Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week John Patricelli, the Big Bear Butt Blogger, brings you some choice tidbits of knowledge on level 70 consumables for the beary furry crowd.
We've talked about the gear you can get to build your tanking set up to Karazhan, but to actually tank in a raid, you need to bring along plenty of tasty consumables to buff you up to tip-top shape. And that's what we're going to cover today.
There are four basic types of consumables you can have active buffs from.
You can have active at one time;
Flask or Elixir buffs (One Flask, or One Guardian and One Battle Elixir effect)
Multiple scroll buffs (as long as the buffs do not overlap with player spell casting)
One Weapon buff
One food buff
Also, there are tons of potions and items that can be darn handy to use in the middle of a fight, especially when things are looking their bleakest, and with the changes to how Druids shift forms in Patch 2.3, there are some very simple macros that you can use to make your own 'oh no!' buttons. Use at your own risk!
What will help you in your fight is situational, but knowing what you have to choose from can make creating your own shopping list a lot easier.
This has been circulating for a while now, but some players have found commands that will improve the graphics display on World of Warcraft. In the category of oops-we-missed-this-one, reader Matthew actually sent us this tip as far back as mid-March after stumbling on a link at the EU forums. We've dug up the commands that he sent as well as the before and after pictures. Simply log into WoW and type up the following macro:
This macro supposedly pushes the sliders in the Graphics Options part of the game beyond what the controls normally allow, although these values are the maximum allowed by the current game system. Using higher numbers will have no effect and some improvements will only take effect when the game is restarted. Some reports say that using this macro will slow down your Frames Per Second (FPS) while some report no impact on even mid-range systems. If you try it out and find that your performance decreases, however, you can simply type the following macro to return everything to normal:
If your system can handle it, you should expect more vegetation, more objects visible in the distance, more detailed weather effects, and sharper graphics overall. Important: readers have written in saying that the revert macro described above doesn't revert to your previous set-up, but instead puts all your graphical preferences to the lowest settings. Proceed with caution.
Yesterday, I bashfully admitted that I don't use the /focus feature in the default UI as much as I should -- in fact, aside from a totem dropping macro I put together a long time ago, I haven't used macros nearly as much as I should. It's not that I don't want to -- I'm sure I could be a better player with more macros (like the ones found in our Macro Anatomy column) -- it's just that as I said in the /focus post, there are so many ways to use macros that it's kind of tough to figure out just where to put them in your gameplay.
So let's talk about macros -- do you use them? If not, why not? And if so, how do you use them? Of course, we all play different classes, but within your class, where do you find it's easier to use macros, and it's easier to play things manually?
A lot of good players could probably become great players with a few easy macros, but for players who have no idea what macros are for, it's sometimes hard to figure out where they fit. If you do use them, how?
Focus is a powerful tool built into the default UI that I just don't use nearly as much as I should. With '/focus" (and a number of key bindings), you can set up a "focused" target that, with one keypress or macro, you can snap back to and cast whatever needs to be casst. Resto4Life has been putting together a great series on Focus and how to use it: They've hit on hibernating, healing with focus, and now using your focus' target to deal out debuffs.
The situation is that you're in a raid and you're healing -- you have a little extra mana and you want to use it to throw debuffs on the main tank's target, but you don't want to miss a second of watching the main tank's bar. Using macros, you can actually cast spells on your focus' target (in this case, your focus would be the MT) without ever changing targets -- just set up a macro to cast the spell, put the button on your bar, and rather than ever having to switch targets, you can just run a macro. You can even use "modifier:shift" and "modifier:ctrl" to switch spells and/or targets. And with simple addons, you can watch your focus target even when you tab away.
Focus is such a powerful tool that it's a little overwhelming to think of all the things that it can make easier in game. But whenever you're in a situation where you're always going back to a certain target (whether that be an MT or self or someone else in the group you're playing with) and can set it as focus, then you can often use macros or addons to make everything else easier after that.
This week Scattered Shots comes to you barking and growling, hot on the heels of an overview about some of the cool complexity involved in being a hunter. Today we turn toward our animal half to get a look at how we can start making some of that complexity work for us.
I love hunter pets. I love thinking about pets and writing about pets, and most of all I love managing my pets. I love that yo-yo feeling you can get when you tell your pet to go do something and then it does it well, coming back to you alive and healthy.
But controlling your pet isn't necessarily easy or intuitive at first, and it can take a lot of practice to get used to. Below I've outlined some of the techniques I use to make the most of my pet, and described a way to practice controlling your pet by taking on multiple enemies at once.
Welcome, troops, to the final stage of your lock-step macro training. This phase is when you will learn all about modifier keys. I had planned to include conditionals in the Run Phase, but that subject will necessitate its own series of posts, so look for that in the future. From here on out, Macro Anatomy will focus more on macro development and specific macros rather than teaching you the basics. In case you missed out on the basics, go check out my Macro Primer, then you can graduate to the Crawl and Walk phases of macro development.
As I said, we'll be taking a look at modifier key, which can extend the functionality of your macros, as well as helping to cut back on how many buttons you are using on your action bar.
Modifier keys allow you to change the behavior of a macro when pressing one of three keys. The keys available for use as modifier keys are:
Shift (shift)
Control (ctrl)
Alt (alt)
Keep reading to find out how to use these three modifier keys.
Between Arenas, V'Ming spends his time as a lock laughing ominously in AV, tanking Olm with his own minions and pondering troll fashion from Zul'Aman. He's recently started to plumb the depths of SSC with his 0/21/40 build and bragging about 8k shadow bolts.
The internet is a beautiful thing. It gives everybody a voice and an easily accessible goldmine of human ingenuity and intelligence. (It is also a repository of human scum and stupidity, but we're not going there today.) As a warlock player, there are TONS of resources out there that you can use to improve your game. Unfortunately many of these resources are scattered far and wide - and it takes a certain deftness with search engines to separate the wheat from the chaff, or simply to find what fits your playstyle.
So, for the benefit of the newly initiated and the time-challenged, I'll start and maintain this list of tried and tested Warlock tips, from the frivolous to the essential. I will not claim credit for these tips, but humbly serve as the chronicler of community content in this case, and will give due credit wherever possible. If you have pet tips that you swear by as a Warlock, please feel free to share them - and I'll add it to this list after the jump.
Very early in patch 2.4's progressive development on the PTR, the ability to send raid icons over chat was implemented. The syntax is pretty simple, you place the name of the icon in those funny looking brackets, like so: {circle}, {star}, etc.
Personally, I'm not too terribly excited, it's not something you'll be typing on the fly, probably. I can't really see a Mage or Warlock(or anybody) taking the extra time to type that out properly when something goes wrong(ie death), as simple as it seems to do so. However, this could be a good tool for raid leaders, not so much the raiders. A raid leader could include these in a tanking/crowd control assignment macro. "/ra Matthew, tank {skull}. Christian, sheep {square}." That sort of thing.
Regardless of how often this will actually be used, it's a nice little feature, and I'm sure post-2.4 mods and addons will make good use of them, even if the players themselves don't.
We've covered Switchblade before (and even posted an impressions and interview about it), so odds are you've probably at least heard of the program, which allows you to play WoW and other PC games with a wired (or wireless with adapter) Xbox 360 controller. Blue Orb recently sent word that they updated the app to version 3.0, and along with the update came not only support for Guild Wars and Hellgate: London, but updates to the way WoW controls.
There are now presets that come with the program for each class, so the priest preset will play different from the warrior preset, and so on. The release notes also say that there is a "key capture" feature -- just press a key to bind it -- and there is also a number of "combo" and "game actions" features. You've got to be careful when running programs that line up sets of actions for you, however; we know from experience that Blizzard sometimes walks a fine line when using inputs that allow macros.
Switchblade is now available as a free download (the program itself is ad-supported) and an Xbox 360 controller (as well as downloadable software drivers from Microsoft) is required to use it.
Every week, Brian Karasek and David Bowers bring you help, tips and advice for the leveling Hunter in Scattered Shots. For those veterans looking for high end Hunter goodness, BRK is back on active duty.
You probably know by now that Big Red Kitty refers to himself as "we" in all his articles. For the longest time I thought this was just him being silly, but with his return to WoW Insider after a long hiatus, he explained that this is actually a kind of philosophical statement as to the oneness of hunter and pet.
You needn't worry that we (being Brian and I) will start trying to mimic him, but he really does have a good point. When a hunter reaches level 10 and gains his or her first pet, your pet becomes an extension of yourself, and an incredible source of power. The game suddenly gets very easy, and enemies start dying very fast. In effect, with a pet at your side, you become your own tank-damage-healing group all by yourself, able to finesse the control over your character and pet alike to achieve all sorts of neat stuff.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is as always here for you, the reader, oh and also because Matthew Rossi is some kind of demented idiot who will do something like get out of tanking a raid and then spend two hours grinding on some Blade's Edge quests on his draenei warrior before logging onto his tauren for some PvP. We figure it's best to let him do all his rambling about the class in one place before he has an aneurysm.
Reader Arnold Luschin emailed in recently with what seemed to me a worthy topic for this week's column. Rather than mangle what he said, I'll reproduce it here.
Having played a druid to 70, and done a lot of tanking, I am familiar with aggro/rage etc, but I have a warrior specific question for you. Could you possible cover the basics of warrior tanking/fighting ability rotations (i.e. the names of the abilities, and the best time to use them in tanking and grinding/questing)? E.g. for warriors, one would use sunder whereas for us bear tanks the most equivalent ability is lacerate (which we incidentally don't get till about level 66 or so...).
And the answer is, sure, I can do that. The first caveat is that warriors tend to be the twitchiest tanking class, especially as you first learn the class. It can often feel like you have to mash buttons constantly in order to hold onto your aggro lead, and even then adds will often peel away from you when they'd stay right in place for a bear or paladin tank. It takes time to really learn and get comfortable with the somewhat frenetic style of the class, and to a degree this translates out into soloing or questing, depending on what spec you're using. I'd suggest checking out Tankspot and browsing the forums, although the theorycrafting can get pretty thick over there. This article is one of my favorites, though. Bookmark it.
If you didn't look closely, you could mistake Ideazon's Zboard for a standard keyboard. It's about the same size and shape as your average keyboard, with 108 keys and a row of hotkeys and multimedia buttons along the upper edge of the keyboard. A glance at the box shows us a left-handed key configuration designed for gaming and a pair of USB ports. So is this a gaming keyboard with a few extras? Hardly! This is only scratching the surface of the Zboard's abilities -- the real magic of a Zboard lies in its customized keysets.
Blizzard has introduced the first part of their new Macro Guide. This guide includes a basic description of what Macros are as well as how to create them.
They have also included some really good Macro references, such as the numbers that correspond to bag slots as well as the numeric values of inventory slots.
Though it is mostly a wall of text, they do list some helpful examples to illustrate the basic concepts. Here is their example for chaining together instant spells:
Do all of those "/stopcasting lines" seem a bit redundant considering they separate spells and items that are cast instantly? Well, Blizzard thinks so too and they will be unnecessary as of Patch 2.3. Not that /stopcasting will be defunct at that point -- it is still good to put at the beginning of a macro, so that you can cast a spell without getting an error if you are already casting another one.
While this guide won't replace more in-depth guides until they publish Part 2 with details on higher-level macro functions, it is still nice to have an official macro guide to turn to for basic macro creation.
The patch hit on Tuesday morning, and Tuesday afternoon, I began my usual cycle of addon laziness-- instead of actually updating my addons, I just checked "load out-of-date addons" setting myself up for trouble down the road, I'm sure.
But while I'll be having addon problems for a while (at least until the next patch-- I'll probably finally fix everything right before 2.3 breaks them all again), you don't need to. Kaydeethree has put together a terrific guide to fixing your addons after 2.2, with links to addons that have updated, addons that haven't updated, and a few great tips on how to update your macros as well.
It seems like KD3 is keeping an eye on addons as they update as well, so the thread will probably be updated accordingly. If, unlike me, you're motivated enough to keep your addons as up to date as possible (so that they all, y'know, actually work instead of throwing error messages at you every few seconds), then KD3's guide should help.
Just yesterday in fact, I was at my local computer store after having a bite of lunch to make my semi-regular browse of their wares. One of the items I saw that screamed "Buy me! Please!" was a Zboard Fang. I'd seen them at EB before, but they were always hanging on a rung so high you'd have to be Michael Jordan standing on the back of a Tauren to reach them. These Fangs were close enough to the ground for a gnome to reach so I picked up the box and had a look. I am definitely a keyboard guy. I hardly ever use the mouse at all – except to click totems on occasion with my shaman. The allure of the Fang and it's programmability was strong though. I only set it down and walked away when I started to think about how long it would take me to get used to it.
Today while following a story tip, I found a proverbial bee's nest of forum activity about one of the Fang's competitors, the Logitech G15. Although the G15 has a full QWERTY keyboard and and adds a programmable LCD display, it's core function and purpose is the same. It allows you to define programmable keys for in-game functions.
The question arises (and has arisen many, many, many times before) whether these products are legal for in-game use. The answer from more than one blue poster in the previous link is: "YES! They are legal!" Blizzard draws the line between right and wrong not at what keyboard (or accessory) you use, but what you use it for. A button to open your bags is not going to get your account banned. A timed macro to run around in a circle and kill everything in your path while you watch Twister in the next room will get you banned, because you're essentially "botting" at that point. The line seems to be drawn between attended and unattended play, but common sense is clearly the watch word here.
What other hardware input device toys do you use in your day-to-day play? What do you think about these Zboard and Logitech products that are marketed so aggressively to the MMOG market? Your comments are key!
Yesterday, I bashfully admitted that I 
Focus
Very early in 
We've 
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is as always here for you, the reader, oh and also because Matthew Rossi is some kind of demented idiot who will do something like get out of tanking a raid and then spend two hours grinding on some Blade's Edge quests on his draenei warrior before logging onto his tauren for some PvP. We figure it's best to let him do all his rambling about the class in one place before he has an aneurysm. 
Blizzard has introduced the first part of their new 
The 
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