rob’s cryptic life

Sylva’s Links For Bear Druid Cubs

Recently my WoW guild (The Shortbread Army) made a group effort to start characters on the Horde side. For me, and probably others, this was a great excuse to try out a class or two that we had never played extensively before. Since my main on the Alliance side is a bear druid and a few of my guildmates have started them on the Horde side, I thought I would post some links and comments here for them and anyone else who might be starting a cub of their own.

As always, I must put a disclaimer here and say that I’m not really a “hardcore” player, I don’t raid or PvP, so my knowledge of the endgame pretty much stops at high level 5-mans. If you want to look me up on the Armory and make fun of my gear, please note that I don’t care, and if you don’t see tanking gear it means I logged out in my cat form set, not that I suck even worse than I already admit.

One of the best references for druid theorycrafting and information is the Druid Wiki. Originally I had a bunch of stuff written here with tips for new druids, but then I realized that the Druid Wiki does it much better and in more detail. Start with their game mechanics page for more detail than you ever wanted to know about stats and mechanics of the druid. The druid facts page is also interesting, with a collection of random tidbits you might not find elsewhere.

Another absolutely indispensable reference, once you get near the end of your leveling career at least, is Emmerald’s feral druid gear lists. Here you will find lists of high-level and endgame gear for both bear and cat forms, ranked by effectiveness for tanking or DPS as appropriate, and sorted by equipment slot.

Finally, a couple of blogs. First I’d like to mention WoW Insider which is chock full of good information for all classes; the Shifting Perspectives feature is specifically for druids, and includes posts such as this one about talent specs for leveling. Another one I like is the Big Bear Butt Blogger who has been writing about druids for quite a while. For example, this post on multiple pull tanking is recommended reading for everyone who is a bear tank or groups with one. (And yes, I admit I’m not all that great at actually implementing what I’ve learned here. Oh well, it wouldn’t be a SBA run without a few wipes, now would it?)

See you in game, whether you’re behind my big bear butt, or I’m behind yours…

World of Warcraft Addons: Introduction

In an effort to revitalize this blog, I have decided to write about one of my favorite things: World of Warcraft. (Thanks to Dan for suggesting the topic of my first few posts!) To start off, I’d like to talk about WoW interface addons; this post will be the first in what will probably be a fairly long series describing my favorite addons and how they enhance the WoW gameplay experience.

For those new to WoW, perhaps I should back up a moment and describe what an interface addon is. One of Blizzard’s most interesting and forward-thinking decisions in the design of WoW was to make its client scriptable. Most games let you customize their interface a little by rearranging windows, graphical skinning, and the like, but WoW goes much farther than that by embedding a complete programming language in the client so that its behavior can be drastically changed or extended.

To be honest, the availability of this degree of customization is one reason I keep coming back to World of Warcraft. I’ve been spoiled — every time I play some other game, I keep finding small inconveniences or wishing for new features, and in the back of my head I can’t help but think “if this was WoW, there would be an addon for this”. (And if there wasn’t, I could probably write one.) So, over the next few weeks or months, I’m going to talk about my favorite addons, why I like them, and how to tweak them to your liking. And since I have so many, this will probably be quite a long series of posts…

Copyright 2001-2008 Rob Tillotson

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