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Insider Trader: Yeah, nice effect -- but does it glow?
Insider Trader is your weekly inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products. Laugh all you like – for a sizable population of WoW players, an enchant's not worth the mats it takes unless it creates a cool glow. A long-time enchanter, I've made my share of snarky remarks in guild chat about dorky customers bringing me mats for completely inappropriate enchants on completely inappropriate weapons ... But then again, back in the day (ok -- way back in the day), I also made sure to equip an alternate staff enchanted with Demonslaying every time I zoned into town. Watch the peons swarm to see what the Great and Powerful Enchanter (TM) is wielding!You'd probably be pretty surprised to learn that there is, in fact, an entire web site devoted to helping enchanters and players figure out which enchants make the coolest glows. GlowChart.com, the brainchild of Cordana of the Detheroc realm, offers screenshots of specific glows, lists of available enchants and their effects, and news on newly updated Burning Crusade-era glows.Read more about glows after the jump, as well as an Insider Trader tip for miners trying to track elusive greyed-out "ghost nodes."
Better Know an Interface Element: The minimap
Today I would like to take a look at WoW's UI -- not any of those newfangled mods, but the default UI, the one that Blizzard wrote. We'll start at the top-right corner: everybody, say hi to the minimap!As far as I've been able to determine, the minimap hasn't changed since I've started playing the game (circa patch 1.4 or so) -- until now! Yes, as I'm sure you've all noticed by this point, patch 2.0.1 introduced a new minimap button, one to open the world map (it's the one in the top-left corner of the minimap pic to the right, all looking like the Atlas button). I was rather confused about this for quite some time, until I realized that they had to take the world map button off the micro-buttons at the bottom of the screen to make room for one for the new LFG interface. But the micro-buttons are a topic for another post.
