There are tons of macro resources around the Web, most of them give you a basic description of what the macro does, who it’s for, and the macro text that you can copy/paste into your macro keyboard’s macro editor or into the WoW macro-editor. But what do you do if you come across a macro that’s supposed to be the best thing ever and make your life easier but you don’t really understand how it does what it’s supposed to do? Or even what it’s supposed to do?

Enter Fitzcairn’s Macro Explain-O-Matic! This handy little tool lets you paste in your macro text and get a step by step explanation of what the macro does at each line. It’s perfect if you want to take someone’s pre-written macro and edit it to do exactly what you want it to do or add steps to include more actions without breaking the macro.

Ah, gold. The main reason I hear from some of my guildmates that they haven’t picked up dual-specs? It costs 1000g. The main reason our my pally friend is tired of respecing between healing and tanking? Gold. Everyone needs it, not all of us have a good, solid way of getting it.

Have you ever wondered how people seem to play the auction house to make money? Have you ever wondered how you can take the economy on your server and turn it into a moneymaking machine without putting so much time into it that you’re distracted from actually playing the game? So have I! Which is why this post, Gold Making Tips from a WoW Millionaire over at WoW Economist piqued my interest.

In the first video, our tutor manages to make 1000g in 4 hours of /played time:

The post goes on into another video that outlines the narrator’s typical day of milking the auction house for all it’s worth – the best part is that this strategy doesn’t particularly rely on being brutal against other players and devastating the server economy in order to make a few extra copper – it’s just playing off the need for certain items and the willingness of many players to simply overpay for something because they want it. All of the videos are created by the writer of WoW Auction Mastery, where more videos and tutorials are promised soon.

A little while ago, I polled my friends at Twitter (you can follow me at @halophoenix, by the way) to find out what the WoW players I know think are the easiest classes to level.

Old wisdom has always been that hunters and warlocks are the easiest to level because you almost had a second character there to help you in the form of a hunter’s pet or a warlock’s summon. I’ve played both classes and found them pretty easy to level, but my main is a hunter and the lock I play is pretty small, so I was curious what other people thought.

Are Death Knights the automatic winner because they start at 55, and the biggest help to leveling is getting rid of those 55 levels to grind? At the same time, retribution paladins have gotten a lot of dps love lately – are they easier to level? I’m playing a ret pally alt right now and she seems to blow through levels faster than I can get her gear for them. What about warriors? Has the nerf stick hit them so hard no one plays them anymore? And what happened to all of the rogues?

Well, the Twitterati came through in a big way. While no one really agreed on a specific class that’s definitely the easiest to level, some trends appeared. There was “easy classes” to level, and there were “unrewarding and completely too difficult” classes to level.

Among the winners? Shadow priests, retribution paladins (as expected), hunters of all specs (also expected), and one passionate vote for warlocks even though they had their hayday a few patches ago and no one seems to play them much anymore. My good friends @nanceinsnow and @transrelativity both weighed in in support of shdow priests, locks, and of course, hunters. (although nance’s dps output is making me want to change specs from BM to survival…) The trend seems to be that dps classes are the easiest, which makes sense – they’re designed for damage output, which makes questing and grinding that much faster. The only class to buck the trend were death knights (suggested by my guildmate Yoshi, who tanks with a 2-hander with style), which were easy not just because of their massive DPS but also because they start at 55, and sure enough – skipping 55 levels makes a difference.

Among the losers? Restoration druids, protection warriors and paladins, and elemental shaman. (unless you’re a multi-boxer and have enough of them to one-shot elites 5 levels above you!) The trend there isn’t so clear. I can understand why prot-spec’d anyone would be difficult to level: you’re specced for damage absorption, not output. Resto druids I can understand too – healing classes are designed for, well, healing. Elemental shamans I was confused by though.

One stand-out though: a good friend in my guild, @tongarityphoon pointed out that she thought holy priests were the easiest to level. I boggled; holy priests? Cloth-wearing healers? Easy to level? How could that possibly be? She insisted; it was the easiest class to level she’d ever played. I’m still skeptical: I might have to roll one to find out.

So what about you? What classes have you played that you found particularly easy to level? Does it matter where in the cycle of patches from launch it was? Rogues and enhancement shaman were in vogue about a year ago, as were warlocks; everyone was playing them. Then along came the nerf train and the new expansion and it seems like everyone who played a rogue now plays a death knight. Additionally, you can’t find someone to pick up all the caster plate that drops in Naxx to save your life.

Maybe it’s a function of which class is on top at the moment, but some classes are consistently easy to grind. Let us know your picks in the comments!

One of my favorite sites, TalentChic, has been updated with talent and spec changes for 3.1!

There are significant changes to everyone’s talent trees this week after the patch, and some of you will find you have fewer points to spend, and others of you will find that you have more to spend, but with time you’ll be able to see at TalentChic what everyone’s speccing towards. Since TalentChic pulls its data from The Armory, it’ll probably be a few days before the site is a definitive resource again since everyone has to go and respec, but once it’s done a few more updates, you’ll be able to use it the way you used to!

Additionally, TalentChic has a new counterpart: GlyphChic, to help you determine whether you’re using the right glyphs for your spec. You can browse both sites by class and spec, and the most popular glyphs and specs will be shown at the top – mind you, they may not be the BEST, or even the RIGHT ones for you, just the most popular. So remember to take both sites with a grain of salt, and use them to help you make your decisions, not make them for you. Enjoy!

Tired of waiting around a dead boss for a half-hour for the hunter and the shaman to argue over who really needs that mail? Or maybe half of your 10-man isn’t taking the trash seriously and you guys wipe over and over again? Then check out this video by Kyth, of guild Fusion, which promises to show you how to turn your guild from one 5 man a night to 2 hour Naxx clears, and having fun the whole way!

While I would say that everyone in your guild would have to agree to this kind of mentality before you really embark on it, I would also say it’s worth it for your guild to be serious enough to do what they need to do in order to make a raid successful while simultaneously having a good time.

The tips are useful even for veteran raiding guilds, and over all are pretty simple: pay attention, stay on task, take everything seriously, give people the benefit of the doubt and don’t put up with poor performance, and handle yo’ business. Check out the video here in HD or click the image above to learn how your guild can raid more effectively, too!

My original main character is a Night Elf Druid. She started on Proudmoore, but left her guild (and most of my friends) behind when transfers to Dragonblight were offered. Since then she’s been abandoned. Now that I have paid US$25 to fix my mistake, I can look at raiding with friends again. I’ll try to keep a log of my attempts to catch up with my friends, with the aim of helping other time-poor players enjoy with their friends what time they can spare.
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Being a fan of the PvP, I’m on the World Defense channel in addition to Local Defense. Today several of us from We No happened to be near XR when we started getting tons of “under attack” notifications so we decided to see what was up. Usually it’s one or two folks attacking guards trying to get some people to come fight. Today, it was what seemed to be an enitre guild. A solid 20-30 lvl 60’s attacking. Right away it was on. We sent out the call to friends and in moments had our own solid defense and stomped the crap of the pesky attackers. Here’s a few screen caps I took. The achilles heal of this attack was that it all hinged on one guy named Aurthor or something like that. He stood in the back and yelled out orders and very quickly we realized that he was their leader. Why they weren’t using a raid chat channel I have no idea, but that they were allinace it was probably because they were 12 years old and don’t understand things like that. :-P Anyway, as soon as we took him out, their whole plan fell apart. And the same with each time they regrouped and came back. They finally gave up and all was right with the world.