, true, but it’s mostly Bladestorm abuse. Fury can blow a globule up in a few swings with proper use of cooldowns, and that has value in tight situations.

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco will be your host today.

I’m on the fence about some of the Diablo III system changes announced yesterday, but at least half of ‘em are pretty good changes, so I’m definitely continuing to look forward to playing my wizard (best class) when the game comes out some time this year.

Erik asked:

What do you feel the odds are that Blizzard will still add the older tier content to Raid Finder? Have them on Normal modes, after the nerfs it should be possible for 25 random people to handle these days. I ask because if there really is no more content patches left, that is a long time to go until Mists.

Couldn’t say. Blizzard devs have expressed a desire to hook up the Raid Finder to older raids, but with cross-realm raiding, you don’t really need the Raid Finder at all for really old raids. For stuff like Firelands or BoT or BWD, I’d imagine there are some issues with figuring out how many people you’d need for a “full” group — 25 is probably overkill with BoT and BWD when everyone’s in 378+ gear from 4.3. And would they need to have a Raid Finder difficulty mode as well? Would you just play them on normal mode? That would defeat the Raid Finder’s purpose as raiding with training wheels on. If it did have a Raid Finder mode, what item level gear would drop? 346 would make the raids even more pointless than they already are; leaving them at 359 would mean no difference from the loot that already drops in normal mode.

Lots of considerations; no easy answers. As much as I want people to see previous tiers of raiding, I’m just not sure it’s worth development time that could be spent giving us Pandaria, which will ship with all its raids hooked up to the Raid Finder.

Each week, WoW Insider’s Mathew McCurley brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond — your addons folder will never be the same.

Do I need to remind you again that right now is the perfect time for you to tinker with your user interface? WoW feels much more relaxed now. A second cataclysm has been averted, Deathwing has been defeated, and life is feeling pretty good right now. Sit back, relax, and clean up your interface. You’ll thank me when Mists of Pandaria comes out.

Grab bag Addon Spotlights are some of my favorite editions of the column because the regular format means a lot of words about just one addon. That’s great and all, but what about those addons that just don’t have many words worth saying about them? These little guys fall through the cracks and land in my grab bag collection sack, thrown into the back of a shady-looking truck and taken off for “processing.” It’s totally painless — no one complains too much.

LightMyMacro

LightMyMacro is an ingenious little addon from Adirelle that allows Blizzard’s action button glow effect to activate on action buttons that contain a macro. My Revenge macro on my warrior, for instance, will not light up with it’s traditional I’m available! glowing alert because it is buried in a macro. Now, with LightMyMacro, macros with abilities that will notify the player of activation with a lit border. Good times.

I used to think that the whole macros not lighting up thing was a bug and was going to be fixed. Has it been fixed? This problem could very well have been fixed a long time ago, and I’ve just been using an addon for over a year to fix a problem that didn’t need fixing. Interesting. Very interesting. If this is still an issue and macros are still not properly displaying the glowing action bar effects, then this is the addon for you.

Yes, yes, it’s an old addon, but it works. Like an old Zippo.

Download LightMyMacro at [Curse].

Who Taunted?

Our next addon is finding out who That Guy is. You know who I’m talking about — the tank with Taunt in his or her rotation. Yes, there are tanks who do this. Yes, they need to stop it. Don’t be rude about it; kindly let this taunter know that Taunt should be saved for actual tank swaps and not as a threat gain. Just because you can’t miss with it doesn’t mean it should be on cooldown permanently.

Who Taunted? simply lets you know in the chat window who taunted what mob with what ability. It is super-simple, works out of the box, and quickly identifies losers in raid groups who steal your aggro with taunts or announce to you that your off tank just screwed up. Wait and see if he says anything about it. Just go on and wait, then move on to the checklist below.