 This is a review of the Logitech G13 gamepad, which I recently bought to play World of Warcraft. This is an extract, click through to read the whole thing. The G13 is a USB device. It is recognised as a keyboard by either Windows or Mac. Its configuration software is fully cross-platform. It has no ghosting. You could press all the keys at once. The G13 was specifically designed to avoid the ghosting problem of normal or gaming  These two guides, written by the lookingformore husband and wife team, are really good:
This is a topic I find very intriguing and I believe is very important. I’m a big advocate of mouse-turning and keybinding. I’ve written about it in the past and recommended people use PvP to improve their PvE skills. Also knowing August 6th, 2010 | One comment |
 From: Playing better |  Tags: keybinding, mouse, ooda, situational awareness  Securing your account is important. I’m regularly amazed how many people do not have an authenticator. The token is cheap, and the iPhone/Android app is free. Having your character sharded and your guild bank raided is totally awful. If you can actively minimise the risk of that happening, why would you not do it? Polar, owner of guildox.com — the ratings website we use for the mandatory progress ranking in members’ avatars — is also keen on account security. The Lich King. We were fairly close to killing him. I was travelling with work, in a hotel. I’d tested the ping from the room the previous day and on the day of the raid, and it was fine. The hotel internet was working reliably for 3.5 hours of the raid. Then in the final 30 minutes of the raid, the lag monster wtfpwned me. Like 2000 to 6000ms ping. It was heartbreaking. Unplayable. I couldn’t fix it. We  I’ve talked about keybinding in the past, which led to discussion on gaming mice and keyboards. We have a thread discussing these awesome peripherals, and I thought lots of pictures would help make sense of them. I’m going to be upgrading my mouse and maybe keyboard too, soon. So, look on down at these babies and read DK tank’s opinions on each in the thread. Wake has written a great post on the question: what makes a great raider? What differentiates them from an average raider? This question follows neatly from yesterday’s post about looking for a new guild. Wake is in a top 100 EU guild. Here’s how it starts: The ability to react and adapt. All boss encounters rely on timed events coupled with some random elements. For the most part you can rely on a specific strategy to handle each situation May 19th, 2010 | Visit our forum to comment |
From: Playing better | Tags: hard mode, leadership, raid, situational awareness There was a report of a user who suddenly had a memory error in WoW. After it crashed, he tried to log in again and had been hacked. The answer has been found, and warning to you all; there’s a fake wowmatrix site which downloads a trojan. Read report at curse. The fake site looks the same but includes the trojan. They’re using google ads to promote the site. Name’s very similar. wowmatrix is not the only site being Sure, Unholy’s fairly weak for tanking, but does it matter? The usual argument I hear, a flawed one at that, is “you pay your $15, you choose your spec”. That is true in a solo game. In a raid, no, you should pick a good spec that works, or you impact the other 9 or 24 people’s ability to progress. If you want to pick a useless spec, go play solo. That said, Unholy tank is not useless. It I set out to tabulate those abilities Death Knights have which require the global cooldown, or trigger it, and which require you are facing the opponent, or can have your back turned. This is useful for PvP and tanking, and goes towards my effort to help DKs become better representatives of our awesome class. It’s simply important to know that:
The table: DK tanks can feel squishy compared to block-tanks in 5-mans. You can offset a lot of this through skill. We have a pretty impressive arsenal to use. Here are some important pointers which are often overlooked by new DK tanks. It’s a good checklist. Tank tree cooldownsUse your tree’s big cooldown a lot: [Vampiric Blood], [Unbreakable Armor] or [Bone Shield]. They’ve got short cooldowns. Use them on trash. I use UA on trash very happily, it’s ideal for that purpose. BS is just awesomeness and AMZ can be very nice but most Unholy DKs will have spec’d into threat instead of that talent. Many padawans tanks save all their cooldowns for bad moments then end up struggling on trash. On a boss fight, of course, you should save them for the damage spikes you know about. On trash though, use them on the pull to reduce initial damage or if you get to 50% health during the pull. Don’t do 10 minutes of trash and never use your cooldowns. VB isn’t so great in 5-mans, as its more a throughput talent that’s for raiding, so in 5-mans its better suited to oh-shit moments than the other two trees. That said, blood has Rune Tap which can be used liberally. Icebound FortitudeThink ahead, and don’t waste [Icebound Fortitude] if you are going to need it on the boss who’s coming up, or a huge pull of AOE adds, but otherwise use it liberally. January 14th, 2010 | 13 comments - (Visit our forum to comment) |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically, Playing better, new to tanking | Tags: ams, aoe, heroics, ibf, tank, training Here’s a debut post from Tykot. – Gravity Across all the guides and strategies I read, not to mention peeking at Ensidia’s armory profiles, Jewelcrafting stands out as the obvious #1 profession. Not just for DKs, but for any class in general since it couples stellar PVE bonuses with premium moneymaking potential. But despite JC being the most recommended profession for DKs, I found little content educating fledgling DKs on how to really maximize the profession. The obvious: JC-only gems, Monarch Crab, Ruby Hare The less obvious: how to make money using JC. Personally, I find that the economic game is interwoven with the PVE game. The more money you make the better your position to acquire gear upgrades. My BC guild was trapped in SSC/TK level content for a stretch, but I had the gold to purchase BT-crafted gear and epic-gems because I spent time learning the profession ropes. And as a new character approaching 80, money is as much a concern of mine as anything. Cold-weather flying: 1000 gold. Dual-specialization: 1000 gold. Epic flying: 5000 gold. Oh yeah, gear? Readily available epics for…. you guessed it, lots of gold! If you’re rolling a DK today you must have a L55 character already. Most of you have a L70 from BC, or perhaps a L80 now. I mention this because JC has synergies with Alchemy, Enchanting, and Mining. And since you’re committing to JC, you can’t possibly maximize your outlets unless you use an alt to take up the others. Normally, I wouldn’t dare suggest you roll an alt just for this purpose, but DKs must have an alt 55+, so use it if you can. The SystemProspecting Saronite Ore and Converting the Byproduct There are guides across the internet that provide subsets of this information, but I never found one spot with it all collected together involving the 3 professions (Alchemy, Enchanting, Jewelcrafting), nor one spot that mentioned all of the outlets I use as I turn product over. If you prospect Saronite Ore, you’ll receive a smattering of green-quality and blue-quality gems. There are three reasonable outlets for these gems. Jewelcrafting OnlySell Cut Green-Quality Gems You won’t have the recipes to cut the blue-qualities initially, but you can vendor-train enough relevant green-quality recipes to cut them. Pricing as always is server specific, but there is at least some demand for these gems, especially red-colored since that provides strong offensive bonuses for most classes, and when people are leveling up they don’t necessarily want to fill gem slots with pricier blue-quality gems. Initially, try cutting 25% of your red-colored into a few different cuts and see what happens. I would recommend Runed, Bold, Delicate, and Bright to begin with. My usual return per cut green-quality gem: 6G Sell Raw Blue-Quality Gems This one kind of hurts. It’s tough to sell them raw because you know you’re losing out on profit you could be making by cutting them. But many of the blue-quality recipes would cost you your daily tokens. You need to decide for yourself if you’d rather buy 1 or 2 cuts for each blue-quality, or save your tokens for epic-quality recipes. I recommend checking the AH and seeing what the pricing differences are between raw and cut blue-quality gems. If you decide not to purchase a few blue-quality cuts, like myself, then you can still make great money selling raw. Scarlet Ruby in particular fetches a lot since it’s used by both DPS casters and healing classes, not to mention it’s a conversion material for Transmute: Cardinal Ruby. My usual return per raw blue-quality gem: 15G Sell Cut Blue-Quality Gems Obviously, you can charge a premium for cut gems. People like to hit the AH and get exactly what they want, now, without needing to ask someone else to finish a process like cutting. Right now the only blue-quality recipe I’ve invested in is Solid Sky Sapphire, and I find that it’s been very worth it to me. A raw Sky Sapphire sells for 6G on my server, but the Solid cut sells for 25-50G. My usual return per cut blue-quality gem: 25G Jewelcrafting & Enchanting (Disenchanting)An advantage of this route is the the Auction House does not charge a deposit on enchanting mats, so you can post a ton of them, or undercut to your hearts desire to quickly bankroll your next prospecting run. If you’re not much into Algebra, brace yourself (okay, it’s not that bad!) Keep reading for income-generating strategies. I decided to level enchanting and mining on my new DK. Enchanting is expensive to level up. From 1 to 300, it has cost 720g so far. Some of the enchants I put on vellums and will now see if they sell. Sold Greater stam on boots 11.5g each. 300 to 350 cost about 800g. Arcane Dust looks like something worth reselling for profit. I stopped counting the costs from 350 onward, but it’s fair to say this is a very expensive profession to level up. Not long after I’d got to 375 or so, MMO-Champion released the enchanting guide. Found some great addons too, but first a snippet on levelling: I ran the no-epidemic unholy dps specs in the simulator for L68, to see how it scales at low gear levels. Result is it checks out at the same dps as traditional. I updated my Death Knight levelling specs page with builds. Having just got my new DK to L75 in blood, I’m going to try unholy for some variety and to get a feel for this short September 30th, 2009 | Leave a comment |
From: Addons, Playing better | Tags: 3.22, addon, dps, guide, kahorie, levelling, Simulation, spec This is poor UI design and on-screen instruction. The Blizzard quest tracker says “you don’t have space to track any more objectives”, that’s OK but then it’s proposed solution is retarded, “stop tracking some first”. What it should say is “make the tracking box bigger, so you get more space”. So all you have to do is drag the tracking window’s frame down to make it as big as possible. Pictures here speak louder than words. This post won’t Verified for 3.22 plus commentary on no-epidemic unholy. What are the specs and talent options for levelling up a Death Knight? Fortunately, they’re all good. Here are some templates to help you decide between unholy, frost and blood levelling specs. I have had the (un)fortunate pleasure of levelling two DKs. As of writing, I’m L68. My previous main Gravity tanked Ulduar 25 in England but because of a move back to Australia, I decided to reroll. (You can’t transfer EU to Oceanic servers). You can get to L68 in about 1 day and 12 hours played (I did) by using a flying mount at L60 (costs 620g with no faction discount). I’ve included L68 and L79 versions of the specs so you can see how you build out the spec as you go. I even did some dps sims.  A good quest for tankspot readers The specsFirst a few explanatory notes. September 8th, 2009 | 18 comments |
From: Playing better | Tags: 3.22, dps, guide, kahorie, levelling, Simulation, spec Wow. Thanks to RJK for highlighting this post on a site I rarely visit, Greedy Goblin. Great for money-making tips, but… raiding? In short: the goblin’s guild cleared 10-man Ulduar, wearing only blues (no epics), including Yogg. This is irrefutable proof that skill matters more than gear. Read about the accomplishment, and his comments on ‘the myth of gear‘. I don’t really need to say much about this. It speaks for itself. Good raiders are more important than good gear. People August 26th, 2009 | 9 comments |
From: Playing better, Raid leadership in general | Tags: blues, casual, gear, progression, raid, ulduar I just came across this speed-raiding guide on StratFu, written in February but I’d not seen it before. It’s very comprehensive, and covers in details the points I have just touched on about fast raids. Their guide includes:
August 26th, 2009 | 2 comments |
From: Playing better, Raid leadership in general | Tags: guide, loot, raid, speed I’m very pleased to say that Satorri, a very well-known Death Knight poster on TankSpot has agreed to have his essay on wipes published here at pwnwear.com. His bio concludes this article. Enjoy the read! Investing in Loss: How to turn wipes into valuable resourcesby guest author Satorri Anyone who has raided knows it is inevitable, even in the best of teams, that you will wipe attempting to tackle raid obstacles. Everyone has to learn new content, new encounters, and to do so you have to face them and fall in combat. I want to be careful how I use language here, because we can use words that lead us to think or remember things as something other than what it really is: learning. The term we use is usually ‘wipe,’ short for being wiped out. For many people it is easy to think of this as losing or failing, but there is a danger in thinking of it as “wipe = fail, clear = win.” The only way to fail in a true sense is to fail to learn from what you’ve done. Simply put, if you do not wipe you may miss your opportunity to improve, to see where you are weak, where you could improve. If you are good enough, or lucky enough, to waltz or be carried through content without dying or failing to clear a boss in one shot, you may start to believe you are infallible and miss the opportunity to improve that others who struggle will get. Read more of Satorri’s guest post on learning from wipes Note: I’ve updated my 10 and 25-man guide post too, nearly finished now. Last night I got to see, and kill on the 12th attempt, Mimiron 10-man. It gave me some thoughts on performance improvement. The guild has had him down before but I missed those nights. Notably our win, the final attempt before we’d have called it a night anyhow, included a change to using a shadow priest rather than warlock on the Aerial ranged-tank phase, suggested by July 6th, 2009 | 2 comments |
From: Observe, orient, decide, act, Playing better | Tags: ooda, ulduar I fairly much suck at PvP, but I think what little I have done improved my raiding skill. Being a tank, before dual-spec, battlegrounds were about me either flag running or being a time-sink. I think I killed a rogue a few times on my previous maintankadin. With dual-spec, I can actually enjoy it a bit more. I might even zone into an arena on my DK one day. Key point: you can improve your raiding skill by Some people can listen to instructions on Vent and get it, others are kinesthetic and the fight won’t click in their heads until they’ve been in it. Thanks to youtube, visual learners can watch a boss fight before they have to try it themselves. I love diagrams but sadly they’re not so commonly used in strategy guides nowadays. Raid leaders should remain aware of the way people learn differently, and bear it in mind when you judge their performance |
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