Cataclysm Leatherworking Spreadsheet updated!

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 is here! New leatherworking spreadsheet!

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)

Magery... who knew?

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

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

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

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.

Winter Addon Roundup: Auctions

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

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)