Not familiar with what I mean by “Greasing the Social Wheels”? Check out my introductory entry on the topic first.

About First Aid

On World of Warcraft, First Aid is one of the three “secondary” professions that can be learned by all players of all classes, no matter their other professions. Fishing and Cooking are the other in this category which can be learned by all.

First Aid allows a player to turn cloth into bandages - progressively more powerful bandages as the player’s First Aid level advances. Bandages can be used as one of the many ways to restore health more quickly than natural healing allows, but the special benefit of bandaging is that it can be used for in-combat healing as long as the bandager and bandagee are not being hit (a hit will stop the channelling of bandaged healing).

Why First Aid Is A “Wheel Greaser”

In a party situation, it’s not always fair to depend solely on the healer to restore your health from battles. And, as a healer, sometimes it’s nice to save your mana and still get a quick heal.

While you may be fortunate and end up with group after group where the healer has plenty of mana to heal the fight and is able to recover mana for the next battle without huge long delays for the group, it’s what you do to “pull out the last stops” on or just after a really hard fight that helps define you as an A-Team player versus an Average Player.

And if you’re a Warlock who likes to Life Tap to restore mana, you’re losing an INSANE number of karma points with the A-Team members if you’re not bandaging yourself up after Life Tapping between battles, at least until the healer says they’ll gladly take over helping you out there.

How To Use First Aid As A Wheel Greaser

The main thing you’re doing by using First Aid is saving the Healer (even if the Healer is you) mana and as a result, allowing the group to progress more quickly, reducing the number of “mana up” breaks the healer will need. Sometimes, however, you’re backing out of a tough battle to bandage for a moment to save your life (so you can contribute more DPS to the fight afterwards) when the healer has been forced to focus solely on keeping the tank up.

Here are some simple habits you can execute between battles that will be noticed by the A-Team:

• Bandage yourself to full health after a battle has completed whenever possible
• Hunters, use bandages as extra healing on top of your Mend Pet ability
• Warlocks, use bandages to restore health after Life Tapping
• Anyone - bandage someone who needs it between battles

During battles, it’s not often all that useful to use a bandage, because being hit cancels the streaming heal of the bandaging process and bandaging can only be done once every 60 seconds. However, if you are not being hit and are a DPS character that can back out of a battle for 10 seconds to apply a bandage, the extra time you give yourself to “live to DPS another day” could end up helping the team more than if you had stayed, fought, and died.

What’s the quickest way to level up First Aid?

Now that you see one of the important reasons to level up First Aid, how do you get it to a reasonable level, quickly?

Personally, I like farming dungeons for my First Aid materials, but that’s because I have a max-level toon. Two runs of Ragefire Chasm, Two of Dead Mines and then about 6 wings of Scarlet Monestary and I’m at 225 First Aid and ready to do the quest in Hammerfall to up the max to 300.

If you’re starting a new toon, however, consider leveling up First Aid more naturally - take the Linen Cloth you find from humanoids from level 6 to the low teens and turn them into bandages, and as you advance your level, the cloth types will advance, too.

If you’re around level 40, consider farming RFC (or the Alliance equiv) for your Linen Cloth, or taking out humanoids in that 6-12 level range in zones you used to play in. Wool Cloth can be found on the Razormanes in The Barrens but is also present in Dead Mines and Wailing Caverns in piles.

And of course, if the prices are good because there’s a lot listed, buy some from the Auction House!

And yes, Wool Cloth is ALWAYS that expensive (more than Linen Cloth or Silk Cloth, at times more than Mageweave Cloth)… but that’s another topic for another day!

Tags: Class 101: Druid, dungeon leader guide, dungeon playing guide, dungeon training guide, Dungeons, Etiquette, first aid, first aid training, greasing the social wheels, guild etiquette, guildmaster guide, how to be a good guildmate, how to be a good raider, how to find a guild, how to make friends, instances, marked down on karma, party leader guide, pick up group, playing etiquette, pugging, pugging strategy, raid leader guide, raider training guide, social guide, things to farm, tips and tricks, Warcraft Tips and Tricks, why to train first aid, WoW Guilds

Some time ago, maybe around Patch 2.1, a change was introduced into the game surrounding chests and how parties handle who gets the loot.

The Old Way (before Patch 2.1 or so)

Initially, whoever opened the chest would get all of the contents, and the regular rolling mechanisms present in groups for corpse loots didn’t apply.

This meant social structures had to be set up amongst players - agreements that when a chest was found in a group situation, everyone in the party would /roll and the winner of that roll would get the chest and its contents.

Of course, that also meant problems - a player could easily circumvent the social expectations and there really was very little recourse except to vow never to party with that player again if it looked as if it were intentional and not an honest low-level-player’s mistake (that we all made or watched someone else make while in our first groups).

In some of the Outland dungeons, like Ramparts (the first one you’d do in Outland), a chest would spawn at the end of the instance after the boss was killed, and since the chest usually contained two blues, the screaming was intense about “ninjas” and how to deal with them. So, Blizzard made a change.

The New Way (current day)

Nowadays, chests obey the looting rules of your party, and therefore a standard party setup makes it so that contents of chests that are Green+ in quality pop up a standard rolling window like a regular corpse loot would.

But, there’s still a question - potions, ores, bags and the likes are White in quality and therefore do not trigger the roll, and therefore whoever opened the chest DOES get those materials where others miss out.

So, has the social agreement changed at all?

What Agreement Do You Prefer?

I’d love to get feedback on this topic from everyone out there - and if you can, please let me know what level of characters you have as well, so I can keep that in mind.

Do you suggest people /roll when a chest is discovered in a dungeon?

If others suggest a roll-off on a chest in a dungeon, what is your response?

Any other comments?

Tags: dungeon etiquette, dungeon leader guide, dungeon looting rules, dungeon playing guide, Dungeons, Etiquette, grouping guide, guildmaster guide, guildmaster mistakes, instances, new to dungeons, newbie tips, ninja loot, party leader guide, pick up groups, playing etiquette, PUG, pugging, pugging strategy, PUGs, rolling etiquette, tips and tricks, world of warcraft