Eshk-a-Babble

Fizzwidget's Feed-O-Matic updated by Gazmik

2010-12-19T12:29:00.001-08:00

So, if you were impatient and went through the trouble of my previous post, Gazmik Fizzwidget (this time I'm awake enough to see that I was typing the name wrong. Whoops!) has updated the embedded libPeriodicTable so that FOM now works with Cata foods "out of the box".

Nice.

Fizzwidget's Feed-O-Matic Cataclysm Update

2010-12-12T10:08:00.000-08:00

Okay, so perhaps the title is slightly inaccurate, as there is currently no Cataclysm update for this one-click pet-feeding add-on, but there's no reason you can't do it yourself!

For those unfamiliar, Fizzwidget's Feed-O-Matic is an addon for Hunters so they can just click one button and their pet gets fed something from their bags. No muss, no fuss. It'll use "basic" (non-stat) foods and the lower-quality foods on it's own, and it won't start feeding the pet your hard-earned +90 agility eels unless you're out of everything else (and not even then if you uncheck the box for stat foods), so there's basically no downside.

...and no, I'm not talking about scrounging around in Wowhead's DB looking for item numbers and editing lua files. There's a far simpler way to do it.

Fizzwidget's Feed-O-Matic gets it's intelligence about what items are meat, fish, bread, fungus, and fruit from a library called LibPeriodicTable. Don't click on that link, tho'. That's the old, unupdated version of the library which has no clue about Cataclysm foods. Feed-O-Matic actually contains part of what's called a "private copy" of that library which you can see by looking in Interface\Addons\GFW_FeedOMatic\Libs for the three directories, LibPeriodicTable-3.1, LibPeriodicTable-3.1-Consumable, and LibPeriodicTable-3.1-TradeskillResultMats. If you go to the developer's site at WowAce you'll find newer versions of LibPeriodicTable which have been updated for Cataclysm. All you have to do is look on the right-hand side at the bottom of the Facts window and you'll see the alpha and beta releases (tagged with a A: or B:). At the present time the latest alpha version is LibPeriodicTable-r315 and so far appears to work just fine, containing all the new foods and the updated information about the old foods.

Download LibPeriodicTable-r315 (or whatever's newest) somewhere and open it with 7-Zip (if you're still using Windows' native zip file support, it's time to stop) by right clicking on it and selecting 7-Zip->Open Archive. A window will open and inside you'll see the LibPeriodicTable-3.1 directory, which you're going to double-click on so you can see all the various sub-directories it has. You don't need all those, so in this directory you're just going to multi-select the directories matching the private copy Feed-O-Matic uses, which are LibPeriodicTable-3.1, LibPeriodicTable-3.1-Consumable and LibPeriodicTable-3.1-TradeskillResultMats, and then just drag and drop them into Interface\Addons\GFW_FeedOMatic\Libs. Windows will ask you if you're really sure you want to do that, so tell it yes you're sure and you're done!

Now the next time you start up WoW, Feed-O-Matic will know about all the new Cataclysm foods, and you don't have to worry about when Gazmik Fizzwidget gets around to updating his addon (which otherwise, still works perfectly well).

Cataclysm Leatherworking Spreadsheet updated!

2010-12-11T16:03:00.000-08:00

There's still a bit of cosmetic work yet left to do, but I've put in all the rest of the new Cataclysm recipes, moved just about every bit of data around, broke the calculations apart into multiple pages, etc etc. The result is considerably easier to edit.

One thing new in this version is automatic averaging of prices for some of the materials (don't worry, leaving a blank empty will not count as costing zero gold) so if you don't like your prices varying so much over time, fill in more than just the first sample (you get a max of three). The arbitrage column (scraps->leather->heavy) also figures into that as a fourth sample.

Basically, this revision is 100% better than the previous revision.

Feel free to clone the Cataclysm Leatherworking Spreadsheet so you can edit the prices to suit your own server, but I still suggest keeping a bookmark to my master version, as I'll be updating/tweaking it further with more features. I'm still working on an easier way for people to simply modify disposable copies of the spreadsheet so they can just plug their materials costs and not have to worry about anything else. Stay tuned on that one...

Cataclysm Hunter... or Pokemon Trainer?

2010-12-09T19:19:00.001-08:00

So, as silly as the title may sound, this to me is about the simplest way to describe the hefty change Blizzard made to Hunters in the 4.0 patch leading up to Cataclysm. Before, you had to really plan carefully as to what pet you brought with you out into the wild... and for the most part this led to something boring enough to make it feel like having different pets was going largely unused.

Wolves and lots of them. If you were running around the wilderness in the pursuit of Fine Loots, you were generally traveling with a Tenacity (tanking) pet and it's wonderful Thunderstomp ability, and if you were doing an instance, by and large there was only one choice: a wolf, all because it gave the hunter (originally the entire raid) a 5% damage buff that was easy to measure. It didn't really matter that you could have a set of different ones in the stable, because if you were the only hunter around what you'd use in almost all cases was a wolf. If you weren't the only hunter around, your choices were less limited but more annoying because to help the raid/group you'd want to take a pet with a different ability, and that usually wound up in one place as well...

Armor reduction pets, and generally a worm. ...and then you weren't even bringing a 5% DPS buff with you which made you less impressive because players can't generally do enough math to figure out what DPS increase a reduction in armor causes, so most of them simply assume that "DPS is moar betterer". ...and then Blizzard went and changed the wolf's buff so that it only applies to the hunter and their pet. So... again, more wolves. It was nice that with a five-minute cooldown you could swap out one pet for another, but obnoxious to deal with in practice if you had to pug something out. Most people were carrying one tenacity pet, one ferocity pet, and then the 1-2 other pets that they personally liked having around to look at. Trying to get flexibility beyond that small selection was frustrating--especially if you'd specced into Beast Mastery because while there were a lot of interesting pet abilities out there, picking one up would mean cutting that rare purple and green sparkle-cat that you can't get anymore loose.

NO MORE!

Now you can have a stable of well, more pets than most people will even want to collect, and by the time you hit 83, you can carry five of them in what amounts to a "hotlist" or basically, the Pokemon Trainer backpack. Seriously. Mind you, Pokemon Trainers hoard a whole ton of Pokemon back in SOMEONE's computer (no idea why it was named that), but can only fit six in their backpack to take with them. That's pretty much the same thing going on here now. You pick your hotlist by talking to a Pokemon terminal, er... Stable Master, and then out into the wilderness you go. There's no longer even a cooldown on swapping them from your hotlist in the field--you just dismiss the one you were using, and summon up one of the other ones on the spot.

Hunters have definitely been gleefully taking advantage of both this and the new pet models. In the past week I've noticed that it's downright rare to see someone traveling with a mere wolf or gorilla. I've been seeing all sorts of crazy pets running around after their masters lately, many of which have been new models but for the most part, a whole lot of different pets which seems to represent that hunters are starting to tote the ones they like more often than the ones they think they absolutely need. Me personally? I've just been cycling through them like mad as I run quests, because I picked up eight more last week. I've got a poo-flinging monkey (Gorillas are not monkeys--Do not anger The Librarian.) a silithid with an exposed and glowing brain, a cute little fox (who will be replaced for a different color soon--don't tell him!) that can do a little dance, an eagle who can fly loop-the-loops, a semi-transparent wolf (who is not replacing Taxes), as well as a gen-u-ine Jowlie Mastiff Houn' Dawg named Slobbers.

This change thing, it is good. :)

Cataclysm is here! New leatherworking spreadsheet!

2010-12-09T16:15:00.001-08:00

Okay, so *pant-pant* I've been a little bit busy scarfing up loot the last few days, and I think my cheeks are as full as they can stand to be for the moment, so it's time to do some updates!

But first... I'm already level 83. Neener-neener-nee-ner! Almost all my T9/10 gear went away before I hit 82, and I don't miss it a bit.

The best part?

I crafted a few of the replacement pieces, because once again, Blizz has given crafted gear reason to live. :)

So... here's an updated version of the Northrend Leatherworking Spreadsheet, with a few more enhancements this time around. I'll warn you that the new one is still very much a Work In Progress, but I've learned a lot of cool things about Google Spreadsheets since the last time.

The Cataclysm Leatherworking Spreadsheet spans multiple pages this time, and I'm going to be putting in a few hooks so you can actually avoid upcharging for miniscule things like vendor-sold materials. One page will have the recipes, one page will have the schedules, one page will have space for notes, one page will have price modifiers (so you can selectively charge more for blues than greens, etc). At the moment it's only about a third finished and just contains the recipes I've gotten at the moment (up to a skill of 500).

Either way, if you're doing Leatherworking, bookmark it or better yet, bookmark here.

(I'll be posting something about the new Pokemon Trainer aspect of huntering in a few hours. I have some IRL errands to deal with right now)

Midsummer Fire Festival and TomTom

2009-06-23T17:30:00.001-07:00

Pastebomb your client with this once you have TomTom loaded:

/way Arathi Highlands 74 41 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Arathi Highlands 50 44 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Badlands 4 49 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Blasted Lands 58 17 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Burning Steppes 62 29 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Burning Steppes 80 62 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Dun Morogh 46 46 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Ironforge 64 25 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Duskwood 74 51 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Elwynn Forest 43 65 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Stormwind 49 72 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Eversong Woods 46 50 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Silvermoon City 70 43 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Ghostlands 46 26 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Hillsbrad Foothills 50 46 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Hillsbrad Foothills 58 25 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Hinterlands 14 50 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Hinterlands 76 74 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Loch Modan 32 40 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Redridge Mountains 24 59 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Silverpine Forest 49 38 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Stranglethorn Vale 33 73 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Stranglethorn Vale 32 75 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Swamp of Sorrows 47 47 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Tirisfal Glades 57 52 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Undercity 68 9 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Western Plaguelands 43 82 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Westfall 56 54 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Wetlands 13 47 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Ashenvale 38 54 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Ashenvale 70 69 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Azuremyst Isle 44 53 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Exodar, The 41 26 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Barrens 52 28 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Bloodmyst Isle 55 69 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Darkshore 37 46 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Desolace 65 17 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Desolace 26 76 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Durotar 52 47 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Orgrimmar 47 38 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Dustwallow Marsh 62 40 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Dustwallow Marsh 33 30 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Feralas 28 44 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Feralas 72 47 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Mulgore 51 60 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Thunder Bluff 21 26 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Silithus 57 34 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Silithus 46 44 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Stonetalon Mountains 50 60 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Tanaris 52 29 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Tanaris 49 27 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Teldrassil 55 91 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Teldrassil 55 60 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Thousand Needles 41 52 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Winterspring 62 35 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Winterspring 59 35 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Blade's Edge Mountains 42 66 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Blade's Edge Mountains 50 59 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Hellfire Peninsula 62 58 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Hellfire Peninsula 55 40 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Nagrand 50 70 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Nagrand 51 34 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Netherstorm 31 63 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Netherstorm 32 68 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Shadowmoon Valley 40 55 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Shadowmoon Valley 33 30 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Terokkar Forest 55 55 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Terokkar Forest 52 43 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Zangarmarsh 69 52 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Zangarmarsh 36 52 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Borean Tundra 55 20 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Borean Tundra 51 12 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Crystalsong Forest 78 75 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Crystalsong Forest 80 53 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Dragonblight 75 44 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Dragonblight 39 48 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Howling Fjord 58 16 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Howling Fjord 48 13 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Grizzly Hills 34 61 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Grizzly Hills 19 61 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Sholazar Basin 47 66 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Sholazar Basin 47 62 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Storm Peaks 42 87 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Storm Peaks 40 86 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)
/way Zul'Drak 41 61 Midsummer Fire Festival (Alliance)
/way Zul'Drak 43 71 Midsummer Fire Festival (Horde)

Your world map will now be litterered with small green pips. Right-clicking on these will allow you select which one will be displayed by by the nice arrow on your main screen.

Good hunting!

Magery... who knew?

2009-03-06T14:24:00.000-08:00

So last night after being fussed at for the umpteenth time about out-DPSing the mage, I pulled up her gear, fed it into Rawr, and began researching what might be necessary to make that gear better. Ignoring everything else in the interface (including the page full of various buffs that can be turned off and on for the simulator) I went straight to eyeballing each piece of her gear in detail.

Problem #1, a lot of missing enchants. You can see this pretty easily in Rawr because each item that is enchantable is in a frame with space under it saying "No Enchant". Clicking on this brings up a list of possible enchants, sorted by what you've selected ("Overall" by default). The little bar under the enchant name illustrates their relation to each other in power contribution.

The only issue with using this is that it'll show you enchants that you might not be able to apply unless you're an enchanter or a leatherworker or whoever else has those self-applicable armor boosters. You must pay a bit of attention to the viability of your selection or dig more deeply into configuring Rawr not to show you these things (but mostly more information is better than having something filtered out, see below).

Problem #2, several items were very, very far from the "best in slot" items at the top of the list on the right. Generally this is a sign that you can go pillage the auction house and add more DPS for mere gold. What else are you planning on doing with this money? At 80, everything else is cheap so you don't really need a dragon's hoard of gold (mekgineer's choppers notwithstanding). Seriously, if you can't see both the gear you're wearing and the top of the list at the same time in the pane on the right, carefully scrutinize each and every item in between using the right-click "Open in Wowhead" option to see if it's a world-drop you can score from the Auction House, a quest reward you probably misjudged (or haven't gotten to yet... W00-h00!) or something a player crafter can make. Do not ignore the player-crafted epics, they are your friend and just about everyone has at least one best-in-slot item that's player-craftable.

Some of the items in the released database don't properly list where they come from. If you see Rawr not mentioning the origin of an item when you mouse over it, or that origin looks wrong, right click on it and select Update from Armory/WoWHead to have Rawr try to get better information. One or the other usually works, although you may have to manually edit the item anyway to re-set it's socket bonus.

Problem #3, I'm an idiot. On the upper part of the right-hand pane you can turn on and off filters that will make Rawr not show (or consider) items that you can't (or won't) obtain. Since I'm not a jewelcrafter, I had BoP Jewelcrafting items disabled and Leatherworking stuff still on (which I'd rightly ignored). This is what I meant above by more information is better than less. Once that was fixed a new trinket and a couple of prismatic gems appear in the list. Suddenly the Twilight Serpent with it's two gem slots steps up and looks absolutely delicious.

Problem #4, I'm still an idiot. The 2.2.0 beta of Rawr has a slightly different approach to gemming than the patched (for Hunters) version of 2.1.9 I'm using, and for my version (equivalent to the stable 2.1.9 release in every way for all other classes) gemmings are handled by simply creating duplicates of the socketable item in Rawr's database of gear, and gemming each one manually. Getting around this is much easier than you might think. While you're ogling..er..browsing the list of gear on the right, look around and below the piece of gear you're wearing for items which have sockets. Right-click them, select Edit, and you see the list of all the permutations of that item (if any). There's a nice Duplicate button at the bottom that will let you clone an item as it's ungemmed form, and then you can simply click on the gem sockets to bring up a list of gems, sorted by their power contribution, to socket it. Everything in my database had been regemmed for Hunters, and attack power isn't what Mages really need. Doh!

Creating the socketed duplicates doesn't require you to make dozens of duplicates--nine permutations on gemming would probably be as many as you'd need because by now you should know what you're trying to gem for and won't be caring about the dinky green gems for the level 60 people. Once I'd regemmed a few things, suddenly Hat of Wintry Doom pops up as best-in-slot. W00t! MOAR DPS! The Twilight Serpent Figurine looked tons better, too.

WARNING! Rawr still has a bunch of gems from the upcoming 3.1 patch in the database it comes with. You will probably just want to delete them from the list for now because they do not exist in the game yet. I will leave how to do this as an exercise to the reader but most people will probably spot it easily.

Now... There is an optimizer in Rawr that can, in theory, produce a list of gear that you should wear based on what you've told it you have so if you have a collection of gear you weren't certain about, it might be able to hook you up with a list. To do this, in the right hand pane you will see a little diamond outline next to each item. Click this to mark that item as something you have or can easily get. Using the left-hand dropdown on the right-hand gear list pane you can select which slot you want to see shown, and do this for every slot, including gems and meta-gems. Once you've marked a pile of these the optimizer will hopefully show you a rating for your current gear and a higher rating for a gear combination you might not have thought of. I say hopefully because although the Rawr.Mage module is supposed to be working, it didn't immediately show me a useful list--only a less powerful set than what I'd fiddled in myself because I'd not marked everything properly yet (another "I'm an idiot" moment). On the theory that what I'd picked based on DPS-contribution was likely better anyway, I spent a few more gold (~700 in total) and snatched the last few pieces from the Auction House and made her take them to the test dummy.

I was a little horrified at the hit rating being so high, because I didn't know mages had a different miss percentage for their spells. A quick check of the Elitist Jerks forum and WoWWiki showed me otherwise. Hunters have it comparatively easy and can reach the hit cap at 262 without straining because their miss chance is only 8%. It's almost twice that for ranged casters... who knew?

Testing the old gear (including a few extra enchants) against the test dummy (three set of full-to-empty blasting) Recount reported ~1500DPS. The test was repeated with the new gear amid cries of "Oh my crit is so looooow!" with a hit rating a mere two points under the cap (she might miss against a boss mob once a week or two) and blasted out ~1800dps.

Don't anyone get excited about that not being 4,000 DPS against the test dummy. Using your own buffs only and no special buff foods/drinks makes your numbers against the test dummy more consistent and more accurate with respect to what your gear is contributing. Unless you're a warrior drinking spell penetration elixirs, it should be a given that any buffs you get in a raid or from elixirs/flasks are always going to be straight up MOAR DPS so they don't really have to be scrutinized as much. ...but feel free to use all those cooldowns, elementals, mirror images, and heck, even the peasants from Scholomance if you think they'll work against a raid boss. There was an initial problem with the testing of only using Frostbolt--which isn't the way you fight a boss--so the numbers really sucked.

700g ~= 300 MOAR DPS. This isn't that bad. I spent about 4,000g tuning up my toon, but that started practically the moment I'd hit 80 and before I'd gotten any serious loot from any bosses anywhere.

Gold. Spend it. Seven hundred gold isn't all that much money to spend at level 80 if you've got two gathering skills or one crafting skill you've been actively working on for money.

Northrend Leatherworking Spreadsheet Updated

2009-02-06T03:14:00.000-08:00

I've updated the Northrend Leatherworking spreadsheet over at Google Docs again. I found a couple of bugs (misplaced cells) and one outright wrong recipe that have now been fixed. The default prices now reflect more in line with the new drop rates for crystalline/eternals (but you can still adjust them to suit you) which resulted in some much cheaper prices than you might expect.

Lower prices is actually a good thing. It's not simply mickey-mousing the game up. It makes the eternals cheaper in the auction house, which means player-crafted epics can come down in price. The amount of effort needed to get the money to buy these actually should be less than the amount of effort (and time) it takes to pound heroics until an equivalent drop happens, because the heroic drops tend to be better still. Now we're much closer to that than before.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pUC_TpnYZmIDRFt_dqykaeQ&hl=en

Rational DPS Measurement

2009-02-06T00:13:00.000-08:00

Okay, so we've all seen them... The guys who are wearing so-so gear and haven't even gotten the player-crafted epics on their new level 80 toon claiming insanely high DPS numbers. You ask them when they measured this and they say "Last night in Heroic Naxx".

Well, that's all well and good for the makeup of that particular raid which generally includes a helping of AoE damage as well, but it doesn't really represent a realistic or rational measurement. That same toon might well be barely able to outdamage your pet in a 5-man run with only one or two buffs available. This is why you need a sane baseline method for DPS measurement. Period.

How you get a sane baseline for DPS measurement is actually pretty simple thanks to an addition Blizzard put in in last fall's content patch--specifically, the target dummies. You can find them in every major city with multiple types available. There's level 60 dummies, level 70 dummies, level 80 dummies, and usually one Heroic Target Dummy. This is basically the one you want to be shooting at if you're trying to come up with a useful DPS measurement for heroics and raids.

How do we go about it? Well, there's got to be some rules first, just to eliminate the things that can cause wild disparities in damage. What would a "wild disparity" be you ask? It's easy... Anything that's going to skew results by a third or more. One thing that really leaps out would be the duration of the fight In theory with a good group makeup this can vary a great deal with Replenishment and Hunting Party going. because mana == healing == life and we all know when the healer runs out of mana, things go south fast. This won't really affect classes with no mana bar, but for the ones who do use mana it means it'll take longer to get a good read on your DPS. You're going to want to start attacking and go like crazy until your mana runs out and then you stop and drink back to full. The saner cooldowns should be ready again now (anything longer than 5 minutes, just forget about) so you'll do it again, and then one more time for a total of three passes. Then you check Recount. Everyone else, just go hog wild for 2-5 minutes (time it, based on the paragraph below and then stop).

The length of the fight matters with respect to abilities with long cooldowns, because if someone's got a couple of cooldowns at 2 minutes, and they attack for 2 minutes and 30 seconds, those abilities will be disproportionately represented in the resulting damage totals. Each cooldown should be considered to be of two parts... the time the ability runs, and the time the ability can't be used. So... if your longest cooldown cycle in question is 20 seconds on, 120 seconds (two minutes) off, you'll want to attack for a multiple of that time meaning 140 seconds or 280 seconds.

Buffs are a hard issue. On the one hand you want to measure the effect of your own buffs. On the other hand, you don't want to go overboard and have other people's buffs, or buffs based on money (like food and potions) so they're out--don't use them. You also have to keep a close eye on the Heroic Target Dummy and make sure some other class that puts a debuff on the target that say, increases crits by 3% or increases damage taken by 5% or reduces armor doesn't come along and slap a few of those down because those will screw up your measurement. By the same token, damage-increasing buffs cast by the well-meaning among us as they pass you at the target dummies are also out of the question. Click them off and start the phase over again or just be patient until they wear off.

This should cover most of the bases and give people a solid baseline for measuring their DPS without artificial epeen enhancement being involved. If you have any questions, ask them in the comments. I'll see if I can come up with rational answers.

Magic Pet Bar Trick with Macaroon

2009-01-24T12:34:00.001-08:00

So, today I've got pretty neat technique to show you--how to use custom conditionals with Macaroon--and a very useful application of this technique (for hunters, anyway).

Note: At the moment, the Bag and Menu Bars portion of Macaroon Xtras is broken for 3.0.8. Just disable that add-on and don't worry about it. If you're having trouble finding the minor edit you need to perform to get the main Macaroon add-on working again after of the change to secure templates, drop me an email and I'll explain it.

Unless you're a Hunter who is very, very (almost obsessively) focused about what playstyle they use, you've got more than one pet. ...and unless you're not very imaginative about your pet selection, you've now got some pets who have some talents that the others don't have. One of my pet peeves (no pun intended) is buttons on the display that can't be used or that make no sense. Heart of the Phoenix is very handy to have on a button, but only for the one pet family that can learn it. Carrion Feeder is also a great button to have, but not when your cat is out. You could try and put these into one of the middle four buttons on the pet bar, but then you can't easily keep cower/growl/taunt in there at the same time where you can keep a close eye on 'em. So how do we make these buttons go away without writing some crazy macro with those length limitations?

The solution is custom conditionals on a new Macaroon bar.

For those of you new to Macaroon that haven't figured out how to make a pet bar, here's now: Start by typing "/mac create bar" (or use the menu item "Create Bar"). A transparent blue box will appear in the middle of the screen which is your new bar. Right-click on it and on the right-hand side of the menu that appears will be full of little checkboxes, one of which says "Pet". Click that checkbox to flag this bar as a pet bar. Now click on the little arrow button in the lower-right-hand corner, and at the top of the next menu change the text to read "Pet Bar" because we want things labeled neatly in case we want to find them later with ButtonFacade or something. Lastly, since all new bars start with no buttons attached (don't forget this!) we now have to add some, so click the arrow-buttons again to go back to the first menu pane and then click "Button Count"--now scroll up or left-click until you've got ten buttons and then middle-click or move your mouse out of the bar area to stop changing button count. By default the new buttons should actually be assigned to pet action id (a.k.a. "pet id") one through ten, but in case they don't if you select Button Edit from the Macaroon menu, you can then click on them to cycle through whether or not they say "action", "macro", or "pet id:#". Make sure they all say "pet id:" and some number.

Note: While you might think you can do something clever like add fourteen buttons to the pet bar, and then edit the last four to be "normal" macro buttons and drop some macros in there, some bug/oddity in Macaroon causes the entire pet bar to be repeatedly (but not always) reset to contain only pet buttons.

Now, before we go on, I should explain a few things. Technically, this pet bar doesn't disappear when your pet isn't out, it merely has two states--one which is visible when you have a pet out and makes the conditional "[pet]" true and one which becomes visible when you don't have your pet out and makes the conditional "[nopet]" true. It just so happens that the [nopet] state of this bar still doesn't have any buttons assigned to it so there's nothing for you to see when it's active. It's important you understand this so that you'll see how our next part works. While you've got bar editing active (click 'Bar Edit' on the Macaroon menu) if you simply left-click on a bar (sometimes it takes two single-clicks to get it moving because the first one will often set the bar as the one you're actively editing) it will change state and go through the various states it could be. In the case of the pet bar two states are involved, pet and nopet. While you've got the nopet state selected, you could add two buttons and drop Revive Pet and Call Pet into them but don't do that--it'll make those buttons appear when you're mounted and when you're in a vehicle and in neither case would it make sense to have them on the screen then. For now what you need to know is that a bar can have multiple states and each state can have it's own independent set of buttons/macros.

Now that you have your relatively plain pet bar, we're going to make a magic pet bar that'll go right next to it which will hold our wonderful new macros and generally make life easier. So, again click Create Bar from the Macaroon menu or type "/mac create bar" to get a new pet bar on the screen, then right-click it and put a checkmark next to "Custom" which enables custom states. Click the little arrow buttons to go to the second menu pane and name the bar "Magic Pet Bar". Finally, at the bottom of the second menu pane you'll see a large text-entry box labeled "Custom States". Paste exactly the following into it (you may edit it later):

[bonusbar:5]hide
[mounted]hide
[pet:Cat]show
[pet:Gorilla/Raptor]show
[pet]show
[nopet]show
hide

Each of these lines contains one conditional test (inside the square brackets) and one result (to the right of the brackets). If the bit that inside the square brackets ("[ ]") is true, then the stuff to the right of it is what happens, and it'll stop working it's way down the list the moment the first one that's true is found. The strange "[bonusbar:5]hide" part is there to avoid a conflict with the Vehicle UI--if you're in a vehicle, then [bonusbar:5] is true, which then makes this state one to hide. If you're on your mount, then [mounted] is true and that will make this bar hide in this state. If your pet happens to be a Cat, then [pet:Cat]show makes the bar appear. If you want the same state to apply to more than one pet, you simply separate the pet names with slash, like "Gorilla/Raptor". You want [pet]show there for when you have a pet which doesn't fit into any of the groups you've just defined (because you neglect your wasp terribly) which can happen more often than you'd expect--there are a few quests out there that give everyone temporary pets. Finally [nopet]show makes this bar appear when you don't have a pet. The hide statement at the end is simply a catchall that will keep the bar hidden should none of these conditions be true (and you probably messed up somehow).

Now comes the fun part. Click the "Done" button so this giant mess of custom stateness will be saved. In Button Edit mode start left-clicking on the bar and you will see the bar change through each of these custom states! You may now have an entirely different set of buttons appearing on this bar for each of these custom states--simply select Button Count while the bar is set to a specific state and add some button slots just like you would with any new bar.

Now decide which of those pet conditionals you're going to change (because I know you're going to if you didn't already ignore me when I said "paste exactly") and change them now to avoid a bug in Macaroon. Each conditional is assigned to an array element and the button settings are tied to that array and not the conditional, so if you insert a new conditional at the top of the list and your cat buttons which may have been third in the list of states before will still be third in the list of states, but that third state might now be [pet:Gorilla] instead of [pet:Cat] and you'll have to go fix all the states again. There is another bug in Macaroon you should be aware of... If you ever see the state listed as "custom homestate" or saying "(not indexed)" it's because the editor has freaked out--just keep left-clicking until the thing changes to a state you recognize. Any changes you make to the bar while it's showing either of those two things won't work properly and may appear over the top of other states (and will not be editable, requiring you to delete the entire bar and start it all over again).

I strongly suggest this Magic Pet Bar be the place where you put your Dismiss Pet button, a Mend Pet button, the macro for FizzWidget's Feed-O-Matic (or just your own Feed Pet macro) and your Master's Call macro, just for starters. The nopet state is a good place to put Beast Lore, Tame Beast, Call Pet and probably Revive Pet as well. It's also probably worth mentioning that you should stick the "common" buttons like Dismiss Pet on one end of the Magic Pet Bar in each applicable state so they'll always be in the same order and relative position on your screen.

Northrend Leatherworking Spreadsheet Update

2009-01-24T12:27:00.001-08:00

So, the spreadsheet I put into Google Docs for calculating profits versus materials costs on the Northrend Leatherworking items has now been updated with the new and modified recipes from patch 3.0.8. Yes, I did fix the names of a few things I'd gotten completely wrong before. ...and yes this was re-cloned from my private copy of the spreadsheet so if anyone was trying to be cute and change the ingredient price calculators, their changes will now be gone.

Northrend Leatherworking

Remember, if the prices on your server differ significantly from the prices on Skywall (which is what I am personally concerned with) you can change the values on the Materials page and the rest of the other page will automatically update with new prices and margins.

Northrend Leatherworking Spreadsheet Update

2008-12-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

So, I finally figured out that the place I was using to build my list wasn't actually listing all the recipes it should have been when I was building the spreadsheet, which resulted in about twelve of the rares being left out. Rather than wrestle endlessly with two copies of the same file, I edited my private backup and then re-cloned it so you'll probably need a new URL to access the spreadsheet.

Here it is:
Northrend Leatherworking Spreadsheet

Winter Addon Roundup: Maps

2008-11-29T14:04:00.001-08:00

There are three map-related mods for WoW that I'll introduce today, and they all work pretty well together (all things considered).

Atlas
Simply put, Atlas gives you maps for instances. Due to limitations in the Blizzard API, it's not possible to find one's exact location within an instance, so it won't be able to show you where you are on the map, but between looking at the minimap and having a map of the instance handy this should make your map useful again while in instances. There is also a companion mod to this (which can be used standalone) called Atlasloot Enhanced that will let you see which instance bosses might be dropping things you'll want.

Atlas v1.13.0 (11-25-2008)
Atlasloot Enhanced v5.02.01 (11-22-2008)

MobMap
Ever had a time when you were wandering around an area trying to remember whether the hairy wonderbeasts you saw were in the northwest corner of Nagrand or the southeast? Well, this addon will put a stop to those problems. Once installed, MobMap will add a minimap icon you can click on, then enter the name of the mob you're looking for (and optionally, the zone you're looking in) and then it will cover your map with little dots marking the places where that mob normally lives (yes, just like the Thottbot maps). It also comes with a few other useful databases (like what things drop, so you can search for whatever drops the most motes of cheese or whatever) and recently has added a quest tracker. There's a binary you can download from their site that will let you update the addon and it's database with a couple of mouse clicks, but you don't have to take on that risk if you don't want to? Scroll down a bit on the page and you'll see where you can download the latest version of the addon, with or without the latest version of the database (English and German supported with separate downloads). You will need to get the version with the database the first time (or there's little point in installing it).

MobMap v3.15 (11-27-2008)

Cartographer
Now, this addon is something pretty useful and it's all about making your own map information. This might not seem terribly useful to you at first but trust me, it's good.

At it's heart, it's a map note taking mod, so it should go without saying that it will let you make a permanent note (think of it like a virtual push-pin) on your region map with a simple ctrl-right-click. You can then set the raid marker icon it'll use, tweak the location of the marker, and set up to four lines of text to describe the marker. Once you've got some notes on your map, you an send them to other players or your entire guild at once by right clicking on the marker. This is an incredibly handy thing to have when you're trying to explain to someone where something is.

As an added perk, Cartographer communicates with the clients of your other guild mates (provided they've also installed Cartographer) and will allow everyone to see each other's location on the region and world maps, in realtime. This is great for figuring out who else in your guild might be doing something nearby you could help with or vice-versa, as well as getting an idea of how long it might take them to arrive.

Cartographer v2.3.6 (11-20-2008)

Winter Addon Roundup: Auctions

2008-11-29T13:41:00.000-08:00

In this category there are very few addons worthy of mention, and none are as thorough as the Auctioneer Suite. The addon's homepage is http://auctioneeraddon.com/ and is regularly updated as the project progresses. You can download just the Auctioneer addon, or you can get it as well as Enchantrix, Informant, and SearchUI all in one go which is what I suggest, although I wouldn't generally enable Enchantrix for anyone but characters who have chosen Enchanting as one of their professions. Auctioneer does many things for you, most notably:

Tracks what appears to be the "going rate" for items and materials
Remembers what prices you listed things for sale the last time
Shows you how close to the "going rate" listed auctions are
Adds a ton of information about auctions to item tooltips

Once you've installed the Auctioneer addon and started WoW, proceed without delay to the nearest Auction House and open up the auctions interface. You'll note that what you have now is rather different from what you had before, and the first thing you're going to need to do is get started on populating its tracking of auction data. Up along the top edge of the auction frame are three buttons, one of which is an arrow that looks remarkably like a "play" button. Click it and wait about 20 minutes (talk to your guild, clean your room, walk the dog) while it reads all the auctions in the auction house. Once it's done reading all the auctions it still has to basically "digest" all this information and will show a progress bar along the top of the screen and WoW will be generally unusable for the next 45-180 seconds because it's doing a ton of computational work. You're going to want to do this at least once a week (or, if you're like me, every time you play) so I suggest doing it on a "trading alt" and configuring Auctioneer to log you out when it's done (yes, that's a configuration option) to minimize the hassle.

Auctioneer Suite v 5.1.3715 (10-24-2008)

By the way, if you do Herbalism or Mining the people who make the Auctioneer Suite also make a rather incredible plugin called "Gatherer" that has a massive database of where nodes spawn and is generally considered a "must have" for anyone who does more than casual ("Oh, there's a mining node here!") gathering of raw materials.

Winter Addon Roundup: Action Bars

2008-11-29T12:18:00.001-08:00

Ah winter... the time when the weather turns cold and hostile, giving gamers everywhere a perfect excuse for spending long hours indoors playing video games. Of course, you want this time to be as pleasant as possible which means not spending long hours trying to evaluate a bunch of new addons for WoW, so I'm going to list a bunch for you that should help you make the most of your play time.

(By the way, I'm not yet certain if I'm going to be doing this monthly or merely quarterly, but since this is the first one I'm not entirely sure it matters.)

We'll start with Action Bars... You know, the things that keep you from having to open the spellbook every time you want to cast a spell or use a special ability.

Macaroon
Back before the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, possibly the most popular action bar addon was Trinity. It had a few minor bugs here and there (mainly misspellings) but with the latest expansion, the author of Trinity wanted to just start over and created Macaroon. Macaroon basically comes in two pieces now, Macaroon and Macaroon Xtras. If you just want new action bars, then you don't need the Xtras package. If you intend to install Macaroon and then disable Blizzard's default button bar at the bottom (which most people do) you'll want the Xtras package as it also gives you customizable bag bars, tool icon bars, and XP/reputation bars. Either way, once it's installed you'll have a small orange candy-like icon hanging off your mini-map which lets you begin creating and editing button bars.

Macaroon v30000.28.1 (11/4/2008)
Macaroon Xtras v30000.11 (11/3/2008)

For those of you new to using Macaroon, by default it creates no bars so you'll have to create some (using the minimap menu) first. New bars by default have no buttons, so you'll then want to right-click on the new bar and select Button Count to add some buttons to the new bar. Read the tooltips Macaroon shows you carefully so you'll know which buttons on the mouse make what change and you should be fine. The command line invocation for Macaroon is simply "/mac". Try to remember it because you might need it.

You will also need to create a new bar, add about six empty buttons, and make it a "posess" bar by ticking the radio button that appears when you right click the bar in edit mode. This will make it disappear at any time except when you are "posessing" a vehicle or NPC. It'll still appear temporarily when you go into edit mode, but for the most part you won't see it again until you need it. Unlike the default UI there will be no "dismount vehicle" button so you'll have to click on the vehicles unit frame (portrait) and select Leave Vehicle from there. Because you won't often see it, I suggest adjusting your possession bar so that it's 25-30% larger than your other bars, and sits somewhere prominent near the bottom center of your screen.

Be careful that if you install Macaroon Xtras you don't load the Macaroon Cast Bar module (click the Addons button on the lower left of the Character Selection screen) if you are using Quartz. They won't conflict or anything, but two cast bars on the screen at once is wasteful and ugly and Quartz is much prettier.

ButtonFacade
Once you've got new Action Bars on your screen making your life easier, you might want to change they way they look a bit as well. ButtonFacade makes this happen. The command line invocation for ButtonFacade is (unsuprisingly) simply "/bf". ButtonFacade can only change the appearance of buttons for addons that have support for it, so if you've got some addon it doesn't work with don't blame ButtonFacade. Trinity (before it became Macaroon) had a number of skins for it, so I'm also going to list the package that gets you those back again.

ButtonFacade v3.0r172 (10/23/2008)
ButtonFacade: Trinity v30000.1 (10/14/2008)
ButtonFacade: Gears v3.0.2.2 (10/25/2008)
ButtonFacade: Entropy v3.0.2.2 (10/25/2008)

The Pillaging of Northrend, Part One of OMGLOTS

2008-11-13T15:25:00.000-08:00

OKay, so I picked up my copy of WoTLK at GameSpot last night at the local GameStop (just about the only reason I'd buy from them, as they have the "We don't know you and don't care to know you" corporate attitude on release day for anyone who didn't pre-order (for everything). I got it home without incident, installed and watched the re-patching process begin (which I expected). Checked for a few addon updates, everything was go and I managed to drag myself out of a conversation on IRC to finally login at just before 2:00am. Yes, it was an interesting conversation but the XP rate kinda sucked.

Valgarde

Next stop, NORTHREND. Being that my guild leader had already scheduled a little raid on Utgarde Kep for Friday night, I figured it behooved me to take the gorilladin over to Howling Fjord via Menethil Harbor (it's the dock on the far right in case you're wondering). This takes you more or less straight to Valgarde, and what do I see the moment I get off the boat? A dwarf with a big, beautful exclamation mark over his head. YAY! Did I mention I like the way dwarves think? With dwarves, everything is simple... It's either about beer, digging things up, or getting into fights. This guy was of the latter sort, and a few clicks later he's instructed me to go talk to the head buttkicker and tell him "I'm all out of bubblegum". Excellent.

The one thing you're going to notice the moment you start running around there is that there's no screwing around with trying to find the skill trainers. Every profession is represented by somebody who is within about 200 yards of the dock, with more than half of them immediately on the left the moment you set foot on soil. More clicks later, I finally see some upgrades to Fishing, Leatherworking, First Aid, Skinning, and Cooking, so hello Achievements! For people doing cooking there's a pile of new recipes. 80g disappeared almost immediately and I practically rush back to the docks for some quick fishing while I wait for Opheria to come over from the other side of Northrend. Ooops. You can fish there, but not well. Buy some shiny baubles for your fishing pole while you're poking around at the Inn. The fish are deeee-licious and have almost absurd regen numbers. Did I mention it's been awhile since I've seen upgrades to anything? I still don't know what's up with the suckerfish I was catching, but I'll look it up later. For now, I can tell you that apparently like lampreys, they must be clinging to other fish because I never caught one alone.

So it turns out Utgarde keep is quite a bit closer to Valgarde than I expected. I could have run there in under two minutes, but instead I ran around doing the 6-7 quests that lead you pretty much to the door and the two quests that send you inside. Utgarde Keep looks more than a bit like Castle Greyskull, by the way. Heh. It is not a simple building with an instance maw at the front. There's stuff inside, lots of stuff. Particularly stuff in the form of people in cages. Backtracking a bit there was a quest to collect keys to free these guys.

Now this bit is cool. Basically, since Valgarde went up, the giants have been pouring out of the hillsides to try to disrupt things, and no one quite knows why. Talk to the shaman with the questionably large bucket of incense (like, Grateful Dead concert-sized bucket) with the questionable looking smoke coming out of it. He'll put you on the path to finding out with some incence of your own, because the incense lets you see into events that happened in the distant past. We're talking really distant in Azeroth terms... 15,000 years. Not to spoil things, but I suspect these giants may be precursors to humans since the first thing you find is a giant couple arguing about what to do with this new weakling baby which sure as heck looks like the typical, blue eyed and squishy-looking human to me. Later on you'll see a whole bunch of giants arguing about why they're having these sickly wimp kids, and their King declaring himself a god. Hoo boy god-kings are nothing but bad news. Thankfully they won't see you but haha DON'T try to take a poke at The Lich King hanging around nearby.

Anyway, back to Utgarde Keep. In the tradition of Deadmines, there's actually a lot of Utgarde Keep before you even get see any instance entrances (of which there are three and I still only saw one, and it wasn't the right one). Remember those guys in cages? If you collected more keys than you needed, they'll be extra handy here because when you free them, unlike other places where the mobs just run off with a muttered "THXBAI!" once you free them, these guys will fight at your side for about three minutes or so to repay you for your help. Like, really fight at your side. Paladins, Priests, Warriors, Rogues, they all do their class-defining things, like heal and buff you. Whoohoo!

Anyway, that's as far as I got with that before camping to make a DK just to check it out.

Deathknights

After carefully cloning Eshk as Ishk the Deathknight (pretty sure I got the hair right, I haven't seen it in ages, but at least I am sure I'm not bald like I was in closed beta) I started poking around. There's a number of new books and papers scattered around to fill you in on the backstory and goings on. Just to confirm, as a Deathknight at this point you are working for the Scourge, i.e., "the bad guys". Just roll with it for now. One of the books you'll want to pay special attention to as it lists the rolls of new deathknights and a little bit about each of them. Apparently they noticed me, but I must not have made much of an impression judging by what's in the book. I found another paper promising eternal pain in a very personal way for anyone who dares desert, so that's probably not something you want to even think about for awhile.

In any case, since at the core of our greedy little hearts is avarice topped with powdered greed, it seems we've got more in common with Deathknights than one might expect. You'll see the Baron Rivendare hanging around, as well as a few bosses from Naxxramas and get to talk to them a bit (Oh yes, VOTE FOR ISHK!) and before you really even get two hours in you'll steal a horse and a get a whole bunch of blue armor, so if you were worrying over finding a mailbox to get your new twink gear out, don't bother. You really don't need it.

I will drop a few suggestions for dealing with being a DK. If you're using action bar addons, make a "Possess" bar because you'll need it. The new vehicle UI kicks in at least five times before you hit 57 and it'll be more than a bit frustrating if you don't see these shiny new buttons. QuestHelper can help you a bit, but mainly, you don't need that either. Blizzard has learned from years of development work and it shows here. Instructions are very clear, and a few NPCs are even snarky about it because let's face it, if your purpose in life is killing and pain and someone says to bring them some human skulls, where to get them should be pretty darned obvious.

A few things that were tripping people up that I'll drop entirely non-spoiler hints about...

1. The Red Arrows (hunters will recognize these easily) mark your targets--you are looking for little buildings because they're in a village.
2. Torture is not supposed to go quickly and dead people tell no tales--take your time with it, have fun!
3. Ghouls are not very bright and will wander off easily. Don't let it bother you.

New AI

You will notice almost immediately as a deathknight that the Scarlet Pansy Crusade behave differently than you're used to. In fact, they'll flee at the drop of a hat if you play your cards right, i.e., be a terrifying embodiment of death and destruction. Separate from this, when you're punting around in the wild, herds of animals are rather likely to scatter when you plow into them.

Anyway, the battery meter is telling me I have limited time left, so I'll cut this off here and stop rambling. You should close the browser now and make with some pillaging!

PWNED.

2008-10-16T00:26:00.000-07:00

I do have to say that Obama more or less completely pwned McCain in tonight's debate. If you didn't see it (even if you're out of the country) hop on over to Hulu and you should be able to watch it there. Oh, and Hulu does appear to have the "clue" about how to do video online, and will probably ensure a bright future for NBC.

Back on the subject of the debate, I begin to think that McCain is in some respects, breaking away from his own party, and for this I am gaining great respect for the man. Earlier this week, someone at one of McCain's town hall meetings started to try to bring up one of the nastier unfounded accusations about Obama (which Palin has been encouraging, to my disgust), and McCain flat out shut them down. He stated right then and there that what was being suggested was wrong, and that he didn't think Obama was a bad guy, and thought that he might even make a decent President but that there were simply some issues on which he and Obama disagreed. In-credible.

One of the bugaboos that Sarah Palin's been swinging around has to do with Obama's association with Bill Ayers, who a rather long time ago was indeed a domestic terrorist. Obama's association with Ayers stemmed from working with him on a school board (which is about as harmless as it gets--yes, Ayers settled down a long time ago and is now a professor of Education at a college) which is not something Sarah Palin feels it necessary to mention. Tonight, McCain completely threw a softball pitch to Obama and gave him the opportunity to address those "out of bounds remarks" just so Obama could completely "knock it out of the park". A-freaking-mazing.

It is absolutely heartwarming to see them both being gentlemen about this, regardless of what the people around them are doing. Personally I think Obama is a more useful man for the job (for reasons I won't go into) but as a person, my respect for McCain has gone up immeasurably. ...almost to the point that I would consider overlooking his change of heart on whether or not the U.S. should engage in torture.

(Originally, for somewhat obvious reasons, McCain was against the idea of torture for any reason. During the latter part of the first big push to do "whatever" to stop terrorism, Bush's people apparently had a talk with him and he changed that view. A man who can't raise his hands above his head actually decided that torture was a valid tool. Whoa.)

It's coming...

2008-10-16T00:14:00.000-07:00

OKay, I think I have all the "essential" addons for regular, runnin' around killin' stuff type playin' of World of Warcraft squared away now. I'll document the list tomorrow and then start going through them one at a time writing "feature" articles about why you need each and every one of them. It seems like this would be a thing I can definitely put on this blog to make it a useful resource for others.

ONOES server status

2008-10-14T14:52:00.001-07:00

Yep. They're still down.

The good news at least is that if you're still waiting for the client to patch itself (I went to bed last night after watching the progress bar for over a half hour) then it doesn't matter to you what the servers are doing.

...at least I got a lot of herbs listed in the AH last night before the feeding frenzy begins. Don't buy the ones I listed for 200g a stack. If people have that kind of in-game money to burn, I don't want to know about it.

Contig and World of Warcraft

2008-10-13T19:40:00.000-07:00

OKay, as promised, I am continuing yesterday's explanation. Read the previous blog post if this seems confusing to you.

Basically, file fragmentation happens when you patch the WoW client because while it's making changes to the giant archive files it can't exactly force the OS to write to the exact same places on the disk as before. So, instead of leaving the file exactly where it is on the disk, bits and pieces of it get moved around to a presumably reasonable-sized empty spot on the disk. In practice this works well enough, but in case you haven't noticed the patch for tomorrow amounts to over a gigabyte of changes in total. It's going to result in a lot of new fragments being made.

A bit more about contiguous reads and disk cache first. Your hard drive (unless you bought something really cheap) has a bunch of actual RAM on it which the disk uses so that it can operate asynchronously from the operating system and hopefully be more efficient. When your OS calls for the information stored in sector 9,242, the drive will go and read that sector and then start filling it's cache with what's in several of the sectors immediately following that in hopes that they're going to be read in next. If the OS is reading one file that's contiguous on the disk, this works out great because the computer might be busy doing something else the moment it gets that sector from the drive and might not be ready to ask for the next sector just yet but when it does, the drive will have that ready so it'll zip right across the drive cable from the RAM in the drive (which is much faster than the disk platters themselves) to the computer. Think of it like two guys working to move everything from one box into another. If there's no cache, the guy with the empty box says "give me something" and the guy with the full box reaches down, grabs something, and hands it to him, and then he stands there waiting while the empty-box guy puts the thing in the empty box and then turns to him and says "OKay, give me something else". The key thing there is that the full-box guy stands there waiting. To represent the function of a disk cache, we'll add a small table to this scenario and place it right between them. Instead of one guy handing something directly to the other, they'll put it on the table where the other one will pick it up. This changes the scenario and allows the two guys to work asynchronously of each other. Now the empty box guy asks for something, and the full box guy can start pulling things out of his box and putting them on the table as fast as he can until the table is full. Now the empty box guy can just grab the stuff off the table and take as much time as he needs to put them into his box. This of course becomes even more efficient if there's two guys with empty boxes (or in the case of your computer, two simultaneous read operations going on).

The thing that makes non-contiguous reads slow is that if the full box guy can't make assumptions about what the empty box guys want next (or if those assumptions are wrong because the file isn't neatly arranged on the platters) he'll spend much more time stooping over and then straightening up again getting one thing at a time when he could be using both hands to just put things on the table one after the other. That stoop-and-straighten can be (unless you have a totally silent drive) as a tiny clicking sound every time the drive's heads have to move to another track on the disk. When there's lots of searching for new places on the disk going on, you hear more than just a tiny click, you hear a sound like teeny-weeny machine gun fire as the disk heads go all over to different places on the disk. Suffice to say, this noise means the drive is reading much more slowly than it could be, and you don't want to spend any more time than you have to staring at that progress bar.

With contig around to clean the filesystem up a bit, you can make sure that if the computer is just trying to read a single big file (don't worry too much about what other things you have going in the background might be doing, because this "degrades gracefully" unless the OS sucks even more than Windows does) that it can do so as quickly and efficiently as possible.

WoW Power User Tippity-tip

2008-10-13T02:53:00.001-07:00

So... Seeing as how my attempt to remap the G-Keys on the Logitech G-15 Keyboard to independent keys (don't ask) has ended in dismal failure, we're going to go on to something else near and dear to everyone's hearts...

TEH PATCH!

...and what it means to you. Aside from the whole "relearning to play without addons" thing it's going to definitely mean two things to most people:

1. Waiting a long @#$!$ time for the thing to patch itself
2. Making your ever more fragmented filesystem much, much messier.

Just guess which one we can do something about.

That's right, #2! (For those claiming #1 because you can buy moar megahurts, sorry, the context of the question was "things I can just tell you how to do that don't cost munnies")

Now, for the uninformed, read speeds from a disk drive that approach anything like what the manufacturer promised you are fairly dependent on the reading of contiguous sector reads, and by which I mean "not having the file scattered all over the hard drive". To put it really simple, if I tell you to pick up a book and just kinda scan over pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 you can do it rather quickly because once you're done with page 2 you can just look right over at page 3, and then flip it to get to page for, look at page 5 and so because they are contiguous. A discontigous series of reads would be for me to tell you to grab that massive dictionary off the shelf and tell you to look at the first word on pages 34, 567, 112, 113, 114, 91, 783, 482, 401, 47 and 888. Flipping around to find pages farther away takes longer. Obviously. The same thing goes on with your hard drive (we'll talk about caching some other time) when it's trying to read a large file that is broken up into a bunch of different pieces and scattered about your hard drive.

...which is more or less exactly the state your WoW installation is in if it's older than just 2 or 3 patches. Sure, even if you're a dedicated little Windows user you might defragment your drive once a month with great zeal, and that does @#$@!-all for the WoW client actually, because Windows will refuse to defragment super-massive files, and there's no way to turn off that behaviour I've ever been able to locate. So, if you'll go run your defrag tool again you'll see that there's a rather large number of sectors colored to indicate "files Windows is too lazy to move".
This creeping fragmentation is why your hard drive makes a noise like it's screening a tiny little Rambo movie when WoW starts and tries to start pulling resources out of those gigantic files they use.

There is a solution to this. It is, in fact, Microsoft's recommended solution. It's a delightful little program called "contig" and it's free. Contig is specifically meant to forcibly defragment files, regardless of size. ...and here's the link to it on Microsoft's site (so, not a keylogger.)

Get it. Read it's tiny smidgen of documentation and go nuts cleaning up the OMGFILEOFMASSIVENESS.MPQs World of Warcraft has. Or don't read it's documentation and wait until tomorrow and I'll tell you how to use it for tidying up the Warcraft directory and explain a little more about why this fragmentation is happening.

How to Win at Brewfest - Part One

2008-09-28T15:05:00.000-07:00

Okay, someone in the guild expressed that they were having trouble getting close to the maximum number of tokens for the Beer Delivery Bi-Daily Quest over at Brewfest, so here is a detailed explanation of how to do it to maximize the chance that you'll get 15 kegs delivered and 30 more Brewfest Tokens in your pocket.

We are of course assuming you've done all the other quests in the area, including the "deliver a mere three beer kegs" one that unlocks this quest as a bi-daily. ...and you did read correctly, this one can be redone every twelve hours, not only once a day.

The Mission
Basically the idea is this... There's a dwarf over outside the outfitters in Kharanos who has a lot of kegs of beer that need to be delivered to Brewfest. He can't get it there all by himself so Neill Ramstien is loaning you the use of an ultra fast Brewfest Ram and their it's special riding crop for about four minutes. That ram can run faster than any epic mount, but at a cost... He has to eat apples in order to keep his metabolism up. Luckily for you, they've got four half-barrels of apples just sitting about with no one watching them reasonably near the part of the road that goes between Kharanos and Brewfest, and the ram can (most of the time) snatch one without even slowing down.

The first two dwarves that matter to us are standing in front of a tent just down the hill from where Brewfest is being held. The one on the left is Pol Amberstill and the one on the right is Neill Ramstien.

We're not going to delve deeply into the mechanics of ram racing because basically, they don't apply to us because our Ram is either blazing along at full speed, or he's "exhausted" (which is about as good as being completely stopped) and we're losing valuable time. The one thing you need to know is that every time you get a portable brewfest keg back to Pol (the dwarf on the left) they add a extra time to how long you get to use the ram. It's not an insignificant amount of time either--it's enough to make about three-quarters of another trip.

The other dwarf we want to concern ourselves with is Flynn Firebrew--a veritable paragon for bringing a ridiculous number of kegs of brew down to Kharanos while still remaining sober enough to get them there.

Now, at the start of this Pol is useful to us for one reason and one reason only... Ask him nicely and he'll just give you a riding crop so you can bind it to a hotkey now instead of messing around with it while the clock is ticking. I'm not going to mince words here, I'm just going to tell you: Bind that riding crop to the '1' key on your keyboard. For the duration of this run you will be steering by holding your right mouse button down all the time with one hand and with the other hand you will be pressing the '1' key on your keyboard to use the riding crop to keep the ram going fast. If you attempt to do it some other way that doesn't involve using both hands--one for steering and one for making the ram go--you will continue to have a very hard time with this.

There are two final things to mention before you start your run. The first is that the ram doesn't go any faster if you beat it to death. Show a little mercy (and stop wasting packets) and don't be like "those other guys" who sound like a Chinese New Year festival when you get near them. When you first start the race the ram will be going slow and you'll need to use that crop "liberally"--to make it clear you mean for it to go FASTERER and to GO FASTERER NAO which takes about two seconds of frantic banging--but after that you only need to press the thing about once every second and a half (every second will do) to keep the ram at top speed. The other is that for the duration of the run, there is no point in stopping hitting that '1' key, either. Not even if you think you're about to accidentally stall the ram. Stopping using the riding crop doesn't make things any better, and worrying about it just stresses you out. You want to be focusing on your turns because they actually make or break this quest.

The Plan
Now that you've got your macro ready to go, you need a "plan", and the "plan" is simple. Looking at the map on the right (click on it to make it larger), the two tiny green pips at the top are Pol and Neill, and the one at the bottom is the dwarf with the kegs, Flynn. You want to go back and forth between Pol and Flynn as fast as possible. The numbered red circles (which are quite large) are where the apple barrels are. You want to hit and #2 and #3 every time if possible, and here's the first tricky part... You should ignore #1 and #4 unless you actually miss #2 or #3. Barrel #1 is fairly easy to hit, because it's right behind Pol on the far side of the tent, but using it involves getting your ram into the tent which is considerably easier than getting it back out without getting stuck on something. Remember, quickly turning with your mouse is everything, and it's not made any easier once you're inside the tent. Barrel #4 is also fairly easy to hit because it's right out in the open, and makes you think a nice, broad turn would be easy there. Easy it is, useful it is not. Both these barrels take you considerably out of you way, meaning you lose about a tenth of a lap on anyone who doesn't hit them, and this distance adds up! This having been said, either is vastly preferable to having the ram exhaust itself. Remember: You don't need these unless you miss #2 or #3. You will see the red splash on your character that lets you know your ram got an apple (messy eaters they are) so you don't have to worry about how many exhaustion points are on your ram--eating one apple resets that to zero, and you will always be able to make it to the next barrel you should hit. It's missing two barrels in a row or going blazing off in some random direction by mistake that can exhaust your ram.

Hint: When you absolutely need to hit an apple barrel, plow straight into it. Your ram will stop cold (which is bad) but you can quickly tap the spacebar and take advantage of some interface physics that make you slippery enough to get unstuck immediately by going over with a jump and the ram will take off again at top speed (which is good). At other times when you managed to hit the previous barrel, you just want to graze the thing as you go by it, and even then you want to turn at the last minute. Seriously. Try to approach the barrel so that your ram's mouth is pointing right at it and swing just to one side or the other of it just as you get there ...the idea being that he can get his head into the apples and snatch one as you steer him away.

Once you're moving, picking the right path is important. Straight lines are always shortest, remember that. Know ye that also jumping doesn't make your ram go faster and there are a few places you'll be tempted to make some great leap into the air and all that does is hurt your ankles and raise your repair bill slightly. If it does manage to accomplish anything, it's usually to throw you further off course and that's something you don't want. This run is about control and precision and jumping is basically neither of those things. The next set of screenshots will show you where you want to be pointed at each time you make a turn to change directions.

Let's begin at the beginning, with Neill (since you've already got your riding crop hotkeyed). Stand between Pol and Neill at the tent, facing south (away from the tent) so that you can see Apple Barrel #2 off in the distance and point yourself straight at it so for this one time, you don't have to turn at all (think of it as a freebie--take it). Next, click on Neill and tell him to give you the "good stuff" and then start spanking that '1' key to get your ram up to speed as quickly as possible while heading straight for that barrel. Remember you can click on the image to make it larger. In as straight a line as you can, head directly to that barrel or just barely to the right of it. Once you actually reach #2 you'll need to make about a 20 degree turn to the right to aim at #3.

The stretch from #2 to #3 is pretty easy. Go slightly to the left of the signpost and make haste for Apple Barrel #3. You shouldn't have to jump to get over the road markers unless you hit one of them head on, and if you missed #2 don't panic just keep going to #3 and hit it head on like we talked about. Once you get to #3 you'll need to make a left turn that requires a little bit of precision because there are three trees (two dark and one light) atop the hillock that you can use to aim with. If you went in a completely straight line to Flynn, that would be taking you to the right of the light-colored tree, but unfortunately the ground is too steep to climb up there! You will have to aim for the narrow space between them (it's wide enough, don't worry) that is to the left of the light-colored tree and to the right of the two dark ones.

The moment you pass between them you can either aim yourself directly at Flynn (if you hit #3) or for Apple Barrel #4 if you missed #3. If you didn't get Apple Barrel #3 follow the fainter dashed line to just go near him and then hit Apple Barrel #4 so you don't exhaust the ram and then make a sharp 180-degree turn. Note, you don't have to go all the way to Flynn! On your way to him, watch him closely and the moment you see him throw a barrel to you do your turn--it'll catch up to you, although it sometimes means having the barrel chasing you for a few moments like some low-budget homing missile. The screenshot on the right shows approximately how close you actually have to get. It's about as far as a normal ranged attack.

Once you've made your sharp turn with a keg of frothing beer in your inventory (good thing it's not real brew) you hopefully won't follow the road all the way back to #2 like some people do. If you had to hit Apple Barrel #4 there isn't much difference between following the road to get to #2 instead of going to #3. You hopefully didn't need to hit #4, which means now you definitely need to hit #3 again, and it's on the far side of a hill where you can't easily see it to aim at it. What you do is aim for an especially high part of the hill just ahead of where the road starts turning right, because on the far side of it is Apple Barrel #3, and there's a lone pale tree poking up just over the top of it that if you go just to the right of also happens to line you up perfectly to graze the right-hand side of Apple Barrel #3. I've drawn a red line and lightened an oval showing what you can see of the tree in the screenshot on the left. You want to hit #3 again even though you might not need to, to make sure if you miss #2 your ram doesn't tire out before you get to Pol (because it will almost immediately).

Going from #3 back to #2 is pretty much a cakewalk, just like it was the other way around. There's an excellent view and not much in your way, and at least in this case if you have to bounce over Apple Barrel #2 you won't go flying particularly far out of the way and you'll have a clear view of the delivery tent and Pol. Turning slightly left at #2 to go back to Pol is also a pretty mild turn to make.

Now we're finally in the home stretch. The screenshot for this final leg shows two paths for a reason. The one on the left is for people who richochet off the barrel with a tight little turn to the left, and the one on the right is for people who bounced over Apple Barrel #2 and will thus be far better off going to the right of the big annoying tree. Either way, the priority is to get yourself pointed at the tent with Pol and Neill (and more specifically Pol or at least between the two of them) the moment you hit the far side.

The moment you get to about 15 yards of Pol, you should just chuck your keg to him automatically, hear a little "ching" as you get two more tokens, and your clock gets a little more time added to it. Remember, if you missed the last barrel you will have to go into the tent a bit to hit Apple Barrel #1 behind him and need to really make a sharp 180-degree turn or get stuck in the tent. If you don't need that barrel, make the turn the moment you're throwing the barrel to Pol. Any way you slice it, this is the hardest turn of the lot because all those trees around (and the tent) are very unforgiving and it's rather easy to go running off in the wrong direction or get stuck on one of the Brewfest pennons. Just straighten up and head back to #2 as quick as you can and repeat the entire thing.

Remember: Don't worry about your clock, don't worry about how many tokens you have, just focus on what you're doing and ride and you should be on your way to 14-pass runs (15-pass runs are ridiculously close when they happen) in no time at all. To use a golf analogy, using this method 13-pass runs (26 tokens) should be considered "par".

Oh, my, gawd. Mechano-hogs are real.

2008-09-21T11:01:00.000-07:00

This just in, the achievement mentioning the "mechano-hog" isn't just a tease. It actually exists.

Screenshots are here, courtesy of the guys at WoW Insider.

Since it apparently doesn't bear any parts that look like they could spontaneously explode and send the rider straight to the graveyard, we can be pretty sure it's gnomes that designed them, not goblins.

I want one so badly.

PTR Code 8962!

2008-09-18T15:21:00.000-07:00

A glorious thing has happened. The PTR (Public Test Realm) got the same codebase as the WoTLK Beta is using, so... There'll be no Northrend coverage or fussing over the new ShadowKnight...er...Death Knight class (sorry), but I should be able to make a very good start at explaining to people what Addons are not only essential, but actually work before the PTR code goes to the live servers and everyone has to learn how to play all over again*. The talent changes are just about that serious. Buffs no longer work anything like they used to, and nearly every class has one or more to bring to a raid now. I promise you will like them. Since these things are new, and "not quite balanced yet", you will especially like the fact that if you are a fairly alert and meticulous person, you will find ways to wreak absolutely ludicrous amounts of havok upon your enemies until things settle down a bit.

So far, the obvious winners (aside from Inscription) have been that the graphics engine has been rejiggered so that it does much more accurate handling of shadows and lighting, which has resulted in a very notable visual improvement in just about every zone. Hunters no longer have to worry so much about running out of mana because of a major change to Aspect of the Viper. Steady Shot has been "unlinked" from Auto Shot, meaning we no longer have to worry about crafting a custom shot rotation macro (those of you who weren't using one still fail, epicly if you thought you didn't need one). ...and for beastmaster-specialized (or "specced") Hunters like myself, we get Exotic Pets which for most people at the moment seems to mean Kurken, the Snowy Giant Two-Headed Dog. Since I have cojones the size of coconuts, I got a "real" core hound. Kurken fans, my pokemon can beat your pokemon. Count on it.

REMINDER: Brewfest begins this weekend.

* - If you're used to having addons around, the time right after game patches have traditionally been when many or all of one's important addons no longer work properly, leaving players feeling like they're playing with a few fingers missing. Players who don't use a lot of addons tend to not understand this strange sensation, which is why I'm explaining it.

Hunter Basics

2008-08-26T20:10:00.000-07:00

Meh. I'll probably come back and cover this topic in detail at a later date, but watching a lot of the player base, I can see there's a few "clues" that are just not getting out there to the Hunters at the rate they should.

First and foremost: Agility is your new god. Worship a the temple of Agility and you basically can't go wrong. Intelligence is your second-best friend, because it means more shooting before the midnight chimes and you turn into an auto-shot monkey. Intelligence should never take precedent over Agility in your gear.

Spirit: Forget Spirit. There's almost exactly zero gear that will give you enough Spirit to make up for what you'd lose in Agility by wearing it. The Blizz devs gave us Spirit of the Viper to make up for the fact that any +Intelligence gear we might obtain will be nearly useless because of the lack of Spirit. Viper between fights (and maybe during some of the longer ones if you can stand the drop in DPS) and Aspect of the Hawk during.

After 40 you wear mail, and only mail: Take a pass on leather unless you're completely deisperate and are wearing something you got 10-15 levels ago. At 70 if you're wearing leather (that isn't a purple) go to the Auction House and search for "Netherstorm" and possibly "Bandit" as well. Netherstorm of the Bandit is green, but it'll be very hard to beat it for some of your item pieces. One useful side effect of that is if you're still wearing a few of those for awhile at 70, your repair bills will be dirt cheap. The belt in particular will be hard to replace so keep an eye out for one on your way up.

If you're a dwarf, buy a gun. Don't waste the racial bonus. (I know this is odd coming from a dwarf using a crossbow, but darn it good guns are really hard to get ahold of at 70.)

Prowl: Unless you do a lot of PvP, Prowl is nearly useless on a cat at 70. Be ready to respec the pet if you get to 70 and realize you've taught him (or he came with) Prowl. The damage bonus for the first hit out of stealth is going to amount to one-half of nothing in the long run, and Hunters are about sustained DPS. Leave the "burst" DPS to the mages (and warlocks riding the short bus).

Melee: Again, unless you're doing a lot of PvP, melee is almost useless for you. If you're close enough to the mob to hit it with your fist, you're doing something very wrong. If you find a pair of pom-poms to wave around that give you more agility than your shiny daggers or fist weapons, wear them and leave the +agility daggers to the rogues. Let them laugh. You have Flare.

Misdirection macro: If you hit 70 and don't have one, make one and have it ready to kick off. There will not be time to click on Misdirect, and then click on the tank, and then click on the mob again, and then start shooting. When the healer gets aggro from what you're shooting at, spank that macro and start mashing buttons so that it goes back to the tank instead of killing the person who would otherwise be keeping you alive. If the healer dies before you do and you haven't popped Misdirect, you have failed.

Fishing: Fishing is not as horrible as you might think. Sure, it's boring to level, but there's no easier source of +Agility buff food. You will also likely wind up with a decent supply of +healing fish, which is good for currying favor with the healer in your group (and will also help to keep you alive).

Food: If you're not eating +agility or +hit food for raids/dungeons, you might as well be going in without shoes or gloves on. Fish, Warp Stalkers and Talbuk are deee-licious.

Ammunition: Buy the biggest darn ammunition bag you can get your hands on. Any decent leatherworker will be happy to craft you a quiver big enough to sleep in if you bring them 100 light feathers (the other materials are always available in the Auction House). Pay attention to your faction standings, and the moment you can start buying specialty ammo, stop buying the white stuff. Halaa (in Nagrand) is good for buying ammo after you get to Outlands, even without having worked on a faction. Every time you login, before you do anything, top off that ammo bag. Running out of ammo == failure, and the super-big quiver/pouch will hold enough ammunition to get you through a full run of Karazahn with some left over. If you're stuck for a bigger ammo sack (and/or until you get some faction-requirement ammunition), make friends with an Engineer because they can craft ammo crates that can each hold five stacks of "at least it's better than vendor-bought" ammunition. Remember, you'll burn through it fast enough so it's not like carrying four crates in your pockets is going to keep you from picking up vendor trash.

Strategy: To put it bluntly, Hunters are the lightning strategist class, almost as much as Wizards were in the old Dungeons & Dragons game. You may not immediately see the utility in the "blue swooshie" ability, but have it ready to smack--it can and will save your bacon by making the mob go bother someone else (sometimes you pet, usually the tank). Same thing goes for Misdirection... That's another way we get to dictate who the mob is attacking. Flare is continually usable with any spec at all, and really hampers rogues. (NO stealth bonus for you mister!) The pet ability "Intimidation" is a stun, which is the effective equivalent of "Full Stop" and again, super-awesome for Saving the Healer. Unless you've got a short-bus riding, keyboard-turning tank on your hands, that delay will usually buy enough time for the tank to get aggro back. As an added bonus, that "blue swooshie" ability you've been ignoring all time time really screws with the heads of the other guys in PvP because suddenly they're targeting your pet who may or may not be in front of them and it will take them precious moments to realize it and go back to smacking you in the face. Frankly, I think it's more useful than FD for PvP.

The Pet Dies First: I know some of you are very partial to your pets, but let's not quibble. You can res him, he can't res you. If you're clearly in a "we're all going to die" setting, have that pet buy you a little time, Feign Death (because it doesn't work so well when you're getting beaten silly) and just lay there. When the dust settles, res the pet and stuff him full of sausages and all will be forgiven.

Third Sunder Rule: In raids, watch those little debuff icons on the target. After the third Sunder, you can generally start blasting away. Sending the pet in before that happens (particularly if you just cast Mend Pet) means a surprise critical hit or three can get you squished.

ClassTimers and why you need them

2008-08-22T18:40:00.000-07:00

It sometimes startles me to find new players who are still using the bare Blizzard UI. While this sort of purism is admirable, it's also somewhat harmful to their play style. Far be it from me to insist that anyone should play a video game a certain specific way or claim that they're doing it wrong, but I will definitely assert that by not using some of these add-ons, they're simply making the game more difficult than it really needs to be. In some aspects, the difference between using add-ons and not using add-ons is much like the difference between calculating sales tax with pad and paper and simply using a pocket calculator (or decent cash register). Sure, you can do without, but you've got better things to do with your time--like looting monsters and buying stuff.

Okay, so I'm going to start relatively simply with the ClassTimer add-on.

What ClassTimer does is relatively simple and straightforward. It provides very visible, and very obvious countdown timer bars for the various spells and effects your character uses. Having little buff icons near your portrait--even with time values under them--is mainly just useful in only the coarsest of ways. Looking at a bunch of them at once, you're more likely to think "Yep, I've got a lot of buffs on" than to notice anything out of the ordinary, like one that's gone missing. Put these babies somewhere in the lower right quadrant of your screen (I suggest top center of that quadrant) and you'll be able to tell with the briefest of glances which of your timers are about to run out, and in what order.

To be more specific about it, this add-on means a greatly reduced chance of you saying things like:

"Oh c**p I didn't notice the Soulstone had expired."

If you are playing a class with abilities that trigger randomly to let you perform extra actions for a certain period of seconds (like say, Mongoose Bite, or Shadow Trance) ClassTimer can even show you a cooldown for those so you know in a very deep and meaningful way just how long you have left to take advantage of them.

Basically, unless you're planning on just hanging around IronForge and talking in /2 all day, you want this addon.

As with all add-ons worth using, the size, fill, color, font, and location of the bars is completely customizable. Note, although many spells are already configured in ClassTimer, a few spells (like Demon Armor) aren't in it's list of things to watch for by default. In the configuration dialogs you can easily add new things for it to pay attention to by simply typing the name of the ability in the little input box.

For you PvPers, it appears that this will even show cooldowns some of your enemies abilities, so you see just how long before you can smack that cockroach..er..paladin in the face when his bubble runs out.

Although ClassTimer is obtainable through the WoW Ace Updater application, I'll simply suggest that unless you're into installing complex add-on management applications that you simply download the zip file of the latest Subversion build from this browsable directory as ClassTimer.zip.

Once it's installed, depending on what other things you have installed, you may wind up with a FuBar button, or a minimap button. If you don't, simply type /classtimer in your chat window and it will bring up the configuration dialog.

I'll get back to Quartz in a bit, after I've had time to polish the instructional screenshots somewhat.

Initial Post

2008-08-21T21:20:00.000-07:00

Ho there. You've reached the blog of Me. I run a toon named Eshk on the Skywall server who is a level 70 Hunter (not hun-tard). No, I don't care for PvP, and it's doubtful I'm going to bother explaining why. What I'm going to do between here and December is hope (and maybe some prayer) I'll get into the Wrath of the Lich King Beta so that the bug hunting can begin anew, and teach you people how to play.

Yes, I'm aware that Big Red Kitty has this pretty sewn up, but think of this as the place you go if what he says is still over your head. We're going to get specific yes we will, and we're going to even be deliberately pedantic at times. Occasionally, we might just be grape-flavored simply because it amuses us.

Sometimes (because we're dodging incipient altaholism) we'll maybe even discuss some rudiments of warlockery.

Rather often, we're going to be jibbering about add-ons for the Warcraft client which should be considered essential to gathering huge quantities of WIN. In fact, we're going to mention one right now. Quartz.

In the meantime...

Nothing to see here (yet). Move along.