Scattershot thoughts

An unfederated collection of thoughts tonight…

I hate to admit it, but I’m looking forward to the new cross-realm LFG system. I know this means I’m looking forward to pugging. And that pugging was invented in the pits of hell to convince the damned that salvation does not exist. I’m looking forward to it all the same.

For some reason, I keep playing the auction house. There’s nothing I want to spend money on, but I keep bankrolling it all the same. I have no explanation for this behavior.

I’m going to start back up on HealingDummy. Now that HoTs tick, it should be pretty easy to get it into the final stretch. Are there other addons y’all were hoping to see?

Everybody and their grandmother was talking about the Hunting Lodge Podcast yesterday. Brigwyn and Daewin have a good thing going there. All told, it was a day full of WoW podcasts. The Elitists, WoW Insider show, Hunting Lodge and the Twisted Nether Blogcast. Do you people all aim at maintenance Tuesdays for your releases?

For anyone missing Tristan’s Thunderstruck this weekend, as I am, he aintn’t dead. Swamped by school last week, but he should be back this week. He’s looking for a permanent co-host for The Elitists Podcasts. Anyone out there with a love of their own voice and a flair for all things Blizzard, look him up. (I have to fix my microphone. Not that I qualify. I don’t know the first thing about Starcraft or Diablo. You click in those games, right? Like, a lot?)

Curse Client v4 is in open beta. I never did a followup post about it, but WoW Interface’s MMOUI Minion is stable enough for general use now as well.

Stoney on Big Hit Box puts to rest any question of upgrading to a fast weapon for Enhancement builds. I picked up an Icefall Blade one night when literally no one else would take it. I tried plugging it into EnhSim to see how it would work out. It was a disaster. Vendor-bait now.

And they’re dropping the cooldowns on our Fire and Earth Elemental Totems to 10 minutes. That’s fun.

Happenings around the web

Shatner. Um, it’s related. He claimed to be a Shaman once. In an ad…

A quiet Sunday morning begs to be followed by a yawning, lazy afternoon. Hence, a cheapie links post. Enjoy.

First, I’d like to point your attention to Tristan’s renewed series of hard mode boss strategies, annotated with kill videos. Posts are up about Freya with all 3 elders and Mimiron’s Firefighter. And if you aren’t already, you should be listening to his podcast. Nowhere else on iTunes will you find Matticus’ mom freaking out.

Friend of the blog and frequent commenter Windsoar has opened up a blog and really hit the ground running. Jaded Alt, as you might infer from the name, covers a lot of ground. Favorite post: A personal view of what it’s like to go from Horde to Alliance. Some unexpected wrinkles in there, particularly for a former Blood Elf Paladin tank.

Another commenter, Charles, makes good with Planet of the Hats, featuring some surprisingly strong Elemental Shaman coverage. My favorite post talks about his Power Auras setup because it’s entirely different from my own, and therefore rich with ideas to steal.

While I was attempting (and failing) to get my fellow healbloggers to post about why they heal, the sphere instead picked up the gauntlet thrown down by Don’t be that Shaman. Followups include a Matticus-penned post on WoW.com titled Don’t be that Priest. Shortly thereafter, not 1 but 2 Holy Paladin variants went up; HolyPaladin.net beat Horde Review by 2 days. If there are others out there I’ve missed, fill them in the comments.

Matthew Rossi on WoW.com summarizes the (dubious) current state of Enhancement tanking. I was hugely excited when I saw the headline. The article disenchanted me, however. The key tools that were once available no longer are. Those attempting Enhancement tank builds now are fighting an uphill struggle. I’d love to try my hand at tanking, but I am not willing to subvert the designers’ intentions to do it. They have shown a long history of striking out at such unintentional consequences.

I updated GridStatusChainWho to fix the Debugging and Enabled switches. While I was at it, I added experimental support detecting Holy Nova and Circle of Healing, but am unable to test this out myself. If any Priests can try it out, I’d love to hear back. After several false starts, the addon is now available on Curse as well as WoWInterface.

Don't be that Shaman...

… who blows your ankh after a wipe has been called.

… who casts Heroism while the boss is in its air phase.

… who drops Mana Spring Totem when a Paladin is blessing Wisdom.

… who skips dropping Totem of Wrath in a raid because Magma Totem makes your personal DPS look better.

… who overwrites another restosham’s Earth Shield with your own.

… who lets the raid drop 3 Wrath of Air Totems without noticing that no one is dropping Windfury. Or that there’s nature damage afoot.

… who lets a moving fight get out of range of your totems.

… who misses the opportunity to put the occasional Flame Shock on the boss during a DPS race.

… who gets bitchy about repair costs.

… who runs out of mana because you’re not paying attention to Water Shield.

… who notices that your Earth Shield dropped 3 fights ago. (Or worse, fails to notice it.)

… who pulls aggro by setting your totems down in front of the tank before the pull.

… who pulls aggro by leaving your totems behind in a gauntlet.

… who casts Water Walking on raiders as they fall to the lake under the Crusader’s Arena.

… who dies in a Whirlwind because you ran into melee range wanting to get your Magma Totem on.

… rolling on spirit gear when there’s a cloth or leather wearer who could use it.

… who knocks mobs away from the tank with an ill-timed Thunderstorm.

… who drops an untalented Strength of Earth Totem in the face of Death Knights.

… laying down a redundant Flametongue Totem in a fight with frost damage.

… who fails to interrupt enemy spellcasters during idle moments.

… who sets your Cleansing Totem out of range of the melee runners during Heigan’s dance.

… wearing a Lightning Shield while the tank tries to pull aggro back off you.

… with a macro to /yell “So long you hearthstone-bound losers!” when you Astral Recall out of the instance.

Search query answers

Sometimes I’ll see questions come up in search queries that landed people here, without any way of knowing if they ever got the answers they sought. Some are incredibly easy. For instance:

healing way talent does this effect lesser healing way

No, it does not. It is a linear scalar for Healing Wave only.

how to configure grid for penetrating cold

power auras penetration cold

Look at GridStatusRaidDebuff or Aura Watch.

tier 9 worth using with glyph of riptide?

Hell yes. If you’re rocking Tier 9 armor, your 3rd glyph should be Riptide.

how to setup debuffs in vuhdo

Check out Matticus’ guest post on that topic.

are shadowed unit frames button facade

No, they are not.

And occasionally they are harder to address.

enhsim for mac

While this project is supposedly cross-platform, recent changes resulted in a broken Mac build getting checked in. This thread at the code repository discusses what people are doing to work around it. Despite being unfamiliar with Apple’s XCode environment, I was eventually able to fumble my way through to a working build. As gosurob posts, there are 4 steps you have to take:

I set my Header Search Paths to “$(SRCROOT)/” with the quotes and all.

XCode’s search paths are stored in the project, per target. In the navigational view, expand Targets, right click on EnhSim and choose Get Info. On the Build tab of the dialog presented, scroll down to the Search Paths area, find Header Search Paths and edit the field to contain “$(SRCROOT)/”

In globalutil.h, there were two declarations for TimeunitsToSeconds/Minutes/Hours.  I deleted the later declarations, keeping just one set.

This instruction really should have come later. The reason there are 2 sets of definitions for these macros is that we’re about to do a search and replace turning __int64 into double. That will cause the __int64 versions of the macros to collide with the double variants. One set should be commented out to keep the compiler from squawking.

I changed all instances of __int64 to double across all files.  You can do this by adding typedefs, or just going a global search/replace.

It baffles me that this change works. Can it really be okay to convert from a whole-number-valued type to a real-number-valued type without issue? Strangely, the compiler does not break over this rather brutal change. The other strange thing about this change is that the code comes with some of the C++ Boost template library, and you must include those files in your search/replace operation.

I removed all #include references to limits.h.  This file was included in the mac 10.5 SDK, and the version in the boost directory was confusing things. 

Here, again, we are making changes inside the supposed cross-platform Boost library. More confusing, there are 3 versions of limits.h in the Boost distribution — one in boost/limits.h, another at boost/detail/limits.h, and a final one at boost/limits.hpp. References to all 3 must be commented out to compile successfully.

Guild Events

Note: Not a hordieFor a long time I’ve been jealous of the stories that a coworker tells me about his horde guild and their periodic guild events. They’ll pick a theme and use it to organize goals outside the usual grind-loot-kill scheme. They’re like an Azerothian flash mob, bringing smiles and high weirdness wherever they go. My favorite of his events was a costume party held in the old Naxxramas. Tauren Link (a la Zelda) was the winner, but my heart was taken by the pictures of Blood Elf Little Red Riding Hood.

The best I ever did was a series of naked instance runs with some 5-man friends. We started naked in Deadmines. Whatever loot dropped, we could keep. When it was done we went to Stockades. Then Gnomereggan. By this point the priest was still in a bikini, and while the warrior had some brassy shoulders, we were begging for the game to drop him a shirt. Disco was supposed to have died in the 70s. We got as far as Scarlet Monastery before the gas ran out.

My guild has decided that the entirety of October shall be an event, to be known as Hallow-main. Each of us picks an alt toon (or alt spec, if need be) to raid with for the month. Apparently we’re playing it straight, pushing as hard as we can with the means at hand. I have volunteered my Enhancement spec.

Verily, I will join the ranks of melee DPS.

In the forum thread where people say what they will play, I note exactly one volunteer healer. Somehow I suspect that those who would be healers already are healers. I may yet be called upon to take up the shield and mace. But if they allow it, my fist and tankard are on call.