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Wednesday, August 14, 2013

A mod for all seasons


Common problems in wow and the mod to solve that problem

Killing your raid by standing in the crap? People dying because you couldn’t get a heal off in time? Miss picking up an add because you are looking at your spells and didn’t see the add until it had already eater the hunter? Whatever problems you are having, there is a mod to solve it. This post is about all the problems I’ve had as a die hard raider who has played since beta. More importantly, this post is how to solve them with a mod. 

An image of a world of warcraft interface
What you can do with weakauras and healbot example

An image of a clean world of warcraft interface
Clean interface by using elvui and weakauras



Problem                                                                   Solution

Healers standing in the crap because they are looking at heal frames. Get healbot and move the window right up beside you. You can see both your frames and what you are standing in. It’s easy to stay alive when your eyes are focused on the middle of the screen where all the action is.
Dps standing in the crap Weakauras and then hotkey your spells. Move the auras up beside your character.
Tanks missing an add Weakauras so you can keep track of your cds.
Tanks dying with their personal cds unused Again…weakauras or at least hotkey your spells. Look online for the string you need for your particular class of tank.
Low dps Bitten’s Spellflash or weakauras. Hotkey your spells
Cluttered Interface Elvui will allow you to move, resize and make certain non crucial aspects of your interface invisible or only visible when you hover over them. There are a lot of interface mods but this one is the easiest to use IMO.
Always Broke Use your farm and sale surplus mats, then get auctioneer and auctionator to make it easy to find out prices and make it easier to post multiple options. You can also go to wowuction and find some good deals.
Tired of leveling different toons in exactly the same way every time. http://wow-pro.com/addon is a good leveling guide. Also, it might take a little longer, but consider questing on a different continent. Either way, you will get a different experience while leveling up.
Tired of playing the same toon but can’t switch Incorporate new spells and abilities into your playing. Very few people use all their spells to the maximum potential. Adding even one overlooked spell into your rotation can improve your playing and renew your interest in your class.
Noxxic
Icy-Veins
Ask Mr Robot
Untimate Wow Guide
Tankspot
Tired of playing the game Sorry. I think you might be ____ed : )


Hope this helps. Let me know if I forgot anything or just reply with a problem you are having so we can help you fix it.

Friday, August 9, 2013

Get things done while waiting for raid

Oh the things you can get done while waiting for a raid to start!


“We going to get started any time soon?” reverberates from different raiders every few seconds through Ventrillo as the rest of the raid anxiously awaits for the tank, healer or dps to finally get their butt online. We’ve all been there. In fact, we may have been the cause of “Where the Hell is Your Name Here” before.
The question must be asked. What great things can we accomplish in the sometimes hours per week that we are waiting for a key raider to log on?
My goal was to set out to see what I could accomplish in just the time it took for a raid to start. Here are my results so far.
Learned to play some songs on my classical guitar:
Bach Prelude 4 for the Lute Suite
Two other songs by Barrios Mangore
Wrote two of the songs for my bands debut album
Songs #3 and #8, which oddly enough people often say are the two best songs on the album.
Wrote an entire book
Not going to link that because it really really really sucked. But the point is taken I’m sure.
It’s great when raids start on time…but when they don’t?
I would love to hear from you all on how you spend your time while waiting for raids to start. To see how people can take that time that would be completely wasted and do something cool with it.
As for me, my new goal is to see if I can learn a new language from DuoLingo 

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Proving Grounds Guide

Quick Rundown on Healing the Gold Level of Proving Grounds


  1. When you first go in you will see a bunch of npc's standing around. Get yourself a lock rock from one of them, re-forge and re-spec if you need to.
  2. Not sure about tanking and dpsing versions, but for healers, it is imperative that you dispel a debuff called "aqua bomb." If this thing is allowed to go off, it will do a LOT of aoe damage to your party. Even if you can heal through it, you will run out of mana quickly, since you can't use mana pots in Proving Grounds.
  3. Track "Aqua Bomb" with healbot or whatever healing frames you happen to use. You might have to manually add the spell in healbot. Here is a picture of what your custom debuff window should look like. To add the custom debuff go to the Cure --->Custom tab and manually type in Aqua Bomb in the new debuff window and hit save. See screen bellow.
  4. The bulk of the damage, at least in the half dozen times I've personally beat it, seems to be in waves #5, #6 and #9, #10 so try to have some healing cooldowns ready those.
  5. Mana might be a problem so try to stay as efficient as possible by using your cheap stuff frequently to keep your party from getting so low on health that you are forced to spam the expensive stuff.
  1.  
     
 There you have it. Good luck and feel free to reply if you have any problems. Here is a video I made using the techniques explained in this post.




Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Feral Druid Weakauras



A picture of weakauras and a Feral Druid in Cat Form Since Feral Druid is such a situational  class, I have basically just put in the auras for cooldowns, buffs and checks for debuffs/bleeds on the target.

I also put in a check to make sure you are in Cat Form since I sometimes get carried away and use a spell that knocks me out of Cat Form.

Lastly, towards the bottom, I have added damage mitigation cooldowns.

Barkskin will show at <= 80%
Might of Ursoc shows at <=60%
Survival Instincts at <=50%


Here is the weakauras string for Feral Druid.





Bellow is the second version of these auras, which is a dramatic increase in dps.


Tuesday, July 16, 2013

New Restoration Druid Weakauras for 5.3 and 5.4

New Restoration Druid Weakauras for 5.3 and 5.4

A cutout picture of a Restoration Druid from World of Warcraft
I have included a map showing the new weakauras for Restoration Druid. A video of these auras in action will be coming soon. I realize that when you look at the map it's easy to become overwhelmed but keep this in mind. Most of these auras will only fire when certain conditions are met, such as with the personal defense cooldowns, innervate don't show unless you are bellow 80% mana...etc.. Right out of the gate, these auras give you about everything you could need and are actually quite compact, fitting right under my healbot frames in my case.

A detailed map of Restoration Druid Weakauras

How to use this aura set for 5.3

Basically, the only aura that doesn't work correctly is the new spell "Genesis" since the spell isn't out until Wow patch 5.4. The way around this is to temporarily hide that particular aura until the patch come out. Here is how to quickly and easily hide it until then:

An image showing how to hide certain weakauras

And here is the weakauas string for Restoration Druid

Thursday, July 4, 2013

Wow Patch 5.4 content

Wow 5.4 Content on the way


Just a quick note for everyone. I’m going to be delving into the new World of Warcraft patch 5.4 in the coming days and weeks. Here are some of the things this site will be working on.
  • New fully updated weak aura strings for the classes I know how to play (Monk, Hunter, Druid, Priest in particular). There are usually a lot of big changes with each World of Warcraft patch and 5.4 is no different.
  • Flex Raiding; what is it and how does it work?
  • New single player Proving Grounds. This sounds really interesting. I’d love to tackle this first but it’s not currently available on the public test realm at the time of this post.
So be sure to subscribe or check back often to get up to date on what’s going on.

Monday, June 24, 2013

World Of Warcraft Movie

After years of talk and speculation, it looks like we might actually have a World of Warcraft Movie coming out in 2015.

From what little is out there about the movie, word is, Legendary Pictures will be bringing the movie to light. They are responsible for a lot of great movies over the decades. If anyone can do the franchise justice it would be them. Here is a list of their current movie catalog. Legendary Movie Catalog

But several questions arise.

 Will it be a hit?

I personally can't think of a single good movie adaptation of a video game. I'm sure there are examples out there but I can't think of one off the top of my head. There have certainly been a lot of Saturday morning cartoon adaptations (pacman,street fighter and Sonic to name a few) but movies? Sure, it don't have to be a Jurassic Park (1 billion dollars gross) to get the job done. So long as it's actually a good movie, it will probably be a hit. Judging from the buzz on the net, it certainly has enough  people who would love to go see it. 

A picture of pacman and mrs pacman
pacman 
Most of you don't remember this little guy on Saturday mornings


Will it bring back some of the millions who have left?

It certainly couldn't hurt to rev up renewed  interest in the game since the bulk of the advertising in the last bit has been of the Mr Tee and Ozzy Osborne variety. When and if (I've learned to be cautious) it comes out, we can see a massive swing in the games popularity again.

Since this entire post is nothing but pure speculation, there being so little concrete information out there at present, feel free to add your opinion. Will it help the game? Will it be a hit?

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Is WoW Dying?

Is Wow dying?
    This is a good question to be asking at this stage in the life cycle of World of Warcraft. This post was brought upon by two factors. Factor one is the recent price drop in moving characters from one realm to another. The other factor is the disturbing fact that if you type "is wow" into a google search box, you get something similar to the following search suggestions.
Is wow dying?
Is wow fun?
Is wow free to play? 
    From the above results, it's easy to conclude that you have basically three categories of people who are interested in World of Warcraft at this point. Those who have played it but are not currently subscribed; those who are playing currently and are concerned with the state of the game; and finally those who have been able to resist the games "Siren" call thus far and want a little more information.
If it is dying then why?
    Another good question. But where do we start to try to discern a primary reason? Chances are, multiple factors contribute to the report that World of Warcraft lost 1.3 million subscriber in a three month period. This is pretty significant considering they have lost four million subscribers since 2010, during which time they went from 12 million to 8 million subscribers.
    The following reasons why they could have lost so many subscribers, at least from my own perspective of one of those players who are currently trying to decide if I want to continue playing are as follows.
 1. The game has been out a very long time. 
                                     
    It's hard to remember the world without Wow. It came out in November of 2004. I'd be willing to bet that most of the people who left are just tired of the game. It's just like eating ice cream. No matter how good ice cream is, the more ice cream you eat, the less you are going to like it. I myself have been sick of the game at least half a dozen times and walked away for extended breaks only to come back with the release of a new expansion.
    What is causing people to become tired of playing the game in the first place? In my talks with other players, especially those who have drastically decreased their playing time or flat out retired from the game, they have given the following reasons.
  • Tired of grinding daily quests
  • Wiping on the same boss and seeing no improvement after several months
  • There is no clear cut direction to the game as it stands. There is simply so much that can be done in the game that some people have a hard time getting anything done at all. It's like turning a child lose in a yard filled with hundreds of toys. The result is very little focus on any one toy, instead it's a frantic run to play with every single toy a little, then moving on to the next one as fast as possible. This would explain the discrepancy in the gear score of one raider over the other.
  • Looking for Raid is not an option for some people.
  • Real life gets in the way.
 2.Cost
    You have to pay fifteen dollars a month to play. This one wouldn't seem to need an explanation at first thought, but if you dig a little deeper, the cost of the monthly subscription isn't the only monetary factor. If someone is playing on a dead or imbalanced faction ratio server, there are costs associated with moving all those characters to a server with a higher population. After all, if people are going to play, it's always nice to have others to actually play with. Since most people can scarcely afford the twenty-five dollars for one toon transfer, the thought of leaving all those precious 90's on the dead server is a little hard to bear. I myself have four level 90's on dead servers.
3. Free to play games.
    Free to play games are pretty much everywhere you look now. In theory, these games are designed to be completely free to play. Any one of these games alone don't stand a chance against World of Warcraft, but consider this. On the website http://www.mmobomb.com/games/mmorpg there are currently ten pages full of top free mmos. Each one of these games, while not being able to go head to head with the big fish, are instead all taking little bites out of World of Warcraft. Some of these are on pace to take more than a little bite out of the reigning mmo champ. Some of the games that are drawing a lot of interest are:
  • Neverwinter
  • Star Wars The Old Republic (newly free to play)
  • Dragon's Prophet (from the makers of  Runes of Magic)
  • Rift (Now free to play)
  • Elder Scrolls Online (due out Q2 2014)
My opinion
   World of Warcraft is still the king of all mmo's but it's losing ground. They are doing everything they can to stem the tide of the mass exodus by reducing the price of transferring to another server by half (for one week only). There are rumors of many more positive changes rumored to be in the works from the developers and I'll do my best to keep you guys updated on them as they become official. 

       


Sunday, May 26, 2013

How much gold do we need now?

     I remember Vanilla Wow just like it was yesterday. Gold was very hard to come by. Quite often, if a player spent their gold too freely, as in buying gear or buying up materials to level a trade skill, they just might not have enough gold to buy their mount. This resorted to hour upon hour of farming for trash to make up the difference. In my case, that very thing happened to me and I had to walk around killing stuff at random until I had the funds. It wasn't like now, where I could just ask a guild mate for what I was missing. After all, they were all just as broke as I was.
    But that was then. Now gold is plentiful and gear is pretty easy to get without laying down hardly any money. Today, just as it was long ago, leveling a trade skill is the biggest zap to my economic standing. So now, it would seem that most of the need for gold revolves around vanity items rather than things I absolutely have to have. While it would be nice to have the 100k for that Darkmoon Rabbit I've been wanting I believe I'll just live without it until the price comes back down to earth on my server.
    However, if something ever came up and I wanted a lot of gold I feel comfortable that I could get it with two simple mods and a single website.

The mods


    With auctioneer, it's not like I'm sharing some guarded secret since it's been downloaded 14 million times since 2006 and that number is just from the curse website alone.


    Again, no big secret as it's pushing 10 million dls itself. But I often here questions like "Which one should I use?" My answer is both since I use them both. I personally like the statistics of auctioneer and the ease of creating and buying auctions from auctioneer.



The Website


A picture of the website WowUction


    A guild mate shared this website with me not long ago and I have to say that I was most impressed. Basically, while this website tells you what is hot and cold on the auction house, it also tells you what items and mats I should produce and sell to maximize my profits. There is a mod for that called trade skill master but I never seem to have the time to figure out how to set that up and the tutorials I've seen on it thus far are are a bit lacking, at least to my admittedly limited attention span.
    Overall, a really great alternative for me. Wowuction scans the auction house frequently so the information is usually quite up to date. I've made quite a bit of gold with this little gem. 









 




If anyone knows of a really good, up to date, tutorial for Trade Skill Master or any other economic addons which I have not listed here, I would certainly appreciate that information. Who knows, with a little help I might get that Darkmoon Rabbit and a Reforging Mount some day. : )










Saturday, May 25, 2013

Hunter Weak Auras

This weak Aura String is the first in a series of weak auras for the hunter.

We'll start out with Survival Hunters since this one is the most up to date. You might want to avoid using this aura on trash pulls because you want to keep all your cooldowns available for the boss.

Here is what the aura looks like fully loaded
A picture of hunter weakauras in action

I can pretty much guarantee that with this aura you will be among the top in dps.





And here is an updated version of the above weakaura hunter strings. Thanks goes Kevin Lassing for taking the time to update this aura to make it even better. The version bellow also has a Focus counter and Black arrow timer. Thanks for the hard work.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Tracking Renewing Mist on your Mistweaver Monk

Renewing Mist and Thunder Focus Tea

It is essential, if you want to do well with your Mistweaver Monk that you keep Renewing Mist up at all times. You should have it up on as many targets as possible but never less than 5 in a 10 man. While you might be able to keep track of it by simply looking and counting the number of people who have it in your healing frames, it is certainly better to simply have a separate aura which keeps track of the number of people who have Mist on them. This way, when you have at least 5 people receiving renewing mist you are free to cast Thunder Focus Tea, which will instantly refresh the duration of Renewing mist on everyone the next time you cast uplift. So my point is this. If you are not on the ball with keeping 100% uptime on renewing mist then your Thunder Focus Tea will only benefit a few people.

A picture of Thunder Focus Tea




So I would recommend this priority.

1. Keep an eye on the aura that tells you how many people have renewing mist on them.
2. When you see the number five, cast Thunder Focus Tea
3. You have 30 seconds from the time you cast Thunder Focus tea to uplift all the people with Renewing Mist on them.
4. Once you uplift those people, find someone who doesn't have it on them, if any, and then before you know it, all 10 raid members will have Renewing Mist.

With this strategy, you will have Renewing Mist on everyone and your uplift will aoe heall the entire raid in a 10 man. 

I credit Affinitii with the Aura I'm about to post.


Monday, May 20, 2013

5.3 Cheat Sheet

World of Warcraft Patch 5.3 Cheat Sheet


This cheat sheet is just for the general changes that effect everyone. I figure most people will want to go in depth when it concerns their own class changes. For that reason, class changes are not included to keep this brief.

The full patch notes in all its glory can be read here
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/9135374

                                              A few stand out 5.3 patch changes

- It will take 33% less experience to get from level 85 to 90

- Item upgrades are returning. 250 valor for 4 item levels. 750 justice upgrade provides 8 points ex. 463 item will be 471 but you can only do it once.

- pvp equivalent will be 750 conquest and 1500 honor

- Heirlooms cost to upgrade reduced by 60%

- Heroic Scenarios are coming. Must be item level 480 and you must be in a pre made group.

- Lesser charms will drop off of level 90 mobs out in the world. So top level dailies should give not only the reward amount but you should get some from killing the mobs now.

- All characters have a base resilience of 65% now.

- You can roll on off-spec loot now. Just right click on your character portrait and select the option from the drop down list.

- Bonus rolls can offer a larger than usual amount of gold. Whoopee...I kid

- Protection from bad luck. (They are talking to me here) The more times you don't get squat the better your chances of getting said squat the next time you bonus roll.

- You will now be able to herb and mine in Mist of Pandaria even if you are at low skill level. Not sure if this means you will get little to no ghost iron or if it means you will get a different kind of ore in accordance with your current skill level. The jury is still out on this one.

My own take is that this patch just screams alt play. Heirlooms upgrade price being cut so low means you can upgrade your leveling gear, then once you hit 85, the amount of xp required is cut by a third. Then once you hit 90 just farm dungeons and upgrade the gear you get from them to 471. This should further decrease the current skill level you see from players in lfr considerably since they will have 33 percent less practice with their toons than they would have had. lol. I kid again.

Gold From Sunsong Ranch

A picture of World of Warcraft Sunsong Ranch

Sunsong Ranch is a Cash Cow

If you are one of those people who need or want gold but you go days without planting anything on the Sunsong Ranch you might want to reconsider.

Many players get their gold through daily quests. This is perfectly acceptable because there are many reasons to do daily quests besides the gold you get for doing them. But we are talking about only two things here, those things being time and gold. Let's compare the yield from a single ranch to daily quests shall we?

Inside the numbers

I personally always plant flowers on my ranch and this is quite obviously because of the golden lotus you get from the crop. As you can see from the above pic, I recieved 8 golden lotus. So my crop yielded the following.

8 golden lotus        = 368 gold value
2 life spirits            = 6 gold saved on health pots
2. water spirits       = 8 gold saved on mana pots
8 snow lily             = 17 gold
4 green tea leaves  = 8 gold
6 silk weed            = 12 gold
4 fools cap            = 12 gold
5 rain poppy         = 10 gold

Total Auction house value of that crop? 441 gold
Time to clear and replant farm?             4 minutes 30 seconds

Farm Vs Daily quests

Daily quests give about 20 gold per completed quest, meaning you would have to do 22 daily quests to earn the same amount of gold as the farm earned. At max speed on a well geared toon I can do about 3 daily quests in 11 minutes and about 80 to 90 minutes to do 22, not counting travel time from hub to hub and providing you are not competing with other players for quest mobs and items.Chances are it would take much much longer to do 22 quests.

And the winner is?

Daily quests
22 quests taking a minimum of 80 minutes = 442 gold value

Farming herbs on the ranch
You can do 16 farms in 80 minutes 
For every 80 minutes devoted to farming = 9,724 gold value

I personally have three level 90 toons and I make a minimum of 1200 gold per day just from my farm. My items sell every time even if I get undercut in the auction house. This takes me about 15 minutes maximum. But this can be very valuable, especially on extremely low server like the one I came from, where there are so few people that you are basically only selling to other guild mates. 

Don't forget tip

Remember to save time on your farm that you can mount up to pull those tangled weeds. I'm surprised by the numbers of my friends and guild mates who did not know this was possible. I didn't know this myself until recently.