Aura Addon Ideas

This is another in my very occasional series of posts of semi-useful things. Today, I thought discussing ideas for using such addons as Power Auras Classic or Weak Auras might be useful. If you're curious about what I've been up to in WoW (and in general), that'll be after the useful bit.

So, aura addons. They can do so many things that it can be very overwhelming. Here's a few ideas...

1) Resource alerts. One of my most used auras was Lyl's "hey, half mana!" one. It gave me a heads up and let me start thinking about cooldowns without being obtrusive. You could easily do this for health, mana, energy, or whatever.

2) Cooldowns. Especially good for short cooldowns in combat (and yes, you can make auras that are only active in combat, or raid, or when flagged for pvp...)

3) Debuffs/Buffs. Trinkets, time warp, diseases, other power increases/decreases. I had one for when my wolf howled (and gave my hunter an attack power boost)

4) Combos. How about having a "ACK!" alert when your health drops below a certain point and your self-healing button is available to hit? Your healers will appreciate it.

5) HOT/DOT timing.

6) Proc alerts. Combustion, shadow word: death, devouring plague, all that sort of thing.

And if that's not enough, many excellent aura packages can be found on the web. Even if you don't use all of them, they can give you some ideas. I generally start out with a premade package, then tinker with it and make it my own.

Anyway, this is what I've been up to...

1) Race-changed my shaman from goblin to panda. I never liked her as a goblin, and look, her hair streaks match her eyes! I'm hoping she'll be more appealing to me to play now, since I like shaman, I just don't like being short.

2) Rolled a belf monk and a panda mage, and tried some pet battles. I love the monk, but low-level mage is PAINFUL. Frostfire bolt has an almost 3 sec casting time, it's really slow and boring. Needless to say, the mage will be going away. 

3) Leveled Lyl. She's almost done with Jade Forest (a couple of orchard quests and the drag food monastery quest to go for the loremaster achieve in the zone). I did get bored with the zone after a while, but I do have to admit that some of the story lines were great. After one, I wanted to renounce both Horde and Alliance and go be an honorary panda instead.

 4) Got a ridiculously stupid hat. Good stats though.

 5) Took a huge amount of screencaps. Gotta hand it to Blizz, the Jade Forest is gorgeous. I'll be uploading my screencaps (unfiltered) via picasa, and I'll post a link (bear in mind that unfiltered means every screencap including the automated ones)

 6) Killed an elite with guildie help (and that's where the stupid hat came from)

7) Started working on both the Tillers and getting cooking maxed.

8) Ran brewery. Had no idea what was going on.

9) Maxed mining. JCing is pretty close, but leveling only via research is rather slow.

 And generally ran around, fished a lot, and had relaxed fun. I've gotten bitten by the bug again, so I'm hoping to get Lyl max level and ready to raid by the end of the month.

So you want to start raiding...

But you're not sure where to begin. Well, things are different than at the end of Wraith, you actually have choices of where to start! There's 4 raids and 5 bosses you can start with, and having downed all but one of them I sat down and rated them from easy to hard. Obviously this is my option, but at least it'll give you some ideas.

1. Pit Lord Whatshisface->Located in Baradin Hold, the Pit Lord is only available if you have Tol Barad. Remember VOA? It's like that. Honestly, I think this boss is the easiest to start with. The strategy (divide into two groups, stack on the two tanks, run around when there's fire on the ground) is very simple, and the fight is more of a DPS race than anything else. If you can't take this guy down before the enrage timer with no DPS deaths, you need to look hard at your DPSers and make sure they're pulling their weight.
2. Magmaw (aka worm dude)->This guy's located in Blackwing Descent, and he's a big lava worm. There's quite a bit more going on in this fight (lava parasites, floor on fire, boss eating a tank, having to use chains to pin the boss's head down, a burn phase), but once you get the hang of it, you're golden. Keep in mind that there's loads of ways to handle the parasites, and experiment.
3. Omnitron Defense System->Also located in Blackwing Descent, these guys are a bunch of robots. The robots activate and deactivate, they all have different abilities, and once their shields come up, any DPS can cause a wipe. There's much more going on in this fight than in Magmaw's, but if you lack enough ranged aoe or a good kiter for Magmaw's parasites, this is a good option instead. Also, even if you off Magmaw, you still have to kill these guys sooner or later to progress in Blackwing Descent.
4. Conclave of Wind->This is located in Uldum, and is off the coast. You're got 3 bosses, and all 3 need to die within a minute of each other. It's not a hard fight, but is very unforgiving of mistakes or bad luck with the RNG. Also, killing these 3 only unlocks your access to Al'Akir and he's probably not one you want to tackle until you've got better gear and experience.
5. Halfus-> Located in Bastion of Twilight in the Twilight Highlands (look for the spiral tower thing), this is an extremely variable fight. Depending on the drakes you get, it can be a piece of cake or your worst nightmare. I'd say check to see what drakes are up, and then decide whether you want to tackle it or not. My raid team is actually saving our lockout with Halfus down so we can try the twin dragons (almost got them) without having to deal with a really hard drake composition. Plus, the trash before Halfus is rather icky. But if you want to progress in Bastion, you have no choice but to kill him.

If I was starting a raid team, I'd start with Pit Lord, then (or if no TB) hit Magmaw, go see what drakes were up on Halfus and maybe tackle him, and then tackle either the Defense Council or the next boss in Bastion. But I've really gotten to dislike the Conclave, so that has something to do with it. No matter what you decide, remember to do your research ahead of time, try different strategies if something's not working, and adapt as needed. Raiding in Cat's harder than Wraith was (imho), so be prepared to spend quite a bit of time on the cold floor dead. Best of luck!

How I Make A UI Part 1: A Starting With Bartender 4

This is just a walkthrough of how I get some of the addons I use to look the way they do. We'll be working with bartender 4, shadowed unit frames, vuhdo, align, sunn viewport art, sexymap, and DS Graphics Sunn Viewport Skins.  This section starts with bartender, since it's the first addon I configure in a new UI. Originally  I was going to do them all in one big post, but well, that would have been a REALLY big post, so I split them up. Next time will be Sunn Viewport Art and Shadowed Unit Frames. Here's a nice picture with the addons all labeled so you can see what is what. It's also a good example of what you'll see when you first log in with all these installed.

Now to configure!
First off, we start with our action bars. So type in /bt and hit enter. You see...

We're going to go to the Blizzard Art Bar option and disable it. I don't particularly like that art. That gives you...

Now, enable bar 2 if you want. I like to have bars 1-4 enabled, but it does depend on how many bars you want.

Then type in /align in chat. That'll put a grid on your screen so you can line stuff up. Then you want to uncheck the Lock box in the bartender window, then close the window. Don't worry, you can get it back any time by using /bt, and this way we have space to move bars around. Move the bars where you want. I go for bars 1 and 2 centered at the bottom of my screen, but that's me.

Now, not only does bartender let you move bars where you want, you can also change the scale of a bar (I shrink my bag bar and micro menu, since I don't need them as big as the default has them), change the number of rows (allowing you to make an action rectangle instead of a bar), and even change the number of buttons per bar.  You can also do cool things like having bars faded out.

Once you're done moving things around, lock the bars. I ended up with...

That's bars 1 and 2 in the middle, and 3 and 4 on either side. 3 and 4 have been scaled down a bit and also made into 3by4 rectangles. The micromenu, stances bar, and my bag bar hang out neatly on top.

Now, I know you're thinking..."But I don't want to configure bars for all my alts. That's such a hassle!"  And with Bartender, you don't have to.  All you need to do is...

Log in on the alt.
/bt
Go to Profiles
Select Copy from
And copy from the toon you just set up.  See...

Here I'm copying my previously setup hunter's bars to my warlock. And it looks like....

And there you go, you now have customized action bars and you know how to use bartender 4.  And remember, you can always reset the profile if you hate what you've done. Oh, and set your keybindings if you need to.

Click-casting and you: A primer

Given that many people are trying new things in Cat, I figured I'd write a guide or two on various things. This one is on click-casting, keybinds, and how to figure out what to bind to what.

First off, what is click-casting? It's the ability, primarily used by healing classes, to mouseover a target either in raid frames or party frames, and heal them with a click.  It's faster than selecting the target, then hitting a heal.

Second, how do I do this? Well, you have several options. Me, I use the addon Vuhdo, which is a raid frames and click casting addon. Other people use Grid (a raid frames addon) and Clique (a clickcasting addon) together, or simply use mouseover macros and the default frames.
Here's the vuhdo wiki.
Here's a couple blog posts about how to setup Grid and Clique.
Here's some info on mouseover macros.

Third, what do I bind to what?
Okay, this you want to think about carefully and have an overall strategy for. I'll walk you through my disc priest setup for Wraith to give you an idea.
       First I figured out what buttons I can use easily. Since I play on a laptop and use a trackpad, I really only have left and right mouse buttons.  But vuhdo allows me to use ctrl, shift, and alt, as well as combinations thereof, to modify my clicks. The combinations aren't really workable for me, so I'm left with 8 click-casting options.
      Left click and right click: these two are the easiest and fastest for me to hit. So, I bound my two most-used spells to them, Power Word: Shield, and Flash Heal. I changed Flash Heal to Heal when Cat hit, but the sentiment of "most used" is still there.
     Ctrl+left click and Ctrl+right click: big heals. I bound my two biggest single-target heal spells, Penance and Greater Heal, to these two buttons. Having my two big heals use the same modifier button helped me remember the bindings when I was learning them.
     Alt+left click and Alt+right click: select target and levitate. Alt+left click is actually the easiest for me to hit, so it made sense to me to bind something I use a lot there, plus I needed some way to select people from raid frames. And as for levitate, well, I like having it keybound, and when I had a heal bound there, I kept forgetting about it. So it made more sense to just bind non-healing functions to alt.
     Shift+left click and Shift+right click: I never used these in Wraith. I believe they were bound to Renew and possibly Prayer of Mending, but I'm not sure.

Since I'm limited in my click options, I tend to be picky about what I bind and don't bind. If I generally only use a spell on one target (renew, prayer of mending, earth shield), or the spell has a cooldown (pain suppression), or does not need a target (circle of healing, holy nova, power word: barrier), I don't bind them to mouseclicks. All those spells are bound to my number keys, and that's how they get cast.

So when considering what to clickcast, and where to bind it, consider:
like functions (aka big heals all using the same modifier button)
ease of clicking (aka bind most used to left and right click)
how spell is used

It's important not to overload your brain. Start small, maybe just with left and right click bound, and gradually increase. If you're moving to click-casting on more than one toon, try to keep the philosophy consistent. For example, my leveling resto shaman has her fast heal and her to go heal bound to right and left click. For my druid, it's regrowth and rejuvenation. For my pally, it was holy light and flash of light (but I haven't looked into pally healing since 4.0).

Hopefully this will help make the wonderful world of click casting less scary. It's my preferred way to heal and I think once you convert, you'll never go back.

Useful Blogs and Resources

Useful blogs and resources (okay, mostly blogs)
The blogs on my sidebar are hunter ones, so I figured I should find some for other classes too.

A Character Builder-> I haven't figured out really how to use it, but it's fun to play with and looks to be a good way to see how new gear might affect your character.

DK Builds-> There aren't many notes on the builds, so it's hard to get an idea of what's effective. But it might give you some ideas.

Bringing the Wood->Yes, the title makes me giggle. Plus, druid healing and tree form.

Kestrel's Aerie->Looks like this blog is shifting away from hunters and towards shadow priests, but it's still a good read.

A Girl and her (Space) Goats-> This would be a bad time to point out that I have 4 draenei among my 10 characters on SC. My main may not be one, but I certainly love the space goats.

A Mage's Musing Because sometimes you just need to freeze something and then set it on fire.

Altoholics Are Us Yup, that's me.

NoobDing A great newbie blog, with loads of useful posts.

A Moonkin's View of Azeroth Moonkin make me laugh when they dance.

A Paladin Tanking Forum I don't always understand what they're talking about, but it's always interesting.

Death Knight Tactics Because this blog taught me that um, it might be a good idea to hit the buttons in some kind of order, and what order that should probably be.

The Big Bear Butt-> I have never played a feral druid, am never likely to play a feral druid, and I still love the blog. Insightful and interesting.

And the alltime theorycrafting must, Elitist Jerks-> Most of the time I'm not quite sure what they're talking about, and I'm unlikely to ever open my mouth over there, but it's the big resource for theorycrafting. I plan to read up on hunter specs next.


On another note, I think I found my DK spec I made it myself
It's a deep Blood Dual Wielding, with a dash of unholy.