Being a Know-it-All Without Knowing it All

Learn Your Resources

All of us have encountered those times when you log on and look at your quest log, only to wonder “so… what the heck am I doing, anyway?”, or those conversations in guild chat where someone asks a question that’s kinda out-there and you can almost hear crickets chirping. Do you want to be that guy (or gal, as the case may be) that always has an answer for everything? The Go-To Person for WoW info on just about anything? I can show you how.

But Lass, I’m basically still a newb! I’ve only played one or two classes, and certainly haven’t done every quest or been to every dungeon or raid in the game! And I don’t know squat about talent trees for other classes!

Fear not, friends, it matters little. You don’t have to have a rolodex of WoW trivia secreted in the vaults of your noggin to be the WoW Know-it-All. You just have to know where to look to find the information you want, and know how to cross-reference sources and do some fact-checking to verify the information you’ve found. Along the way, you’ll no doubt add to your personal knowledge base about the game, making it that much easier for you to provide answers when necessary. So, how do I do it? Let me show you.

Determine Sources

While there’s lots of information about the game I’ve managed to memorize over the three years I’ve been playing, there’s even more information I just don’t have. However, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, I like to be helpful and be able to provide information to fellow players whenever I can. As a result, I’ve established a fairly reliable network of credible sources to find the information I want on just about any game-related topic I can conceive of. Armed with this arsenal of game information sources, I can answer just about any WoW question under the sun with minimal effort on my part, and with varying degrees of authority.

From virtually Day One that I started playing WoW, I established a means to be almost completely self-reliant when it came to answering questions about the game. Because I started playing when very few of my friends played, I had limited resources to rely on to answer my questions for me. As a result, I specifically sought out ways for me to find the information I needed without having to bother anyone else about it. I hit up Google and did search after search to answer questions as I thought of them, constantly Alt-Tabbing to web pages as I made my way through quests and zones. After a while, I noticed a pattern to the sites Google returned for information and began bookmarking sites I visited frequently, and made notations in Notepad or a notebook I kept near my computer with information I’d found that I felt I might need to refer to later. This is how I began to establish my network of sources.

By now, WoW information sites have grown and become more comprehensive, and more sites are popping up all the time. There are scores of great resources out there for WoW-related info, and it would be impossible for me to list them all. In this article, I’ll mention only the sites I personally use on a regular basis and what I use them for. You, of course, can develop your own network of sources and methods for searching that work best for you.

In order for you to determine the types of sources you’ll need to have access to on a regular basis, you’ll need to determine what types of information you’ll need most often, and then break up your sources into categories based on what types of information they provide.

General Reference Sources
First, let me talk about my absolute favorite site for general information: WoW Wiki. This site has been an invaluable resource to me since the day I found it, and is probably one of the most all-encompassing and comprehensive sites for game info out there. I can easily spend hours skimming through content there, just for the sake of reading about a game I love, and still not read everything there is to be found there. Countless times, I have been able to answer questions for guild mates on subjects I have absolutely no background in whatsoever with surprising accuracy and detail just by taking a quick spin through WoW Wiki.

Here’s an example: one day in guild chat, when few of our members were on (it was fairly early in the morning), one of our shadow priests was asking about the importance of specifically stacking spell penetration with their gear, and what benefits were to be had by doing so.

Now, as many of you who have visited my blog regularly know, I have very limited experience with playing casters. I have a shadow priest in her early-50s, but that’s it, and I play her very infrequently. Also, she’s not really at a level yet where I would be worrying about such minutiae. So, already you know I know just about zip on this subject. However, because there weren’t really enough folks on, and those that were on knew as little or less than the questioner on the subject, I decided to step up and try to take a stab at it.

So, I turned to my laptop (thankfully, I’m lucky enough to be running two systems side-by-side now, so I don’t have to deal with pesky Alt-Tabbing anymore) and hit up WoW Wiki. I did a search through WoW Wiki on “spell penetration” to get the ball rolling, and started to skim through the information there. Linked to the page on Spell Penetration, there was also a page about the formulas for calculating spell hit chance, which I opened as well. After briefly skimming through those pages, I was able to relate the information I’d found to our shadow priest.

With my tendency to be rather thorough when relating information (you’ve seen my Text Wall crits here before, so you know what I’m talking about), I decided to follow up with some further information for our shadow priest. It was then that I continued on to another one of my resources: The Armory.

The Armory is a Johnny-Come-Lately to the WoW information site scene, but it has quickly become an invaluable resource (thanks Blizz!). For casual researchers, it’s merely a means to look-up someone’s gear and spec. For those of us who like to plumb the depths of WoW info, it is so much more than that, and it provides information straight from the source: the game developers. With The Armory, not only can you view gear, specs and lookup items, but you can also follow the trends of various classes at level 70 (as Armory Musings… has kindly shown us) and make inferences based on those perceived trends. Let’s return to my anecdote about our shadow priest friend, and I’ll explain how The Armory came into play.

So, after relating the information I’d found on WoW Wiki on spell penetration and spell hit chance, our shadow priest still wasn’t satisfied.

That’s all well and good, but that doesn’t tell me if I should be stacking that stuff with my gear or not.

This was the basic sentiment from our shadow priest. So, on to The Armory I went. Once there, I started doing searches on some of the top world raiding guilds, because I knew our priest was trying to get geared up for raid encounters. I skimmed through the rosters of guilds like Death & Taxes and Nihilum looking for shadow priests. After identifying a few candidates, I started looking at their stats in hopes of identifying a common trend, and related my findings back to our shadow priest.

Doesn’t look like D&T and Nihilum shadow priests are specifically trying to stack it, really, and based on the info I found on WoW Wiki, it doesn’t appear to be too terribly important as opposed to the other stats you’d probably have an easier time finding on gear anyway–like spell damage and spell crit.

And thus, we had a satisfied shadow priest. I was able to at least superficially address his concerns to his satisfaction on a subject I knew virtually nothing about personally, all with about five or so minutes of searching.

Of course, not everyone would specifically want to go out of their way to answer questions like this, but it was a good example to prove my point: with the right sources, you can find out just about anything. And it also raises another good point that I’ll cover in more detail further on: learning to cross-reference sources for more depth. But, I’m getting a little off-track here. Let’s get back to general resources.

As I’ve (thoroughly) established, WoW Wiki and The Armory are great general-purpose resources. There are several others out there that I make use of on a regular basis, so let’s take a look at some of those.

WoW Head
This is another great source I use on practically a daily basis, and have spent a significant amount of time looking through. Unlike WoW Wiki, WoW Head isn’t a site I can just go to and browse aimlessly, though. WoW Head is a site I go to when I have a very specific goal in mind. Most often, I’ll use it to look up quests, as it has, so far, provided me the most comprehensive and reliable information on things like where to go (with map coordinates!) and what to do. I use it constantly when I’m working on leveling an alt. Also, WoW Head was the site I used most commonly to look up items and where they can be found, while planning out my upgrade strategies. Although The Armory (and lately Lootables) has added some features to make this helpful as well, I’ll still use WoW Head for more detailed information on how to go about acquiring the items I want.

Thottbot
To be perfectly honest, I don’t use Thottbot all that much. I know there are folks out there that swear by it, but I’m not one of them. Typically, I will only use Thottbot when I’m looking for something very specific, like ability ranks and tooltip information. (In fact, I used Thottbot almost exclusively as a resource when I was developing my Pet Talent Calculator.) I can’t knock Thottbot though, as it was one of the original sites for WoW-related info “back in the day”, and continues to be a reliable source of information for so many, but personally I have never liked the site’s “look” and the way it returns search information, so I’ve tended to take my investigations elsewhere when possible.

Allakhazam
Prior to the advent of WoW Head, this site is where I spent the vast majority of my time looking up items and quest information. Since discovering WoW Head, though, I have spent very little time here. I do still occasionally visit this site, though, for information on profession recipes and where they can be found (or purchased) and the requirements to make certain items. I made the move to WoW Head mostly because I like its interface a lot better, not necessarily because it provides better information.

To summarize, the major general purpose sites I visit most frequently are:

• WoW Wiki — All encompassing
• WoW Head — Quests, item look-ups
• The Armory — Individual gear, specs, trends, item upgrades
• Thottbot — Tooltip info and ability ranks
• Allakhazam — Profession recipes

Because I’ve had folks mention before that too much text all at once can be a little overwhelming, I’ll break this article down into multiple parts so it’ll be a little easier to digest. Once all the parts have been posted and folks have had a chance to look them over, I’ll be adding this to its own “page” on the site for ease of reference. Coming up next: Specific Sources.