Filed under: WoW Rookie

Last week, we talked about what it takes to kill a healer. While we obviously had a few "be a death knight" jokes, the discussion was pretty good. It's a clear and obvious point: If you don't kill the enemy's healer, you're in for a long, hard Battleground.

If it's so important to kill the enemy healer, then the inverse must also be true: Protect your healer. If you'd ever like to experience the life of a rope caught in a tug-of-war between 15 wild dogs, roll a healer in Warsong Gulch. It's kind of like that.

Without your protection, your healer will soon be enjoying life as a greasy spot of ex-character. This is bad. First, that healer's your team member. Second, that healer is your own best avenue of survival, since you need healing. If you want healing, protect your healer. Simple stuff.

As a general rule, I'd place protecting your healer among any Battleground's highest priorities. You can't let the protection get in the way of things like capturing the flag, but by the same token, you probably won't capture said flag without your healer.

Here's how you get that protection done.

One of the themes that keeps coming up when we talk about PvP is this: Killing a healer is tough. It's a fundamental part of balancing an MMO. If any single DPSer could simply kill a healer with ease, then there wouldn't be much point in being a healer. If all factors were truly equal, then a healer's output should match a damage dealer's output. It's just a matter of one equals one. Only superior skill or gear should allow for the death of a healer in any reasonable amount of time.

More importantly, a healer must be able to keep up with the damage from more than one DPSer for a short period of time. Consider 5-person Arena matches. Commonly, teams are built of four DPSers and one healer. (We're not looking for comp arguments here, just the basics.) For at least a few seconds, a healer should be able to keep a focus target alive. The same goes for three-person Arena teams. See where this is going? Healers, by nature, need to be able to withstand a huge amount of DPS for a short time.

These balance issues come into sharp focus when you're one lone PvP damage dealer trying to whoop up on a healer. What was once a fundamental basic of balance philosophy becomes a huge pain in the neck. Here's how to handle the situation.

Last week, we talked about some basic strategy for Warsong Gulch. We ran through the basics, the general flow of the fight, and how you (tend) to win it. One subject came up a bunch in the comments and landed in my email box a few times. That question: How do you run the flag successfully?

It's no surprise that's a contentious issue. Without debating the fine points of who should be running a flag, I think we all agree that being the flag carrier is an incredibly vital role. Touch the flag and you just became the focus of 19 people in the Battleground. There's a little more to the job than just mashing a particular cooldown, so let's take some time this week to talk about strategy and tips.

In our continuing efforts to help players new to PvP get out there and blow up other players, we're focusing this week on Warsong Gulch. We'll talk briefly about the rules of the game and then look at common strategies.

Warsong Gulch is one of the simpler Battlegrounds in terms of raw strategy. It's essentially Capture the Flag. Each team has a base, and a flag that sits in that base. Your team's goal is to grab the enemy's flag and return it to your base without losing your own flag. Do that, and you score. Score three times and you win.

When you pick up the flag, you can't mount or use certain effects without dropping the flag. Notably, druids and shaman can engage their travel forms while carrying the flag, making them speedy options for what's known as the flag carrier. (Speedy does not imply superior; we'll get into that later.) The longer the FC holds the flag, the more damage the FC will take from player attacks. When you kill an FC, the flag will temporarily sit on the ground, waiting for someone to pick it up. If the friendly team does so, the flag returns to base. If the enemy team does so, they now have a new FC.

There you go. Those are the basics.

Well, the end-of-expansion blues are here, there's this other MMO out there, and guilds are seeing members drop like flies. Now's the time when many players who don't want to give up WoW find themselves turning to PvP as a way to kill time and keep playing while they wait for old friends (and new content) to come back around.

The thing is that PvP is a fundamentally different game from PvE. I'm not saying one's better or worse; the two aspects of WoW just have significant variations in gear, thought processes, and playstyles that can make the transition a little bumpy. As such, let's renew a guide to getting away from killing bosses every week and get down to how to kill your fellow players. (In game. Let's not get weird here.)

Dungeons drop gear. For many players, that's the whole point of going into an instance, whether it's a 5-man dungeon or a huge raid instance. We're locked in the ever-expanding search for better gear, and you have to kill bosses to get your sweet, sweet loot.

Most guilds use one or more various systems to make sure loot distribution is fair. Some employ a basic rule of civility; once you get gear in an a raid, it's polite to defer further drops to other guildmates. Others use complicated but effective point systems, assigning dropped gear a point value that members can bid against. No matter what the general system for rolling on gear, the foundation of the system is based on all group members' being part of a common team.

Pickup groups and Raid Finder groups possess no such commonality. The teams comprise random folks thrown together by Blizzard's behind-the-scenes group-building algorithms. Basic roles are filled, a few rules followed -- but basically anyone can get thrown together into a group.

Random groups rarely agree on loot etiquette before getting started. We all say we should agree on loot rules beforehand, but that rarely actually happens. Instead, most folks charge ahead into the dungeon operating under only a few basic assumptions about how loot will be divided. With that in mind, let's review the basic etiquette of rolling on gear in groups.

WoW Insider reader and generally well-rounded dude Tim sent me this question:

I love playing damage characters like a rogue and a retribution paladin. When I read through the forums about how to play these classes well they talk about how priorities have replaced rotations. I don't really understand the difference or the history of what they're talking about. Could you explain?

Oh, yes, Tim. I can explain. It's a fun little meta-discussion, because the change in damage rotations is actually a microcosm of the way WoW has evolved over the last seven years. Don't believe me? Hold onto your seat, and let's get started.

First, let's establish that rotations exist for all classes and roles. While you usually get a little more play from figuring out the best rotation among damage classes, I assure you that healers and tanks worry nearly as much about pressing the right buttons. That's really what the whole mess boils down to: Which buttons should you push?

You see, Tim, back in the days of original WoW, most players kind of mindlessly mashed their buttons without a specific order. Sure, we had a general notion that a high-level Fireball would do more damage than a low-level Fireball. And we knew that some spells had higher cast times but delivered more damage.

But it lacked science. Rotations existed in a murky, primordial game ooze. All the raw material was there for damage buttons to spring into animate life of its own. But they were missing some essential spark to transform into the elegance of damage rotations.

Enter the theorycrafters.

New around here? WoW Rookie has your back! Get all our collected tips, tricks and tactics for new players in the WoW Rookie Guide. WoW Rookie is about more than just being new to the game; it's about checking out new classes, new playstyles, and new zones.

One of the quietly celebrated features in contemporary Cataclysm is the ability to level up entirely using the Dungeon Finder. It's a little rough in a few places where you cross expansions, around levels 58, 68, and 80ish. But other than those few spots, you can fly through the so-called younger levels without much trouble at all.

While speeding your way to level 85 this way doesn't require a lot of strategy per se, it still helps immensely if you get your act together beforehand. Consider issues like leveling professions, keeping up with gold, and even how you'll handle your downtime between queues. Most importantly, once you're actually inside the dungeon, you should be prepared with some tips to avoid annoying the heck out of your groups.

It's a little hard to believe that Cataclysm has been out for a year. About this time last year, we all stood in line to get hold of our own little piece of Deathwing. Folks flooded back to Azeroth to see the changes, roll worgen and goblins, and embrace a little bit of WoW once again. But like every expansion before it, Cataclysm lost some players after a few months. People quit the game. (Shocking, I know!)

With the final raid of the expansion upon us, plenty of players are coming back around to the game. After all, if you want to get the essential Cataclysm experience, it's now or never. It won't be too long before the world of Azeroth is overrun by pandas, monks, and even more pandas. So, if you're exploring Azeroth once more, here are the things you absolutely shouldn't miss.

New around here? WoW Rookie has your back! Get all our collected tips, tricks and tactics for new players in the WoW Rookie Guide. WoW Rookie is about more than just being new to the game; it's about checking out new classes, new playstyles, and new zones.

Welcome back to WoW! So, you've not played the game since some time in Wrath of the Lich King, right? All right, let's start at the top with the key lore changes you need to know. The Lich King is dead. A bunch of heroes got together to watch Tirion Fordring kill him. It was sad, and it became even sadder when Bolvar Fordragon stepped up to be the new Lich King.

Since then, basically, dragons have been going to nuts all over Azeroth. Deathwing went on this long flight across Azeroth, changing up zones and radically altering talents for every class. He also flapped his immense wing and littered new loot all over the place.

Of course, now that you're back to the game, you want to get up to speed right away. Here are the things you should make sure to hit along the way.

The Raid Finder's been out for a week now, leading hundreds (perhaps thousands, millions?) of players to finally get their own, personal bite-sized piece of endgame content. This week, Raid Finder groups are now able to lay low Deathwing himself. It's a very exciting time.

Of course, for players who are just coming back to the game, gearing up alts, or just now considering the idea that they can finally take part in a raid, there's a single obstacle that must be overcome. In order to take part in a Raid Finder group, you must have achieved an item level of 372.

That number isn't terrible. It's somewhere just shy of Firelands gear, though it's well above the drops you'd get from Blackwing Descent and such. The number is high enough that just randomly doing all the things won't get you there; someone who's hit item level 372 presumably has some idea of what the hell they're doing.

The Raid Finder is now live and active. This tool is probably the single greatest boon to casual and solo players added to WoW since ... well, I'd have to struggle to think of something more exciting. If you can't commit to a raid night or more than one raid night in a single week, the Raid Finder means you can still participate in the raiding game. Sure, your item level may be a few steps behind players involved in traditional 10-man and 25-man raiding. But now with the glorious Raid Finder, you can actually take part in the story.

Of course, for newer players, using the Raid Finder can be intimidating, especially if you've never spent any time in PUG raids before now. Grouping up at random with 24 other players is intimidating. You can't just ignore that; jumping into a raid group that has expectations and demands about you can be a scary thing.

With that in mind, here's a handful of tips to make sure your Raid Finder experience goes as smoothly as possible.

Patch 4.3 is cruising down the lane toward us. It won't be too much longer before we all get to update our mods and game clients, all the while cursing the inevitable server interruptions and instability. But when we weather that troubling Tuesday, we'll all have the gift of patch 4.3 to keep us entertained for many moons.

The question is, why should non-raiders care about patch 4.3? After all, another raiding tier just isn't exciting to folks who prefer 5-man dungeons, solo questing, and a little side PvP. The good news is that patch 4.3 contains huge stacks of cool stuff for casual players. In many ways, this new content patch is the most exciting addition to the game for non-raiders since Cataclysm itself was released.

Let's talk about all the things patch 4.3 offers players ... even if you don't happen to raid.

New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the resources they need to get acclimated.

We featured Wowcrendor's How Not to Be Bored in WoW. Like most of Wowcrendor's work, the video had plenty of satire and community introspection. It also managed to kick off some unexpected discussion.

Both patch 4.2 and Cataclysm as a whole are getting a little long in the tooth for some players. If you've been playing WoW long enough, you may find yourself getting a little bored. Short of enumerating all the reasons for that, it's simply fair to say that people sometimes need a little help getting through the doldrums.

We have some tips to help you get through those blues and keep enjoying the game.

New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the resources they need to get acclimated.

Especially on old servers, it can feel like all the good names are already claimed. Creating a new character with a strong, iconic name is one heck of a challenge, especially if you want to avoid joke and parody names like McDoomChicken. You can give up your dreams of finding real-world names like Stephen or Michael; the only way you'll grab a straightforward name is to grab it on a brand new server (and we're fairly unlikely to see a brand new server any time soon).

With Mists of Pandaria careening toward us with all the excitement of a monk rolling along in a fuzzy ball, now's the time to get your unique snowflake name reserved. Rest assured that every variation of Jack Black you can create has already been taken. Let's talk about how you can create a unique, interesting name without resorting to all the special font characters WoW will allow.