Non-WoW Guild Activities

Hi folks, yes I know it's been a while.

Before I get into today's article, I want to brag again that another of my guides is up on the WoW official site, this time my favorite - the tree healing guide. Of course, it's company on the site include several guides that have not been updated since before BC came out... but what can ya do.

Today I want to mention some fun stuff that my guild likes to do that is NOT involving WoW. I know I talk a lot about my guides on here, but I want this blog to cover a wide range of things related to WoW - the nearest and dearest to my heart being guide writing, raiding, tree healing, and guild management.

An Example

As my long-term readers probably remember, I help to manage a very small, dedicated raiding guide called Fianna. The guild is very close - I consider these people to be some of my best friends. But most of us just can't handle raiding for more than two or three nights a week. Still, we want to hang out and spend time together over the internet.

Luckily, most of us also love tabletop RPGs, such as Dungeons and Dragons. So I decided to start up a weekly D&D group, using vent and an online map program called MapTool. This was immediately taken up by many others in the guild, and we now have weekly gaming sessions, trading off DMs each week so no one gets too sick of it and so they have time to prepare. So far it's been a big hit, and its a great way for us to "send time together" outside of WoW, but without having to drive hundreds of miles across state and country lines.

Choosing an Activity


First, you need to find out a common interest that many of your guild mates share, and it needs to be something that can be done online with multiple people. Do they all like Diablo or Starcraft? Perhaps a different but much more casual MMO (for a while a bunch of my guild mates got into the silly MMO Maple Story)? Even simply online games such as online card games or the kind of thing offered from Yahoo or Aim could be fun. Think of things you might play at a party, such as scrabble or pictionary - there are online versions of these as well. Perhaps your guild is intellectually inclined - you could have a guild book club or debate. Maybe your guild includes card players, either of the normal variety or of specialty card games like magic.

Setting up Your Event

Whatever the case, you will most likely be able to find one or two things that a lot of people enjoy. Once you have that, it's simple. Find a time that won't conflict with your guild's other activities and set up your out of WoW activity. I use the in-game calendar for mine, or you can use your guild website if you have one. If you aren't an officer, make sure you clear your activity with the guild management before setting it up.

One note - be careful to be fair in your invitations, but also be cautious of the number of people you invite. If you have a large guild, inviting everyone may not be the best idea. You don't want to end up with a huge crowd of people and not enough spots in whatever activity you have planned.

Running Your Event

If your event requires preparation (such as a D&D game does), make sure this is done as much as possible ahead of time. There's nothing worse than sitting around waiting for something to start. Your guildies will become cranky and everything will just be a little less fun. During the event, try to be fair to everyone and give everyone a shot at the fun. How to do this varies greatly depending on what type of activity you are doing, so I won't go into details.

Planning for the Future

After the event, talk to your guildies. Find out if people enjoyed the event and ask for advice on how to improve it. If it sounds like people had fun, put another one on the calendar. Be honest with yourself - if people didn't seem to have fun, try something different next time!



Well that's all I have for today. Have fun with your guilds!

I'm Official!

So, my good buddy eric over at WoW-Pro.com just pointed out that my leatherworking guide is on the official WoW website! While it's not my best guide, it's pretty cool to see it up there. I'll have to update it more often now!

Tree Changes in 3.3

I'm going to take a moment to talk about some upcoming changes for tree healing. So for you readers who don't play trees, just bear with me for a bit.

Blizzard is really keeping trees guessing about the next patch. There are several very big changes in store for us.


Gift of the Earthmother Nerfed

First, Gift of the Earthmother will be changing. The current PTR build reads thusly: "Increases your total spell haste by 10%." This is a huge nerf from the effective 30% haste that Gift of the Earthmother is currently worth for instant cast spells. Now, this is the PTR and things are subject to change. A recent update to the PTR shows Blizzard is toying with the possibility of an additional 10% GCD reduction for only Lifebloom. This would still be a pretty bad nerf considering the heaviest used spell in PvE these days is Rejuvenation, but it would be a bit better and may encourage more Lifebloom use. All in all, this change seems to indicate that we will need to stack more haste after 3.3.


Rejuvenation Nerf Reversed

In a recent post post, Ghostcrawler indicated that Rejuvenation will be returning to it's 18 second duration. The spell was nerfed in the last patch, but Blizzard felt like hitting druids with two hard nerfs back to back was too much, so they are reversing this decision in favor of the Gift of the Earthmother nerf. What does this mean for druids? Well, it means that the new glyph may be a more viable option. Which brings me too...


New Tree Glyph: Rapid Rejuvenation

Patch 3.3 will introduce a new tree glyph: [Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation]. This glyph will cause our haste to make our Rejuvenation tick faster. This means more HPS, but it also means we will have to refresh our Rejuvenation more often. I think the choice of whether to pick this up or not depends largely on the individual druid. I mainly heal 10-mans, and I'm usually raid healing, which means blanketing the entire raid with Rejuvenation. Usually it's fairly easy to keep HoTs up on everyone, especially if I don't have to worry about the tanks. With the return to an 18 second duration, I am definitely going to pick up this glyph and try it out.



Tell me trees - what are your thoughts on these changes? Will you be picking up the new glyph?

A Return to Blogging

Hello blog readers!

I have been away from my blog for a while now. This has been due to starting my graduate program. Now that things have settled down and I have classwork under control, I am returning to my blog.

I'll kick off my return by announcing an update that should be done this weekend to my Tree Healing Guide. I'll be completely changing the gearing section - instead of a big, unwieldly, and often out of date list, we'll have several links to useful tools such as Rawr, MaxDPS, and WoWhead. I will explain how to use these tools to choose the best gear for your tree, based on your current gear and your personal healing style. This is *much* more useful than a static list, because a static list does not reflect the various differences in healing style and the current stats on your gear.

Additionally, this weekend I will be getting together (online) with Jame from to set up a new release of his leveling addon. This will fix the issue of the addon reading as "out of date" and generally clean up the addon work in progress page over on WoW-Pro.

I'm hoping to start work on a guide for the next major holiday (the WoW equivalent of Thanksgiving) soon.

I'm going to try to post at least a "food for thought" post every few days over here. Hope you all enjoy!

WoW-Pro Collaborative Projects

I've recently begun a push to create some collaborative projects on WoW-Pro. There are some guides that are really too big for one person to write, but which would benefit from a matching style and quality.

A WoW-Pro Collaborative Project is one in which many authors come together to contribute to a guide. They may not all be contributing equally - some may only be editing, others writing, others doing formatting. The idea is that it allows massive and extremely useful guides to be written that would otherwise be too much work for a single person.

So far the guides proposed are:

• Instance Healing Guide - This would cover all level 80 heroics and possibly raids as well, with specific advice for healers. It would also have advice specific to different types of healers.
• Glory of the Hero - Rather than full instance guides for each instance, this guide would cover only the specific boss fights, and the methods for getting achievements in those boss fights. Class-specific advice or group make-up advice may also be included.
• Glory of the Raider, etc. - Similar to the above, but for raid instances.
• Instance/Raid Boss Macros - A guide containing short fight explanation macros for all bosses, useful for raid leaders.

For each of these projects, there will be a team working in various roles. There may be multiple people in one role, or likewise one person may perform multiple roles.

• Project Head: The person "responsible" for the project, helping find more people to work on it, figuring out what needs to be done, making sure it all comes together. Not the "boss", but the coordinator.
• Editor: In charge of making sure formatting matches across project pages, also checks spelling/grammar/word choice, etc. In charge of the overall image and presentation of the guide.
• Writer: Writes content for the guide. It's best if they have some knowledge of formatting, but not necessary if the project has an editor.
• Contributor: May do some writing, mostly pitches in with helpful comments or quick edits.

There may be even more specialized roles for some projects. For example the healing guide might have a writer of each healing class to write sections for each encounter. Or, a guide which needs a lot of pictures might have someone specifically responsible for that.

More people are needed for most of the guides, so if you want to help, go to the project's link above and sign up!

The Care and Training of Venomhide Ravasaurs

I know this one is out of the blue, but I just came out with a quick little guide about how to get the [Whistle of the Venomhide Ravasaur]. It's over at WoW-Pro.com, check it out when you have the time!

August Update - Current Projects

Hi folks! It's that time again, and I'm bringing you my monthly update. You may have noticed that I've been a little sparse with my posts this month. I've been working hard on my D&D Campaign World, which I will be running for some other geeky people in my WoW guild, and it's been taking up a fair amount of time.

Here's a link to last month's update, if you'd like a refresher.

Completed Last Month

• Major Addon Update - Thanks to Jame, I now have the ability to release updates for the addon. I compiled all the revisions completed by the WoW-Pro community, including my revamp of the Horde 31-41 guide, and released them.
• GIMP Guide - Yes, it was finally released. It's a simple guide, but it is in wiki format so if anyone has tips to add they can! I even got a complement from a friend of mine who has nothing to do with WoW-Pro, who found it useful. So that's good I suppose!

Look Forward This Month To...

• Tree Guide Update - It's that time again. I'll be adding the new items from patch 3.2 and updating the healing strategies accordingly.
  
• Retro Raids, Part 1 - I have been working hard on this, but it's quite a lot of work. I'm over halfway done with the first section, and I do think I will release it this month.
• Addon Work: Horde 31-41 Speed Testing - So, I'm considering transfering Mokrana to my home server. I will still be using a strict no-interference policy with her, but I have no reason to stay on the server she is on and I want to get away from PvP ganking. Anyway, we will quickly be approaching the shaman kick-ass region of leveling, where she will start catching up with those darn paladins.
  

Ongoing Projects

• Achievements with Honani - Honani's been racking in the achievements. Currently I'm working on acquiring recipes and being horribly frustrated by the disparaty between Alliance-only and Horde-only recipes. I think I might wait until the new Harvest Festival in September, rather than scrambling around for quested Alliance recipes. I'm also working on Outland heroics and various other general achievements.
  
• Retro Raiding Guide - I'll be working on this guide for quite some time, and releasing it in parts. It will cover all non-WotLK content. If better guides for specific sections have been written, I'll probably just summarize and link to those guides. Currently I'm completing Outland heroics as research for this guide (and for those yummy yummy achievements)
  
• Addon Work - I plan to continue my revamp and speed testing of the Horde addon guides.

Possible Future Projects

• Fishing and Cooking Leveling Guide (Horde)
• Fishing Achievement Guide
• Cooking Achievement Guide
• What a Long Strange Trip It's Been guide
• Various Instance Guides
• Continued work on the Loot System Guide
• General Healing Guide (for beginners)
• Advanced Healing Guide (using addons or macros effectively)
• Specific Healing Guides (for each instance/raid)
  

There you have it! I'm hoping to be more active this month, even if it's just a few extra little updates. I plan to post at least once a week, but I hope to increase my post frequency to once every few days if possible.