Posts with tag debuff

Addon Spotlight focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience -- the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same! This week, Satrina Buff Frames takes your buff and debuff frames to a whole new level.

A lot has changed since the early days of buff and debuff presentation. Back in the early days, we were limited by very basic buff and debuff trackers. These days, however, one addon truly stands tall and proud, a giant among men. I speak of the impeccable Satrina Buff Frames, a wonderfully customizable and skinnable buff and debuff frame that can give any user interface awesome amounts of flexibility.

I used to work at a sandwich shop.

Yes, I've heard the "make me a sandwich" jokes already.

I worked the lunch shift and I had this regular customer who came in a few times a week to get a hummus pita. If you don't know what hummus is, it is a delicious and flavorful spread made of mashed chickpeas and spices. It's often served with pita bread as an appetizer, or as a side or dip for various Middle Eastern or Greek dishes.

Anyway, after a few weeks of making the same pita for this woman, she told me "you know, you make the best hummus pita here." I smiled at the compliment and responded, "Well, I just make yours the way I would make my own. I really like hummus IRL." As the last letter of the acronym escaped my mouth, it twisted into an awkward tone as I realized the error in my sentence. Immediately flustered, I stuttered, "Err-- I mean... I like hummus... Uh..." She laughed at me with a smile and replied, "Don't worry, I know what you meant." But my nerdiness was already exposed; I was prone. I sensed an incoming AoO. It never came.

At the time I was probably overreacting, granted. The usage of net speak is pretty acceptable and easily understood to the average person these days. "BRB" doesn't bewilder most people, for example. On the other hand, I find myself telling my friends once a month, "I don't feel like going out: girl debuff," always getting mixed responses.

Recently, a friend of mine going off to college soon came to me for some advice on dorm living. I told him, "if you want more privacy, just bunk the beds." Before I could continue, he followed up with "oh yeah, that'd block LoS." I stared at him, dumbfounded. Had someone just out-nerded me?

So what WoW terminology do you use in your everyday life? How do your friends who don't play WoW react?

AddOn Spotlight focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience -- the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your AddOns folder will never be the same! This week, we get real sexy.

Timers for spells is an imperative addon for many classes that rely on steady rotations of DoT management and keeping debuffs up on enemies. DPS can be greatly altered by the careful balance of spell effects lasting for certain periods of time on enemies. There are a lot of good timers out there for spells and abilities, but today I want to introduce you to my favorite. If this addon is old news to you, and you already know how powerful it can be, help out the less fortunate! If you're new to his wonderful piece of code, stay a while and listen, as I sing a love song to SexyCooldown.

I'm sure you all will be quite happy to hear that the Swine Flu has struck Azeroth.

Yes, you read that right.

Out in the Borean Tundra, Unliving Swines near Warsong Hold will cast the debuff Swine Flu on you when you're fighting them. The pigs are dirty little creatures, and luckily anyone can cure the disease that has such an ability.

The Swine Flu disease itself is benign, however every time you attack something it has a chance at triggering an Outbreak. An Outbreak of Swine Flu will cause a fever that inflicts 120 nature damage every 2 seconds for 8 seconds total, and reduces movement speed to 70% of normal. Like Swine Flu, Outbreak is a disease that can be cured.

We should note that this isn't some joke recently put into the game. It's existed since Wrath of the Lich King released, so all the conspiracy theorists that are suggesting Blizzard manufactured the real swine flu in order to make more people stay home and play their game are clearly wrong. Clearly.

Oh noes! There's a knock at the door... I think Ghostcrawler and Belfaire are here with an offer I can't refuse.

So there's a slight problem affecting Unholy Death Knights in groups and raids these days: When there's multiple Unholy Death Knights, only one can put Ebon Plague on a mob.

This wouldn't seem to be an issue at first glance. After all, Multiple Curses of the Elements from multiple Warlocks don't stack, right? Here's the deal though. The Ebon Plague counts as a third disease for the purpose of Death Knight abilities that count diseases to deal damage, such as Scourge Strike and Blood Strike. When only one Death Knight can have Ebon Plague up, the other Unholy Knights are left out in the cold and have a part of their damage stripped away.

Previously you could only have 40 debuffs up on a single mob. That might seem like a lot, but when you got in a raid with 25 other people all putting up their own set of debuffs and dots, etc... things tended to get a little full.

Daelo, the Lead Encounter Designer, announced today that the debuff limit has been removed*. This is a subtle yet important change for many raiding guilds.

He notes that the default UI won't normally be able to show all the debuffs, but that's just a bug in the UI. The debuffs are still there and working. We don't have any verifiable information yet as to if custom mods can display an infinite number of debuffs.

This week on Ask WoW Insider, a reader has a suggestion, not a question, to put forth to you readers. It's about a problem lots of folks are having lately, with the servers as full as they are:

One thing that has been annoying most people is the ninjas who spend their time waiting for players to take down a pat so they have unobstructed access to the quest items or loot/ore. It happened to me even with the Oil-stained Wolf quest last night in the expansion. People waiting to steal poo! Sick! Why should the players who take down the pat be disadvantaged and lose out on the ore?

The rest of the question and your chance to answer after the jump.

While Blood is not quite as as powerful as it once was, it remains, at the least, a solid DPS tree and one quite a few Death Knights will probably choose to level with. The wide array of self healing abilities means that a Blood Death Knight has a very hard time dying, and nothing interrupts a good grinding session quite like a death.

In Skill Mastery today, we'll look at one of the Blood Death Knight's signature talent abilities, the 21-point talent Mark of Blood. Mark of Blood is placed on an enemy, and every time that enemy deals damage, their target is healed for 4% of their max health. It costs 1 Blood Rune. It lasts for 30 seconds, and has a cool down of 3 minutes.

It's a straightforward skill to use. Throw it on your target and keep fighting. Using it effectively, however, may take a little bit of thought. Here's some tips to figuring out the best way and time to make your mark:

Part of the allure of drums in raids has been the ability to overlap the effects of different types of drums by having several leatherworkers drumming at a time. One member might boost attack power and spell damage for party members in range, while another might restore health and mana.

With the new Tinnitus debuff, any targets affected by drums are immune to the effects of all other drums for two minutes. While this sounds like a nerf, it might actually have a balancing effect.

In fact, other professions are seeing similar changes. Potions will create Potion Sickness, which will prevent the consumer from using more than one in any given encounter. Players will have to rest out of combat in order to refresh the privilege.

So far, this also is affecting mana gems and similar items, although it is unclear if that particular effect is a bug or not. What does this mean?

Welcome to Hybrid Theory, where we discuss all things hybrid in the World of Warcraft. Hybrid Theory is brought to you each week by columnist/blogger Alex Ziebart.

Here on Hybrid Theory, we've done a lot of glorifying the group utility that Hybrids provide. It's one of their strongest points, and the factor that could make or break their raid spot in a setting of pure recruitment. Recently, I discussed the direction this concept of utility is going with a few raidmates of mine, and some interesting points were made.

The synergy between classes in The Burning Crusade is powerful, but moving in a direction in which the classes and specs become too reliant on one another, or you have to decide which hybrid is more important to you than another hybrid in the same role. Some class/spec combinations simply can't perform in a raid setting without a specific hybrid class alongside them. Some hybrid classes can't perform without other hybrids in their group. This poses a problem for the pure classes, and even though we don't know the exact details of the Death Knight, adding another class may only make things harder.

Aloud on the podcast last week, I wondered if the patch 2.4 changes to WSG had made a difference (I haven't been able to make it in there yet -- too busy writing about Hello Kitty Online, of course), and now maxomi is wondering the same thing: since the changes dropped, has WSG actually been fixed?

Unfortunately, from what we're told, the answer is no. The changes, designed to cut off turtling and players who ran around with the flag without capturing it, first made the enemy flag carriers trackable after 45 seconds, and then gave a damage debuff to the flag carrier after ten minutes (which doubled at fifteen). But all the reports from players say that makes no difference -- people still turtle away, even with the tracking and debuff, and eventually both drop the flag and the whole thing resets.

So what's the solution? If you crib some notes from other capture the flag games, a match timer sounds like the best option, and indeed, that's what most people are suggesting. Blizzard would have to determine how long to tune it, but the idea would be that after a given amount of time, if there was no winner, the match would end in a draw, with both sides losing in terms of a reward. It doesn't seem like Blizzard can force players to fight, so the best option overall might be to just call it in a time limit, and keep the matches from going on for long amounts of time.

Here's more about the upcoming AFK debuff in Alterac Valley. Last week, we talked about what the voting requirements might be to give out the debuff, and there were some really great comments on that post, specifically about an idea to give the debuff out right when players start the battleground. I think that's a great idea, and it would give everyone in the BG an impetus to get right into battle and do what the BGs are meant for: PvP fighting.

But here's another concern, voiced by Fantastiko of Alleria: Currently, as we know it, the debuff won't actually disconnect AFKers from the battleground. If players vote to give them the debuff, and if they don't enter battle within the set time period, all it would do is keep them from gaining honor while AFK. Which means that even if the debuff works as planned, and the 10 people in the Peace Cave get the debuff and gain no honor, your team is still down 10 people. Not good.

So as planned, what exactly will this debuff stop? AFK players can still go AFK, and just hope that no one thinks to report them (when this first starts up, tons of reporting will probably go down, but eventually, people will likely be able to get away with more and more). It seems like the best solution would be to give everyone this debuff when they enter the BG, and have it cancel on combat. And if combat isn't entered, or they are reported, AFKers should be disconnected from the BG completely-- even better, with the "deserter" debuff-- allowing other players to take their place.

Of course, this reporting system is still in the planning stages, so it could be that Blizzard has already reached these conclusions and it is going to be implemented this way. And I'm sure there'll be plenty of testing as well-- we likely won't see the system until 2.3 or even beyond anyway. But the problem with this is that AFKers are crafty-- if there's any way at all that they can gain honor while they go AFK, they'll do it.

One of the choruses we heard at BlizzCon was that Blizzard knows about the AFKers in Alterac, and justice will be handed out. The plan, we've been told, is that it will be handed out in the form of a no-honor debuff, that breaks on combat. In other words, if enough people report you for sitting in the Peace Cave, you don't gain any honor until you get moving and start fighting.

The problem, however, is that we don't know exactly how many people it takes to hand out that debuff. Thunderbein tells the story of an AV where only 20 out of 40 players were actually playing, and so if the number of players that have to "vote" for the debuff is anywhere over 20, no one's getting the debuff in that BG. Hortus replies and says that it's not as high as 30, but how high is it? Can you give someone the with two people? With ten?

And then there's the question of whether we should know at all. What if we learned it was 10 people (in the interest of clarity, I should stress that we don't actually know what it is yet), and a group of 31 AFKers joined up to the BG? Then, nothing is solved at all-- those guys could sit in the Peace Cave all they wanted and gain honor the whole time.

The AFK debuff sounded like the best solution at BlizzCon, but every system can be gamed. Blizzard is going to have to be really careful about setting up the numbers on how the reporting works. And because we'll likely find out whether they tell us or not what the number is, they'll have to watch out for other ways AFK players can get around the punishment.

It looks like an old idea from the TBC Beta has returned to the game. Ever since patch 2.1.2, when you enter "unreachable" areas like Mount Hyjal, you receive a debuff called "No Man's Land" that tells you "You are where you should not be" and teleports you out. Rumor is that it also reports you to a GM for account actions, but that hasn't been corroberated with any evidence.

People who enjoy exploring unreleased/rare content are upset about this change, and have posted threads on both the US and Euro forums. The explorers make some pretty persuasive points. There are no mobs in the unreleased areas, so the players aren't getting any material benefit out of being there. And since most of these areas are found by cliff jumping and regular game mechanics, Blizzard could automatically make them off-limits by changing the terrain or putting in instance gates. It's not like explorers are removing walls to sneak into other areas. Plus, exploration gets us great movies from Noggaholics that help give us an insight as to what Blizz is planning for the future.

I'm a bit of an explorer myself -- I swam around both the bottom of Kalimdor and the top of Eastern Kingdoms before BC, spent a long time cliffwalking to get into Hyjal and see Archimonde's skeleton, and used to lead expeditions to the Caverns of Time and got to watch as certain reckless mages blinked themselves into the abyss ("Summon me quick! Summon me! Summon ... too late.") It makes me sad that you can't do that anymore. If they have to do something about exploring, can't they just bring back the Guardians of Blizzard? Then at least we'd get to watch poorly-informed raid groups attempting to take on invulnerable bosses.

What do you think of this change?