[If anyone else wants to post class guides on here from things they're picking up in Karazhan and would like to share with the guild, drop me a message on the forum and we can sort it out :)]

Well we visited Karazhan last night and it was my first time. It quickly became clear that I have to work for a living now; no more just standing at the back and healing. I have crowd control duties now, as the place is crawling with undead. I’ve never really used the shackle undead spell before, so had to get learning very quickly. I’d already setup a macro (which I’ll come back to later), which was a big help once I got going.

What I learnt as we went along is that I can’t wait for the shackle to break and then reshackle, as then chaos ensues! So every 10 seconds or so, once the tanks were topped up and with renews ticking I’d quickly reshackle my mob to prevent it from breaking. Seemed to work ok for the most part doing it that way - the macro helped a lot with that as well. I picked up the following macro, which cleverly means that once I have shackled something, I can keep the tank targetted, and repressing the shackle macro button will reshackle, without taking my target away from the tank. Very handy.

/clearfocus [modifier:alt][target=focus,dead][target=focus,help][target=focus,noexists]
/focus [target=focus,noexists]
/cast [target=focus]Shackle Undead

Egotistical Priest has a great post all about shackle undead which is well worth a read, for priests and non-priests alike. The Ego version of the macro is slightly different but I think does pretty much the same thing, I may have to try it out later:

/clearfocus [modifier:shift]
/clearfocus [target=focus,dead]
/clearfocus [target=focus,noexists]
/focus [target=focus,noexists]
/cast [target=focus] Shackle Undead

Ego’s note to other classes is also worth a mention:

If we have been assigned a mob to shackle, please do not break the shackle. Do not hit, stun, AOE near, or even spit on its foot (assuming it has a foot). We?ve got this one covered. If we miscalculate and shackle breaks early, remember that we have no way of knowing WHEN it will break. It could break one second into being shackled. One thing we can promise is that if shackle breaks early and we’re not in the middle of a heal, we’ll be reshackling that mob as quickly as we can. Don’t touch it, and for the love of all that is holy, do not DoT it. If you cast a DoT on my shackled mob, I will be quite wroth with you.

Also I mostly forgot to take screenshots, but here’s one below that I managed to grab of our intrepid adventurers (click for larger version).

WoW Web Stats (WWS) has been experimented with and discussed quite a bit recently in guild.

To help with anyone getting started, there are several WWS guides out there to pick from: I’ve listed a couple below that looked particularly helpful to me.

(The ubiquitous (in a good way )) BRK covers getting started and thoughts on measuring DPS.

For a more healing, less pew-pew view, Priestly Endeavours (one of my favourite Priest blogs) has a first look at WWS along with WWS for holy priests (which I think should help other healing classes too).

Whilst we’re on the subject of technical type stuff, Priestly Endeavours also has an introduction to writing macros, which is very timely hot on the heels of our (well, Bob’s) detailed mage macros post from the weekend.

A guide to mage macros was posted on our forum courtesy of guildee BobTheWorm. It looks pretty handy to me, so I’ve taken the liberty of reprinting here. There’s also a Mage Macro section at WoW-Wiki that is worth checking out. Enjoy:

#showtooltip Counterspell
/stopcasting
/cast Counterspell

Kind of obvious what it does, but for those who have never used macros before, it will stop whatever spell you’re currently casting and cast counterspell. Very useful for pvp.

#showtooltip Pyroblast
/cast Presence of Mind
/stopcasting
/cast Arcane Power
/stopcasting
/use Vengeance of the Illidari
/stopcasting
/cast Pyroblast

Hehe, the IWIN macro While standing still pressing the macro button once will do everything and cast your pyroblast (virtually instantly). If you are moving you will need to press the button twice to cast your pyroblast.

An alternative is to replace the “/use Vengeance of the Illidari” line with “/use 13″ or “/use 14″. Can include either/both of these lines here depending on which trinket slot you want to activate.

#showtooltip Polymorph
/cast [modifier:shift, target=focus] Polymorph; Polymorph
/focus [nomodifier:alt]

It was very hard to get a nice precise macro to do exactly what I wanted here, but I believe I finally found it, and it works well! Quite simply it will sheep whoever you cast it on. And if you want to resheep the same mob press whatever the modifier is when you cast it. ie. in this case hold shift while you press the button. This also works if you have it on a hot-key. The modifier can be changed to “ctrl” or “alt” if prefered. This means that you won’t have to retarget the sheeped mob to resheep him making life that little bit easier.

#showtooltip Slow Fall
/dismount [mounted]
/cast Slow Fall

Not entirely sure if this is already built into the game now after the last patch, but it is quite useful. This macro allows you to feather (and hence slow-fall) even when mounted… It has saved my life a couple of times! And as a little trick, if you run jump off a big cliff on your mount and use this, you’ll float along at the same speed as when mounted. So in Arathi Basin you can run and jump off the Lumber Camp hill and land at the Blacksmith flag for a nice aerial assult!