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.

How to Disc, a Simple Guide. Part 1: the tools, speccing, and glyphs

So, you've decided to jump into Cataclysm healing with bubbles, or you're tired of getting trounced on the meters. Either way, welcome to the bubbling side, we have Power Infusion but sadly, no cookies.

First off, disc healing is no longer about spamming PW:S. You do not have the mana pool to support it, trust me. So, here's your spells and when you might wish to use them. Keep in mind that there is no healing rotation, and this is just one way to heal. Also, I'm raid healing, so I talk about spells more from that perspective.

Power Word: Shield-> still important, still useful, but now costs more. In raids I try to keep this up on the tanks, and throw it on dpsers or healers in immediate danger. Try to avoid having shields fall off, you really do want damage to break them for the mana return.
Flash Heal-> Honestly, the only time I use this spell any more is when I hit it by accident. It's expensive, and if I need a fast heal, I have other spells.
Penance->Your fast heal. Also the "crap, about to die" heal and the "yay I can stagger the tank" heal.
Greater Heal-> best used with the borrowed time buff from a pw:s cast. When I need a heal and penance is on cooldown, this is my go-to.
Prayer of Mending-> Keep this Frisbee of healing goodness bouncing. It's cheap and a smart heal.
Prayer of Healing->This is your group heal. It's best used with Inner Focus, and remember it's a group heal, not a raid heal. You need to cast it on someone in the group you want to heal.
Renew->useful as an extra tank cushion or a on-the-move heal for someone who needs to be topped off but isn't going to die immediately
Power Infusion->If you're down to the wire on an enrage, throw on a dps (mage preferably). Otherwise, keep it for yourself for a little extra healing oomph
Pain Suppression-> Your tank-saving cooldown. You could possibly also use it to mess with your tanks, but I wouldn't recommend it.
Leap of Faith-> a way to pull people out of bad stuff, or a way to mess with fellow raiders. You can also use it to help kiters.
Inner Focus->Try to use before as many prayer of healing casts as possible if you're raid-healing
Power Word: Barrier-> great for incoming heavy raid damage, just keep in mind the long cooldown and that people have to stand in it

Inner Fire vs Inner Will->Inner Fire's best used for tank healing, where you need more power to your heals. Inner Will's great for raid healing, as it lets you throw more shields about without going oom and yay faster movement.

Now to the specs and glyphs. Disc priests have a choice to make, spec into Archangel and smite-healing, or not. Archangel does not return enough mana to make up for the mana you used smiting, and you don't have control over who gets healed with the smite. It automatically heals the lowest target within 15 yards, including temporary targets and pets. I'm currently spec'd into archangel, but I'm going to redo that, as I'm really not using it. I like the idea, and I'd say try it both ways, and see which works better for you.
Disc spec without smite and archangel
Disc spec with Archangel
There's some optional points in there, especially in the shadow tree. Personally I'd pick up the spell haste, but that's optional.

Glyphs->
Primes: Penance, PW:Barrier, PW: Shield, and/or Prayer of Healing
Majors: Divine Accuracy (for smite builds), Prayer of Mending, and whatever else you'd like to take
Minors: Shadowfiend, Levitate, and whichever other one sounds appealing

Next up, updating the gearing post!

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!

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.

Rawr, a very simple how to

Well, guys, sorry about the lack of posts. Someone dear to me is going under the knife soon, and it's got me more than a little stressed. Normally when I'm stressed I go for escapism (like playing wow), but this time my brain has decided knitting obsessively is the way to go. I don't pretend to understand this, but at least I've gotten two shawls out of it.

But enough about me. Let's talk about a nifty little tool called Rawr.  Now, I know just enough about this program to be dangerous, but so far it's been very useful to me for optimizing my shadow stuff.  So, I bring you a simple how-to optimize your gear and generate an upgrade list in Rawr.

Step 1: Download and install, or use the nifty beta version that opens in a browser window. I used the downloaded version for all screenshots, so things may look a bit different from the beta.

Step 2: Load your character from the armory. You'll end up with something that looks like this...

That's Lyllea. On the right you can see a list of headgear.  You can use the options above the list to change which slot you're looking at, change how the gear is sorted, or remove gear from certain sources.

Step 3: Go through the gear list, clicking on the green diamond for any pieces you have available to you. I'd suggest sorting alphabetically for this step, it makes the gear easier to find.  Once you're done, head up to tools.  You're going to want to hit optimize and you get...

Now, you have many different things you can optimize for, and you can use more than one, like say dps and cost. I just went with dps. Adjust thoroughness to your liking and hit optimize.

Step 4: After working for a bit, you should get...

On the left is your current gear and on the right is what rawr thinks will give you the best dps from what you told it was available. Most of what it's suggesting for me is some regemming, which leads me to another important option. Edit gemming template. This is under tools, same as optimize, and if you're like me and object to gemming for hit on general principles you can tell rawr not to use certain gems.

Step 5: select the optimized setup.  Then go back to tools and select optimize again.  This time we're building an upgrade list.  This can take a while, so I tend to start it and wander off.  Once it's done, you get...

Except generally not with wow.com in the background. This is a list of headslot upgrades, with how much your dps would increase, and if you mouse over them it'll even tell you where they drop. This is great for making a loot priority list, since you can clearly see how much each piece is "worth". And you can even save this list in rawr, or export it.  Or if you're me, you can just jot down the best pieces and where they drop.

And the best part about rawr? It works for multiple specs and classes, can be used by tanks, dps, and healers, and has a multitude of options.  I'm really just scratching the surface here. Of course, always use your common sense as well. Rawr is a great tool, but it can screw up.   Hasn't for me yet, but it can happen, so if it's telling you something odd, go research it before you spend a ton of gold on new gems and enchants.