 I’ve been really busy this last week or so. Haven’t got as much beta testing done as I’d have liked, but there are only so many hours in the day when I can play the game. Many times, I can write articles or forums posts most easily. I wanted to highlight a few key things. EJ For over a year and a half, Suno has been maintaining the DK tank thread at Elitist Jerks. He’s done well and I August 17th, 2010 | One comment |
 From: Addons, Guild management, Raid leadership in general |  Tags: ej, kahorie, leadership, raid leader, rawr  Since addons are disabled in Cataclysm Beta, but the player and target frames are in such a remote position, I came across this script which allows you to move the default Blizzard frames. » continue reading July 2nd, 2010 | 4 comments |
From: Addons, Cataclysm Beta, Mechanics and systems beta | Tags: frames, macro  I don’t mind gearscore personally. It has uses. We have been chatting about it in the forums, there are people on both sides of the fence. Gets a bit emotional. This, however… well, a picture is a thousand words. Loserville. Most of us will have a rune-watching addon of some kind, or be using whatever is built-in to your unitframes. Runes obviously are important to keep an eye on, along with diseases on the target. So which of the many rune addons to use? There are a lot of them. In the forums, Deph has compiled all the addons with a brief description and screenshot. He’s also classified whether they include disease watching, global cooldown, melee range and other There is a new gear-analysis website, Elitist Armory. It is from Shadowed, who developed the Elitist Group addon, and uses the same logic. (It’s the intelligent alternative to gearscore.) The site lets you analyse gear (helpful in a PUG, for example), or apply those tests to an entire guild or realm. You can find the DK tank with highest average ilevel, check the appropriateness of gear/talents/enchants across your guild, and more. I am supporting the site by donating CPU and It’s pretty mortifying to type /played. If you want, log on your alts and check them too, or better yet: get the Altoholic addon which does it for you (amongst other more important features, like searchable banks and gold, all alts’ talents and such). Because I played on EU realms for two years, I’m missing a lot of hours on my Altoholic summary. I can’t log onto those characters to add their time, and to be frank I have A new addon Spamalyzer is available, which replaces the addon fubar_addonSpamFu. Addons like GearScore (it’s badly coded) and Carbonite can spam the crap out of you when other people have them installed. Note this happens even if you do not have it installed. Other users’ addons generate addon chat traffic. It can be very large and cause latency and lag, unless coded properly like Elitist Group is. Spamalyzer will help you identify spammy raiders so you can tell them RankWatch: this addon watches the rank of spells you or party members use. If it’s lower than the maximum available, it whispers them or mentions it to you. In levelling my druid alt in 5-mans, I often find it telling people about spells they’re using. A few have replied saying thanks. You can end up having lower ranked spells yourself because of not training both when levelling up dual spec, or because you haven’t updated the spells in your I came across this today, TidyPlates, and it’s a great replacement to the periodically maintained, hard-to-configure Aloft. Note the version on Curse is older, so install it via wowinterface, not the Curse client. Name plate mods help you know up who you have threat on, and who you’ve lost, and should be designed to reduce visual clutter. TidyPlates has modes which are tuned to tank, dps or pvp usage, and I found the tank settings ideal. It’s also lightweight, January 7th, 2010 | 8 comments |
From: Addons | Tags: addon, name plates, review, threat, tidyplates I have mentioned this great addon once before, Boss Notes (back in Sept 09). Those guilds going up against Putricide you might find it helpful. Saves alt-tabbing to whichever website you use. It can learn boss’ abilities (make sure you turn this on; it’s off by default). This gives you their spells (with tooltips), in a handy notebook, into which you can also write your own tips and reminders. Includes simple written strategies for all the older bosses, too, January 7th, 2010 | 2 comments |
From: Addons | Tags: addon, boss notes, heroics, raid, raid leader, review, strategy I’m in a discussion about world of logs at the moment. Forum writer ‘opdk’ started some analysis between frost and blood tanks, using WoL, with some side-by-side data he had. I had earlier asked for help to analyse [Acclimation] and the two interests have converged. See the thread. Look around dk.info for some of his other data munging. Hopefully it’ll lead to some more solid analysis on the value of acclimation (and then [Spell Deflection] too) as damage-reducing talents. January 4th, 2010 | 16 comments |
From: Addons, Analysis | Tags: absorbs, acclimation, Analysis, wol, world of logs Progression tanks, before the next wing is opened: I recommend you get this new version of TankTotals, get familiar with it, give the author some feedback and then use it when the next wing of ICC is live. It’s out of alpha/ beta and released now. The new effective health calculations from Theck and implemented by Reynard will let you do post-wipe analysis to optimise your gear choices before the next attempt, the best example being swapping stamina trinkets January 4th, 2010 | 3 comments |
From: Addons, Tanking in general | Tags: addon, effective health, eh, gear choice, progression, tanktotals, total effective health TankTotals is now including the new effective health calculations in its Alpha version. Read about it and the ongoing development, plus download link on maintankadin; second post on that page. On personal note, my move back to Australia is going well. Lots of logistics. December 8th, 2009 | One comment |
From: Addons | Tags: effective health, tanktotals, total effective health I’m really delighted to have this guest post! Enjoy. – Gravity Rawr.TankDKHello, I’m Shazear the current contributing developer for the Tank DK module in Rawr. For those who don’t know, Rawr is a 3rd party tool to help evaluate gear for your PvE endgame WoW character. It does not have a direct in-game corresponding addon, but rather can import characters from the Character Profiler addon or via WoW Armory. Each module does its own evaluation of your character appropriate by class/role, so most gear-evaluation bugs are unique for the module, e.g.: between DPS and Tank DK. What TankDK Does PoorlyBlood. This tree tanks differently than any of the more classic models of Survival and Mitigation. The talents don’t model very well in the current structure of evaluating only what the Tank itself can bring and possibly what additional buffs may be provided by the raid. There are key +health temp buffs as well as +incoming healing bonuses, be it through damage done or through healing buffs to take the raw healing burden off your healers. My initial implementation of key blood talents: Vampiric Blood and Mark of Blood caused problems with the model, either through completely tearing apart the results in the case of VB, or causing a weird loop/hang with Mark of Blood. After getting some Rawr3 implementation taken care of, getting the Blood talents integrated more reliably is next up on my list of work to do. The other challenge is dealing with the variety of bosses. Each boss mechanic in the current raid scene are different enough that tanks are swapping out some pieces of gear to better tackle whichever boss they may be looking at any time. Some raid teams swap out different types of tanks for some fights, and just look at that as being the normal way of dealing with leading content. In the coming versions of Rawr, we’re working to implement the ability for any character to tune their gear for a specific boss encounter. This is not just for tanks, but it will be generic so all classes can have good expectations for the bosses they have to deal with. I see this really helping the tanking modules so that we are no longer just trying to guestimate the type of boss in very vague terms. Accuracy and ComparisonsWithin Rawr, there are many stats and evaluations. Something most users need to remember is that it doesn’t just model the static values of what’s equipped like Pawn or most of the other evaluators out there. Most of the stats include the procs of the trinkets and such, and are relayed in the context of the boss level for the current raid content. So for example Dodge/Parry values will be lower than you see in the Armory or in-game because the level difference decreases your effective avoidance. I don’t use other addons or simulators to compare to the results of Rawr. I rather would work to ensure the accuracy of the model. Because Rawr has the full power of a compiled application, I can, given enough time, make the model exceptionally accurate. Right now, however, I still feel like I’m just getting the model to stand on its own. A key point that contrasts Rawr with other addons/simulation tools out there is the active modeling of procs and buffs. Most addons simply can’t do the work to make those evaluations very accurately. Even the accuracy within Rawr can vary depending on the situation. As we integrate better boss-modeling we should see some of the tanking procs and such come into their own even more. What TankDK Does WellNovember 17th, 2009 | 4 comments |
From: Addons | Tags: avoidance, gear, rawr, Simulation, stats, tank Reduce your WoW latency. If you play on an Oceanic server, or on a US server from Europe, lowerping.com is a service which will reduce latency substantially. I have been a paid user now for two months and confidently can say, it works: it halves my in-game latency.
Benefits: normally from the UK playing on an Oceanic server, I get 380 to 400ms lag, but when I’m running lowerping I see 180 to 220ms. Mostly its around 190ms. If you PvP or raid, this make a very noticeable different. Your dps increases, your reaction time is improved, you respond more quickly. You can use their free trial to test for yourself, their server will just disconnect you after 10 minutes or so. You just sign up in the normal way, and your usage is automatically as a trial user. Cost: for an USA/Oceanic server is A$20.45 for three months or European server 16.95 Euro. Setup: is a bit fiddly, they don’t have fancy documentation with clear labelling. I’ll give you some tips here. Lowerping does have a technical support forum also, and you may well find the answers there already before having to ask. Once set up though, it’s rock solid. » continue reading I’m levelling mining (for the stamina bonus and an income). At 400 now on my reroll DK. I use the SexyMap addon combined with GatherMate to get a HUD when flying around, and for overview of node locations on my maps. The two addons are integrated within the SexyMap configuration. The HUD is best explained with a video, so I put one together (narrated) to show you. Because the HUD hides your normal minimap, I have a Runeforge Gossip have a good short article on how to use Rawr as a DPS DK. It can be a fairly confusing tool at first with all its options even though on the surface it appears simple. There are also optimisation and gear-search features which are worth understanding. The DK tank module within Rawr is still being developed, but one thing I do like about it is their model for comparing weapons lets you weight threat or survival. It I’m going to have a single post which lets people download the XML settings files I’ve been using for Kahorie’s DK simulator, which might save some time or let you double-check how I’ve done it (in case of errors). Settings
October 2nd, 2009 | Visit our forum to comment |
From: Addons, Death Knight tanking specifically | Tags: kahorie, Simulation, tank Found some great addons too, but first a snippet on levelling: I ran the no-epidemic unholy dps specs in the simulator for L68, to see how it scales at low gear levels. Result is it checks out at the same dps as traditional. I updated my Death Knight levelling specs page with builds. Having just got my new DK to L75 in blood, I’m going to try unholy for some variety and to get a feel for this short September 30th, 2009 | Leave a comment |
From: Addons, Playing better | Tags: 3.22, addon, dps, guide, kahorie, levelling, Simulation, spec One of my must-have addons, being a stats geek, is TankTotals. It just got updated to v3.310 and is now compatible with patch 3.22. If you’re not already using TankTotals, let me point out that in a prior patch the author Reynard added a few nice features. I particularly like his time-to-live calculation which even factor in expertise/parry-haste, which will be interesting for everyone including dual-wield tanks. Druids will enjoy seeing a figure for savage defence uptime, too. I September 24th, 2009 | One comment |
From: Addons | Tags: addon, avoidance, dual wield, dw, review, stats, tank, tanktotals I like this addon, Boss Notes. Gives you an in-game notebook for each boss. Comes with dot-point reminders of the key things for Ulduar bosses, for example, and you can enter your own. These can be broadcast to a channel you choose.
Another example of what a warlock might put in a personal note for a boss:
It also knows and learns the abilities that boss’ cast, so you build up a reference September 14th, 2009 | One comment |
From: Addons | Tags: addon, heroics, raid, raid leader, review, strategy In case you haven’t checked, the new TankPoints is out a few days ago. It works correctly with 3.2 mechanics, but you have to edit the TOC file (to 30200) since he forgot to do that. It’s safe to edit the TOC file, and will make it load without having to enable ‘out of date addons’ in-game. TankPoints is correctly calculating avoidance, but I do not think it fixed the Frigid Dreadplate bug I found (so DKs should add August 25th, 2009 | Leave a comment |
From: Addons | Tags: 3.2, addon, avoidance, tank, tankpoints, tanktotals Action-bar customisation addons I just switched to Dominos from Bartender. What really surprised me is it only took about five minutes to reconfigure. I had been worried. It was fast because they seem to use the built-in action bars in a similar way, so the spell-assignments were all transferred. All I had to do was position them where I wanted and disable a few which I don’t use (empty ones). Nearly all the keybindings had remained too, so just This service, lowerping, has a fee (about AU$8 /month for US servers) but is both legit and effective. It uses routing, tunneling or VPN services to notably improve your latency when you’re on a US or EU server but are geographically distant; like in Asia-Pacific or Latin America. Reports there are of Australians going from 400ms down to 170-200ms ping, for example. I tested it myself Sept 4 2009, and from the UK playing on a US server went A few times I’ve come across this site Vranx, most recently when looking for a replacement for Elkano Buffbars (I’m speculating it’s causing this horrible drop to like 5 FPS I get in a few situations like Razorscale and Mimiron). What I like is it has a categorisation of addons and set of recommendations within each. You can save a lot of time by starting your search at Vranx, rather than google/curse/wowinterface. It’ll give you a short-list. 3.2: it |
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