Posts with tag strategies

Looking for the best approach to a certain boss? How about gearing guides for all flavors of 85s, whether you just hit the level cap, are working your way through rep rewards and heroics, or are already digging into raiding? What if you're just getting around to figuring out best practices for your newly 85 alt?

WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm has you covered! We add fresh links every week to keep you up to date with the latest tips, tricks and strategies for the Cataclysm era. Here's what's new from the most recent weeks:

Best class tips

• Cataclysm tanking for warriors, part 1 / part 2 / part 3 / part 4
• Blood DK Tanking 101
• Protection Paladin 101
• Shadow Priest 101

Best gear

• Pre-raid gear for resto shaman
• Gear your tankadin for heroics
• Gear your tankadin for raids
• Raid-level gear for DKs

Best raid tactics

• Raiding Blackwing Descent as a shadow priest, part 1 / part 2 / part 3
• Raiding strategies for feral cats, part 1 / part 2 / part 3
• Priest healing strategies
  • Ascendant Council
  • Cho'gall
  • Maloriak and Nefarian
  • Chimaeron and Atramedes
• Holy paladin healing strategies for Bastion of Twilight, part 1 / part 2
• The enhancement shaman guide to Nefarian
• Best practices for healing heroic Chimaeron
• A Blackwing Descent healing playbook
• Healing heroic Halfus

More

• Blackwing Descent and the Prestor legacy

There's much, much more where this came from -- get the whole scoop on WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm!

---

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.

---

Looking for the best approach to a certain boss? How about gearing guides for all your level-capped characters at their various levels of play: new 85s, heroic instancing and raiding? What if you're just getting around to figuring out best practices for your newly 85 alt?

WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm has you covered! We add fresh links every week to keep you up to date with the latest tips, tricks and strategies for the Cataclysm era. Here's what's new from the most recent weeks:

• Blizzard's Tom Chilton discusses Cataclysm design, talent and zone revamps
• Bear weapons, trinkets and relics
• Datamining Cataclysm's legendary staff
• Entering the Bastion of Twilight as a balance druid
• Top 10 trinkets for the pre-raiding shadow priest
• Warlock strategies for Cho'gall
• Gearing your feral cat for raiding, part 3 and part 2
• Balance druid strategies for the Twilight Ascendant Council
• Level 85 shadow priest gear
• Warlock strategies for the Twilight Ascendant Council
• Holy paladins tips for healing Chimaeron
• Balance druid strategies for Cho'gall

Read WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm.

---

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.

---

This article has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com.

So you're ready to venture into the thankless realm of healing? It's not for the faint of heart. You will be begged to heal an instance you hate and blamed for deaths that aren't your fault, only to lose gear upgrades to DPS -- all in the same run! On the other hand, healing can be a nice diversion from faceroll macro-mashing, and it's definitely nice to have instant dungeon queues.

Whether you're changing specs at level 80 to help your guild progression, stepping into The Deadmines as a level 18 healer or twinking out a battleground medic -- here are some helpful hints as you prepare to make those health bars greener.

We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

• WoW in an Hour really enjoys doing the new raid weekly quest -- nice raid rewards, under an hour of play.
• Chill of the Grave has some great suggestions for Death Knight gear to be found in the new 5-mans.
• HTFTMFW takes you through quick strategies for the first four bosses in Icecrown.
• Starnaglethron has a declaration of love for the Dungeon Finder (which most of you would probably echo).
• And finally, Pike has some bad news for you Glyph of Bestial Wrath addicts. There's a new glyph in town and he'll up your DPS.

The Colosseum takes us inside the world of the Gladiator (Brutal, Vengeful, Merciless, and otherwise), to interview some of the top Arena fighters in the battlegroups. Our goal is to bring a better understanding of the strategy, makeup, and work that goes into dueling it out for fame, fortune, and Netherdrakes.

So far, your intrepid Colosseum has brought you a shaman multi-boxer, a rogue, a warrior, a druid, and a hunter. This week, we're looking at a Warlock player -- Ryzer of Shadow Council. The Warlock class itself used to be a great deal more dominant in Season 1 of the Arena. Now in Season 4, of course, it's not been faring so well. Armor penetration, increased tactics for dealing with Fear, and a few nerfs have come together to make the Warlock class a reasonable, but not dominant, Arena class.

This is what makes Ryzer's 3v3 team -- SUPER CUTIE FEAR SQUAD -- an interesting team for this week's Colosseum. Comprised of a Druid and two Warlocks, it's a team that definitely leans on its class makeup for some interesting fights. Check out what Ryzer had to say behind the cut.

Spoiler alert: this video shows a successful kill of Kael'thas, the final boss of the new 5-man Magister's Terrace in patch 2.4.

Besides news here at WoW Insider, one of my favorite places on the web is over at WoWWiki. The site is a virtual treasure trove of World of Warcraft lore, class information, formulas, and strategies. Back in October the site passed 45,000 articles, and today it stands around 53,000 articles. That's A LOT of content, much more then anyone could possibly hope to read.

Where does all this come from?

The way community wiki's work (wikis like WoWWiki and Wikipedia) is that everyone who reads them can effectively edit anything in them. If you're looking at the strategy for Zul'Jin and see something that's not right, or that needs to be added, you can do it right on the spot. Of course you have to sign up for an account and make sure what you're putting in is correct, but that takes all of five minutes. User submitted content is critical to the success of a wiki, and WoWWiki is (as I'm sure most of our readers would agree) one of the most successful game wikis out there.

"Read the strat!" It's in every raiding guild's Guild Message of the Day at some point. There's nothing more annoying to raid leaders than to have one person wipe the group because "I didn't know the boss was going to do that." But there are different ways to prepare for a boss fight.

When I'm told to read the strat, I usually head over to WoWWiki for a basic overview of the phases and abilities, and then to Bosskillers to figure out what I actually need to do as a rogue (or, on some fights, whether I should actually show up.) A lot of people swear by video strategies, as they can offer an unparalleled view of what the actual fight is like, but I never liked them that much. With everyone else's addons and stuff clogging up the screen, plus the myriad of different perspectives, it can be tough to figure out what the boss is actually doing. One guild I know used the somewhat unusual strategy of getting people from the opposite faction who had killed the boss they were working on to come into their Vent during the raid and talk them through it.

When you have to "read the strat", where do you go? What do you think is the best method to learn a new boss fight?