Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

Be a Shamanistic Genius while you level : Too Many Annas looks like good leveling advice for my shaman. I’ve actually leveled my shaman a bit lately - I ran out of rested XP on my druid. I seem to like to level toons in groups of 3 - hunter/warrior/paladin earlier and druid/shaman/warlock now.

How to make a duck tape bullwhip « Skip To My Lou looks like a fun idea. I wonder how long it will take before the first sibling gets hit with a whip and I have to take the offender’s whip away? (via GeekDad)

If that’s not authentic enough for you, check out How To Make Whips a Leathersmith’s whip guide.

I know that strafing is a vital skill for hunters, but I hadn’t thought about it for Shadow Priests. Melted Faces: The Strafe: Learn it, Love it, Live by it gives instructions for using strafe as a shadow priest.

According to this thread, Kara DPS Per Class, DPS in Kara should be doing a minimum of 400 DPS on boss fights. If a DPS class is doing less than 600 DPS, they need gear or are doing CC/off healing/providing other utility. When DPSers are done Kara, they should be pulling in 800+ DPS. A lot depends on the fight and what other utility DPSers are providing.

On one of my hunter’s few dungeon runs she hit 500ish DPS on some fights and averaged 400ish? I have a ways to go with getting her ready.

*edit* my hunter was averaging 500ish DPS and hitting 530ish at times.

Loot Rank for WoW looks like another useful tool. I like this one because it lets you rank the stats that matter to you as well as specifying where loot can be obtained. Then it gives you a top-ten list of the gear that matches your preferences.

For example, hit rating matters to my hunter because she’s not hit capped. At the moment, hit rating is pretty important. Once I get 15ish more hit rating, it won’t matter anymore. My hunter may do 5 mans, but will most likely not be seeing any Kara or badge loot (let alone Black Temple loot). I can restrict my search on those criteria.

Note that using a pre-made template from the forums then tweaking it is a good way of getting some quick answers.

A Dwarf Priest has a detailed guide to using Loot Rank.

These GeekDad Father’s Day Gift Suggestions look really good. Now I just need to budget to buy myself everything on the list…

A Year of CrockPotting: CrockPot Fried Chicken Recipelooks very tasty. We’ll doubtless be eating more chicken again as we’re pretty much done the half-cow we bought in January.

General TPS from WWS for druids and pallys - TankSpot looks like it would be a useful application. My threat for my last few boss fights varied from 460-650 TPS. Nightbane was one of my lowest threat fights. I wonder if that’s due to the skeleton drops interrupting my threat rotation? I should compare numbers with some other WoW Web Stats reports. I’m planning to try out his in-game TPS tool as well.

Our little guild alliance downed Nightbane last night, which means we have completely cleared Karazhan! It took us approximately 11 weeks. We first poked our noses in there on March first. We’ve managed to keep our raiding low key - we raid approximately 6-8 hours per week. I know of at least one player who only plays another 2-4 hours a week on top of raiding, so progress is possible with minimal play time.

Now to start farming the heck out of Kara so that we can move on to Zul’Aman!

My daughter just registered her first complaint about those boys not putting the toilet seat down after peeing.

Micro Persuasion: Become an Expert with the Power of Deliberate Practice gives the tried and true response to becoming better at something - Practice! The notable addition is that you track what you’re doing. I know I tend to be more motivated to keep going if I keep track of what I’ve learned.

Mirabilis.ca » Blog Archive » A lush, no-care lawn looks like it has good ideas. I’m not so sure about the idea of a moss lawn, but a clover lawn might work out well.