With Cataclysm coming out shortly, most of our current discussion threads become more or less completely obsolete, so in the interest of making the new Cataclysm information easily findable, it is my intention to lock (almost) all existing threads and start new ones. There will be a new Simple Questions thread, a new Blue Post thread, and so on.

Hence, there are a fair number of new threads that will need to be started. We'll need anew guide threads for each spec, a new UI discussion and optimization thread, and probably some others as well. So if you're interested in creating one of these threads (and maintaining the first post with current information), let me know. If you have an idea for a discussion thread you'd like to see that I haven't mentioned, again, let me know. If you're doing either of those things, feel free to post in this thread. If you're not doing either of those things, please don't.

Note that you probably don't want to volunteer if you're not willing to put significant time into the upkeep of a thread. This isn't a matter of spending 5 minutes banging something out and then ignoring it; I'd like good, insightful first posts akin to the Pocket Guide in early Wrath, or the spec threads that most other classes have.

I can step up to create / maintain a reference thread. Unfortunately, since the beta is now down, there's not going to be much ability to do testing. How are you guys doing on the ShadowCraft project? Is it to the point where we can start figuring out stat weights and rotations for level 85?

The calculations piece is... getting there. The Assassination and Combat models are to a point where I feel comfortable pulling ballpark figures, and there is also a subtlety model, though it's not tested as thoroughly as the other two and is thus probably buggier. Also note that all the cycle models are a bit crude at this point, and there's still a handful of things not implemented, so we can't yet give definitive answers on all questions that need to be answered around cycles and whatnot... but we can give some ballpark figures.

The challenge is, the UI is lagging somewhat behind, so in order to use it at this point you'll need to edit the test programs directly, which is likely impractical for most forum-goers. In particular: if you can't figure out what you need to do from looking at what's been checked in, then you probably should wait for the UI work to finish and use that. Please don't deluge me (or the forums) with requests for explanations on how to use it. Some of you can probably figure it out. The rest can wait a few weeks for us to get it to a more usable place. If you plan to write a guide thread or other useful resource and the lack of specific numbers from ShadowCraft is the only thing stopping you from doing so, I'm willing to devote a certain amount of time to helping such people get set up, but I simply don't have time to teach everyone how to get it working at this stage.

Basically: I realize that we can't necessarily say a whole lot yet. Most of these guides can't be written today. Fortunately, most of them don't need to be - it's a good 2 weeks till Cata comes out, and realistically most guilds probably won't be raiding in a serious way until January. So we have some time. I just want to make sure we have a plan for getting some useful threads up and running between now and then.

To expand on that, if anyone plans on creating and maintaining one of these threads, now would be the time to create your outlines, figure out formatting and plan out what you need so that when information does become available in 2-3 weeks you can just gather it all up and plug it into the spaces you left.

Realistically, the maintainers of these threads are probably better off being good editors and readers. In a few weeks the forums will explode with information and in the short term it's going to be a Herculean task to find and summarize it all; after that it becomes an endurance to continue to monitor all the threads (even if they don't seemingly relate to yours) to ensure that your thread is always up to date with the latest theorycraft. Don't forget too that monitoring of other class threads is also important to developing and maintaining theorycraft; WotLK saw a lot of overlap regarding ArP between warriors and rogues.

It should also be noted that if you're maintaining a thread on a specific spec, it's normal to have information overlap with other spec threads as we all have to think about things like the poison hit cap although each spec may approach it differently.