Essential WoW tools, a word on macros, TSG trick, the honor grind, Ensidia, and e-thuggin' hardcore

Essential WoW tools

I wanted to start this entry off with a quick list of tools everyone should know about.  A lot of players will already be familiar with these and if you recognize the name you can safely skip over it, but there's a surprising amount of people that have never heard of any of these, so here's to hoping it helps at least a few!

SnowfallKeyPress
This addon makes it so your spells are activated upon pressing a key down instead of when you release it.  An absolutely must-have in my opinion.  Unless you self-consciously hold down your buttons and wait to release them (I actually know someone who does that) you shouldn't notice any negative side effect in using this addon.  It should really be included in the game by default, even if just as an interface option.  (You may wish to disable "Animation" in the options menu after installing it.)

Leatrix Latency Fix
Not an actual addon, but this tool will modify your Windows registry to change how frequently TCP acknowledgements are sent to the WoW server, effectively cutting your ping in half.  It's completely safe and reversible if needed.  If you're really interested in exactly how it works you may view the description on the addon page, all I need to know is that it's amazing.

SharpKeys
Again not an addon, but this program will allow you to easily modify the Windows registry to change how certain keys behave.  For example, I use it to completely disable my Windows key, to make my Caps Lock key act as a secondary Alt key (opening up a lot of more efficient key binding possibilities), and to rebind my Ventrilo key (tilde/~) to a blank key (0x006C) so that it doesn't interfere with my typing or spam annoying beep sounds at the desktop.  Plenty of other possibilities with it as well, a great tool to have.

TabBinder
A shameless plug for my own little addon, this mod will automatically change your tab key binding to only target enemy players when in PvP zones, and to target all enemies when not.  If you only PvP it may not serve much purpose to you, but for those of us that like to do some PvE as well it can be very helpful.  No assembly required.

FluidFrames
This addon allows you to move the default unit frames to different positions on your screen.  All I use it for is to move the player and target frames to the lower middle portion of my screen (as seen below), a spot that I find is much easier to constantly keep an eye on.


The same effect can be accomplished by using normal script commands, but they can be buggy and reset without notice so I'd only recommend using them at LANs.  Accompany it with Align if you share the same OCD tendencies as myself in arranging your UI.

Action Bar Saver
This incredibly useful addon lets you easily save your entire action bar setup (where all of your spells and macros are positioned, not the key bindings associated with those bar positions) so that you may restore them later at any time.  Not as mandatory as it used to be before dual specs, but if you use more than two specs or just find yourself respeccing often it can save you a lot of trouble.  If I wanted to change up my PvP spec a little I would simply type "/abs save armspvp" before unlearning my talents, and then "/abs restore armspvp" once I was done, which would automatically restore all of the spells that normally fall off my bars when respeccing.  Also works between dual specs and even different characters (for tournament realms and whatnot).

BindPad
The last addon I will be covering for now, this mod allows you to very easily bind spells or macros without requiring a visible hotkey, saving precious screen real estate.  It is mostly useful for abilities that you do not need to see the cooldown of.  The actual mod is not required once you've finished setting it up (as long as you're not using custom BindPad macros), since it simply changes your key binding file to point to certain spells instead of action bar slots.

There are plenty of other amazing addons out there I could recommend, but I personally only use ones that won't affect my performance in any negative way when adjusting to a completely modless atmosphere at LANs, so the list is somewhat limited.



Macros

I won't dedicate a large portion of this article to just warrior macros since it wouldn't interest about 90% of the readers, but I do have a few important words for all macro users.  Be careful when using conditional macros.  Learn how the macro system works when creating macros, spells that do not trigger the global cooldown do not need to be linked to other spells in cast sequences or conditional checks.  The reason for this is that all of those kinds of macros add a slight delay to them while the game checks to see if they return true or not.  You'd think they'd be instant but if you test both variations back to back you'll see a noticeable difference.  Here is an example of a macro you do NOT want to use:

/cast [stance:1/2] Spell Reflection; Battle Stance

For the completely macro impaired, what that does is check to see if you're in battle or defensive stance, if you are it'll cast spell reflect, if not then it will put you in battle stance.  The problem is the delay in checking for that stance conditional can mean the difference between reflecting a polymorph or smashing your keyboard while you stare at the spell reflect buff on you as you waddle around in sheep form.  To fix this you would want to use this macro instead:

/cast Spell Reflection
/cast [stance:3] Battle Stance

This will accomplish the same effect but will not add any delay in checking to see what stance you're in first, since it is going to attempt to cast spell reflect regardless of anything else.  If you're interested in seeing what other macros I use you can find them here.  They aren't groundbreakingly original or anything, but fellow warriors may see one or two they didn't think to use before.  I have also included my key bindings just to give an idea of how they're laid out and which macros are on which stance bars.  (You'll also notice I put /startattack in almost everything since it helps tremendously when coming out of stuns, fears and the like.)

In addition to the above tip, players who use different stance bars may want to consider making some macros similar to this one:

/cast Shield Bash
/cast [noequipped:shields] Berserker Stance
/cast Pummel

I have both shield bash and pummel in there, this is because when changing stances sometimes you'll press the hotkey from the last bar during the transition, even if you're already considered to be in the new stance.  In this scenario it may allow me to cast pummel slightly faster than I would be able to otherwise.



TSG trick

Quick little trick that warrior/paladin teams can use and may not be aware of.  Unimproved Blessing of Might gives 550 attack power, while unimproved Battle Shout only gives 548 attack power.  This means Battle Shout cannot overwrite Blessing of Might.  To take advantage of this, have your paladin buff himself with Might before the match begins, then have the warrior cast Commanding Shout about 10 seconds before the gates open.  After casting Commanding instantly cast Battle Shout, and once Battle Shout is up on the DK/Warr the paladin can replace his Might with Kings and get a "free" 2255 HP.  Just make sure to never put Might on the DK or Warr and everyone will get their optimal buff setup.  Speccing into improved Battle Shout will make this nifty little trick not possible though.  Works great for paladins who like to wander out into the middle of the map!



Honor farming

With season 8's arrival also comes the dreaded honor grind, something that has become almost unbearable for veteran players such as myself.  I have grinded out at least one (sometimes up to three) honor sets for 7 seasons now, and I have to say I quite simply despise battlegrounds at this point.  I used to love them when they first came out, but now they have become very repetitive and lack the feel of any real purpose other than to get your epics.  Even Isle of Conquest I was sick of the first time I zoned in.  Running around to capture random nodes is not fun, despite how amazing and innovative it might have sounded on paper.  Even if it was an all-out brawl fest in the middle of the map featuring 40v40 combat, it would still just feel like the same boring zerg fights you've seen before.  If you some how still enjoy throwing yourself against a wave of random opponents then I truly envy you, but the only thing I fight for in battlegrounds these days is to not get flagged as an idler while I spend the majority of my time minimized.

In addition to the pain of suffering of simply having to do battlegrounds, I have to wait about 10-20 minutes for each one on my battlegroup.  I am desperate to upgrade my warrior's Furious pieces to Wrathful but it's been so painful so far that I'm honestly considering resorting to just the weekly Wintergrasp quests, putting the rest of my team at a disadvantage while I fight in way outdated gear.  Many players have turned to botting honor now and I don't think they're very wrong to do so.  They risk their account security which is obviously their own concern to worry about, but I cannot blame anyone that's been playing as long as I have for wanting to take that risk.

If players were allowed to turn in their last season's gear for a partial refund (say 50% of the honor originally spent), it would go a tremendously long way in helping address this issue.  Battlegrounds still wouldn't be enjoyable, but the unpleasant experience wouldn't have to last nearly as long, maybe even resulting in players not becoming as burned out as they have.  Is it really fair to have to grind out a full 68k honor just to upgrade your boots from 245 to 264?  Instead they should allow the Relentless boots to be vendored back for 31k honor, giving you a nice head start on the new upgrade and allowing all of the pieces to work as stepping stones.  Anyone who is gearing up a new character would still have to pay the heavy initial cost the first time though, which I think is perfectly reasonable.

One other change I would like to see added is rewarding a small amount of honor points for every arena win, say 100 honor points per win.  It would take 750 arena victories to cap out in honor so it would by no means replace the normal honor farming method, but it would at least let people start working on their honor for the next season by just playing arena like they normally do.  It wouldn't need to based on your rating or your opponents' rating at all, just a small flat bonus per win.



Ensidia gets what they deserve

Trance mentioned earlier this week that he felt Ensidia was deserving of the world first title on Arthas.  I have to respectfully and completely disagree.  I don't want to beat a dead horse but I just want to quickly explain what fight mechanic they skipped for people who may be unfamiliar with the encounter.  During "phase 3" three Val'kyr will pick up three of your random raid members and carry them away from the raid.  If they make it about 40 yards out before being killed they will drop your raid members off to their death.  What Ensidia did was make it so that instead of those players being dropped to their death they were dropped safely to the ground a few feet below them so that they could run back and rejoin the rest of the raid, thus eliminating any need for DPS to focus on the very hard-to-kill adds, and trivializing what is probably the hardest part of the fight.  They even had the audacity to go on to say "the DPS requirements seem quite high!" in their original kill post, I can only imagine the smirk they had on their faces when uploading that.

How they did it or how simple it was accomplished is completely irrelevant.  They had done the fight on 10 man and they knew perfectly well that was not how the fight was intended to work.  Showing combat logs of your rogue using engineering bombs on other fights doesn't justify abusing something like this in the slightest.  The right thing to have done would have been for the rogue to go out of his way to not use a single engineering bomb.  Sure, it's annoying to have change your normal play style based on a bug that Blizzard was completely responsible for, but if you're trying to achieve a respectable world first kill you'd think they'd want it to be legit.

Do you really think they would have ever mentioned anything about it if not for Blizzard publicly announcing a hotfix shortly after they (and only they) killed it?  Of course not.  Now some of their members are threatening to quit because they feel they're being treated unfairly by Blizzard.  Please, do us all a favor, and hit that unsubscribe button.  You cheated (again), you got caught (again), and got punished (for once).  You're not owed anything and you have no one to blame but yourselves.  I personally would have hearthed out of the raid if I saw my guild taking advantage of something like that, each of those 25 people had that opportunity and turned it down.

The ONLY legitimate excuse I can see them making is that they were truly unaware of what was causing the bug, and every time they attempted it it seemed to bug out by itself.  If so that changes things a bit, but for the intelligent kind of strategic thinkers they are I have a really hard time believing they couldn't pinpoint the source.  Even if they were unaware, they still had the chance to turn down an obviously bugged kill until Blizzard could implement a hotfix for it, but given the nature of their past behavior I'm not really willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.  There is no way they brought that boss down to 40% without knowing they were clearly exploiting it, period.  As a simple rule of thumb, if you ever have doubt on if your kill is legit or not: if you wouldn't feel comfortable posting a video for all to see, then you probably cheated.  I really doubt they would have been in a hurry to release a video of Valks dropping people off softly at the edges.



E-thuggin' hardcore

I recently encountered an interesting little individual on the MLG realm...


Someone who I had never even heard of was threatening to "hurt" me if ZILEA didn't give his name back... on a private and unpopulated TOURNAMENT realm.  First of all if you've ever met me I'm not exactly small, so when a random arena player wants to hurt me forgive me if I'm not overly concerned.  Aside from him looking like a total idiot trying to e-thug it up, the funniest part was probably him trying to threaten me for something one of my teammates did.  Really?  I mean, you're probably not alone in wanting to hurt Zilea, but why drag a poor innocent fellow like me into it?  I have feelings too you know.

And if you've ever been this kind of person... just, please, don't.  You don't look intimidating or threatening, you just look like a fool.


UPDATE

Apologies to the real Belligerentz as I have now learned that was not actually him.  Maybe I should have done a little more investigative work since that person was obviously acting a little extreme, but I've seen worse on the internet so I didn't find it too unbelievable.  I have also never talked to the real Belligerentz before so I wouldn't know what kind of personality he has to even think anything was unusual.  Since it's still pretty funny I'll leave it up for good laughs but I have no intentions of trying to tarnish his reputation.  I do, however, have an idea of who it was and considering he's "smaller than Trance" I'll be sure to watch my back at the next event.