Wow Peggle

Okay, so I'm just a little behind on this addon. Just for kicks, I downloaded the Peggle addon last night. This isn't a review, per se, but it is a nice little addon. There's a single-player mode that's just like the non-wow game. You get to choose one of two people (that basically decides your super ability). And it's just like one of those dumb online flash games that suck you in for no reason. (That wasn't meant to be negative, that's just how I classify them.)

They've made a lot of intelligent choices for designing the game. From the way it will automatically go away when combat starts, to the way that it is sort of grayed out and less protruding on the screen when your mouse is elsewhere, it really shows that they put a lot of thought into it. You can even brag about your scores by a Peggle announcement in different chat channels (only tried Guild). There's also a talent tree. How Wow can you get? lol.

I could totally see the benefit of having this addon. Since there's generally at most maybe 5 people in a 25-man raid that are doing something pre-raid. 1 person is deeply involved explaining strategy, maybe a couple are listening because they don't know the fight, a couple more are listening to add to anything the raid leader forgot, and the rest? The other 20? They can be playing Peggle. Or maybe 2 people are actually looking to fill the PUG while the other 18 are playing Peggle waiting for 5 more people to magically join.

The only problem for me is this: I'm usually the guy explaining the raids. And if I'm not, I'm usually listening to make sure nothing was missed. And if I'm not doing either of those things, I'm talking with my wife. So, after one night of one heroic 5-man TOC run, my wife suggested that I probably shouldn't get hooked on a game within a game. I wholeheartedly agreed with her and uninstalled the addon after getting off last night.

Deadly Boss Mods: Revisited

Bless WowInsider's heart (or Wow.com as they're now called). They are a great source of information. They compile so much from so many sources. It's just a shame when they miss little things. Like they're little post about Essential addons for raid leaders. The very first mod they list is for Deadly Boss Mods (good). And as is mentioned, it's kind of a necessity for all raiders. But the most important part of that suite for a raid leader doesn't come from Curse as is linked on their site.

Oh no... the most important part comes from the Deadly Boss Mods downloads page. They're two extra packages called "Spell Timers" and "Raid Lead Tools". Let's see the description, shall we?

Spell Timers
"DBM-SpellTimers is a small but powerful addon that uses DBM timers to show spell cooldowns from raid members. It is fully configurable through a simple GUI so you can easily add new spells."

Want to know when Heroism is up? Or how about who cast Rebirth, and who's still on cooldown? Or how about anything with a significant cooldown? (Yep... even portals. lol.) Yeah, kind of important for a Raid Leader to know. Go get this one.

Raid Lead Tools
"Raid Lead Tools uses the DBM API (especially the kill/pull detection) to manage your raid and DKP. You can export tracked raids to eqDKP with just a few clicks!"

Now, I've actually used CT Raid Tracker for this functionality. (Found here... used to be hosted on Curse.) But it sure sounds like a useful Raid Leader Mod to me. :)

Point being though.... the Spell Timers are WAY better than having to ask, "Whose Battle Rez is up?"

Edit: I didn't even mention the best part of these additional mods. Not sure which one it is, but one of them gives a mass invite to all guildies. Saves a ton of time when you have exactly 25 (or less) on. :)

Add-On: Guild Tax

Disclaimer: I have not tried out this mod yet.

It seems like forever ago that I made a post about a Guild Tax for the Guild Vault. But just this morning, I got a comment on that post about a new mod that was developed by walking_fishy. It's called, quite simply, Guild Tax. It appears to be this developer's first mod. It was uploaded on 5/20, and 2 days later, it already has 36 downloads. (For a no-name mod, I'm guessing that's some pretty good marketing... or one person just downloaded it 36 times.)

The idea is this: By default, there's a 5% guild tax on "Small Change" (money off of mobs) and Quest Rewards. When you go to the Guild Vault, it's automatically deposited. And anyone in the guild with access to the Guild MOTD can change the tax to whatever they'd like.

But here's the nice thing about his philosophy: first of all, it's kind of on a volunteer basis. Each individual has to install the mod, so that means that they're agreeing to donate. It's not like this money is being taken straight out of somebody's loot either... you don't want to pay, simply don't visit the guild vault.

Next thing as you can see from the Screen Shot (from Curse) is you can disable any part of it. Planning to do a bunch of dailies for your own epic mount and want to save up? Disable the Quest Reward Tax Collection. Have a huge tax that you simply can't pay at the moment because you need to repair your red gear, but need to get a flask from the vault? Disable Bank Deposits.

I see it fitting along with how I play perfectly. I always mean to contribute to the Guild Vault, but since I usually have another officer take care of that, I usually forget. So, I think, I should contribute a large amount, but then I'm poor because I just Dual Spec'ed (or whatever reason you want to insert here).

For those Guild Leaders (or members) that want to make sure others are actually getting taxed, there's also a whisper command:

If you whisper a player who has the Guild Tax addon with the command '!GuildTax' you will get a reply with that players settings and their total tax paid.

So, bravo, Walking_Fishy. I'll have to check out this mod tonight.

Newest Gold Spammer Antics in Wrath

This past weekend, I spent an evening running Steamvaults with my wife and a couple other friends. I was on my Shaman, so I was healing the run. Out of nowhere, I get a message from a level 1 toon. WIM initially blocks tells from level 1's, but I was curious as to who it was and what they said since the name was something that sounded legit.

In the message, I was asked if I wanted to trade my shaman for a 70 rogue with S1/S2 and T4/T5 gear.

Well gee... I thought the gold spammers were bad, but now this? He didn't even validate the tell (as WIM requests you to do if you're a level 1 toon).

Let me first say that this is totally against the EULA. You cannot trade accounts.

But it got me thinking about their marketing strategy. The Gold Spammer of old at least had a product that appeals to everyone. Even if you don't want to buy it with real money, everyone in the game has a need for money. Some might have enough where they don't need any more, but they still need to have some.

If you're targeting specific classes, you've just dropped your supply by a great deal. Over-simplifying the numbers, you are now only dealing with about 1/9th of the population. And you're making a pretty big assumption that that's the only level 70 that that account has. And you have to find somebody that isn't happy with their class and now wants a rogue (in this case). Wow... Talk about a market niche.

Now, far be it from me to tell somebody how to do marketing for their business. Maybe it was some random kid sending out a ton of whispers. (But again... I would think they would have validated the WIM message so it would get through to me?) It would certainly seem that if you were advertising your web site or service of trading toons, you'd want to do so to a much bigger audience. Who knows? Maybe spell out your web site name in IF using dead gnomes. Oh wait... the Gold Spammers already did that.

Then again... maybe this was just some random person looking for a shaman to trade for.

Rawr The Program

So, I really can't believe that I haven't blogged about this before. I feel like I've let down the druid, mage, and many other communities. The information is certainly out there, but why haven't I told you guys about it? Selfish? No. Forgetful? Maybe. But the truth is that I thought I had already blogged about this.

What am I going on about? Today I'm talking about Rawr. Rawr is a program that was originally developed to help Druids figure out gear upgrades for Bear and Cat forms. I know it's been around for at least two years, but know exactly how long. There's been many changes (it's now in Beta 15), and it's come a long way from just supporting Druids. It now supports the following classes/roles:

• Bear
• Cat
• DPSWarrior
• Healadin
• HolyPriest
• Mage
• Moonkin
• ProtWarrior
• RestoSham
• Retribution
• Tankadin
• Tree
• Warlock

Phew! That's a lot of gear lists. I tend to lean more on Rawr than say MaxDPS.com since the Rawr suggestions seem to make more sense. The MaxDPS will give you the items that will give you the highest DPS, but it doesn't take into consideration survivability. What good is a dead mage? You got it... good for nothing. Also, it doesn't take into consideration your mana pool. So, what good is a mage without mana? So, Rawr takes into consideration dps and total damage possible. Overall, seems like an excellent guide for those classes to figure out gear.

Likewise, for tanking, you can see how each item stacks up in different areas. For tanks, it's not just how much stamina you have. So, Rawr breaks it down into Mitigation, Survival, and Threat. All of which are important to tanks.

You can also enter all the gear you currently have, and it will optimize it for you. Results may vary. Most of the time it seems to give good suggestions. There's some gear choices that are debatable, but aren't they all?

Now this program is essentially for level 70 toons. You can change your specs and the gear will adjust accordingly as well. If you're looking for gear lists of any of the above classes, go check it out. It's a great program.

TourGuide Mod

When leveling a toon and coming to a new quest hub, my general rule is to get all of the quests, and then start at the top of my quest log and work down. I may even make a special trip back to the quest hub if the reward is particularly attractive. In doing this method, I've noticed mistakes many times as in: "Dang... I could have killed these mobs that were just 2 steps over instead of traveling to the other side of the map to complete that other quest." For the efficiency reason along, I started looking at leveling guides.

For those that have not seen it yet, TourGuide is an excellent add-on for those that are leveling toons. The latest version seems complete for the Alliance, and I believe it's mostly complete for the Horde.

What is TourGuide?
It is an in-game mod that guides you to be more efficient in your leveling process. The creator has loaded a leveling guide that will tell you when to get quests, when to turn them in, and when to go the next area. It automatically brings up kill/collection quest status for you for the next quest you should be working on, and there's generally coordinates of where you should go to complete the next step.

Do I have to do everything TourGuide says?
Of course not. There's things I skip, but I generally try to stick with it so that I don't miss any first quests to those important chain quests that I'll want later.

Why don't you just use one of the Leveling Guides from some web site out there?
Well, this is from a web site. :) But I found that this in-game mod that automatically tracks my quests and locations makes knowing the next step so much faster. No more having to alt-tab out to a pdf or web site to know where to go next... no more losing your spot in said pdf or web site. And multiple toons in those external things? Forget about it. But with TourGuide, it's all taken care of for you.

So, if you're leveling toons and you want to be efficient in your quests, head on over and check out this mod.

Grey-Trash Selling Macro

I realized this long, Columbus Day weekend (yeah, I got the day off) that one of the macros that I've used for the longest time, and quite frankly, I can't live without I hadn't posted. Sure, there's plenty of mods you can use to do the same thing, but it's also as simple as creating a macro and using that button.

So, what am I describing? Everybody gets them. Some of them, like the [The Stoppable Force] are even worth over 2 gold! So, yes... I'm talking about the grey, poor quality items. If you don't save them, if you don't pick them up, you're losing out on a good chunk of change. But they can be a pain to search through your bags to find. So, what does one do? Add the following macro:

/script for bag = 0,4,1 do for slot = 1, GetContainerNumSlots(bag), 1 do local name = GetContainerItemLink(bag,slot); if name and string.find(name,"ff9d9d9d") then DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage("Selling "..name); UseContainerItem(bag,slot) end; end; end

Drag the macro to an open action button. And then every time you go to a vendor, click this baby, and see all that trash sold in record time, and without you having to search for it. Giving credit where credit is due, this came from the Mage forums on all their macros.

Updating Mods

Patch 2.2 has been out for over a week now. Most of the mods that are still being updated have been updated by this point. If they're mods you can't live without, go get them now. No more excuses. I've covered a couple different mods such as Omen (necessary enough that Blizzard may eventually integrate it into the game) and Deadly Boss Mods (for the raiders and PVP battleground folk).

On some of the bosses, it is almost impossible to win without having some type of timer to know when events are coming up. Gruul the Dragonkiller is one of those bosses. Having at least a decent idea of when the shatters and silences are coming are essential. So, go get those mods.

We had a guild run to Gruul the other night. Out of 25 guildies, something like 11 had the required Deadly Boss Mods. So, we told everyone to get it. What seemed like 15 minutes later, there were still only about 17 people that had it. What's up with that? Are there certain people that are that leet that they don't need it? Grr... required raiding mods are there for a reason, people. Kk... enough of my rant.

2.2 Impact

Given previous patch days, yesterday seemed like a pretty smooth patch day. After the few updates I was able to get, most of my mods seemed to work. From what I could tell, the world servers all pretty much stayed up. (We were about to engage Gruul when Bronzebeard went down for a short time and then the instance servers were down for about 30 minutes. But overall stability seemed decent for a patch day.)

Of course, I know there's some guildies that would completely disagree with me. Who knows what add-ons some of them were using, but we were getting a ton of people that kept relogging multiple times. One guildie threw his hands up in disgust at how poor a company Blizzard is. Personally, I think the standard UI is pretty stable, it's just the mod community that hasn't updated all their mods. Can you blame them? It had only been a few hours since the patch went live.

I've seen a couple different lists of undocumented changes. The two that I really noticed were:

1. All members of our raid that got killed in the High King Maulgar fight got rezzed with full mana. (Although the Druid's Rebirth was the same.) I'm sure this is a bug, but was nice to have last night.
2. UI scaling has been tweaked. To quote Hortus from the official forums:

The WoW client now automatically resizes windows to maintain aspect ratios.

So if you are in windows mode and and have the same resolution set in game as you have for your windows desktop the window will be slightly re-sized to fit into the space allowed above the task bar. This eliminates stretching and distortion that occurred when windows were filling the available space.

If you do not have UI scaling turned on your UI elements should stay relatively the same size when switching resolutions, you can use the UI slider to adjust the size to your needs.

I guess it's time for me to turn on UI scaling so I can fit all my add-ons on the screen. Anything else you've noticed in Wow 2.2?

Cryolysis: Revived and Killing Blows

I can't believe that I haven't written about one of my favorite mods. And since it's kind of important to my story, I guess I'll have to highlight it now. So, today you'll get the 2 for the price of 1 deal. I'll try not to be too lengthy.

Many months ago, I finally got tired of opening my spellbook every time I wanted to teleport or open a portal. Open spellbook... click on next page until I get to the back... and then finally find the right city to open the portal. Yet those spells weren't important enough to warrant their own hotbar button either. So, the next logical step was to find a mod that would ease my pain. What I found was a full-service mage buffet.

I believe there was an original mod called Cryolysis. It probably worked about the same as Cryolysis: Revived, but Revived was updated for WoW 2.0. There's a whole bunch of things it can do, but I'll just hit some of my favorites. Head over to Curse for a full description. It's basically this sphere with spell circles around it (as seen in the picture) that is able to cast all mage spells.

-Portals- Yes, all of your portals and teleports are packed in tightly to one button. click the button, and the sub menu will open up with all your choices.

-Reagent Restocking- Set how many Rune of Portals, Rune of Teleports, and Arcane Powder you want, and every time you visit a Reagent Vendor, it will restock those items for you. I'm rarely out of reagents in normal situations.

-Eat/Drink Button- Sure you can create a macro for this, but you get this nice big sphere that you can click on that will cause you to eat and drink at the same time.

-Sheep Watch- I used to use a sheepwatch mod, but that didn't get updated in 2.0. I believe my other mods like Quartz handle the sheep timer bar, but Cryolysis provides me with an audible notification that the sheep was broken. (Warning: not 100 effective, but still pretty, darn good.)

-Mana Gems- You can use the Mana Gem button and sub menu to cast and use your mana gems. Was a huge bonus when I starting doing Kara and found that I needed to have multiple gems for the long fights.

And if that doesn't give you mages a reason to check out this mod, I'm not sure what will.

Well, along with other fights, we went to battle against Prince last night. Our raid DPS wasn't the highest, so I knew that it was going to be a long fight. I used potions, I used evocate, I used gems. Wait... I thought I used gems. Well, those little buttons on Cryolysis are so small. I usually don't have any problem with them at all. Just for whatever reason, I missed that I hadn't used my second gem.

Well, Prince seemed to stay at 1% health for a very, very long time, which I'm sure he did since many of our raid members were dead by this point. (Prince fights aren't usually this close, but our high DPS rogue got boxed in by Infernals, so we lost her early.) I was doing all I could, but didn't have much left. Wand, wand, scorch, pray that he dies, etc. There was a moment of panic when he killed the tank, and ran straight for me. The scorch was all I had left in me until I was out of mana again. It was already casting. Other than myself, just the healers were alive. Scorch goes off, I died, and then he immediately fell over as well. I checked the combat log to verify that my Scorch killed him, which it did. It would have been a lot less scary if I had used my gem (which I didn't know I had at that point) and just Fire Blasted him. But the bigger question in my mind: My Scorch went off first. I killed him. How did he kill me? It's not like it's a Fireball that has a delay between the time you cast it and it hits. It's an instant-hit spell as soon as you finish casting. Odd... just odd. Bottom line, I guess, is that he's dead, so what did it really matter?

Tracking Damage

While I've admitted that I'm not a huge fan of knowing who's on top of the damage meters, I think I may have under stressed the importance of knowing who can deal serious damage when needed. If two people of the same class are dead and I only have one battle rez, who am I going to rebirth? Did the mage who went from quest greens to full Spellfire set really increase their DPS that much? So, while I hate them (for the pissing contest they can be sometimes), it's one of those necessary evils I suppose. Furthermore, I've probably had a damage tracker installed as an add-on since my first toon hit 25.

So, where do you go? What do you install? The time honored favorite from what I've seen seems to be DamageMeters. It's pretty simple and straight forward. It shows up as a little box that fills up any time somebody in your party or raid does damage or heals. You can have it show up as Healing Done or Damage Done. I'm fairly certain it will track all healing though. So, overhealing could certainly pad the scales quite a bit. Meanwhile, killing rats with Pyroblast could also be a way of cheating the meters, but not really the point I'm trying to make. lol. You can right-click on the meters to bring up a whole list of options. This is also where you tell it to report the meters to raid/party/whisper/whatever.

There are some limitations with DamageMeters however. It only tracks the damage you see, so there's a distance issue. If you die and are corpsing back while the rest of the party is still blasting/healing away, they don't get credit for all of that fighting. Or in some fights where people have to be spaced out, there may be some issues as well. I believe by default, the distance limitation is 50 yards, but I could be mistaken on that one. So, if you're on one side of the dining room fighting the adds for Moroes, the tanks on the other side may not get credit.

SW Stats, however, seems to overcome that limitation. You'll notice the same basic structure as DamageMeters. You get to see who's on top of the damage/healing charts. There's some nice, easy ways to report the stats to any channel you wish. But the difference is that SW Stats works behind the scene to synchronize the data between everyone that's running the mod. They recommend having 5 people using the mod will more than cover your entire raid. So, once a sync is requested by a player, all "members" that use the mod are asked to alloy the sync. (Usually would occur at the beginning of a raid or boss fight, but whenever.) That resets the meter from that point. It's technical, but it uses some type of time line, so your data isn't technically erased. At any rate... it tracks data, and it tracks it well. ;)

Now, to be fair to DamageMeters, there is some synchronization going on. But it doesn't work quite the same. If I recall correctly, all members have to have it set to allow syncs, and even then you sometimes get old data, or data from other players' alts. So, it seems that they've got the basic concept down, but I've never seen it work as well as the first night (and every night) that I use SW Stats.

So... If you want a damage/healing tracking tool, my recommendation is to download SW Stats and tell all your friends about it. lol. Does anyone know of any other tracking tools like these two? Who knows... maybe there's something better out there.

Possessions Mod

I saw this one on WoW Insider the other day and knew I had to bring it up. Here's the scenario, and I'm sure it has probably happened to all of you: Somebody asks in guild chat, "Does anyone have any X item?" and your response is "I think I do in my bank" or "on an alt". So, you make the trip back to the bank because they really need it. Or you log on with the alt for the same reason. "Oh wait," you respond, "I used them all yesterday." There's certainly got to be a way to be better organized.

There used to be a mod that I used called Character Inventory (or something like that) that would show you the bags and bank slots of all your toons. It was really nice because you could see your own bank even when out in the field. But the Add-on that WoW Insider recently highlighted seems to go even further, and better.

It basically inventories all of your items in bags and bank, and then you can do a search for the items. Take, for example, the picture I borrowed from WoW Insider. You can type in search criteria such as "silk". It will bring up all the items that have the word "silk" in them that you have on any of your toons (once Possessions has scanned them all). Then when you mouse over the items, it tells you which alt has the item, and whether it's in their inventory or their bank.

While this add-on seems like it would really help me since I can't remember what is in my bank... for people that constantly move items between toons, this would probably be a required mod. I haven't taken the time to install it yet, but I can certainly see the huge benefit that this mod will give you.

For those that want it... head on over to World of Warcraft UI / Mods to pick up this beauty.

SmartBuff and SmartDebuff

I never saw a big problem with buffing my mage throughout her journey to level 60. Each of my buffs (Arcane Intellect and one of the two shields) were both 30 minutes long, and there was no real issue to remember to keep those buffs on. As I started leveling my priest, the 10-minute (max) Inner Fire, seemed to give me problems. Not to mention the Shadow Protection spell had the same problem for me. So, a friend of mine found a mod that would buff you, if needed, pretty much anytime you did anything. Whether you were turning or walking or running in circles, if you needed a buff, the mod was there. (Darned if I can't remember the name of that mod. Autobuff?)

Another mod from back in the day was Decursive. This one didn't have a pretty interface like most other mods I've used, but you would set up a macro to trigger it, and it worked great. Basically, any curse, poison, magic effect, etc. (based on your race) in your party or raid would be detected and moved when you clicked this magical button. It was great.

Then came the dreaded day for a lot of guilds when patch 1.10 came out. Blizzard no longer allowed you to hook procedures off of movements (that ruined Autobuff), nor did they allow you to cast a spell without first determining which target you would cast it at (bye-bye Decursive). I know this really devastated a lot of raiding guilds, but I can certainly understand Blizzard's point of view. They actually wanted us to think, and not mindlessly click a button until it said everything was clear.

I don't know if there's been any development directly on those mods, but the same friend showed me a replacement a long time ago. SmartBuff and SmartDebuff can be found on curse here. There's all the settings for all the classes. You can pretty much decide how and when you want to buff members of your group. It's not as easy as moving to cast, but it's still pretty darn simple. Once SmartBuff is all set up, you only need to scroll your mouse wheel and it will buff everyone in your group.

One of the great things about SmartBuff is that it takes some of the checking off your shoulders. You don't even have to check if Joe-Priest has Intellect on him if you absentmindedly zoom in and out like I do. If you're in a raid, you can click on check boxes to determine which party (or parties) you'll be responsible for buffing. And if those members aren't in your party, you would normally have to figure out if they have the buff (by either selecting them or looking for some small icon), then targeting them, and then casting the spell. Bah! Sounds like a lot of work. Just let SmartBuff take care of it for you.

SmartDebuff isn't quite as simple, but still is a huge time saver for me. A box similar to the one shown here is available to you. If you're solo-ing, it will have only your name in the box. When you're in a group, more names will come in. Personally, I have mine broken up by classes, but I believe there's a few options here. And hard to tell how fro this picture, but either a large "R" or "L" will pop up on the names. (I'm assuming it's the red ones how this picture has it set up.) As a mage, you only have to ever "L"-click (left click) the cursed members. But if you're a class that can get rid of multiple ailments, you'll either have to "R"-click (right click) or "L"-click the persons name. It's that simple. You just have to pay attention to the box. :)

Omen Threat Meter

I think anyone that's done some raiding or 5-man end-game instances in Outlands has probably heard of KTM. KLH Threat Meter has been around for probably about a year and a half now. If all members of your group have the mod installed, it works great... sorta. If you've only got one target to kill (think bosses) it's a great way to know that the tank is on the top of the threat meter, and that pesky rogue that does uber DPS is not. It's fairly accurate and has helped a lot of groups with encounters. What did we do before KTM? Who knows?

But what about when we have multiple targets? KTM is an aggregate threat meter. Said in another way, if you, as a DPS'er, switch targets after killing the first (or at any point during the fight), the threat list you see will still be reflective of that first mob. KTM is pretty useless after that first mob. So, how do you know when you'll pull agro on that second, third, or subsequent mob? Bottom line: you don't.

So, while KTM paved the way for threat meters, a new generation is upon us. Enter Omen as the new threat meter. It actually tracks threat on different mobs. So, when you switch from Mob A to Mob B, you can see that the tank hasn't picked up much agro on this mob yet. You don't have to go back to the guess work of old to figure out how much damage you can do before you pull agro.

Sounds too good to be true? Well, there are a few catches. First off, the good folks over at Ace have said they're still in beta for Omen. Updates to the mod happen at least once a day, and sometimes up to 15 times a day. So, some of you might want to wait until release. They've also said that the only thing that's holding them back on final release has to do with pets, but all of the classes (the players themselves) are done. So, they're almost there.

One more word of caution. Because of the way that Blizzard allows you to track different mobs, mobs with the same name and level will share the same agro table as far as Omen is concerned. So, it's still not perfect, but it's a lot closer than KTM is.

Finally, while Omen will obviously work best if everyone in the group has Omen, it will also "listen" to other threat mods, such as KTM, and supply you with that data. As it's stated on the Ace site though, "Please be aware that as KTM is an aggregate meter and not aware of multiple targets, any values from it will be incorrect in any multi-mob encounter beyond the first mob."

I've been testing it on our raids, and it looks really good. Everyone else in our guild (that I'm aware of) is still using KTM, and I haven't pulled agro yet, unless I did it intentionally. So, once it goes live I'll let you know.

One last thing: I've tested a few add-ons recently, so I'm not 100% sure that it's Omen, but I believe that Omen flashes the screen red when you pull agro. If it's not this mod, I'm pretty sure it would be Deadly Boss Mods. Any additional information on this would would be appreciated.

Deadly Boss Mods

After being gone for all of the Karazhan for my guild for this past week, we tried to do The Curator for a second (or maybe third, I'm not sure) time this week. Those of you that aren't familiar with this fight should head on over to BossKillers and read up on him a bit as I won't be explaining him here. Unfortunately, we did not kill him. I don't think it's gear or group composition, it's just our current inexperience. Plus, when our MH only has enough time to give it two tries, it kinda limits us. I'm pretty sure that we'll be able to down him this week.

But the main point of this post is less on a specific boss and more on a specific mod. I imagine that most people are pretty aware of CT_mod and the closely linked CT_RA (Raid Assist). There's a lot of great UI augmentations that CT provides. For now, go check out their site if you want more information on it. What I'm going to focus on is the Deadly Boss Mods.

Technically speaking, this is a compilation mod. There is a GUI mod and an API mod that is kinda the base of the mod. They also control which mods are loaded. You only load the mods you're using. Furthermore, if you aren't in any of the raids or battlegrounds, none of the other mods will be loaded. Makes it nice that it's not taxing on your system at all. Also, this is pretty much for raids only. It does not contain anything for the 5-man instances or even anything like UBRS. But it's your traditional raid places: Onyxia, ZG, Naxx, Serpenshire, Karazhan, etc.

So what does this mod do? I'm not an expert, and I'm sure I don't know a lot of the additional functionality of this mod, but what I've seen is impressive. It creates timer bars to let you know when things are going to happen. For example, during the Curator, the timer bar tells you how long until his next evocate, and then also give another bar when he's evocating to let you know when it will be finished. Another example is during the Maiden of Virtue, it estimates how long until the next Holy Fire and Repentance. For Moroes, it lets you know when he's going to vanish. For the Oz event, it lets you know when each new mob will enter the fight. The timer bars are just really, really cool.

CT_RA has a feature that sounds a bell and gives a warning message when you pull agro off of the tank. I'm pretty sure this is only when you pull the target off of the MT. Deadly Boss Mods seem to go a step further. First of all, you don't have to (or can't) set an MT for your raid. DBM seems to scan all targets and all of the edges glow red when you pull agro. There's also a message of who you pulled. It just seems to really give me that sense of urgency when I pull something.

The last thing I'll talk about for the raid portion is the distance meter. The Maiden has the Holy Wrath ability that can chain through players that are close enough together. The Curator has the Flares that players can chain their arcane damage to others. You want to keep a certain distance from other players, but how do you know how much? When DBM is loaded, there will appear a box right in the middle of your screen (yeah... hard to miss), that will tell you who is too close to you. For this reason alone, it's a good idea for all your raid members to have this mod. There's also some synchronization things that happen if multiple people have the mod, but it hasn't caught on much in my guild yet.

Finally for the battlegrounds. I don't spend too much time there myself, but there is a neat timer that tells you how long until the leading faction wins based on the number of resources they have and how many points they currently control. (Think AB on that one.) Not sure what it does for the other battlegrounds, but I'm sure they've included something.

Bottom line: It's a good, solid mod. It seems to be updated every few days, so you know that people are working to perfect it. I haven't seen any bugs yet, so that's refreshing. If you start using it and see other features that I missed, please let me know.

Tonight we'll start Karazhan over again since it reset. Let's see how far we can get this week. :)

Mmm (Mage Mods & Macros)

In case you didn't know, my main toon in WoW is a female mage named Leiandra. I spend most of my WoW time on her, so I have a hard time writing mods and macros for say a warrior. That said, I've run across a couple of things that I want to highlight. (I hope I didn't lose everyone, there may be a macro or two that would help the other classes as well.)

First I'll start with a few macros that may be useful to everyone. This first one was feature on a WoW Insider article named The Creamy GUI Center: Macro Mania. They've got suggestions for general macros, and also class specific macros. Seems like there's probably a little bit of something for everyone, so feel free to head on over there. For the mage types, they suggested the following macro for polymorphing:

#showtooltip Polymorph: Turtle
/focus [button:1,harm] target /cast [button:3, target=focus,harm] Polymorph: Turtle; [button:1] Polymorph: Turtle /stopmacro [button:1,button:3] /clearfocus [button:2]

I actually added the first line, but showing the tooltip seems to make it more finished in my opinion. Basically, this macro will polymoprh your target when you left-click the mouse on the hot-key (or press the appropriate hot key number) and set that target in memory (or "focus"). If you then middle-click that key, it will polymorph it again, and you don't even have to have it targeted. Right-clicking the hot key will clear the mob of your focus. Personally, I usually don't clear the focus, I just set it again with I polymorph the next target. If you don't have Polymorph: Turtle (don't worry, I don't either), you can set it to Polymorph: Pig or just plain Polymorph. Also, if you choose the "?" for the macro icon, it will attempt to recognize what spell your using. In this case, it will set it to the turtle polymorph.

The next suggestion is actually a combination of a mod and macros. It comes from the official forums, but I'll be darned if I can't find the post now. The post was basically the whole mage vs. warlock debate, which I am not getting into. One of the suggestions for the "decreased" damage for mages at higher level raids was that in testing mage damage at Blizzard HQ, there's no lag for them. Casts of 3 seconds always take 3 seconds. Now if you're red-barring, a cast of 3 seconds could probably take closer to 5 seconds. For sake of illustration, let's say it takes 6 seconds. Now as a mage, you're doing about 1/2 the damage since most of our spells are direct damage. With warlocks and their dots, the damage continues even through a lag may persist. Again, I'm not taking sides, just showing how this mod will help.

When you cast a spell, this is what happens: You press the button, and a message is sent to the server. After a certain amount of time, depending on your current connection speed, the server gets the message and starts casting. For illustration purposes, say it takes 0.5 seconds. After 3 seconds of casting your Improved Fireball, the server sends a message to your computer, there's another 0.5 seconds, and you can start casting again. That means that your 3 second cast has now become 4 seconds; or said another way, you're doing only 75% of the damage that you would be able to if there had been no lag. (All class can see this lag effect, just try to jump in the last milliseconds before you've finished summoning your mount. Most likely, you'll be mounted even though you canceled the summon with your jump.)

Solution: Enter Quartz. There's a lot of neat things with Quartz, but basically, it replaces your cast bar and gives you an estimate of when your spell will be finished. So, because you can't cast again until your computer gets the message that the spell is finished, you need to interrupt the cast when the bar gets just past the red mark, and then cast again. Yeah, you could jump, or slightly move, but a macro makes this so much easier.

#showtooltip Frostbolt
/stopcasting
/cast Frostbolt

Just replace all of your spells with this macro (change spell name, of course), and now you can actually cast 2 Fireballs in about 6 seconds (as compared to the 8 seconds before). This will work for a lot of classes, but it seems to be most helpful to the mage class.

p.s. Didn't run Kara this weekend due to too many people being out of town. So, sorry there's no links to phat lewt.

WUU - WoW UI Updater

Like a number of people, I use a fair amount of add-ons or "mods". Patch day can be a major pain with procedures that are no longer allowed so your once precious mods are disabled and you're forced to use solely the Blizzard UI. (Which, after all the things they've stolen incorporated from mod developers isn't near as bad as it used to be.) Personally, my mods mostly just add functionality. I'm not 100% gimped if I don't have them; I'm just not 100% as effective. (Cryolysis, a mage mod, is a perfect example. Helps me with portals and watching sheep, but doesn't kill my game.) But besides the patch days, a lot of the times you want the latest updates for your mods to incorporate all the updates and changes, you just keep forgetting to look up before you launch the game.

Enter WUU - WoW UI Updater. Now, I'll admit that I just downloaded this quasi-mod last night. The official web site can be found here. It's a stand alone program that checks your mods' versions against the versions that are now available on the Internet. You can specify which mod site you want the updates to come from, but a lot of the mods, once scanned, will have a default web source. There's still a couple mods that it missed. For example, it catches Auctioneer, but it doesn't recognize !Swatter or BottomScanner (both in the Auctioneer pack). So, it's not fool-proof, but it did update a bunch of my mods, so now I'm a believer.