Doodle: Worgen Hunter

Arrows, pew pew. Does anyone else find it odd that worgen don't have tails?

MBTI Results: Nertok's Analysis

Nertok/Arael has been helping pass the survey on beyond my blog in places like the wowhead forums, and he's compiled his data with mine and made up some more charts :) He had an extra question on his survey asking about favorite race, and I will say that was interesting to look at in comparison to the personalities!!

You can check out his results here: http://feralnertok.blogspot.com

Thanks again for the help, Nertok :D

Faction Champions and You: PvE "PvP"

Faction Champions are a wild swing in another direction for most raids, and given their similarities to an arena match, it can be confusing as to what the raid needs to do to get them down.

-- Common MYTHS: --

• "Wear Resilience!" Resilience does not protect you against the faction champion enemies.
  
• "Kill healers first!" While this strat may work for some guilds or combinations, other raids (such as my ten-mans) will find it easier to CC, interrupt, or otherwise ignore enemy healers in favor of taking out the high-damage dps enemies first. This can vary due to your raid makeup (such as banishes on the tree druid) and the number of players in a 10-man available to CC targets in comparison to the 25-man raid. Don't take this statement as law!
  
• "AoE to damage them all and split their heals!" AoE, including cleaves and glyphed mauls, will break your valuable CC. A lot of guilds may not remember the importance of CC ("Crowd Control") from back in vanilla and TBC, but suffice to say that CC is very important and due to diminishing returns that will make them immune to the CC, breaking said CC is a Very Bad Thing.
  
• "You, keep that one sheeped the whole time, all by yourself!" etc. There are diminishing returns (DR) on CC against the faction champions, where the 4th cast will have no effect on the target. AOE that breaks the CC will still count against your DR: each time you cast a CC against a target, it will have less affect on the target than previous casts. As such, a single CCer can't chain-CC a target by themselves.
  
• "DR resets 15 seconds after last cast!" In regards to a CC spell, the DR will reset 15 seconds after the last CC effect of that category wore off of the target... not 15 seconds from the time it was cast upon them.
  
• "Tank them!" Your tanks in this fight should either swap to a non-tanking offspec, or they are going to be purely CC/utility during your faction champions fight. Taunts *will* work to briefly fixate their target away from a squishy dps or healer, but as with other CC, taunts are subject to DR and don't last long.
  

-- The enemies: --

You will face 6 enemy champions in the 10-man, and 10 in the 25-man.

Heals
These can and will focus heals on your dps targets. CC, interrupt, and stun-lock as available.

• Tree (Toughest of the healers; banishable, purge/dispel the HoTs)
  
• Holy Pally (uses hand of freedom, bubbles around 25%, dispel)
  
• Resto Shaman (dispel the earth shields, cleanse hexes off of raid members)
  
• Holy Priest (dispel the renew and PW:Shield)
  

Ranged DPS
These tend to be squishier, but also less dangerous than the melee dps from a burst-damage-omg-wipe perspective. The greatest danger from these is the silence and spell-interrupts they will use on your own casters.

• Moonkin
  
• Mage (will counterspell, blink, and ice block; CC this one as available)
  
• Shadow Priest
• Warlock + Pet (pet will silence, and will stay up after lock is killed; has a habit of hellfiring.)
  
• Hunter + Pet

Melee DPS
These are your heavy hitters, but can be controlled through use of slowing effects, roots, and snares. Use mortal strike/wound poison to cut through armor and heals.

• Ret Pally
• Rogue
• Shaman (destroy the totems!)
  
• Warrior
• Deathknight
  

-- Survival --

The enemy dps can and will focus-fire on one or another of your raid members, and their target selection is NOT dependent upon threat! While resilience gear will not help, extra stamina and a PvP trinket for popping out of a long stun (hand of justice, etc) will be very useful. Whenever you have a melee dps on you, you need to use all available tactics to escape.

As a resto druid, it is helpful to remember these abilities:

Options when Melee is hitting you:

• PvP trinket to break long stuns
  
• Barkskin
• Nature's Grasp
• Cat + Sprint (especially during a whirlwind-chase from the warrior)
  
• Warstomp/Shadowmeld
• NS + HT
• Swiftmend
• Health Potion/Healthstone
  
• If all else fails, bearform: bash, frenzied regen

Options when a Melee is further away and you have cast-time available:

• Entangling Roots
• Cyclone
• Hibernate the hunter's pet
• Keep moving

Options against ranged DPS:

• Cyclone
• Warstomp to interrupt casts
  

-- Resto Druids and the Faction Champions Fight --

Around survival (which is priority one!), a resto druid's other duties can include:

• keeping rejuvs and wild growth up on the raid as much as possible,
  
• using swiftmend and NS+HT to quickly save the life of another player,
  
• cleansing hexes and poisons, and
• using cyclone and entangling roots as often as possible on any loose targets.
• using moonfire to destroy enemy totems
  
• hibernating the hunter's pet
  

As such, you probably won't spend much time in tree form. However, don't forget that you can shift into tree, cat, or bear to break out of a sheep!

Do not cast cyclone on the current dps target unless you really absolutely have no choice--which should only happen if you are completely out of CC options and are about to die because you can't get away from it, and the rest of your raid didn't help CC the mob off of you with their own slows and roots and taunts. Cyclone will prevent any attacks against the target, wasting valuable cooldowns and time the dps needs when focus-firing its targets.

Use your cyclone against any loose targets that are causing trouble. Your cyclone will be primarily useful against enemy casters, including healers and the mage. The warlock pet can also be cycloned to prevent it from silencing you and other casters. The melee dps can be rooted to control their damage, which means your cyclone is best put to use on the casters who will keep on casting in spite of your roots.


~~Have some further suggestions for the faction champions fight? I would love to hear about them!~~

Jaraxxus Hard: Mistress' Kiss

This is a very important spell debuff to be aware of for hard-mode Trial of the Champion.

When Lord Jaraxxus spawns his Mistresses, they will cast Mistress' Kiss upon two people (on 10-man) at once (it will reach one person, and then a second or two later another person will get the debuff as well). This is a DEBUFF that will last for 15 seconds and is really harmless... until you cast something with a cast time ;) At that point, it'll interrupt your spell and lock you out of all spells of that school of magic for 8 seconds!

You can add this debuff to your Grid frames, and watch for it. Target the demon when she spawns so you'll know when she casts the debuff, or have your OT call it out; it cannot be interrupted, but it's good to know when it's going off. When it goes off, the raid needs to be alerted to hold off on spell casts (timed ones) until both of the debuffs have been assigned. Once the two kisses have been applied--it can and will hit ret, prot, and feral pallies and druids--the untouched players of the raid can continue casting as normal.

IF YOU HAVE THE KISS:
The best options are to either:

• Use a timed spell of a school you don't normally use (such as starfire for a resto druid) to trigger it, or
  
• Wait it out for the 15 seconds while using only insta-cast spells.
  
• This pretty much screws over holy pallies; holy pallies might as well trigger the debuff and wait the 8 seconds for the spell lock to be over rather than wait the 15 seconds for the debuff to wear off!

---

We used 3 healers for killing heroic Jaraxxus on 10-man (holy priest, resto shaman, resto druid), for those curious. We used 2 for the Beasts, because we needed the extra dps.

Flying in Azeroth

Possible perks to being able to fly in "old-world" Azeroth:

• Oops, did you just miss that boat? Hop on your trusty griffon and try to catch up before it speeds away and zones!
• Out-of-the-way quest hubs stuck up on the top of a hill with a tiny, out-of-the-way access route. Like Thorium Point.
• Most of the flight paths take the "scenic (overly long) route." You don't have to.
• Big Cliffs o'Doom, and their related Elevators o'Death, can be easily circumvented. Just mount up and those elevators are a thing of the laggy falling death past.
• Big Cliffs that just simply serve as barriers to make you walk/run really far will also be a thing of the past. See: Stonetalon Mountains, Hinterlands, EPL, Feralas, Dustwallow Marsh, the Wetlands/Dun Morogh border, and the Un'Goro/Tanaris border.
• More quickly get backup on PvP servers. Downside: hit-and-run gankings will likely increase, and be harder to see coming.
• Faster travel from CoT (and its portal from Dalaran) to Gadgetzan and its x-faction AH.
• We can all laugh at the Greymane Wall's inability to keep us out of Gilneas, no matter if the door's also been broken down by the time we can fly over it.
• Possible spectral gryphons on death... or else it will create some very horrible places to gank someone and force them to spirit res, ala TBC (glad I'm on a PvE server now!)
  
• Herbing/Mining "old-world" stuff will be sooo much easier.
• Aerial visits to enemy cities will make pvp raids quite entertaining.
• Horde have less of a hassle questing in WPL and its complete lack of a flight path.
  
• Special atmospheric easter eggs hidden in locations only accessible by flight, akin to the mysterious daycare/orphanage north of Shattrath.

So, I'm certainly looking forward to Cataclysm's addition of flight in EK/Kalimdor. :)

Worgen, Goblins

I am quite disappointed. I wanted my cow to be a worgen. I wanted to play a horde worgen. I can't have that. I get troll-druids and little green men.

Oh well. I'll live. I promise this post isn't *that* much of a whine fest :)

My current plan is to leave both of my druids the way they are. In the stress of work and life recently, I caved and gave up on moonkin in favor of kitty-spec for my resto main's secondary spec, which didn't hurt my raids because we've had shaman totems making up for my transient moonkin aura. As for my alliance druid, I like my night elf as she is and don't see a reason to move her to horde if she can't be a worgen on horde (another cow after the possibility of being a worgen? nty)... and if she's on alliance, I have no reason to race-switch her to worgen either since I won't be playing her with my friends. She'll remain an elf. Kaelynn will be a moocow as always. Status quo.

I will certainly be leveling a worgen alt, of course; probably as a hunter. The hunter class has been fun for me, and I have two hunter alts already (my first, level 64, was named Wolfpaws), they were just left behind on old servers. I'm sure many of my guild will be goofing off on worgen alts as well, and it'll be easier to chat across factions with the RealID chat being added in, so it won't be so lonely! I'm really looking forward to creating that new character. I just want to jump in and create her and play her now. I'm watching Huzzah's Dude, Where's my Worgen? blog for all the tantalizing scraps of worgeny info, and building up a character backstory for her already--something I don't often do with alts:

She paused there in her landing crouch, for she could hear a soft chuckling. Looking about, she grew frustrated as she could not locate the source, and let out a low growl. "Who's there?" she whispered hoarsely, a feral edge to her young voice. "I suppose you are not used to looking to the trees, little one," came the musical voice of an elf. "Undead have rarely made use of such tactics."

As for goblins, I will say this: as little interest as I have in them, I cannot deny that some players love the idea and are excited that they'll be able to level one and, eventually, race-swap their mains to one. I certainly did a double-take when they told me this, but considering the other races they've been playing for so long (orcs, undead?) the idea of little green wrinkled goblins isn't that bad a thing for them.

Worgen are WAY cooler, imo, and I will embrace all my new druid worgen buddies warmly. The trolls, too. As long as they don't try to shrink my head. Bearform butts are big enough already without a tiny head compounding the issue.

Creating Graphics for use in WoW

Many mods allow for custom graphics, including LunarSphere, eePanels, and KGpanels. World of Warcraft will not support all types of graphics, however: if you drop a .jpeg or .gif (for example) into your addon folder and expect it to work, you will be disappointed.

World of Warcraft will only support the following file formats:

• .tga
  A Targa, or Truevision Advanced Raster Graphics Adapter, is an image file extension that supports "alpha" channels: that is to say, transparency. It is used by a lot of video games since it's easy to implement and isn't bogged down by patent restrictions. It is an older and lower-quality file type, however.
  
  
• .blp
  The .BLP extension is Blizzard's own image extension. World of Warcraft uses the BLP2 version of the extension. Like the .tga, it supports alpha channels, but most image-editing programs do not recognize the .tga format. Converters exist to change an image to a .blp, and vice-versa.

Some image programs, such as Photoshop, can work directly with .tga images. I prefer to work in Photoshop with .png format since it is higher quality and easier to work with, and then use a converter program to turn them into .blp files. Most browsers also support .png files, so I use them regularly.

NOTE: some addons will only support one of the two available formats, simply due to the way the addon's developer decided to code for the addon to look for graphics. Check your addon's instruction files to see if it will limit you in what formats you can use.


Dimension restrictions:

World of Warcraft will only support tga/blp images with pixel dimensions that are a power of 2, though the width and height do not need to be the same. You may use these numbers as your image's overall pixel height or width:

• 2 (totally tiny!)
  
• 4
• 8
• 16
• 32
• 64 (standard for Lunarsphere graphics)
  
• 128
• 256
• 512 (would fit in the width of this post)
  
• 1024 (a common monitor resolution pixel height)
  
• 2056 (really big)
  
• etc.

Going beyond 512 will result in huge graphics, so most dimensions will be below that, aside those used for very large UI images. Lunarsphere sphere graphics are 64 x 64 pixels, for example. Your height and width do not have to be equal, but both must be a multiple of 2! 256 by 512 is permissible, for example.


Programs:

Personally, I use Photoshop for the majority of my image editing. It is an expensive program, however, so if you're looking for a free download, I recommend checking out GIMP: GNU Image Manipulation Program.

The key to creating graphics for use in-game is the transparency settings for the image: parts of the image that don't have any color and let whatever is behind the image to show through, ie they're "invisible." If you import a flat image without a transparency layer that the game can understand, the image's background will show up white, rather than showing the game going on behind it! This transparency layer is also called an Alpha Channel.

For the following demonstration, I will be creating a graphic for Lunarsphere's central sphere.

Photoshop:

1. Create a New file (ctrl-n). Set its height and width to a pair of the restricted dimension sizes listed above; for this example, I am creating a 64 by 64 pixel image. Background fill should be transparent.
   
   
2. Paste in or create an image you wish to use for the graphic. Resize, color, sharpen, and otherwise edit the image as needed.
   
3. I like to delete any part of the image that I want to be transparent. For a circular selection such as for a Lunarsphere image, I use the Elliptical Marquee tool to select a round circle of space. I suggest starting just within the border of one corner of the image, and dragging down to the same distance from the border in the opposite corner, to ensure that the edges aren't cropped. Then, select INVERSE (shift + ctrl + I) and delete the selection, which will remove everything that isn't within the circle.
   
   
4. Create an Alpha Channel by going to the Channels tab and creating a new layer. This will overlay your visible image with a pink hue to show you what parts of the image WILL BE TRANSPARENT when you save the image! The pink does not show as a color when the image is saved, it is merely to denote transparency. If the other RGB (color) channels hide themselves, you can turn them back on by clicking on the little "eye" boxes along the left side of the list.
   
   
5. Delete the pink from all areas where you want the image to be visible. A quick way of doing this is to go back to the Layers tab and ctrl-(left)click on the layer to load a selection of it, assuming you've deleted everything that you want to be transparent, and then deleting your loaded selection from the Alpha 1 layer in the Channels tab. This will remove the pink from the deleted area of the image, showing what parts *will* show when the image is imported into the game. Everything that is pink will be transparent. (Ignore the other layers shown in the screenshot's list, they are not visible and are just from me playing around!)
   
   Note: If you fade out the pink by deleting only part of it, such as with a partly-transparent selection or with a half-opacity eraser brush, then that area will show up partly transparent in the game, rather than fully transparent or fully opaque.
6. Save the image with the Alpha Channel's pink layer visible as a .png file (I select "None" for the interlacing question that will pop up). Below is the image that I created.
   
   
7. Use a file converter to change the .png into a .blp file. I personally use the BLP2PNG converter, which can be downloaded here. Simply drag the image file's icon from the folder it is saved in and drop it on the BLP2PNG.exe file icon, and it will automatically generate a .blp copy of your .png file in the same folder as your .png image.
   
   
8. Place your newly created .blp file into the appropriate folder for your image import mod. For Lunarsphere, this is the LunarSphere Imports folder. Some mods may tell you to just type in the path location of the file; create a folder in your addons for your images, name it something like "MyImages," and save your .blp there.
9. Start up WoW and use your mod's instructions on how to import the image. For Lunarsphere, sphere images are imported from the Skin tab in the Settings menu; hit the Import Art button, type in the file name (in this case mine is "howlmoon"), and hit "import." If all went well, you will have a new image to use for your mod!
   
   
   

The above screen shot shows the demo "howlmoon" image uploaded into LunarSphere. I also created a background image that I imported using kgpanels that serves as a border for my Lunarsphere as well as my minimap:


GIMP:

In progress :) I have had less practice with this program. It is far better than MS Paint, but many of its tools are not as powerful as Photoshop. It's taking this Photoshop user quite some time to acclimate to. I will post the GIMP walk-through as a new post later, when I feel more comfortable with the program, though I can tell you this, now: it does have the same "layers" and "channels" tab, and the "alpha" channel is included in ever image by default. You will just need to paint on the alpha channel to add areas of transparency to your image.