jesta
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Creators of Epic Advice working on Epic Plan encounter planner
Now this is interesting. Our old friend Jesta, who made the EpicAdvice.com site not so long ago, is working on a new project at EpicPlan.com, and while it's still hidden away in pre-alpha, you can see what they're up to in this thread on EA. It's a slideshow/diagramming web app, basically -- you can take maps of the game's instances, lay out icons and symbols on them as you wish, and then animate and caption boss fights and encounters. The end result is a very clear way to show off different raid strategies, and we're told the slideshows are embeddable on other sites as well (you may even see some here eventually on WoW.com). Unfortunately, they're only taking signups for the beta of the service right now, and while you can watch a show in action on the technology demo, you can't make your own quite yet. But it seems like a very impressive tool for raidleaders, both to share plans with the public and players seeking help, as well as your own raid members. It'll be great to be able to make a quick and easy visual display of where to stand and what to do during boss fights and instance encounters.
Two online tools for jewelcrafting
If you're a jewelcrafter (or just want to find some good gems to stick in your armor-- and who doesn't?), you'll probably find these two little online jewelcrafting applications invaluable.First off, Xornot's Gem Finder by Xornot of Gorefiend is an awesome little application that lets you browse through all the gems in the game (so far-- I'm not a jewelcrafter, so I don't know if it's completely up-to-date) according to socket color, stat bonuses, crafting or vendoring, and even by name. All of the gems are color coded, and because Xornot is apparently a l33t web coder, everything is Ajaxy smooth. Very cool tool for finding just the right gem for that shiny new epic you just picked up.Jesta has also created a jewelcrafting tool that may not look quite as shiny as the first one, but in fact goes a little farther-- not only can you browse all the gems in the game (by base gem, color, or class appropriateness), but it looks like eventually, jewelcrafters will be able to log in, list the gems they can make, and even list prices for prospective buyers on the server. It's kind of like a custom online auction house listing for jewelcrafting. Unfortunately, there's no date listed for functionality, and it seems like Jesta is a little too busy working on all kinds of other things to get it up and running, but we'll throw a hug his way and thank him for the great online app.The 2.1 changes will bring a little more order to the auction house in terms of gems, but until then (and even afterwards), these tools look really useful for both prospectors and their customers.[ via WoW LJ ]
