Welcome!

Hi folks! Just a quick post to say hello to all the new visitors coming over from Resto4Life. Thanks for the link, Phae!

I hope you find something useful here. But I wanted to say something about where I'm coming from. Our guild is 10/15 in normal Naxx, and we typically PUG in two players for our raids. We wipe often (currently on Hegian and Four Horsemen sometimes and on Grobbulus a lot). I'm not as strong at theory as Phaelia or World of Matticus or the crowd at Elitist Jerks. I spend as much time on Festival achievements as I do on raids.

That said, I believe a few key things:

• A casual player might not have the gear that a hardcore raider does, but there's no reason the casual can't have the same skills.
  
• The casual player often has to work a lot harder and needs more skill than the raider in a guild that's farming heroic Naxx and EoE every week.*
  
• There is an amazing amount of heavy-duty theorycraft and good analysis that's out there.** But it's a very steep learning curve, and casual players often have to spend a lot of time to process and assimilate that knowledge.

That's what I'm trying to do with this blog: connect some of the dots for more casual players — specifically Balance and Restoration Druids — to help you upgrade your skills.

So most of my posts will be pretty elementary for the hardcore players. But hopefully they're useful to a lot of people also. I sometimes simplify stuff, and I'm sure I get a lot wrong too. Call me on it! And if there's anything you want to hear about, let me know.

*The hardcore raider may well be more skilled; that's what got him or her in the hardcore raids to begin with. But those raids are going to see shorter fights, less damage, and fewer mistakes. Casuals by definition are going to have to deal with a lot of crap, so they use their skills more.

**I can't emphasize this enough. The available resources are astonishing. There are whole disciplines of IT that should be so lucky.