Printable Gearing Guide

Any WoW pro worth their salt has an item level guide saved to their desktop and pinned to a frequent Discord channel. Why not go a step further and print it out, then tape it to the wall above your monitor? To that end I tossed together a more printer-friendly dungeon/raid loot upgrade guide.

Access the source excel sheet here via Office 365 (free): Raidfather's Printer-Friendly 11.1 Gear Guide.xlsx

8.5x11" printable PDF download (this is the normal paper size in the USA, "US Letter")

A3 printable PDF download (smallish poster, featured in the video below)

(creative commons, CC-BY licensed, feel free to modify/redistribute)

Recording and Transcribing your VODs

One of the best ways to improve at any difficult task is to record yourself doing it, then watch the replay and note where you could have done better. Between this and the popularity of streaming, it's easy to accumulate many terabytes of game recordings.

Rather than throw them all out, you can use modern AI tech to parse out all the text from those videos and save a copy. While you're at it you can re-encode the videos to save space.

I recently did this on my MacBook with an ultra-fast MLX-powered port of Whisper. Whisper is a tool developed by OpenAI for completely legitimate purposes* which can process an audio stream and write out text of everything that was said in that stream fairly accurately.

Think of this more as sample code to inspire/help you do this yourself rather than a working product. The transcriber script is here: github wowscribe.py

Separately, I used my beefy Windows gaming rig to re-encode all the videos to save space. This saved a ton of space, a lot of recordings went from 4 gigs down to 500 megs or less. The re-encoding script is here: github reencode.py .

Note that an AI tool such as Grok or Deepseek can easily regenerate these scripts in one shot, I encourage the reader to learn some python or shell-scripting basics and start making one-off helper scripts to get more out of your computing experience.

* they MAY have scraped and parsed every publicly-available video on YouTube to help train their state of the art large language models

DPS Practice Macro

I wrote a quick macro you can use to start a 3 minute timer with a countdown, then snapshot your current DPS from Details when it expires. This makes it easier to practice and judge your DPS on a target dummy without having to use WarcraftLogs or carefully make sure to check the DPS as of the last second of combat.