Tank like a girl

I admit it. I have a problem. It’s the same, after every raid. The moment I have hearthed, I will alt-tab, and upload my combat log. Thanks to Loggerhead, I always log. And then I upload it, and stare at delicious numbers, for hours. I try to discuss them with my partner, but she really doesn’t give a damn about me only pulling off 54.4% avoidance on Patchwerk. Or about DPS numbers. Or me squeeing about healing meters (which is really a terrible habit but I like being kickass).

But aside from me just loving the numbers, it’s a valuable tool for raid analysis. Without a log, I wouldn’t have realized that all our failed phase 3 attempts on Malygos were a range issue having us all hit by Arcane Pulse. Or I can see that some new DPS has too low hit or never uses 51 point talents.

Today, I want to talk about the latest and best of combat log sites, IMHO. There’s currently 3 sites out there: old-school WWS, WMO and the new kid around the block, World of Logs. I am going to talk about the latter in some detail, as this is currently my log flavor of the year. Why? WWS has pretty much gone down the drain lately. There are no more support forums, it’s not been updated for a while, and it doesn’t account for discipline priest healing, e.g. It’s just not as accurate as other sites. Then there’s WoW Meter Online. Which is a good tool, but I personally cannot stand the Engrish, and I hate the looks. I tried to like it, but I can’t. Along comes WoL. It’s very up-to-date, and changes almost daily. It looks slick. It has graphs that look confusing at first, but offer great information at a glance. You have a powerful log browser. Easy overview of dispells and interrupts. Accounts for mitigated heals, like PW:S. Live reports. What more could you want? In my following description, all sample screenshots are taken from my guild’s last Naxxramas raid.

Overview of WoL

• When you open a review, you first get an overview of all bosses, in what order, and your first taste of numbers. Duration, overall DPS, Damage Taken, HPS. Each category is weighted, and so you can see at a glance which was the fight with the most DPS, damage and healing. In my example screenshot, Kel’thuzad was the longest fight, Loatheb took the most damage, Sapphiron was the fight with the most damage and the most healing.
• Clicking on your boss fight of choice, in my sample Patchwerk, takes you to the Dashboard of the fight. You can see at a glance that there was a slight DPS spike at the end, that early in the fight there was a huge damage spike that heals didn’t quite cover (our rogue got one-shot by a Hateful Strike), and that damage was done by Patchwerk and our suicidal retribution pally with her wicked belf blood rituals.
• A click on Damage Done takes you to the overview for the DPS hungry. See the fancy graph up there? Right at the start of the fight you see a red line, indicating either a) someone died or b) a hunter feigned. In this case, the above-mentioned rogue ate two Hateful Strikes and bit the dust. The rest of the fight, the warlock and the hunter have some nice damage spikes. If you want to see all of your DPS represented in the graph, just check their names. Interested to look at one of the spikes in more detail? Drag the mouse on the time frame you want, right-click on it, zoom in. Or set the page to selection, then you’ll get a Damage Done overview for that selection. Very nice. For a more exciting graph, check out the one below, from our Razorscale kill. It has feigning hunters, a dead tank (yowza, she hits hard), a Rebirth right at the end there (the orange line). See the blue area on the graph? That’s Bloodlust. Which incidentally did not cause any DPS spikes.
  
• Same is valid for the Damage Taken category. You get to see the two Patchwerk tanks, me and our pally. As Sawyer had higher effective health and just about the same avoidance, she ate the Hatefuls, I just did my tanking thingy, and only had one bad spike. No complaints on my side!
• I want to look at my own performance in detail, so I’m clicking on my name, and end up with several categories. I am starting with Damage Done, to see how I did on spamming HS. That’s 63 Heroic Strikes, and only 22 white swings, so I did some spamming alright. I don’t have the near flawless execution of progression tanks, but I don’t need to. As an aside, Blizzard, please fix HS! Down with the spamming! Ahem. I also went into this fight with my avoidance spec, and probably won’t again. Without a Deep Wounds build, I feel my damage is gimp. If you mouse-over the various abilities, you get nice diagrams, displaying hit, crits, misses, etc. At the bottom, I can see Damage Taken, including how well I did on Avoidance. With two disc healers, there was a lot of absorbing going on, and the amount of dodge and parry seems okay to me.
• Healing Done is in the same vein. If you mouseover a healer (or DPSer or tank) you get a quick summary as tooltip. Both priests were Discipline, and so you can see that WoL estimates the amount of mitigation Divine Aegis and PW:S do, finally showing in logs how powerful discipline healing is.
• Care to know how your peeps died? The Deaths Overview will list the last three damage sources before someone died in the raid. In my example, I kinda moved Faerlina unexpectedly and ran out of range of the healers and then she killed me during the Frenzy. Ouch. Very helpful in figuring out how exactly people died.
  
• Another example to evaluate raid performance is to look for specific occurrences in the log browser. In my example, Show events where event type is Hit and target is Kadomi and spell is Eruption. Whoops, got hit twice during Heigan. Yay for having a big health pool! You can construct all sorts of queries and run them, it’s quite powerful.
• WoL has a raid attendance feature based on the logs you’ve uploaded. It sorts by class and calculates attendance. Very handy. Now if only I could add loot, that would make it even more perfect as raid management tool. Maybe I should suggest that.
• A feature I haven’t tested yet but which I bet is powerful is the live reporting. As soon as you start your combatlog and run the client, your data will be uploaded right as you play, and you can check out data between tries. If only I had used that on Malygos, I would have been able to see our range issue in phase 3 immediately. Next time!
• Add to that a thriving forum with quick responses from the developers, I can put myself behind this tool. It has all that I loved about WWS, but in a newer, slicker design that actually is up-to-date with 3.1.

If you want to test this tool yourself, you can grab a beta key here.

I got lots of nice comments about my first UI video, so I made an even longer one! Oh boy oh boy oh boy. Most of the questions I received about the UI were about how to set up Power Auras, and questions if I could share my setup. Yes, we can. Power Auras settings. All you need to do with those is to copy them paragraph by paragraph. In-game, open the PA settings by typing /powa, click on Import, then paste in your current paragraph. Voilà, you have a copy of the settings as seen in the video. Speaking of video, here you are. As always, choose HQ for a much nicer version.

If you have any questions at all, don’t be shy, I could talk about UI stuff aaaaaall day long. I am taking this moment to recommend two blogs for the addon-philes: Shields Up! is really a shaman blog during the day (in phases with new content), but UI goodness at night. And then there’s the brandnew NoStockUI by Matticus and co, which is off to a very promising start as dedicated WoW UI blog.

As I mentioned I dabbled with my first video. The quality could be lots better, but I wanted to try the performance of my computer while capturing in lower resolution first. Went great, so I am ready to actually try high resolution very soon. For best quality, click in the HQ button. I have added annotations, but if you have any questions, please let me know!

 
Per request, some static screenshots as well:

 

 

Visible addons in the video:

• Fortress (LDB Display)
• Statblock_ZoneText
• Fubar_MoneyFu (could be replaced with Ara_Broker_Money)
• Attrition
• Drop the Cheapest Thing
• Broker_Group
• Ara_Broker_Guild_Friends
• Statblock_Ammo
• tomquest 2 and it’s daily quest timer
• MakeRocketGoNow
• Broker_Channelwatch
• Fubar_FarmerFu
• zBrokerPerformance
• Broker_HitCrit
• Fubar_ToFu
• Outfitter (no longer available for download)
• Broker_Factions
• Broker_Wallet
• BankStack
• Broker_AllXP
• Buffalo
• PocketPlot
• ouf with the ouf_pazrael layout
• Classtimer
• MikScrollingBattleText
• Power Auras Classic
• Digits
• Skada Damage Meter
• XLoot
• Quartz
• Chatter
• TrinketMenu
• AutoBar
• Dominos and OmniCC
• ButtonFacade + ButtonFacade Onyx
• Cellular
• Eavesdrop
• Combuctor
• TipTop

Today’s addon corner will present an addon that has nothing to do whatsoever with tanking or general UI stuff. Nevertheless, it’s one of my favorite addons and I hope it will take off just as its towering competitor Auctioneer did when it was first introduced. As always, click on the images for full-size versions.

If you’re an Auctioneer user, you might have noticed that since the Classic version was kissed goodbye, you are now using an unwieldy giant of an addon, with a feature richness that is quickly overwhelming when you’re not very math-inclined. To change any of the settings requires going through extensive menus that are not very intuitive at all. If you think that’s all a bit much, maybe you’re looking for something that’s more simple to use. Meet AuctionLite.

When installed, you will gain two new tabs, Auction-Lite Buy and Sell. The latter is the core of the addon. AuctionLite wants to help you sell your stuff by undercutting your competition. Open the sell tab, Alt-Right click on what you want to sell, and AuctionLite will scan the AH for the item, show all competitors and offers pricing, undercutting the cheapest seller. That too cheap? Click on the item listing you want to undercut and the price gets adjusted. AuctionLite will store historical price values after scanning and the estimated profit you can make via AH selling will be displayed in the tooltip. Nice and simple.

 
If you’re in for finding great deals on the AH, click on the Full Scan button on the Buy tab. AuctionLite will do a very fast scan (about a minute) of everything that’s on the AH, and if it finds something that’s sold way underneath historical value, will be offered as deal. Alternatively, you can supply that you want to buy 20 Saronite Ore, as example. It will then check the AH for the cheapest way to get those 20 ore, even if this means buying out several smaller auctions and reselling the extra ore.

 

 
AuctionLite will use about 20 MB addon memory, or rather, that’s what it’s running on my system right now. I will often turn it off on my non-banker characters because I can do without the tooltip with price values. But for reselling and buying, it’s incredibly useful, and a million times easier to use than Auctioneer. I greatly endorse this. If you’re into the AH game at all, give it a shot. For reference, I have four characters with epic flyers and am currently running around with 9k gold total. Playing the AH works.

At popular request, I will give a complete overview of my UI next week, so I am hoping to take a couple nice UI screenshots in Naxxramas this weekend. Stay tuned!

It all began when I just couldn’t keep track of my weapon buffs on my shaman. I started looking for an addon that would give me a visual cue when Flametongue ran out, and that’s how I found TellMeWhen.

TellMeWhen is a visual reminder addon. What does it do? It offers you four different icon groups that you can configure to show as many buttons as needed. Every icon group can be scaled individually. Once you have set up a group, you place it where you want the reminders, then right-click on any button to configure them. On my shaman, I have one icon group with a huge icon in the center of my screen, which will only show up if there is no weapon enchant on my main hand. Handy!

However, that’s not all you can do with this addon, and by now I’ve actually configured it to be used by all my characters. Here’s what I use it for on my warrior:

 

 
An icon group of five. First icon shows when my Retaliation macro is available. Second icon is visible when my Recklessness macro is available. Third icon is visible when my Medallion of Heroism is usable. Fourth icon pops up when I have no Well Fed buff. Fifth icon shows me when Heroic Throw is available. In my sample screenshot all macros, the trinket and Heroic Throw are available, plus I hadn’t eaten, because I was fishing in Borean Tundra.

You can set it up so that buttons will only show during combat, so you could use it as a Shout Reminder. As my example shows, you can configure it so that buttons either show when something’s off cooldown, or when a buff is missing. It’s flexible, easy to configure, gets my thumbs up.

To further demonstrate its strength, let me actually set up the Shout Reminder. You can click on some of the images for a larger version.

1. Activate an icon group in this menu. I’ll set it to 1 row, 1 column, because that one button is all I want. I can now drag this huge button wherever I want to have it, and then click in the lower right bottom corner to change the size.
   
    
   
2. Right-click on the button and pick a spell. In my case I will use Battle Shout. A questionmark icon shows up, that’s just a placeholder until you have told TMW what kind of ability this is. In my case, that’s a Buff. Bam, Battle Shout icon shows up.
   
    
   
   
    
   
   
    
   
3. Now we refine the settings. I only want to see this button when I am in-combat, and I am missing Battle Shout, and I only want it to monitor myself.
   
    
   
   
    
   
   
    
   

    
   All done! Now whenever I am in combat and I don’t have Battle Shout up, this button pops up to nag me, and disappears while I out of combat. Set up Commanding Shout next to it, and you’ll never miss a shout dropping again.

Want to watch a debuff on a mob to keep it up, like Thunderclap or Demo Shout? You can set it up just like that. The possibilities are almost endless.

If you prefer an equally flexible setup for watching buffs/debuffs but really prefer timer bars, you should check out Runycat’s post about NeedToKnow over at Unbearably HoT. It’s by the same author, but provides bars instead of icons to watch effects on a target.

I discovered AutoBar when I was looking for a better way to set up consumables aside from having a whole action bar devoted to consumables and such. I was looking for something more dynamic. Enter AutoBar. It’s a dynamic popup bar. It will only show the buttons you want it to show. I use Hearth, Healing Pot, Healthstone, Battle Elixir, Guardian Elixir, Buff Food, normal food, Quest items, etc. as example. In case of healing pots and bandages the best ones will be shown in the button. To use an old example, if I went into Tempest Keep, it would show the Nethergon pots, and outside would switch to normal pots instead. If you move your mouse on a button, a menu will popup and show what else you have got in your inventory.

I just find it extremely handy to have access to all consumables with a quick click.

AutoBar also offers the same concept for class bars. I don’t use that at all as warrior, but on my shaman I have a classbar for all my totems, for specific shaman buffs, for the elementals. Incredibly handy. For warriors you get buttons for stances, shields, Charge, and an emergency macro which I haven’t looked at yet.

You can use keybindings for every single button, and as I am a keyboard-heavy player, I have most of the important buttons bound.

All in all, it’s one of my must-have addons, I feel it makes managing consumables and even class-specific tasks a lot easier.

Back in the day, Blizzard’s default combat log sucked. Like a lot. A massive wall of text and it was hard to discern what exactly happened specifically to yourself. Enter combat log addons. I used SimpleCombatLog for the longest time. It only showed my own events, color coded, I could see stuff specifically for me. Kinda like what the default combat log does these days.

And still, I wanted it even simpler, more compact, easier to read. Meet EavesDrop.

EavesDrop is written by Grayhoof, author of Scrolling Combat Text, so it looks very similar in how it works. You could call it Scrolling Combat Log. You get a configurable window with Player events on one side and Target events in the other column. The player column will list events happening to you. Basically all damage, all incoming heals on you, they will be there, with an ability icon in front of it, and colored for damage/heal type. In the target column, you will see all damage you do, with the corresponding ability icon.

Whenever I die in an instance or raid environment, I can just scroll up, and see the fatal blows or lack of heals. At the end of combat, there’s always a quick summary of damage done, heals received and damage taken. Very handy!

As added bonus, there’s a history function tracking your hit/crit records.  In my example, I clearly need to reset it, because it has the astronomical values from Battle of Undercity in it that I’ll never repeat. It tracks damage done, damage taken, heals, just about everything you would want to track.

Very configurable, I wouldn’t want to miss this little gem of an addon.

In this week’s addon corner, I am taking a look at buff displays. When I rebuilt my UI, I wanted something that offers me a lot of screen estate. Most buff displays use bars, which I have used for a long time, but I wanted something more minimal. That’s how I ended up with Buffalo.

At first glance, Buffalo looks exactly like the default buff frame, with the important difference that you can move buff, debuff and weapon buff frames whereever you want them. I use three horizontal lines as display, right underneath my Fortress Data Broker blocks. All you get is an icon for the buff/debuff, and the time underneath it. Buffs that run out you can set to flash as a warning. Buffalo can be skinned using ButtonFacade, if you like eye candy.

My only request would be to have a more visual cue when a buff completely falls off, I keep running around without a weapon buff on my shaman way too often, but I am using TellMeWhen now, which btw is totally awesome as buff/debuff/proc reminder.

If highly flexible buff bars are more your thing, I still wholeheartedly recommend Elkano’s BuffBars. Caulle over at Tankspot has done a video tutorial how to set it up if you don’t like bars and including filters and the whitelist system, pretty nice.

Welcome back to my addon corner. I am currently pondering moving this column to a Wednesday, as weekend reader numbers are traditionally very low. This means that the next addon corner might be happening in a couple days already, as I am trying to work out a posting schedule at the moment.

Today, I’ll talk about addons that will pep up your minimap. There are several different ways to spice up your minimap, from being able to move it around freely to using different shapes, etc.

I am currently using PocketPlot. I only recently discovered this gem of a minimap addon. This addon is very lightweight. Or what would you call an addon that’s 0.5kb in size? Really small. Why PocketPlot? I recently went back from having my minimap in the lower area of my UI to back to the default position. I personally don’t need fancy skins. I really enjoy the custom ‘blips’ that I like more than the default Blizzard ones, I like the clock underneath the map, I like the positioning of stuff like mail, LFG, tracking, etc.

What might take some people aback is that the addon has absolutely zero interface for setting it up in-game. And still, it’s very easy to set up. It requires you to open the pocketplot.lua file in any text editor and follow the simple instructions that Seerah provides in the comments.

As example, this is what my setup looks like:

If that’s all too minimalistic for you (which is the point of the addon), there are several great alternatives. The latest one on the scene is SexyMap by Antiarc (of Omen and Chatter fame). It seems aptly named, because the textures that come with it look gorgeous. If you are looking for a very shiny minimap, this might be for you. I am more tempted by such ’sexy’ additions as minimap buttons all gone unless you hover over the map.

Another staple is Chinchilla by cknight (of Fubar and Pitbull fame). I used this for a long time, and it’s very solid. Drag and drop your map, use several different skins, display coordinates, this minimap can do it all. Its only fault is probably that it can do too much and feels a bit bloated.

Simple Minimap falls into the same category. It seems as feature-rich as Chinchilla. Maybe a bit more modular, so you can delete all the features you don’t need.

Minimap buttons:

There are several addons that specifically deal with the problem of buttons cluttering up your minimap. I am using MBB, which stands for Minimap Button Bag. What it does is that it creates one button on your minimap that when clicked will show you all other buttons from other addons. Those can still be used normally, MBB just keeps them out of sight. If you want to have specific buttons not hidden by MBB, Ctrl-Right clicking them will put them back onto your minimap. In my above screenshot, I have one button moved outside MBB and have the rest happily hidden away. It does seem to have a problem with something called DagAssist, so if you use that, MBB might not be for you.

Another alternative would be to use Minimap Button Frame, which creates a frame with all your buttons that you can place anywhere on your screen. It’s a neat idea, but I prefer the buttons hidden completely when I don’t need them.

Since the patch rolled around, I’ve been spending a lot of time tuning my UI, which I find almost as enjoyable as slamming my shield into the faces of big bosses. For 3.0, I deleted all addons that I had and rebuilt my UI from the ground, similar to what Anna from ToomanyAnnas has done.

My UI is not the prettiest out there, but I find it very functional, very informational, and clean. I use a lot of addons, but for now I will only talk about the ones that are immediately visible, the core UI.

This will be a series of posts dissecting my UI. If you have any questions about elements, ask away. If you know something cool you think I would like, let me know!

Let’s start the show with a snapshot of my UI when I am idly standing around, and the introduction of one of the elements of my UI: Data Broker

 
Data Broker: At the top I have Data Broker blocks, just as I have them on the bottom of the screen. I used to be a die-hard Fubar fan, but if you follow the trends of Ace developers, they are all moving away from Fubar, towards the flexibility of Data Broker. What exactly is Data Broker? It’s an Ace library, short LDB, that allows endusers the choice of what LDB display they wish to use. There are a bunch of different displays that all have a different look and feel. I myself use Fortress to create a Fubar lookalike, but it is a lot more flexible. Every Data Broker addon gives me a block I can freely move anywhere I want to on my screen. If you look next to my chat frame, that’s where I have all my raid modules, e.g. The first time you set up all Data Broker plugins and your display of choice, you might be overwhelmed, because the blocks will be all over the place, but you can simply drag and drop them to where you want to have them, and they dock when you connect them.

LDB displays:

• Fortress
• ButtonBin
• StatBlockCore
• MakeRocketGoNow
• Carousel
• Titan

Yes, Titan, the old resource hog and first information bar is now Ace’d and LDB-ready. Unlike Fubar. Go figure. However, there are two addons that their developers call hacks to make Fubar and LDB compatible. The first is Fubar2Broker which turns Fubar plugins into LDB objects. I use that myself, as I haven’t found native Broker plugins that are as good as a couple Fubar plugins I still use (MoneyFu, QuestsFu, ToFu and TopscoreFu). If you’re a dedicated Fubar user, you might have run into the problem that recent addons no longer provide a Fubar plugin to access it (e.g. Omen, Bugsack, etc.). Those of you can use Broker2Fubar to turn LDBs into Fubar plugins.

As I said, I chose Fortress as display, after testing most of the others. This was the one I could make look the cleanest. I then later added another display. Yes, you can run several displays without any problems. I have set all my informational plugins to be displayed by Fortress and all launchers are displayed in MakeRocketGoNow. Launchers are the plugins that serve like minimap buttons. You click on them to get access to the configuration menu of an addon. Many addons came with native launchers for Fubar, and a lot of Ace addons have switched to LDB launchers.

That's what MakeRocketGoNow looks like in action

You get a Rocket block you can place anywhere, and when you click on it, you get several large buttons of all launchers of your various addons. Clickie, end up in Omen configuration, as on the screenshot. Saves up a lot of info real estate.

If you want to look at what addons you get for LDB, check out the Data Broker category over at WowInterface.