buff-tracker
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Addon Spotlight: Buff monitoring with Weak Auras
Way, way back in the last Addon Spotlight, we talked about addons to monitor your debuffs on your target, and after a lengthy hiatus, we're back to look at buffs. Why is buff monitoring a good idea? Well, think of DoT classes. The way the game works is that when you cast a DoT, it will take a snapshot of your current situation, so, if you have a buff up that increases your intellect for a few seconds, such as a weapon enchant, then that intellect increase will be applied to your DoT. If you refresh that DoT without the intellect proc active, the second DoT will be weaker than the first. The same applies to healing, to general damage, to so many things, so monitoring your buffs is really important. Regardless of what class you play, there will be buffs you want to look out for to make the best of what you're doing. So how do you watch them? With addons, that's how! We're going to take a look at several addons that monitor buffs, and we're going to start with the one I prefer, which is the oddly named Weak Auras. Weak Auras was originally created as an alternative to Power Auras, which, alas, has rather fallen by the wayside of late. Weak Auras is, therefore, the one to look out for. We've talked about it before here at Addon Spotlight, but Weak Auras is just so good at tracking buffs we thought it was worth dedicating an article to that specific role. Setting up Weak Auras seems daunting at first, but I promise you that this is really, really easy. You just need someone to tell you how to do it.
Mists of Pandaria: UI Updates
If you've been nervous about how Blizzard intends to handle the item squish that Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street discussed in a developer blog back in November, worry no more -- we saw the solution in action first-hand at the press event. We also saw a few other notable UI updates and additions, such as the full implementation of the new talent pane, a new buff tracker, and a revamped character creation screen. Mega Damage Rather than compressing item levels and retuning seven years' worth of content, the developers appear to have opted to go with the concept of Mega Damage, replacing a bunch of spare 0s with a K or an M where appropriate. When killing mobs in Pandaria, my four-digit damage was not compressed. If I hit something for 3,000 damage, it displayed as 3,000 damage. However, five-digit numbers and higher were compressed. 30,000 became 30K. It's a very simple solution and should have very little impact on your gameplay overall. Here's Ghostcrawler's explanation of the Mega Damage solution from that old dev blog:
