f13.net

Hmm seems like every decent addon I use is fundamentally broken now.  Suddenly playing WoW feels like a chore.  The forums in Curse Gaming are starting to look like the Vault.

Anyone have the scoop on what is going on?  Has Blizz decided enough is enough?  I can see how things like Auctioneer's Scan feature had to go.  But it looks to me like an entire generation of creative addons is about to be abandoned by people who were already leaving the game.

I guess I'm lucky, good ol' CT_Mod hasn't given me any troubles yet.  Oh yeah, and gatherer is fine too.

How can not having an addon make the game feel like a chore?

Explain this to me (and the addon) please.

I barely use them...And I can't for the life of me figure out how players can get so fucking crazy about it. Ex: Recently, in my first week on ED, I was in an instance run when towards the middle of it, some Warlock held up the entire group for like 20 mins just to get his interface working. Wtf?

WTF?

As much as I mentioned it, he just could not turn it off temporarily, and get the damn quest finished with. What would make someone be so stubborn? I don't understand.

The problem with Auctioneer is currently in enhanced tooltips.  You need to go to the actual Auctioneer site (I'd give it to you but I'm at work) and they have a quick-fix that replaces the offending file in that directory.  I DL/d and installed it and every function works fine in Auctioneer.  One of the tooltips things doesn't work, but I can't remember if it's vendor's buy price or something else..

This is also why I've been weaning myself from UI mods since about 3-4 months after launch, you feel gimped if you get too used to them (And they don't alter gameplay that radicaly that you should.)  and then there's the possibility they'll be abandoned.  I'm currently down to Auctioneer, Cooldown Count, Scrolling Combat Text and some kind of DPS meter. I had CTRaid, but since I'm not raiding it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense to keep it.   I think the only mod I'd really like to have in addition is some sort of fast-loot mod so I didn't have to shift-click anymore.  My Pinkie starts to hurt a lot while farming.

CT Raid, even tho I've never used it, and SCT.

I had some others, like the really cool 'gouge and stun meters' for rogues, but they don't work anymore and it's no great loss.

To be fair, I only use SCT cause it looks cool.  I could live without it.

http://auctioneeraddon.com/

I use Bginvite so I can actually get the alliance morons i'm forced to play with into a group immediately giving us a partial chance at scoring points. I also use CTRaid, Fishing Buddy, and SCT.

Speaking of Auctioneer.... is there a way to disable that retarded mesh preview? I would love to start using it again, but the spinning, untextured geometry that popped up on all the items I had was driving me insane, so I dropped it like two patches ago.

Yes.  Type in /auctioneer show-mesh off

If you type in just /auctioneer it gives you a whole list of settings and abilities of auctioneer beyond just the tracking function.

Its called "stunwatch" and it works just fine as far as i know.  I use most of those mentioned so far, and a few others that really make life easier for a rogue.  Like auto retarget after getting CCed so i dont accidentally target someone else and lose all my cps, and auto trinket when feared.  Losing any of them would certainly NOT make the game feel like a chore though, thats just silly.

The only plugins I really use are for merchanting.  Without them it's a chore - back to spreadsheets and pads of paper.

So wait, did Blizz break them on a permanent basis, or just really badly?

most of it is just code tweaks that need to be done.

The problem comes from the fact that they "plugin-ified" a bunch of their core ui components (Auction UI, inspect UI, Craft UI, Raid UI to name a few) and any old plugins that directly called these ui elements now choke, because the script for most of them has been changed from:

Call UI elemnt function -> do shit with it

To:

Load UI Element
Call UI element Function -> do shit with it.

I expect much of it will be fixed by the plugin coders in a day or two.

Something that auto trinkets when feared ?  You interest me strangely.  Does it also use WotF ?

I deliberately levelled up without any add-ons, but my guild requires CT_RaidAssist and Decursive (there are actually DKP awarded for having them). CT_RaidAssist is invaluable for healers like me, because it shows the health, mana and buffs of everyone on the raid. It also has boss-specific functions, such as timers for an AE proc, an alert when the boss mob targets you, etc. Decursive makes my druid remove a curse or poison from one member of the raid every time I press it, without needing to look at who is cursed/poisoned. The other one I'm adding is WhisperCast, which makes your character deliver a buff or cure to anyone in the raid who sends the keyword (e.g. they send a tell saying "mark" and my character casts Mark of the Wild on them).

All those make success more likely on a raid.

Hmm...

And I just started dabbling with Druid too.

So is this what I should expect (IF I get...) in the higher lvl game? A dependcy on 3rd party tools? Does the "Tetris" game inherent in the healing classes just become unmanageable without automated help?

Already it seems like the Druid classes clash with my "HULK SMASHH!!!" mentality I've garnered from playing Warriors up until now (but that's another story). And what you describe doesn't even sound like a "game" per se. It would if I had to target heal though (but not if it's impossible)...

[edit] Back to my "Warrior mentality" real quick:

PvE: Taunt/ Sunder Armor x5

PvP: Charge > Hamstring > /golfclap


I had no idea everyone else's perception of the game was far more complex...

I only "need" the add-ons in raids. I can do instance runs fine without them. The problem on full-scale raids is that a healer is the potential saviour of up to 40 people, all of whom may need help at once. Depending on the abilities of the target boss mob, you may be tasked with healing just one tank, other times there is chaos and people are dying, and the ability to see all the health bars at once is invaluable.

Well, druid is good like that. You sound like a candidate for Feral/Balance spec, whereas I am Restoration specced (all healer).

But CT_Raid makes sense. Another example is the "ready check" it offers. Let's say the raid leader calls a 5-minute break, followed by an attempt on a boss mob. The raid leader sends a ready check, and everyone with CT_Raid installed gets a chime sound and a "(Name) has requested a ready check" box. When you are ready for action you click OK. So without spam or confusion, the raid leader knows whether enough people are back at their keyboard for the next fight. CT_Raid also stops heals if someone else heals your target first. This saves a lot of mana and makes the raid more efficient.

That said, I don't think WoW raiding is that good. I'm a veteran of the EQ raiding game, which felt more risky and challenging. But my rationale for participating remains the same: I'm an explorer type. I only want loot because it makes me better able to explore, and there is a big WoW expansion pack coming up. The more I raid and get loot, the better able I will be to explore the expansion zones. The more I help my guild raid, the more they will help me explore the expansion zones and be one of the first to figure out new things. I don't really care about my character or its equipment, I care about where it can take me.

If I have to go through a "not like a game" experience to achieve that, I will, because exploring a raw new virtual frontier is the height of gaming for me. In real life I have travelled 12,000km by bicycle through foreign countries, and that involved a lot of pain but it was similarly worth it for the euphoria of the journey.

Molten Core is just a big, brown, boring cave. But it's also a social experience. Last night, CT_Raid and Decursive helped me keep in-game friends alive to the point where we had a shared sense of achievement and fun. That can't be bad.

EQ raiding is the same as WoW raiding, the difference is the tools.  Instead of one person needing to keep track and call to a chat channel "do XYZ now!" you've got a program that can't be distracted, or fatigued or bored doing it.  Instead of chat channels that can be ignored or missed in the middle of the action you now have a majority using Ventrillo or Teamspeak.  Use of these tools just underscores that the problem and challenge in most raiding is the people, not the actual encounter once you have figured out a strategy.

If anything WoW raiding is a lot more like late EQ raiding encounters with early EQ characters since players are all a lot closer in HP so a caster can take a hit or two without dying.  That might be while you feel it's more forgiving. Mudflation hasn't set-in so you don't have 30k HP tanks with 10k armor in the same group with 6k HP casters with 5k armor in a system that was originally designed for 4kHP and 2k armor max.

For healing, get Benecast.  It's not game altering, just a new way of looking at healing.

I think what I'm asking is: Did anyone take down raid bosses and whatnot, or manage to be successful, at say, auctioning, BEFORE any of these mods came out?

Or...Do you people just generally kind of suck?

*  Not meant to be offensive or rhetorical. I'm just asking a question. Not meant to be an insult against anyone's ePeen.

Or to rephrase it: Is it laziness? Or geniunely hard to manage?

Benecast-k is the most updated version, right?

Have you tried BWL yet? That's the raid dungeon that ups the bar for ex-EQ raiders quite a bit.

If you can keep the current and average prices of thousands of items in your head, then I guess it wouldn't be hard to manage without auctioneer, but I sure can't. Some people were successful by specializing in knowing the going rate on certain blue items I'm sure but I doubt anyone other than some sort of idiot savant with a photographic memory could follow the trends for you the way auctioneer can. Just the tedium of scanning all auctions a couple of times a day manually would kill it for most people.

People took down most raid bosses fine before CT_RA announcements were put in. I would imagine most of them had someone who's job it was to watch a clock and hit a macro announcing things to the raid (or in teamspeak) to time AE's which is how we did it in my old EQ raiding guild. You could also assign someone to watch for the specific line's in the chat log (with creative filtering this wouldn't be that hard really) to alert the raid that an event had happened. Most of the addons just let you play the game a little less tediously IMO, not cheat as is claimed by trolls on the Blizzard boards on a regular basis.

I would imagine both depending on the player.  Those who are good get bored and need to automate tasks.  Those that are bad want something that'll do it for them.  Not realising that it usually just makes them worse.  The wife uses decursive in raids - She made a comment that she would go mental at a priest who couldn't do without it tho.

Regarding decursive. When I played my pally I found the tiny little debuff icons on my party members almost impossible to see when they showed up, so having something that would spot that for me would have been nice. It also alleviates a little the problem most healers have on raids. That is, never seeing the fight or anything else other than people's health bars because they had to keep their eyes glued on them to do their functions. With the inability to turn off spell graphics in WoW I would have a much harder time playing a healer than I did in EQ, where I could see mobs beating on people, assist the mob and heal their target quite quickly. The huge spam of spell graphics, while pretty, gets in the way of staying aware of all aspects of the fight for me. Not to mention it brings my aging system close to it's knees, when I go from around 25-30 fps prefight to 5-7 fps once the spells start flying.

Heh, wow, moment of clarity:

I take back what I said about WoW not drawing on the legacy of their RTS's (in the Expansion thread). To an extent at least (as far as pace and multitasking goes).

I can see now that some things in the game are counteractive to what many mmo gamers may be used to....But perhaps not to others?

I could dead wrong though.

I completely disagree. You don't risk anything except a few coins when you raid in WoW, compared with the potential of corpse recovery or corpse rot in the real EQ (pre-PoP). I know many people here didn't enjoy being put in that situation in EQ, but it doesn't necessarily have to involve those mechanisms. What's missing is the pressure and adrenaline of succeeding in the face of a heavy penalty for failure. That changed the way we approached an encounter, even if we had done it before and knew a strategy.

I probably put EQ on more of a pedestal because I'm from a low-population time zone and we had to achieve everything with about 40 people, where US guilds had raids of 60 or 80 or more. But that's another difference between the two games: WoW has actually had to restrict raid numbers to make its encounters risky, whereas EQ had plenty of mobs that could wipe a raid of 80 the same as 40 if something wasn't done right. Something in WoW is not quite all there, but I'm still happy playing it.

My guild isn't strong enough for BWL yet. The screenshots definitely look more attractive than the brown cave of MC.

Even pre-pop if you were at risk of losing your corpse, your entire guild sucked because all you needed to prevent it was a necromancer.  The ONLY place you ever risked all of your possessions was Fear or possibly Hate before they reworked the entrance. Other than that, a quick necro summons and you were a-ok to loot and be on your way.  You only risked your time and XP, and if you were raiding in EQ time wasn't exactly a precious commodity to you. (Not to mention if your corpse was summoned you were also quite likely getting an xp-restoring rez).

 I get more pissed and anxious when bits of my equipment go red in WoW than I ever did about multiple deaths in an EQ raid.  The only difference is nostolgia. It was your first experience, so it seems more special or somehow different.  I feel the same way about 'raids' that happend in Text-muds I was playing in '97, but when I step back I realize it was the same thing, minus graphics and with fewer people.

I still disagree. Summon Corpse wasn't even in the game until ... hmm, was it just before Velious? I think the first SC spell co-incided with the revamp of Splitpaw or the addition of Temple of Sol Ro.

They were the main raid targets for a long time and I was thinking of them in part. You But having your corpse under Naggy or Vox was pretty challenging too.

Not really. It depended on what you were doing. For example, fighting Trakanon: it was really hard to get set up in-place again after a fail (could do it on the ledge opposite but had to be very careful of aggro range). It was designed so that at least a few groups had to "do" the dungeon to reach Trak and summon the others, and it was a long way down with great pressure to succeed.

I think you underestimate time as a penalty. It's a far from ideal penalty, but it hurts anyone, even the most hardcore addicts. A wipe halfway around Circle of Veeshan in ToV was a major pain to recover in place (summoning corpses to zone-in meant a pain to get back inside, too). Often it was the end of your raiding night. EQ also had a lot more patrolling respawns with bigger aggro ranges and less places to hide, so there was rarely a simple way to get the raid back on its feet. In WoW the patrollers are simpler to avoid and you just pop the soulstoned pally back up to start the rezzing in place.

Even with the fixed repair costs in this last patch dying in WoW at 60 is way worse than dying in EQ at the max level ever was on a raid. Making back the 5-10g it can cost if you wipe a few times on a WoW raid can take as long or longer than getting back the tiny bit of experience lost when you got a 96% exp rez in EQ.

Granted early EQ was far worse but even then most raiding guilds had monks with rez sticks to pop back up and start rezzing. It wasn't until they nerfed the drop rate on rez sticks that they got particularly rare, and even then, guilds had 2 of them and used the cheap recharge bug of vendoring which wasn't fixed until PoP came out. By the time PoP was out, wipe recovery was pretty trivial anyway so the rez stick was no longer really needed.

Enough people didn't like corpse runs/rot that there is now a graveyard zone where your corpse appears after a week or so.  It was only exhilarating until you actually did lose your corpse. The risk also caused players not to try new things / areas / mobs.

But back on topic I downloaded some of the addons discussed here and found most to be great.  I can't believe that auctioneer one is allowed, it's pushing the boundaries of what might be considered an exploitive macro.  And I really like the way scrolling combat text works, it does make it feel Final Fantasyish.

I never had to use any WoW addons in EQ.

I don't see auctioneer as all that exploitive. It doesn't do anything that you couldn't do manually if you were a complete fanatic on playing the auction house.

Completely agree.  I got burned all the time on people gouging on the AH.  Now, I'm "in the know" and actually have fun with that portion of the game.  I used to abhor using the AH, because I felt like I had to sit there forever writing down prices and comparing, etc.  It would be nice if they incorporated histories for items on pricing like FFXI does.

Why hide that information or make it a job to put together?

Yes it does:

http://www.curse-gaming.com/mod.php?addid=1418

Cheers mate.

That's only because you care about 5g (which was reduced in the recent patch for most armour). If you have enough gold not to care about spending, which is the case for many people, death doesn't hurt at all. I'm in that situation because my tradeskills are mining and skinning for income, and I happened to loot some things that sold very well on the AH. EQ had a similar financial penalty in the form of coffin costs. WoW lacks any further penalty, so the rich don't really care when they wipe.

I'll have to try Auctioneer today. I read it was a way to bloat your UI memory requirements due to the amount of data, so I never installed it. But it sounds worth a look.

It is pretty brutal for people who enjoy raiding but aren't 40 hour a week catass farmers.  Especially when learning new raids, you can expect to die 10+ times a night, and have to pay inflated repair bot costs.  It's way, way harsher than mid-late EQ1's death penalty on those people.

It's nothing for your non-raiding accumulator types, though.  They rarely die and have shitloads of cash.

You could use that exact same argument to legitimize bots that auto level you to 60 and farm gold for you.  "Well it's nothing I couldn't do if I were a fanatic who played the game 18 hours a day.  So why not?".  You have to draw the line somewhere.

I guess it's a matter of perspective. To me something that builds a database of current ah prices is in no way comparable to a programmable bot that plays my character for me by messing with the program space of WoW.exe.

I'm not drawing the line on auctioneer.  I think you've completely lost perspective.  I suppose if you look at everything like a legal document, you're argument would be valid.  I'm just playing to have fun.

I think I found another Add-On that's useful enough to bother with.
AutoProfit (http://www.wowguru.com/ui/autoprofit/)  - Autosells all grey items in your inventory.  You can also change it to not sell certain greys (why) or to add certain whites you know won't sell on the AH. (Like Fish Oil for Alliance)

That looks sweet.  Might try that when I get home.

Did anyone ever find an auto-poison that actually worked well ?  For buying from Vendors and whatnot ?

I would imagine not wantin it to sell certain Greys (such as Evil Bat Eyes, or Vibrant Plumes) would be because they are used for factioning with certain groups, such as the DarkMoon Faire.

Well we're talking about a feature baked into the game - Blizz intentionally released a minimum function UI and turned the players loose creating interesting stuff, stuff that Blizz often in turn made part of the base UI.

I think this is all good.  Insisting on playing with the barebones interface is interesting in an e-peen sort of way but plug-ins are not 3rd party tools.  I go back and forth on this with a good RL friend who brags to this day he didn't use UOAssist until two years ago.

Also, I think dependancy is a little much.

Eh, don't go there Iron. That's shitty.

Anyways, I'm definitely not it doing for "e-peen" reasons. I just simply bought a game, installed it, and started playing. No extra steps. Just like other every other game I play. I didn't know Blizzard's UI was "barebones" because I had nothing to compare it to. And now that I do know more about them, I look at back at the times I've played, and I can't see one situation where I might have gotten some use from their aid. I've done fine without them.

I shake without them.  Is that wrong?

Um.  I think I've been misunderstood.  Again.

I am merely pointing out that pretty much all the 3rd party addons that we've used (or been forced to use for Raiding) have been things that have aided tasks rather than 'doing anything for you'.

And while Blizzard added some raid tools, the fact is that CTRaid is still a lot better than what comes with the game.  Personally, I love the 'signal ready' thing that comes with it.  It even has its own little fanfare.

Wasn't being shitty.  Honest.

I think the closest thing to a game breaker that I have used is Gatherer and, frankly, with the rising gold prices and competing with farmers for resources, I find it a lot easier than relying on dumb luck.

I mean pointing out the typo....Yes, I fucked up. No need to bold it  :wink:.


That is, unless you were bolding it to emphasize my use of the word, and not my misspelling. If so, then I fucked up again.  :wink:

I took it as the use of the word.  Didn't notice any typo.

I agreed that dependancy is a strong word to use.  Sure I piss and moan when they get broken, but it doesn't stop me from playing.

In fact, I got tired of fixing them for awhile and went with the raw UI.  It is fine.

Yes.

I didn't notice the typo.  And I have an English Degree (hons).  So I guess you can call me the dick for not noticing !

:D

I spent this past weekend playing without any plugins - stayed with the aforementioned "barebones UI e-peen" friend.  It was a pleasant surprise to see how many things have been folded into the base UI, little things like mouse-over numeric displays on rep bars and whatnot.

By the way, hard to miss what one never had... ;)  Running in a full-featured UI with best of breed plugins just makes it an entirely new game.  One with more fun and less tedious.