Token Female Gamer

Strategy

This really comes in two parts, strategy on how to play your character and strategy on how to be successful in an encounter. Both of these can be theorized ad nauseum, but nothing can make up for experience. So brush up online and then jump in.

Maybe I should emphasize the ‘brush up’ point a bit more, especially when it comes to group/raid events. While it’s true that nothing is as good as experiencing something for yourself, it helps immensely if you have an idea of what you are going to be encountering.

For any encounter, raid or group, there are certain strategies that have been extolled online. Lots of information can be found and should be perused as it helps immensely, especially when the encounter is relatively complicated (and most of them are in WoW). Do read up, just remember that each attempt will be unique, each group will be unique, so its best to work with what is available and stay flexible.

Also, just because the website said to do an encounter one way does not mean that is the only way to complete it. Take note of how others will do things and you might find a more efficient way.

Thankfully in my guild we review most of the fights before hand. Since we are small we have the option of discussing and pooling our experiences, thus upping our collective knowledge of the event by quite a bit. This is also the time where questions are permissible and encouraged. The more everyone knows about the encounter, the better chance we have at succeeding.

For me the ideal introduction to a new event would be to run through it once just so I can get a general feel for it. Then go online and see what it all means and what other people have done etc. While this might be my ideal, I rarely go into a raid without some prior knowledge, as I find it incredibly rude towards the other players to be essentially dead weight (which is what most completely inexperienced players start out as being and its doubly so when they have really no idea what is going on!)

So don’t be a dick, read up on it!

Character wise it’s a bit different. Mostly because I think the experience part plays a larger role. Part of the reason that one plays a character through all the levels is to develop an understanding of how the character works and what their spells/skills do.

Part of the problem here is that once a character reaches maximum level their play style tends to shift. For me, both of my characters ended up with totally different talent builds after starting to raid, which means I had to learn which skills/spells to use in which order and at what time.

Which means that once you have your character all set up with all the bells and whistles, then you need to make it all work together. This will take some time, but just remember, the more you know about your character and what they are supposed to be able to achieve the better you can focus on reaching that goal.

Here are some helpful questions to get you started. If you can answer even half of them you are doing pretty well.
Do you understand the purpose of your character?
Do you know what all your spells/skills do and how they are interdependent?
Do you know what your optimum skill/spell rotation is?
Do you have a pet that needs managing and how to manage it?
Do you know what all your special bonus effects do (bonus things that happen when you crit/stun/etc)?
Do you know how to get out of tough situations and what your characters “oh shit” skills are?
Do you know what is your character really good at and what should they avoid doing?
Do you have a way to gauge how effective your character is?
Do you know about agro and how your character can best manage it?

Here are a few more helpful links for strategy in particular, but the character links will also have quite a bit of important information available.

http://www.stratfu.com/strats/

http://www.wowwiki.com/Guides
http://www.tentonhammer.com/wow/guides/general

Where do you get your strategy from?

Tags: guide, levels, links, loot, skills, strategy, world of warcraft

This entry was posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Articles, Computer Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.