After a short hiatus, your weekend Colosseum interviews are back with an interview with Drwhy, an Arena Priest on Burning Legion. Working in 2v2 with Nostalgia, a Blood Elf Rogue, Drwhy is currently striving to excel at the end of Season 4.

Drwhy talked to us not only about how he’s been doing in the Arena to date, but also about what he expects to see with the approaching end of season, and Wrath’s future release.

Check out what Drwhy had to say after the cut.

Continue reading The Colosseum: Drwhy of Burning Legion

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Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. This week Matticus offers his opinion and experience on raid healing at level 80. Find out about how Matt manages his mana, his take on whether Priests really are “useless”, skills needed to thrive, and just how hard it is to heal tanks.

When I write blog posts about Priests, I don’t like to rely on speculation. I am certain there are many Priests (other healers even) who want to know what the next age of Wrath healing will look like. I am not a Shaman, a Paladin, or a Druid; therefore, I cannot speak from their perspectives but I have seen them in action. I am not a theorycrafter. I can’t break everything down into numbers for you. There have been a few blue posts asking for healer feedback and maybe this post can offer some insight.

That being said, this post is drawn from my experiences as a healer in both normal (10 man) and heroic (25 man) versions of Naxxramas and Obsidian Sanctum. I won’t tell you what I think should get nerfed or buffed; I will, however, tell you how I coped with the challenges that the expansion brought forth.

Continue reading Spiritual Guidance: Everything you ever wanted to know about raid healing at level 80

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Most of us were kids at one point. A portion of us probably played computer or video games even as kids. Thus, I’m sure that at least a good handful of us, when told by our parents to turn off the computer and go do homework, eat dinner, or get some fresh air, tried to counter with something like this: “But Mom, games are educational! They give you hand-eye coordination and map reading skills!”

Now, all these years later, it seems we may finally be getting some backup from teachers and educators. Livescience.com recently highlighted some educators who are using World of Warcraft or lauding it for its educational values.

Continue reading World of Warcraft as a teaching tool

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Ready Check is a weekly column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, ZA or Sunwell Plateau, everyone can get in on the action and down some bosses. Or motivate 24 other people to do so!

For many guilds, raiding is in a bit of a lull at the moment, with far more focus on the future rather than the present. One of the things that can keep raiding life interesting is to try out different things; play an alt, try a weird setup, revisit old content…

How about a slightly different challenge? Something that will stretch your ability to multitask, to communicate, to deal with people; it’ll try your patience but provide immeasurable rewards when that patience pays off.

No, I don’t mean running for an election. I’m talking about raid leading.

Continue reading Ready Check: Leading the fray

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Wowhead keeps adding new features, I know. But this is a big one. Last night, while most of us were busy watching the vice-presidential debate, they launched a fairly sophisticated tool for comparing items or sets of items. Basically, you can add any item or set in the database, and group them up however you want (by dragging items between groups), and then compare groups against each other to see what stats you gain and lose on.

There are tons of additional features to this tool, and it might be worth reading the instructions to see all of what you can do. Some things I particularly like:

• You can add stat weighting scales, to see (an estimation of) how good the item is overall for your class and spec. Click the scores to toggle the display format; I like the percentage display particularly, which shows the “best” group as 100% and everything else in terms of that.
• The “gains” row shows you in short what’s different between your groups, by subtracting out all shared stats.
• All item listings on the site now feature checkboxes that you can use to quickly compare items.
• Each group has an option to view in 3D, so you can now finally use Wowhead as your dressing room: just create a group of items you want to look at, click the little triangle on the top bar of the group, and select “View in 3D.”
• You can set one group as your “focus” by clicking the little eye icon, which shows all stats relative to that group.

I will definitely be making use of this in the future; it’s much easier than figuring it out in your head or making a spreadsheet.

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I’m not sure that we’ve ever done a plate chest here on the column, and I know for sure that we’ve never done a Pally chestpiece, so here you go.

Name: Heroic Judicator’s Chestguard (Wowhead, WowDB, WowProgress)
Type: Epic Plate Chestpiece
Armor: 1983 Armor (which is as good as it gets on that state for Plate chests)
Abilities:

• +78 Stamina, +22 Intellect
• Three sockets, two blue and a yellow, with a socket bonus of +6 Stamina. Throw a Facet of Eternity or a Splendid Fire Opal in there. Whoops — was gemming with a Warrior tank in mind. What do ya’ll recommend for gems on this one?
  
• Yup, as you’ve probably already guessed, this is a chest for a tanking Pally. Not only does it have 29 Defense rating and 44 Dodge rating, but there’s a damage and healing bonus on there of 60.
• As Prot Pally chests go, this is about as good as you’ll get going into Wrath. And those sockets are super helpful, too — you can up any of the various caps you’re trying to hit, or just throw a little extra frosting on the cake if you’re already maxed out.

How to Get It: Entropius in the Sunwell Plateau drops this one — he’s actually what M’uru comes back as after you kill him (and as we noted very early on, the two have a similar shape, because they’re basically two sides of the same being.

So finish off M’uru in his weakened state, take out Entropius before his negative energy, like, really bums you out, man, and hope that this drops at a rate of about 10-15%. And be a Paladin, because seriously, nobody else would want this thing anyway.

Getting Rid of It: Disenchants into a Void Crystal, and sells back to vendors for 10g 56s 13c. If you’ve got a Sunmote, you can take this to Yrma in Quel’danas, and she’ll give you a Noble Judicator’s Chestguard for it (a Healing version of the same gear). And you might want to think about doing that, since the Death Knights are going to take all your tanking roles, amirite?!?

Hey, lookit that! Phat Loot Phriday just recently turned the ripe old age of two by my count, and we’ve discovered, after two years and over one hundred ingame items, that it might be a good idea to put them all (or at least most of them), in gallery format for you to browse through. So click below to check out past Phat Loot and be sure to come back every Friday for more great gear on a Friday afternoon.

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