More important than GearScore

PVE Raiding - Player versus Environment

GTFOOF ^ (get the f out of fire). (This will come up often).

You need to answer 2 questions.  Are you prepared to Tank?  Are you prepared to Heal?  If not, you will be a DPS.  Sometimes even if you are willing to tank or heal you will be DPS - but not often.


If you have not yet done so:
* have a look at  www.wowwiki.com/classes, specifically the What do want you to know about your class.
* have a look at Wow.Com Resources.  If you are going to tank or heal, have a look at the suggested sites.  Regardless of role, have a look at your class.


The advice in this article is general.  If you are after specific strategy for specific classes or bosses, look elsewhere.

Basic strategy
As a tank, your priorities are:

• Keep yourself alive.  This means GTFOOF and use defensive cooldowns when needed.
• Keep your healers alive.  Do a basic amount of threat and ensuring ranged mobs don't target your healer.
• Keep your fellow tank(s) alive.
• Keep the DPS alive.  DPS do stupid things.  If you have a spare taunt and are not going to sacrifice either of the above, feel free to use it to get the attention of a stray mob.
• If in doubt, face the boss or mob away from the raid.  This helps with all of the above.
• Allow the DPS to do damage.  It's what DPS do.  Unfortuneatly the are not so good at doing damage when being hit by various nasty things.  This means that you need to do have more threat than they do.

As a healer, your priorities are:

• Keep the tank(s) alive.
• Keep yourself alive.  GTFOOF.  Physician - heal thyself.  Most classes (but not all) don't do very much while taking a dirt nap.  Dont stand in front of a boss, dont stand behind a dragon.
• Keep your fellow healers alive.
• Keep the DPS alive.
• Keep your mana up.  Sometimes this means you need to stop casting, or use mana replenishment  (water shields & mana totems for shamans, ask for replenishment etc).
• You can do more than heal.  Sometimes you dispel. Sometimes you sheild. Use a wand.  Hurt something.

As a DPS, your priorities are:

• Keep the healer(s) alive.  One time you are allowed to grab threat is when the healer is being beat up.
• Keep yourself alive. GTFOOF.  Let the tank keep threat.  Don't stand in front of bosses.  Don't stand behind dragons.
• Hurt things.  Generally this means ensure you dont steal threat off the tank.  If you are a caster, AOE groups, and DOT then Nuke.  If you are melee, bleed them then hurt them (note: I am yet to play melee DPS).

Stat priorities - DPSYou need to get to your hit cap.  It changes by group composition, talent composition and self buffs.  Use a hit calculator.
If you are a caster - spellpower is king.  Some classes benefit from haste, crit, or even spirit.
If you are melee or a hunter - I only have limited advice.  Strength or Agility, Attack Power, Expertise and Armor Penetration may be good. 

Stat priorities - Healer

Spellpower, enough MP5 to last a fight, Haste, Crit.

Stat priorities - Tank
Defence (unless you are a bear) : 535 for heroics, 540 for raids.
Stamina (health), dodge, parry, block (unless you are a DK).

Stats to avoid for PVE
Resiliance.  Anything with resilliance is for PVP, and has no place in a competant PVE set.


Talents
Once you are level 80, and have even very basic gear, you don't need to spec your talents for solo work.  So that leaves PVP (see below), or PVE instance and raids. Most classes have a preferred tree for their role (Shadow priest healing isnt great).  Most tree's have a beneficial 51 point talent, some do not (Blood DK Tanks for example).


For each and every point you spend, does it meet your priorities (above).  Things that affect pushback, run speed are PVP talents.  Things that affect your health are generally Tank or PVP talents (or both).  For DPS things that directly increase damage are better than things that increase regeneration etc.


For your chosen tree, spend 51 (or 50points), getting to the bottom of the tree.  Generally better talents are near the bottom.  Then go spend 10 points in a different tree with the same priorities.  Finally spend your remaining points as you see fit.

Gear selection
DPS : You need to get to your hit cap.  It changes by group composition, talent composition and self buffs.  Use a hit calculator.

Gear Maintenance

• All gems slots should be filled, even if only with cheap gems.  If you can afford repairs, you can afford basic gems.  If you can't afford repairs, make gold (play the AH, craft, gather, do dailies untill you can).
• Get a belt buckle, and gem it.
• Enchant your gear - even with only basic enchants.
• Give your gear a check.  I don't use gearscore, but quite like ElitistGroups.  Examine yourself on wow-heroes choosing 'live'.

PVP - Player versus player

All I know about PVP can be summed up with 3 simple rules:

• Can't do that while stunned.
• Can't do that while dead.
• This link will help.

In summary
As always, I am not the fountain of all knowledge.  There are pages written on how to best set up for any given class/role.  Reading in game descriptions & websites, watching videos are all valuable learning methods.  If you have general advice that helps (especially with melee/hunter DPS), please leave a comment. If you disagree, please say so.

And Get the F out of the fire

Notes:
^GTFOOF is also a blog worth reading