Altitis

As usual, we’re finding out that the barebones behaviour of yet another ability is pretty poor. In order to make the brand new ranged paladin taunt more efficient, here’s a macro you can use:

#showtooltip Hand of Reckoning
/cast [target=mouseover, harm][harm] Hand of Reckoning

Bind it to a key.

This enables you to either taunt your current target or simply hover with your mouse over another foe to taunt with a simple keypress.

A more advanced version if you focus one specific add, eg one which gets CCed (to avoid having a mage or priest sandwich after sheep or shackle runs out):

#showtooltip Hand of Reckoning
/cast [modifier:shift, target=focus, harm] Hand of Reckoning
/stopmacro [modifier:shift]
/cast [target=mouseover, harm][harm] Hand of Reckoning

If you’re holding down shift, it will taunt your focus, otherwise behave just as the other one.

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In terms of menubar utilities, it appears I’m just a sheep following the lead of the enlighted Mr. Kestrel. It was after one of his posts that I moved from Titan Pannel to FuBar, and it was again after reading his November post on LDB that I migrated from FuBar to LDB (currently using StatBlockCore myself).

One of the small things which have been irking me since the transition, though, is that a certain amount of FuBar plugins (like DurabilityFu) are Load on Demand, and since I no longer use FuBar, there’s no longer anything to demand that these are loaded.

This has been annoying me for a while now, and I finally decided to write my own AddOn loader.

Fortunately, it’s so easy even someone as ungifted for coding as myself can do it. I suspect I might run into issues at some point but for the time being, it works.

And this is how you do it.

First, go to your Interface\AddOns\ folder.

Create a new folder, name it eg. MyLoader

In this folder, we will create just one new text file, called MyLoader.toc

And we will add the following code:

## Interface: 30400
## Title: MyLoader
## Notes: A little self-made utility to load some load-on-demand addons.
## Version: 0.1
## DefaultState: enabled
## OptionalDeps: loadondemandaddonX, loadondemandaddonY, loadondemandaddonZ, (...)

Make sure that every AddOn you want to load with OptionalDeps are named exactly as their respective Folder names, save it, and voilà, your own AddOn loader is done.

Clunky, and you’ll have to update the ## OptionalDeps (and ## Interface) information manually if things change, but it does the trick and only requires a minute to make.
Why pick OptionalDeps (Optional Dependencies)? If you use required dependencies instead, the little loader we just wrote will not work if for whatever reason one of the addons you want to load is not enabled or not present.

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The risk when you’re running as a healing / tanking / DPS hybrid (paladin) with a DPS / tanking hybrid (DK) is that you’ll end up having to heal your buddy who’s tanking to ensure the core of an instance PUG is covered.

We wanted to do the amphitheatre of Anguish last night, and you guess where it ended, I finally bit the bullet and respecced Holy.

And while I will readily admit that the wrath healadin is better than the TBC healadin, despite the new toy (Beacon of Light) or the improved old toys (6 seconds Holy Shock, and no, I’m not really using it unless things get hairy, and long distance judgement of Light), it’s a lot less fun than Ret or the Death Knight.

That being said, I somehow managed to get us through Amphitheatre of Anguish, Gun’Drak and Violet Hold, clobbering together about 1070 spell power and 11k mana out of spare kit I had been assembling in prevision of this very situation, two AH purchases and a couple of well-timed drops in the above instances.

Fun situation: in VH, the run was 4DK + me. A tanking cloak drops off the Aroakka boss (if memory serves). A level 73 DK needs because he wants it for his tanking set. I need for the same reasons. And after I win the roll, he starts whining that I stole it since I’m holy spec.

Memo to the clueless whining noob with a misplaced sense of entitlement: the healer has the same right to need on off-spec gear as a DPS, and if you have an issue with that, you make sure you get really good with combat bandaging. Especially when said healer blew over 200g in respec and AH gear cost to drag your underleveled arse through the instance.

Beacon of Light is an interesting spell. Using it properly at the right time is probably a bit of a learning curve, but I’ve been tossing it on anyone taking a HP dive at the same time as Steptoe (the tank, duh) and it seemed to work OK.

That being said, it took me a moment to figure out how to macro it properly to speed things up, and here’s what I came up with:

#showtooltip Beacon of Light
/cast [target=mouseover, help][help][target=player] Beacon of Light

Binding the macro to a key then allows me to hower over an unit frame to cast, or select a target, or if nothing else is selected, cast it on myself at one single keypress.

That did the trick.

Later, I went outside and tried to kill something with my holy spec. And wept bitterly. Never gonna make 80 with holy spec. I hope the bloody dual spec feature doesn’t get delayed too much, it’s really becoming a must-have feature (and we haven’t even tried it out yet…).

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Here’s the Frost Death Knight’s equivalent to the pallie’s Bubble + Bandage macro:

#showtooltip
/cast Hungering Cold
/use [target=player] Heavy Frostweave Bandage

Useful when things start getting out of hand with an AoE pull.

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Here’s a cool macro template to get your rune strike into your opponent’s face:

#showtooltip Blood Strike
/cast [nomodifier] Rune Strike
/cast Blood Strike

Make one for each of your relevant runic abilities (not RP, only runes) and you’ll be sure to dump RS whenever the opportunity is up.

If you need to conserve RP for Dancing Rune Weapon or a Gargoyle, simply hold down any modifier key and the spell will be cast without RS. Oh, and make sure RS is first in your macro, the other abilities are on a cooldown, which would prevent RS from being cast on the same keypress otherwise.

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Stranded in WoW 3.0.2 withtout working addons? Getting mad because you can’t exactly figure out what’s broken where?

Many things actually work, but in order to get it fixed, a methodical approach works best.

Here’s my method:

Tools

• AddOn Control Panel (ACP), found here
• If you’re using Gatherer or Auctioneer, Swatter which is part of the distribution, otherwise I recommend Rabbit’s excellent Buggrabber.

Method

1. Disable all AddOns
2. Make sure ACP and either Swatter or Buggrabber is active (if you have both, Swatter will politely yield to Buggrabber)
3. If you’re using Swatter, after loading a toon, type /swat enable. Remember, if you have both, only Buggrabber will actually work
4. Type /reloadui (it should now work) or /acp and click the reloadui button, you’re now in a clean slate state
5. Now add your addons back through ACP step by step, and reload the UI between each step
6. Swatter should start popping up by itself, if not, type /swat show to see the error list, and /swat autoshow once to have the window pop up on an error
7. The errors due to any missing libraries are at the beginning of the error lists, the rest are usually errors borne out of the fact that said libraries aren’t there
8. /buggrabber # will show you each error in turn. Swatter will need you to click through to reach the earliest errors.
9. Now go download your missing dependencies, exit the game and restart to get them accounted for, then rince and repeat.
10. Last but not least, with Swatter, make sure you type /swat clear before you reload, since it actually saves the entire error list. Buggrabber does not.

Note that Buggrabber also relies on a companion, bugsack, which gives a nice window display too. It doesn’t currently work for me, though, and barebones buggrabber does the trick as well.

It’s a long and painful process, but the only way to recover whatever you need asap without going completely insane.

I hope

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As many readers have been slowly realizing over the past 24 hours, the WoWAce community has gone through a massive change in the way they make addons available to the general public – ie. all of us end-users.

The reason given is simple, the Ace community’s success, combined with automatic updaters, have been vastly exceeding their servers’ capacity, to a point which became seriously threatening to their core mission: to provide AddOn developers with the adequate means to work, share, interact and develop code.

The AddOn distribution part of WoWAce has started to effectively imperil the AddOn creation part, something which would, in the long term, harm us, the end-users, a lot more than having to change our downloading ways.

In concrete terms, the WoWAce community will no longer host AddOns for wide distribution, but rely, instead, on Curse.com for that task.

This will impact us in the following manner:

• If you were manually updating AddOns from files.wowace.com, switch over to curse.com or wowinterface.com (which is still operating at full speed)
• If you were using WoWAce Updater, this tool has been discontinued. Your recommended choice is to download the curse client instead and start using it.
• If you were using a different updater and it supports AddOn site changes, like WUU (which is what I’m using), you’ll have to start the sometimes gruesome (when you have 290 AddOns and libs in your portfolio, that is gruesome) task to reroute each of the Ace packages to a different site, adapting the site ID in the process. Note that Curse repositories in general use only lowercase names (contrary to what wowace had) and WoWInterface uses an ID number followed by a dash and the addon name (eg. 1234-myaddon). Also note that WoWI is currently in the low bandwidth mode and updating through the standard siteID is actually not possible.

No matter how, solutions are at hand to help you bring your AddOns up to 3.0.2 par. Granted, the Curse client is, at the time of this writing, quite lacking in features, bells and whistles, but it mostly works.

However, one of the core and fundamental benefits of using Ace AddOns AND getting them from WoWAce was the possibility to download the AddOns separate from the Libraries. The advantage isn’t just in file size, it’s also the best way to ensure you’re not suddenly having two AddOns having library version conflicts, like one loading an older instance of a library which doesn’t hold more recent or updated functions the other one would need.

This is therefore an appeal to the people in charge at WoWAce and Curse. You yourselves have extolled the virtues of nolib distributions, of disembedding the libraries from the individual packages. You have convinced us years ago because it made perfect sense, and you were right then. It still makes perfect sense today.

Please give us access to the bare packages without the libraries. Manually erasing 220 lib folders every update is just not viable.

Thank you kindly.

One of your enthusiastic end-users.

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Just a quick heads-up, Blizzard has put official talent calculators for Wrath up for playing. Here’s the EU version, and here the US one. The latter has a nice landing page, too.

Alternatively (or if they are down / too slow for your taste / whatever), MMO Champion has added their own talent calculator as well. And there’s of course the one at wowhead, but you know my stance about linking to these guys by now.

Anyway, that’s most certainly enough toys to start theorycrafting level 80 builds, unless you’re part of the lucky beta testers

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Just a quick heads-up here. I’ve now read on four separate sites that some people are ordering more than one Blizzard Authenticator for themselves, eg. if they play on a desktop computer and a laptop.

It doesn’t work that way, I’m afraid. You can use one single Authenticator for several accounts, but not the other way around. Multiboxing? One authenticator for all your boxes is enough. WoW, Scarcraft2 on battle.net and the future diablo 3 accounts can all be protected with the same Authenticator. But you can’t have two authenticators protect the same account twice.

From the Authenticator FAQ:

Can I apply my Blizzard Authenticator to more than one account?

Yes! You’re welcome to associate a single Blizzard Authenticator to as many accounts as you like. Please remember that you must have that Authenticator with you to log in to any of these accounts afterwards.

Can I keep one Blizzard Authenticator at home and another at work, and have both associated to the same account?

No. Each account can have only one Blizzard Authenticator linked to it at a time, so you would need to carry the Authenticator with you to log in from different computers.

Hope that clarifies it.

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Blizzard announced a new tool in the arsenal of measures to combat account theft, their authenticator. In short, you buy the authenticator for a small sum of money, tie it to one or more Blizzard game accounts, and from then on, whenever you want to log in, you will be prompted to type in not just your username and password, but also a short authentication code.

The authenticator should be a little RSA-like device which generates a new random code every minute or so, akin to what many banks are providing for e-banking. This will immediately make keyloggers moot – the key will be long expired by the time the information they provide is being used.

That doesn’t make WoW accounts hack-proof, by the way. It just raises the difficulty of doing so by several notches. Considering that at the same time, due among others to the new dailies, wow currency prices are dropping faster than ever, what we have here is a concerted approach by Blizzard to make the cost of cracking an account way too high compared to the potential profits it could generate.

But let’s not fool ourselves. By that same measure, as soon as the “optional” authenticator starts spreading, the pressure on the accounts not using it will intensify big time. As the pool of easy target decreases, attempts of account theft on them will start to multiply.

If you value your accounts at all, and I know you do, you’ll be well advised to buy the authenticator as soon as possible. If that’s not immediately possible, here’s a practical recommandation to limit your exposure a bit.

Go and download Ubuntu 8.x

You can now either burn it on CD then boot on it, or mount it using daemon tools, then run it under Windows and launch the “lite” installation version. In that case, it won’t repartition your hard drives, it will just install like a normal windows application and then show up as a Windows boot option when you restart (you can later deinstall it simply by using the windows control panel’ add/remove program option).

In either case, run Ubuntu, then launch Firefox and change your password regularly. Very regularly. Weekly.

Yes, I’m saying that you should download a full 700 MB ISO of a perfectly good operating system just for the sole purpose of changing your password weekly. Why Ubuntu? Because it’s so simple that even a half-wit like me can use it. And if I can do it, you all can.

Too much of a hassle? Fork out the money for the Blizzard authenticator. It’s only optional until it launches.

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