Reflections From The Pond

Archive for the ‘Game Info’ Category

A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, when I had just started playing WoW and was taking my first stumbling steps out of Northrend Abbey into Elwynn Forest I remember meeting a weird-looking player in Goldshire whose name tag above his head was not green or blue but yellow. He spoke unintelligible things and challenged a lot of us lowbie players there to duels.

My son, the resident WoW expert due to his having played way much longer than me, told me that it was a Horde player and his nametag being yellow meant that I could attack him if I wanted to. He recommended me not to because if I were to attack, the Horde would retaliate and I’d be dead.

Later on, I learned that not attacking Horde only protected me from being killed if I were in the Alliance starter zones, and that encountering any Horde outside those areas was likely to be associated with one or many corpse runs. Playing on a pvp server but sucking at pvp ftl.

Sometimes you saw Hordes amassing at Thorium Point, a 40-man raid assembling to go for Molten Core or Blackwing Lair, and as a little Alliance rogue you quickly rode away.

The Horde was truly alien. You could emote at them but you could not speak with them, and it was not until Outland opened up and Shattrah became the new central town that you actually saw Horde on a regular basis and for longer than the usual few seconds that was my estimated lifespan when meeting them out in the great wilderness.

On a normal server the Horde are even more remote. You know they are out there, but as you not normally are flagged for pvp you don’t really see them. When I transferred from my original pvp server to Aerie Peak it took me a long time to realise that half of the players outside Karazhan using the summoning stone were actually Horde, so conditioned was I to interpret blue or green name tags as friendly and only react when I saw a red tag.

It’s the same in Dalaran. The Horde are there but you don’t really see them and you don’t interact with them at all.

You do Wintergrasp battles against them, you do the other bg’s and fight the Horde, perhaps you gather up to kill the Horde leaders for that black bear and the achievement, but apart from that, they might as well be thin air or insubstantial ghosts or not even there, so little do they affect your actual everyday game play.

My son played a gnome mage on the same pvp server I started on, and one of his friends played a Horde char of some class or other. Sometimes they’d meet up in the wilderness with headsets on so they could communicate and go slaughter boars or help each other with quests in that area and just play a little together. Being on a pvp server, it was generally a pain when they ran into some other player who often would attack whomeever was of the opposing faction, sometimes despite the hurried attempts to explain that this was a friend and not to be killed, please!

Seems friendships across the faction barrier were destined to be hard to maintain.

And then I read something in a post by Sudiin over at (Gnome) Tank for Life which intrigued me. He was talking about alts and how Blizzard seems to go out of their way to encourage people to create and play alts, and he speculated a bit about the future in asking:

With people running out of new avatars to play will they finally break down the Horde-Alliance social barrier?

Now, as readers of this blog probably can guess, I think that would be wonderful.

I know there are a lot of old bad blood between the two factions, but if Horde and Alliance already can co-exist in the cities and even fight battles together (Veteran of the Wrathgate anyone?) I see no reason why we should not work on bringing this peaceful co-existence out in the world.

Even before Shattrah and Dalaran, the druids of both factions managed to co-exist peacefully and share Moonglade, why should the other classes and other races not be capable of this?

I know it would take a lot to turn the other cheek, to decide to if not forget then at least forgive old wrongs and grievances, to make that conscious effort to start anew with a peaceful and patient mind. But would it not be worth the effort?

And while the faction leaders negotiated and signed this peace treaty, and would be expected to make their best effort to keep it, there would still be contested areas where battles and skirmishes would be fought, like in Alterac Valley and Arathi Basin, – maybe this way you would find out if it’s really true that the Horde always pwn Alliance in bg’s.

And there would still be disgruntled faction members out in the wild who would fight this peace and attack what used to be enemies on sight, world pvp would not go away just because a new and fragile peace treaty exists.

Think of the possibilities it would open up!

You could learn the languages of the Horde and go visit their cities as a tourist and you’d (probably) be safe as long as you didn’t wander into the really dark alleys.

You could run dungeons and raids with Horde that were friendly to Alliance, or possibly friends that play Horde.

You could try out all the quests Horde-side, all of Alliance could help out and perhaps finally Mankrik could stop looking for his wife.

Making the Horde and Alliance green to each other would not be necessary; they could still be yellow to each other (on pvp servers) and thus attackable. But if you worked hard you would gain rep with the Horde factions, going from neutral to friendly to finally Exalted and then you would be green to everyone, friends with everyone.

Friends with everyone – wouldn’t that be awesome?

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You have all done the Sons of Bitches Hodir grind, right?

I started doing it with my shammy since even though she was a baby of late TBC she was my first raid toon in WotLK, and I didn’t have any old rep with either the Aldors or the Scryers to get her some shoulder enchants.

So I waddled through the snows of the Storm Peaks, flying back and forth between Nifelheim and the terribly tall Tower of Storms to make the ice giants come to look upon me as a friend instead of an enemy.

And after what felt like an eternity in hell and a Sisyphus challenge of some magnitude my shaman got Honored with the giants, and could purchase a set of sparklies for her shoulders.

And it was so dreadfully boring I was on the verge of quitting the game. I guess I got mired down in other dailies as well, because I don’t think it actually took that many days to actually get honored.

Honored she was, my little shammy, and honored she stayed. The priest, the druid and the warlock, was already Exalted with the Scryers and I never even entered Storm Peaks to get them more advanced enchants, so deep was my hate for the polishing of the helm.

Then, when I joined Adrenaline, I started doing the Bitches Hodir dailies again to get her the extra few sparkly points, and although I was not overly fond of the dailies my initial hate had subsided some and I didn’t choke on doing them and didn’t even once contemplate hiring a child to do them for me.

After a looot of days, and generous donations of Relics of Ulduar from my guildies, my shammy finally got Exalted!

Fast forward a bit, and now the SoB shoulder enchants are Bind to Account! Only problem is, my shammy – my only char able to buy the shoulder enchants – is on Stormrage and the rest of my toons are on the Peak.

So, in a slight attack of insanity, I decided to start doing the SoB grind with my druid.

She was at the time Hated by the SoBs but I was pretty sure she had done a few of the pre-quests, and I criss-crossed the Storm Peak trying to find where I left the quest chain. Swearing and checking wowhead, I finally found a Slag-covered thingy in my bags that apparently was vital in gaining the giants favor.

So, I did the Slag quest and the rest that opened up, and when I had done them all I was more than halfway through Honored! From Hated to Honored in a few hours!

Apparently the rep rewards for all the quests have been upped quite a bit, I seem to remember getting about 450 rep for each daily now as opposed to like 200 before.

I popped in to the AH and bought me 600 Relics of Hodir at a bargain price, less than 45 silvers apiece, and returned to Nifelheim and talked to the Quartermaster. 650 rep per Relic turnin and some 400 Relics later I was Exalted…

….

Quite the anti-climax.

I was expecting a weeks-long grind and I was done after only a few hours. Took me longer to find the quest where I left off than doing the entire Hated-Exalted rep gain.

So I bought my girls some new glittering shoulder enchants, but what shall I do with the 200+ Relics of Ulduar still littering my bags?

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When it is only slightly epic? Not-quite-epic? Epic light?

I’ve always thought epic was, you know, epic. I hear that word and my head fills with images of grandeur and awesomeness, of fantastic tales of love and terror and marvellous adventures affecting a whole world. Epicness, simple as that.

In WoW and according to Blizzard, Epic denotes a certain level of item rarity.

You can find poor items all over, common ones too, uncommon items are (surprise!) slightly less common than common ones, rare items are rare, epic items are rarer and legendary items are rarest of them all.

After having played this game for some three years I am still rooted in the belief that epic actually is epic, that once I get an epic item I need never look further, I can sit back and relax and treasure my own, my beloved, my preciousss rings with matching preciousss jewellery and assssorted garments.

I guess my never getting past tier 4 raiding in TBC can partially explain this, I never actually got the chance to regularly replace my epic items because the ones I wore were the absolute top of the line for me, the best that I could attain. Sure, I had my share of badge gear as well but most of what I was wearing actually dropped for me from some boss or other and I had wrested it from a still-warm dead body after having made a lucky roll. In a very Tam-like way.

Enter WotLK.

I actually wore most of my sssweet and preciousss things until level 80. I still wear some of them, my durids tank rings for example, her well-earned Violet Signet and her Shermanar Great-Ring, both from Karazhan.

Now that is epic to me. Those things were so good, so awesome, so grand and wonderful that I did not need to replace them during all my Northrend adventures while levelling, and yet they were only from the first tier of raiding in TBC.

I could totally live with the fact that the Northrend level 80 epics would be even more grand and awesome than my level 70 epics and that I had to replace my well-worn gear when I hit 80 and started adventuring with the big boys and girls. I mean, it’s a whole whopping ten levels difference.

But then I realised that the level 80 epics I started accruing during my Naxx10 runs and through various crafting friends and reputation aquiantances, they were not really epics at all. They were slightly less than epic, apparently.

Even Blizzard themselves say so as the Naxx10 gear and similar does not count as epics in the (infamous) Epic achievement. Apparently, the real epic gear is being handed out in Naxx25 or in raiding instances a tad more respectable than Naxx10.

It seems that although all epics are epic, some epics are more epic than others.

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My computer, my beloved laptop, although getting on in years (it’s soon three years old!) and although it has been to the shop twice, has never had any problems dealing with the graphic settings of WoW.

When the special shadow effects were introduced some time ago I got seasick from them and turned them down to the barest minimum where you could still see shaped shadows and not just formless blobs.

I’ve ran all of 25-man Naxxramas (AoE heaven, remember?) without any problems at all, and although I mostly raided 10-mans after that up till just a few weeks ago I never ever had any problems with lag or disconnects during raids apart from the very rare power cut or similar total loss of net access. Never!

Now, enter patch 3.2.2.

The release of this patch coincided with me moving my shaman to another server and starting running 25-mans with her.

On these 25-man raids with her I have been disconnected from the game once or twice per raid night.

It may not sound much but it is one time (or two!) too many, especially since it seems to happen in every fekking raid!

If I am “lucky”, it happens during the startup phase, only making me miss portals to Theramore for Onyxia or the generously provided Fish Feast.

If I am not so lucky, it happens during an encounter. And in case you haven’t noticed or maybe it has slipped your mind, the encounters nowadays are pretty damn unforgiving of people standing still.

Standing still, you know, like someone who has just lost all her control over her toon by disconnecting but said toon is still in the game, still in the raid, and she is NOT MOVING when Kologarn looks at her nastily, and she is NOT MOVING when the blue sparkly roaches start trailing to Thorim and she is NOT MOVING when the lava around Sartharion and his three hench drakes starts churning.

And if the disconnect didn’t do enough damage, either collateral by me and my uncontrolled toon drawing hurt to my fellow raiders, or incidental by me not throwing my heals where I was supposed to, when I do manage to log back in the dc always, always, ALWAYS screws with my healing addons.

I lose all the raid frames, and even if I manage to do a /reload ui while back online, the reloading screen takes forever and ever to load through and all that time I am NOT MOVING.

And even if I do get through that prolonged hell of waiting and having to listen on Vent to what is happening and I actually do get the raid frames back, sometimes they are not sorted, sometimes they are not clickable, and sometimes the amount of health they show are frozen and unchanging!

The clickability comes back once either I or the boss is dead, but the randomness of the sorting linger on.

(Incidentally, this is why I had a brief session of  Earth Shielding the druid tree instead of the druid bear last night, because my main tank setting was lost and the spot in my raid frames grid where the bear used to be was now taken by the tree – same orange color and their names are similar enough for me not to react immediately (hey! It’s not like I read all the names on the raid frames!))

Turning down all graphic settings to the absolute minimum does not seem to help at all, I was playing with that last night and I still got dc’d.

Sometimes I wonder if it is server-related – I find Dalaran on Stormrage way more laggy than I find Dalaran on Aerie Peak – but maybe that is just a matter of me being in Stormrage Dalaran during peak hours more often than on Aerie Peak where I am mostly out in the bush or the old world.

Sometimes I wonder if it is raid-related – I raid 25-mans on Stormrage and 10-mans on Aerie Peak, but then again I have done the odd 25-mans on Aerie Peak too after the patch and although my fps was very low at times I never got dc’d.

Sometimes I wonder if it is computer-related – my computer is not the most modern and fastest one, and is generally slow when tabbing in and out of WoW, but why have I not encountered these horrbible dc’s before patch 3.2.2 then? I seem to have had more dc’s after 3.2.2 than in my entire WoW history before that.

No, I firmly believe patch 3.2.2 is the root of all this evil – it is the patch from hell!

Well I’m sitting by my game rig
But the frame rate’s way too low
And it lags with every spell cast that I try out

And I’m standing still while running
In the raiding fireworks
Scared beyond belief to get the login screen

And this perverted fear of dc’s
Chokes the smile on my face
And common sense is ringing out the bells

This is a technological breakdown
Oh yes, this is the patch from hell

And all my addons got resetted
And there’s nothing I can do
It’s all just bits of pixels not controlled by me

Oh look out world, take a good look what comes down here
I must learn this lesson fast and learn it well

This ain’t no fresh exciting new content
Oh no, this is the patch
Said this is the patch
This is the patch from hell!

(And fear not, I am not going to sing out. Well, not loudly at least. Well, maybe loudly but in the shower only where no one can hear me.)

I like words.

Swedish or English, I’ve always been curious about words and their origins and I love finding new ones and synonyms for old ones.

I used to giggle inside when I knew more words than my high school English teacher (can you believe she did not know that sorcerer was a synonym for magic user!) and I always flooded deluged my essays with lots of odd old words.

I guess to a native Englishman my way to speak and write is a peculiar mix of the different varieties of the language (British, American, Aussie, etc) and also I guess an odd mix of modern expressions, old idioms and my own constructions. 

Anyways, one thing that fascinates me with World of Warcraft is the words of the game.

There is a popular urban myth claiming that the Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow, but I wonder if Blizzard is not close on their tails there.

I mean, how many words for ice bolt can you think of? Or how many words for fiery bolt?

Well, you have the basic Fireball of course, but also Fire Blast (blast = to explode or destroy something), Scorch (wither or parch from exposure to heat), Pyroblast (pyro denoting fire, heat or high temperature), Immolate (to kill or destroy by fire), Searing Pain (searing = very hot), Incinerate (burn to ashes) and Conflagrate (burst into flames), for example. All very fanciful and imaginative and conjuring up images of fire and brimstone and devastating heat.

Same with the more wintry kind of spells, with variations of Blizzard, Frost, Ice and Icy, Icebound, Winter, Freeze, and Cold among the many different spells of the Frost schools (mages, death knights and shamans), and they all bring forth allusions to biting, debilitating, numbing coldness.

But there is one spell I just don’t get – Wrath. The word wrath means intense anger, often on an epic scale, and wrath is one of the cardinal sins (the rest of the sins also having grand names such as gluttony and sloth). I don’t see any connection at all to the Nature based druid dps spell, and given the imagination shown by Blizzard in naming spells of all kinds I do think they could have come up with something better for this streak of greenish-turqoise fire.

There is also all the different items dropped by mobs all over the world, given names ranging from the plain and simple like Light Feather to more eloquent ones like Sericeous Down (covered with fine silky hair).

For example, there is a quest in Zul’drak that requires you to gather Diatomaceous Earths and Banshee Essences. Now, diatomaceous means something that easily crumbles to dust, and diatomaceous earth is a naturally occuring chalk-like sedimentary rock, very porous and light. When I was doing this quest I started to try to get this word into our guild chat conversations, and my fellow guidlies were not slow to pick it up and it didn’t take long until diatomaceous seemed like a word as common as a very common thing.

And the words just keep coming.

Last night, for example, as we were doing Trial of the Champion, the Cord of Tenebrous Mist and The Dagger of Tarasque dropped from the Beasts of Northrend encounter there.

I asked what tenebrous meant because I had no clue, and got a reply from a friendly guildie that it meant shady (thanks!). Shady, dark and gloomy, and it dawned on me why one of Sartharion’s hench drakes is called this – Tenebron, who like the other two hench drakes does a lot of shadow damage.

(Sartharion’s other drakes are called Shadron and Vesperon, and I guess Shadron is a play on Shadow + the drake name ending -(r)on. Vesper is an archaic word for evening, which again hints strongly of shadows.)

Tarasque was another matter, and I got suggestions that maybe it was not a “who” but rather a “what”, like instead of a dagger of cheese it was a dagger of the material tarasque.

Subsequent research showed that Tarasque was not a material but a fearsome beast found in both mythology and Dungeons & Dragons, as well as in the French military where it denotes a towed 20 mm anti-aircraft gun.

It is also a statue in the town of Tarascon in France.

I wonder what new things I will learn in WoW tomorrow.

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So, still suffering from the dazed shock known as “getting back to work after the summer vacation” I was browsing through my feed browser today and happened to come across a post at the Pink Pigtail Inn about the coming cross server LFG.

My heart and mind did a double beat – this is by far the most awesome news I have heard about what is coming in WoW!

Deathwing ripping the world apart, the Greymane wall breaking, Worgen druids, bah, what is all that compared to being able to play with friends on other servers?

I was originally playing at a pvp server. It took me what? 5? chars levelled to 70 before I finally acknowledged that world pvp was not for me.

I folded my teepee and transferred to a pve server, where I have played happily ever after since.

But of course I miss playing with a few of my friends back on my old server, and miss a few of those who have moved to other servers than mine.

But this looks like I’ll I be able to play with them again and not just by doing lowbie alts together on some god-forsaken servers!

I really hope Blizzard will make this EU-server-wide and not restrict it to battlegroup-wide only.

So, dear Blizzard, if you open up this cross server LFG and make it possible to play with old friends again, I promise I will never ever utter a word of complaint against anything you do! I promise I will see the possibilities only, not the obstructions, and if I ever rant about anything it will be in a happy and tongue-in-cheek way.

Maybe Paynne the warlock will finally be able to play with her knight in shining armour again!

I can’t wait!

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*singing* HealBotting across the Universe, on the Starship Enterprise, under Captain Kirk *stops singing*.

Hmm, well, not really, but I just love that song :D

Now, back to business! I use HealBot (or HealBot Continued which seems to be its current real name) when I heal in WoW. I’ve tried to use some other healy addon with even more custom options , like Grid, but since I was so used to the HealBot it felt like an unsurmountable hassle to figure out how Grid works and set it up to my liking.

I’ve heard rumours that it is a memory hog, but I’ve never noticed that, so I’ve stuck with HealBot, and in fact use it on all my chars, not only the healery ones, for a range of functions.

So how does it work?

Well, start by downloading it from Curse or some place of your liking, and install it. There is a manual of sorts on the download page and there is a whole forum dedicated to it, but this post is about how I have customised it to fit my way of playing. Anyone interested in it should not take my words as gospel but rather play around with it yourself to see what works for you :-)

If it doesn’t open automatically in-game type /hb to start it up.

You’ll see a frame looking something like this:

You use HealBot like any other raidframe, by clicking on the named healthbar to perform a variety of functions or spells. HealBot comes loaded with a default setting, but where’s the fun using that? Customising time!

Left-click on the small yellow H icon on the minimap

or write /hb o.

This opens up the first tab of the HealBot configuration, the General tab:

Disable HealBot turns the HealBot frame off. Turn it back on with /hb.

Show minimap button -- what it sounds like.

Lock position -- once you’ve found the ultimate place for the frame lock it in place so you don’t accidentally drag it around your screen. Not too fun to misclick on the anchor point instead of a bar and toss the entire thing out under your other action bars.

Anchor -- the HealBot frame grows from this point, and you left-click in the chosen corner to drag the frame around.

I usually chose Top Left as my anchor because then the groups will be sorted nicely with 1 on the top left and increasing to the right and down. It also means that you will have to move the HealBot frame around to fit it in depending on the size of the raid, since after a 40-man AV the tiny frame with your name only in it will be sitting almost in the middle of your screen and not neatly down in the corner.

Close automatically -- this closes the frame when no one needs a heal or a decurse of some kind and pops it open again when someone does. I have my heal frame enabled at all times because the popping up and down of it can be rather annoying. You can’t make it so only the bars of people needing heals will open up, it’s either all or nothing, so I prefer having it open all the time.

Play sound on open chimes so you won’t miss that HealBot is now ready to be used. Not very useful to me so I’ve turned it off.

Hide options button -- checking this saves some space in the frame since the “Options” at the bottom of it will be hidden. Better to instead use:

Right click opens options -- right click anywhere on the frame apart from a heal bar to open the configuration menu (options panel).

Hide party frames -- I check this since I don’t need the usual five party members’ frames visible when I have HealBot enabled, but I don’t check Include player and target since I find it reassuring to see my own frame all the time and I often have a mob or boss targetted to see who it is targetting in turn and which spells and abilities it is using.

Enable libQuickHealth is for the more advanced people using some sort of mob health thingie. I have not had the time or inclination yet to figure out if this would be useful for me, so I have not checked it, same with the Use CPU Profiler.

In the chat option, the only message I have enabled is the resurrection one -- Notify for ressurection only. It is slightly annoying when you ress people only to find out a second or two before your 10 second ressurection spell is finished that someone else was ressing your target too. HealBot shows dead people’s name in black letters which turn to green when someone is casting a ress spell on them, so you can check that before you try to ress someone as well to avoid double-ressing.

I don’t use messages for healing (as you can see I have checked No messages) but you can select any recipents of your choice if you want to broadcast whom you are healing and for how much (estimated).

The original ressurrection message has been good enough for me so far (Casting #s on #n), but you can make fanciful messages of your own if you please. #s is the spell you are casting, #n is the target for the spell and #h is the estimated amount this target will be healed for.

 

Now, the next tab is the Spells tab.

The top drop-down menu lets you choose if you want to use enabled bars at all times or if you want to disable them when out of combat. You can have different spell settings and key-bindings on the enabled and disabled bars.

I always use enabled bars because frankly I have enough spells to keep track of as it is, and adding another set of depending on whether I am in or out of combat would do my head in.

As you can see you can bind spells to five mouse buttons, and you have to check for yourself which button on your mouse corresponds to what.

For each mouse button, you can have up to four different keybindings, the simple click or a click when holding down a modifier key, shift, ctrl or alt. I use ctrl as my push-to-talk key for our Ventrilo, so I have cleared all ctrl-clicks from my HealBot.

You type in the spell or macro you want to use for each click-combo. (More on my macros later.)

Save unique spells for each spec is a nifty feature that will let you select different spells for the clicks if you are dual specced. I have not yet tried it with any of my girls since I don’t have anyone with two healery specs, so I cannot say for sure how good it works.

Use enabled settings when target is in combat is a small variety of the top drop-down menu, but since I don’t use disabled bars I have it unchecked, and the next one, Always use enabled settings, is checked to be doubly sure. (Well, enabled settings is not quite the same thing as enabled bars, but close enough :-)

Avoid accidental PvP flagging is checked so if I can’t heal anyone engaging in PvP unless I am flagged myself.

Having an addon choose which spells to use when in combat is a strict no-no and would be boring as hell, but out of combat it really doesn’t matter, does it? Checking SmartCast when out of combat and checking which kind of spells you want to use for this enables the addon to pick whichever spell is appropriate for your target. This is probably the only times nowadays my priest actually uses Lesser Heal or Heal when she’s SmartCasting out of combat to top her off.

The SmartCast spells are cast in the following order; ressurrection spell, decurses, buffs and finally heals.

I am a lazy one so I have enabled all types of spells :D

Be aware though that for the SmartCast of buffs to work you need to set which buffs to look out for, which you do on the Buffs tab, and likewise which spell(s) to use for decurses, which you do on the Curse tab.

 

Next tab up is the Healing.

Here you can choose from a number of different options in which heal bars to include.

I generally have Self, My Targets, Group, Raid, Pets and Target Bar checked. Raid includes yourself and the group you are in, if any. If you check Self and/or Group, those health bars will be pulled out and displayed as separate groups before all the other raid groups, like this:

See how the groups sort themselves nicely in the options order?

The Pets include all sorts of combat pets, hunters’, warlocks’, priests’ Shadowfiends and any MC’d minions of theirs. Very handy in the Inspector Razouvious fight, for example.

Main Tanks are picked up from ORA2 or whatever raid addon you are using.

My Targets is a list you make yourself by Ctrl-Alt-Right Click on the health bar of whomever you would like to add to this group, up to 10 members.  To remove someone from your My Targets-group, Ctrl-Alt-Right Click on them once again.

Target Bar is showing the player or NPC you have targetted at the moment, and they don’t need to be grouped with you. Handy for escort quests and such things. If you want your target to show up as a group of its own on HealBot, select which options you would like to include. I usually have them all unchecked.

Checking Restrict Target Bar to predefined settings is supposed to make you able to add people to your My Targets-group by right-clicking them, but it is not working for me atm, so I have it unchecked.

Alert Level is the threshold (percent of max health) below which the health bars will highlight to call for attention, like in this example where the level is set to 80%:

I have normally this level set to 100 %, so my health bars are always highlighted. This is because you cannot easily distinguish between the fading done for people above 80 % health and the fading done for people out of range in Healbot, so to not risk trying to heal people out of range, or failing to run towards them if needed, I prefer to clearly see who is in range for my heals:

The range check frequency is simply how often HealBot checks who’s in range, and as usual, the more often the spiffier computer you need.

Since I don’t use disabled bars I’ve not bothered about Disable bar when range > 100 yards, with my settings above it does not matter if it checked or not.

In the nextx pane, Show extra bars is for any raid members not already selected in the top pane, and it can be filtered accordingly. I rarely meddle with this since I most often raid 10-mans (except when bg’ing which is too chaotic anyway for me to bother trying to sort things neatly) which are pretty easy to keep track of and thus I keep it on All Classes sorted by Groups.

 

Next tab, the Cure tab!

At the top, I’ve checked the Monitor to remove debuffs and also in combat. I can remove debuffs and I use Healbot for this as well, so I only have one addon for the whole keeping people good and well and happy-business. So, debuffs needs to be removed, and especially in combat since some are rather nasty and might even interfere with my ability to heal.

It’s a screenshot from my shaman’s HealBot, thus I’ve chosen Cleanse Spirit for debuff removing and I am monitoring it on the raid, which also includes myself and my group. This is the spell that SmartCast will use when de-debuffing, but you have to set the decurse spells and key-bindings yourself in the Spells tab for when in combat.

I’ve chosen to ignore debuffs by class, ie magic effects won’t show up on my shaman’s healbot since she can’t dispell magic effects on friendly target, and debuffs which are not harmful or which has a short duration is also ignored. I hate being slowed so I’m keeping an eye out for such debuffs even though they are not directly harmful.

In the next section, the custom debuffs allows you to watch for debuffs that you can’t dispell but need to react fast to. HealBot comes witha few debuffs loaded, but you can always write in a new one and save it when you encounter it. Kel’Thuzad’s Frost Blasts and Ignius Slag Pots are examples of debuffs that requires fast reactions to heal.

I have colour-coded the different debuffs so I can easily see who’s affected directly on their health bars, when the bright leaf-green turns to any of the darkish colours indicated, violet for diseases, blur for magic effects, green for poisons, brownish-yellow for curses and reddish purple for the custom debuffs.

I’ve unchecked Display warning on debuff since I see it directly with my colour-coding, but I have checked Play sound on debuff, although it is usually too noisy to hear it through the raid din.

 

Next, the pimp options are found on Skin 1 and Skin 2.

On these two tabs, there are several options for textures, widhts, fonts and font sizes etc, and you have to fiddle around with them to find something that works for you. Remember that you can save different skins for different situations, you can use considerably larger bars and fonts on a 5-man dungeon run or a 10-man raid than a 25-man raid or even a 40-man AV raid.

You can’t change the colour of the health bars when unaffected by debuffs and not lacking any buffs, or the colours of the rage/mana/energy/runic power bar, but otherwise it is pretty customisable. 

There are a few different skins to choose from an you can make as many of your own as you want, just tweak the settings on Skin 1 and Skin 2 and save them under another name.

The Background is the color of the frame or (lack of frame) around the HealBot health bars.

If you check Show headers, all your target options from the Healing tab will be sorted into neat groups with headers, which in my opinion makes it much easier to see the whole picture. Just check out the difference between this AV raid with headers:

 

 and the same AV raid without headers:

Speaks for itself, eh?

I want to monitor for aggro and I use the Flash bar which blinks on above the health bar of the player in question to alert me if someone has pulled aggro and might need a quick heal. This monitoring covers both aggro towards the triggerhappy mage with a string of crits that actually passed the tank in threat and the random aggro-redirect of certain boss spells which are flung haphazardly out on the raid.

I don’t use fluid bars because the wildly fluctuating of the health is a bit nauseating at times.

I use Show HoT icons but not Debuff icons since I see the manner of the debuff by the colour-coding anyways, and the health bars are a bit crowded at times. For that very same reason I put the HoT icons on the bars and not off them, and to the left because that let’s me see the first part of the player’s name to easier identify them. Icon count is for charged buffs, like Earth Shield or Lifebloom, and duration is for normal HoTs, like Riptide or Renew.

On the next tab, Skin 2, there are more options for the appearance of the health bars

I have set the opacity for out of range and disabled to the same value, because like I said before it is very hard to differentiate between them even with largely different values.

I also make the Mana bar size rather large since I like to keep track of my fellow raiders mana and if they might benefit from an Innervate or Mana Tide totem.

The bottom pane has some more informative options. I try to keep the bars rather small, so I only use Show name on bar and not Show class on bar, but to make up for that I use Color text by class and use a rather fat font to be able to see the colour. If you have good enough eyesight, a good enough and large screen resolution, you can check the Double text lines to squeeze in two lines of text on each health bar. I don’t, so I settled for the above settings.

I don’t use Color bar by class since it screw up my debuff colour coding.

I also don’t show health on bars since that is a rather large number with lots of digits and needs a large health bar to be visible. I do like to be able to see something else besides greenih bars, you know, things like the boss and the splendid fireworks going on around him and even some of the lovely scenery of their hideouts.

 

The next to last tab, the Tips tab, deals with the tooltips.

All these options sets what is shown on the tooltip when you mouseover a health bar. I usually don’t pay too much attention to this, it is basically information about the target and which key-bindings you have available.

 

The last tab is the Buffs tab.

I always check Monitor for missing buffs and also in combat.

This is my shaman’s Buff tab, and she has it easy and needs only keep track of her own buffs, the Water Shield and Earthliving Weapon, but you can set this to check raid wide for missing buffs.

Out of combat, player’s who miss a buff will have a white health bar (or blue, in my case) and it won’t turn green until all buffs you monitor for are in place. You change the un-buffed color by right-clicking on the bar and drag the sliders around til it suits you.

 

Now, this is the basics on how HealBot works and how I have set it up. The trickiest part is to assign spells, macros and abilities to the various keybindings and to find a way to work with them fluently, especially if you, like me, use this addon for many different chars with different spells at their disposal.

This turned out to be a pretty long post in itself so I will cover my actual key bindings and when I use them on my various chars in another post. Til then, have fun fiddling around!

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No, seriously, why can’t a gnome be a druid?

There is one immediate and profound question -- what size bear would she be?

But apart from that, is there something inherent that prohibits a gnome from studying hard and learning the tricks and become a shapeshifting druid or is it plain old discrimination?

Tauren and Night Elves are the only races that can become druids, but although both are very old races as opposed to the younger race of the gnomes, there does not seem to be any physical or  spiritual criteria for becoming a druid, only the racial one. And if Night Elves can become druids, why can’t Blood Elves? After all, they share the same heritage.

Maybe it’s something taught?

The druids learned their ways from Cenarius, the son of Elune, the Moon Godess and Malorne, the White Stag. Cenarius was brought up by Ysera, the Green Dragon Aspect and Protector of the Emerald Dream and he taught the druids to be the keepers of the world, to heal and nurture it and to keep the delicate balance of nature. The druids’ powers come from nature itself and their affinity with nature is strong enough to let them change their shapes.

Now, the druids do not rely on Nature exclusively, because some of their offensive abilities like Moonfire and Starfire actually uses Arcane powers, but the absolute majority of the spells at their disposal are of the Nature school (or the Physical variety when they are in Cat or Bear form).

Is it maybe so that gnomes can’t use Nature spells at all, maybe it is impossible for them to learn how to tap into the forces of Nature and shift into a tiny teddy bear?

Well, actually none of the classes available to the gnomes (Warlocks, Mages, Warriors and Rogues) uses Nature damage spells of any kind (Rogues’ poisons are Nature damage I believe, but that is something applied from without), and if you are to believe Gearmaster Mechazod the gnomes were originally created by “The Grand Architect”, a Titan keeper from within the halls of fabled Ulduar.

According to the Gearmaster, life is “a condition that eventually befalls all of the creations of the Titans!” 

In other words, the gnomes supposedly started out as robots of some kind, and, over thousands of years, slowly turned into fleshy beings!

(The Gearmaster is busy reverting this condition in the quest The Mechagnomes in Borean Tundra atm, go there and help Fizzcrank stop him!)

So, given the gnomes’ possible un-natural creation, born from cogwheels and metal and tinkering and far from the lush green forests of the Emerald Dream, maybe they are barred from tapping into the energies of Nature and thus truly unable to become druids.

(Although it would not be too unreasonable to assume that during their long historical transformation from fleshless to fleshy they would have approached the natural ways somewhat, and that it would not be impossible for a determined gnome to go the whole way and totally embrace Nature, would it?)

But what about the other races? Hunters use Nature spells, Shamans use Nature spells, and you can find Hunters or Shamans of every race there is, except gnomes (edit: or humans or undeads). So it seems all most other races can tap into Nature powers, why can’t they become druids then? Is Blizzard oppressing us?

I say we should start up a rebellion! Let’s all join in the People’s Front of the Emerald Dream and fight Blizzard for our right to be druids!

Even if we can’t be druids we can have the right to be!

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My druid Joaquime has long flowing white hair.

Apparently this will mean that when patch 3.2 hits, she will transform into a cat that looks like this:

or a bear that looks like this:

Joaquime is one happy druid, I can tell you that! :-D

(For a peek at what kind of cats and bears druids with other haircolours will turn into take a look at MMO Champion.)

New Moonkin and Tree forms are under development, and I am really looking forward to that too.

I would love a white lazer chicken, and if she didn’t have to walk around looking like overcooked broccoli Joaq might even try going resto for the very first time in her feral life!

This last year, I’ve cycled through all of my alliance chars.

I learned to tank with my druid and loved taking on multiple mobs, I could sneak past anything and anyone with my rogue and play hide-and-seek games with them, my warlock was a master crowd controller, runaway stopper and general kicker of behinds. My priest could heal through almost anything and I loved it when those oh-shit moments turned up because I knew I could almost always handle it and keep people alive. My shaman went from windfury mania to chain heal craze and my little fury warrior happily beat the crap out of every mob in Outland.

Ok, maybe I am exaggerating a bit but what I am trying to say is that I was in control. I knew the talent trees, which spells to use where and what stats were good for what spec, for all of my girls. I knew how to play them decently enough and I knew enough to play them they way I wanted to and found fun to do.

And then WotLK came and everything I knew was tossed out the window like yesterday’s paper with yesterday’s news. New spells, new talents, new stats to look out for. I had no clue what to do. I was lost.

But I ambled along and managed to fumble my way to 80, first with my shaman healing through all Northrend instances and then with my warlock questing happily away, and I actually had a great time doing it. Now I feel reasonably confident about the abilities of those two classes (well, with the specs I have anyway), but nothing like the in-depth knowledge I had of their sisters’ in the pre-70’s.

And now the ground crumbles under me again, like in phase three in the Eye of Eternity, and my precarious hold of class knowledge is swept away. Will there be a red dragon to catch me and help me soar again or will I fall down into the dark abyss of change and information overload?

Meh, enough whining, there is more stuff coming in the patch than just total and utter chaos! :-)

After having browsed through the long and extensive patch notes (information overflow, anyone?) I found a few things to look forward to, for example

Ulduar! Well, of course, even though I can’t yet call me Twilight Vanquisher or Champion of the Frozen Wastes it will be fun to see a new raid instance.

 The Draenei racial Gift of the Naaru has been changed to an instant-cast heal-over-time. Now maybe I can find some use for that spell – instant heals are very handy in many situations.

Innervate  and Mana Tide Totem no longer costs any mana! It has always struck me as slightly odd that spells for getting mana back costs you mana ;P

Poison Cleansing Totem and Disease Cleansing Totem have been merged into Cleansing Totem. Cleansing Totem pulses every 3 seconds, down from 5. Thank you, thank you thank you. But why not put in a decursing ability while you were at it? The shaman spell Cleanse Spirit removes poisons, diseases and curses so why can’t the totem do it too?

Mana Feed: This talent is now a 1-point talent, down from 3 points. Now is the 21-point talent in Demonology, granting 100% mana return to your pet, up from 33/66/100%. Wohoo! No longer any hard decisions on how much mana I should allow my pet to get back, or if I should spend those talent points on something else!

New Talent: Decimation: When you Shadowbolt or Incinerate a target that is at or below 35% health, your next Soulfire cast time is reduced by 30/60% and costs no shard. Now maybe I can get some use out of that spell! Sure, it hits for a lot, but with a 6 second cast time and a wasted Soul Shard it has not been the most commonly used spell in my warlock’s arsenal.

Master Conjuror: Increased from 15/30% up to 150/300%. I have not done the maths but it seems to be a pretty hefty increase of the usefulness of Firestones and Spellstones.

The Crazy Alchemist Potion is now correctly increased by Alchemist Stones. And here I’ve been happily chugging those crazy drinks when I needed mana and/or health! Have not even noticed that they didn’t get any increased effect. /facepalm.

A new (and very rare) special mount can now be caught from Northrend fishing pools. A fish mount? Gief!!

You can now fish anywhere, regardless of skill. Every catch has the potential for fishing skill gains, but you are likely to catch worthless junk in areas that are too difficult for your skill. Thank you thank you thank you! Think I might lvl my fishing on more toons than my rogue and priest now :-)

Find Herbs no longer tracks Glowcaps. Finally I’ll be able to traverse the western parts of Zangarmarsh looking for herbs without getting overwhelmed by all those silly glowcaps! I guess it is bad if you are looking for Sporeggar currency, but the mushroom-flowers are easily found anyways just by flying around there – they are all over the place!

New elite mob frames have been added for V-Key frames. No more uh-oh, that was apparently an elite I just took a shot at!

Loot from clams now stacks correctly! Yay!