Posts with tag UnitFrames

We here at WoW Insider are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

• Darraxus the Warrior has laid down the Commandments of Pugging. He only lists six, but they're enough to make the difference between a succesful run and another nightmare PuG..
• Wulf's Warcraft Weblog has been dreaming of a Wolf Spirit Beast to tame. So they made one. Check out their concept art.
• The Master's Call blog has a guide on Gearing For Raids for Newbies. They're just getting into raiding and sharing what they are learning in a series of posts.
• Gnomeaggedon shares his views on Why WoW Is Like Bringing Up Kids. From crowd control to rolling restarts to bear form. Head on over and add your own suggestion.
• Miss Elf is considering the pros and cons and introducing her mother-in-law to WoW. How would she react encountering her first ninja looter? The response is classic.
• One Rogue's Journey continues their Friday Morning AddOn series, this time with a movie explaining ag_UnitFrames.
• Big Hit Box, a blog focusing on posts for all melee DPS specs, has a new post up on macros for PVE Enhancement Shamans.

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A bad case of space cancer put me out of commission for the last few days, and for that I apologize. In addition to my apology, I blame the pandas. They caused me to come down with such a horrid plague. I'm back on my feet now though, so the Q&A will continue!

jtrain asked...

I'm admittedly new to tanking, and I hear people talk about a 'rage dump'. Why would I want to dump rage? I thought the whole idea was to build up a good amount so I don't have to sit there auto-attacking waiting for my abilities to become usable. In Wrath, I never seem to have a problem generating rage and at the end of a fight in which I've pulled several mobs, I usually have quite a bit of rage still available. Am I doing something wrong?

While I'm pushing through Black Temple and Mount Hyjal nicely as my guild's tank, I am still trying to improve my style and playing elements. There's not much more I can do to build threat – the Devastates, Shield Slams, Revenges, Heroic Strikes, etc., are all going off at the right time. Gear is fine, I can pretty much tank anything in the game at this point and succeed. So why am I still dying? Why am I missing that critical moment when I could put up my Spell Reflect and live a second longer?

I think I've found it.

It's all about eye movement. Try this: focus your sight to the upper left hand corner of the screen, and now move your sight down to the bottom of the screen. If you have a large enough monitor, you completely lose focus of the text and items near the upper left corner. This is problematic for tanking in that the unit frames (those things that tell you who's in your group and who you're attacking) are by default located in the upper left corner, and the action bars are located at the bottom. So if you want to make sure you're going to hit something – or even look at your keyboard for a moment – you're moving your eyes quite a bit.

The basic chat interface in WoW is pretty limited. It's easy to miss what's happening in the chat window while fighting, for example, and there are many other ways in which the chat windows are not very user-friendly. Prat helps solve a lot of these usability problems, and since it's modular, you can turn its features on or off easily. New functions are being added over time, too. Here are a few of the things it can do:

• Enable mouse scrolling in the chat window.
• Abbreviate the channel names (from [Guild] to [G], or just the green color, for example)
• Add keybindings for various chat channels.
• Add a slash command (or keybinding) to whisper to your current target.
  
• Add timestamps to the frame (so that you know when someone sent a message).
• Color player names according to their class, and add their level beside their names.
• Toggle the chat buttons on or off, or move them about.
• Turn on chat logging.
• Move the chat input box (the Editbox) to a different location.
• Copy text from the chat frame.
• Shorten existing commands to your own personal alias comands. (eg: "/say "Get ready, I'm pulling now!" could be shortened to "/pull". This is like a macro, except that it is executed with your own shortened command instead of a button to click on, which is handy for things you say or do often, while out of combat.)

As for that problem many of us have, where, in the thick of battle, someone will say something like, "WAIT! DON'T PULL!" or "Help me! I'm being attacked!" and you miss it because you were looking at the fight, not at the chat window: a recently developed addon, blandly named "PitBull_Prat", helps solve this problem by working in conjunction with PitBull and Prat together, by adding the text of what you and others say to a colored speech bubble right next to that player's unit frame in your interface (as you can see in the screenshot above). Since you're more likely to be looking at your friends' health bars to keep aware of how the battle is going, hopefully this will help you to see what their saying in time to help them too. Click here to download Prat and PitBull_Prat from files.wowace.com, and remember, PitBull_Prat will only work if you have both PitBull and Prat installed.

I've been putting off writing about this addon, mainly because it's one of the greatest addons out there, so it's hard to do it justice -- what doesn't PitBull do?

Well it won't win the game for you by itself, and its name doesn't really describe anything about it, but other than that it does pretty much anything and everything you could expect from a unit-frames replacement and then some. You can, of course, personalize your unit frames to your heart's content, more than any other unit frames mod I've seen, and that in itself is worth the download. On top of that, though, you get a ton of other features, all of which can be enabled for functionality or disabled for performance, whichever you like. Here are a few of my favorites: