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Patch 5.1 changes item tooltip displays
As part of the Patch 5.1 item upgrade system it seems our item tooltips got a redesign as well. Instead of having the sockets and enchants appear above the green text, as they do in this old screenshot of patch 4.3 valor purchases, the information is now broken up so that the item's base statistics are displayed first, and any enchants or item upgrades are displayed after. At first I had a typical 'eww, why'd they change that' visceral reaction of distaste for the change, but going back and looking at the older item screenshots, I think the new format is easier to read and puts the information in a more coherent and organized way. Having the item's basic stat information and reforges up top makes it clear what's basic to the item and what's an enchant or gem. It makes knowing what the item's upgrade level and reforges are easier, in my opinion. I'm still not used to the change, but I expect I'll grow accustomed to it. Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.
EVE Evolved: EVE Online's new tutorial
If you've ever tried EVE Online and couldn't make it through the cumbersome tutorial, you might want to revisit it. The new player experience received a huge update with the recent Inferno 1.2 patch, which visually updated the starter tutorial and revamped the rookie ships and free frigates players are given. The new tutorial is fully up to date, even introducing recent gameplay updates like the "loot all" button on cargo containers and the new interface for accessing agent missions while in space. A lot of effort has been put into the updated tutorial, but has it really made a difference? This week I gave it a try to find out. Last night at around 6 p.m. EVE time (GMT), there were over 38,000 players online, and only 1,200 were marked as trial accounts. I logged in to find 2,800 players in Rookie Help, a mandatory help channel exclusively for characters under 30 days old. That means just over 7% of characters logged in at the time were either rookies or veterans starting new alternate characters. With only 1,200 of those characters being on trial accounts, a healthy number of the remaining 1,600 must have been recent signups on fully subscribed accounts. Even the most cynical player has to admit that these are encouraging numbers of new players. In this week's EVE Evolved, I give the new EVE tutorial a spin to find out whether now is a good time for new players to sign up.
Quests added to mob tooltips on the PTR
The Godmother over at ALT:ernative ducked into the PTR recently, and noticed something new: Blizzard is apparently testing adding Questhelper-style notes to tooltips of the quest-related mobs you come across. This looks so familiar that I thought it was an addon, but no, apparently Blizzard really is planning to tell you when a mob you're looking at happens to be the target of a quest.It shocked me for a second -- not only is this dumbing down the questing game even further (maybe someday we will have a large red arrow pointing out a quest target from zones away), but it seems to be an awfully big break in immersion. Blizzard is basically telling you that "this is the mob you need, right here," and actually reading the quest text becomes even less necessary.But then I realized that tooltips themselves aren't exactly paragons of game immersion -- it's already a little jump in the reality of the game to see a box with a mob's name and level whenever you mouse over it. Tooltips are already where the UI meets the road, so to speak. And as for the "dumbing down" of the game, most experienced players already had this functionality through addons like Questhelper and MonkeyQuest anyway (and if you do plan to complain that this makes things way too easy, make sure Questhelper is out of your Addon directory before you start typing). But if the tips stay in the game when the patch goes live, questing will be that much easier for people who stick to the basic UI.
A WoW gift bag for Valentine's Day
How great is this? Reader angrypanda a.k.a. Joshua links us to this update on his Livejournal, in which he shows off the awesome set of gifts his wife got him for Valentine's Day. It's a romantic gift basket, with everything, from the chocolates to the Linen Bag itself, marked out with WoW-style tooltips. Everything looks authentic, too -- there's a Bag of Candies, Dark Desire (looks like the hit rating bonus got nerfed for the RL version, though), and even a Moonberry Juice. And there's a "Jox (Horde) Shou" handmade craft in there, too -- those are their character names, Jox and Lykishou.Joshua says he and his wife have been married nearly 15 years, and they weren't planning to do much this year (or so he thought -- here's hoping they had a very nice dinner and movie later that evening). Very awesome. Because the Livejournal seems to be hidden behind a content filter of some kind, we've put all of Joshua's pics in a gallery below so you can see everything all in one place. What a terrific Valentine's Day gift.%Gallery-44901%
Addon Spotlight: TipTac
Welcome to the Father's Day edition of Addon Spotlight. I honestly tried to think about an addon that would match the holiday theme for all of thirty seconds before deciding to just write about an addon I've found to very useful. (Although perhaps you got your Dad some tools, or your Dad is a tool, so take it for what its worth.)TipTac is a tooltip mod that adds a load of features to the little informative frames that appear when you hover over characters and objects in the game. As I've implied before, I enjoy quick and easy visual references to important information. This includes a character's class, health and reaction. (in the case of NPC's)TipTac provides another way to discern details; a redundancy I embrace for the sake of easy targeting and planning.
How to get Wowhead tooltips in Google Reader
An ode: Wowhead tooltips, O how I heart thee! I wish...eth I wouldst to be able to carry thou aroundst in mine pockets. (Did people even have pockets back when they went around saying thee and thou? Mine coineth purse?) Anyway, the point is: we love Wowhead tooltips because all it takes is a mouse-hover to find out everything you want to know about an item mentioned on WoW Insider or other websites. And now that you've gone ahead and put WoW Insider on your Google Reader, you can take the next step to get the nifty little tooltips in to show up in your RSS feeds.Here's how:
Wowhead power updated
You've probably noticed that we use Wowhead to embed item, spell, talent, and quest tooltips in articles here, and some of you use the same functionality on your own blogs. Wowhead's codeslinger Skosiris has made a change in the way this is handled, and that change necessitates a small update in the code needed to produce those tooltips. All you have to do is change the line "<script src="http://www.wowhead.com/widgets/power.js"></script>" to "<script src="http://www.wowhead.com/widgets/power.js?lol"></script>" wherever you have it in your code; this will force the users to reload the JavaScript so they're not running an out-of-date version.If your own site is not powered by Wowhead, but would like it to be, it's as easy as adding "<script src="http://www.wowhead.com/widgets/power.js?lol"></script>" anywhere in your page code. If you do that, all relevant links pointing to Wowhead will get tooltips. Nifty, eh?
Wowhead now knows NPC abilities
Wowhead has gone live with a few new updates to brighten up your April Fool's day, and help you get the pink residue of Hello Kitty out of your eyeballs with some of their tasteful black (just don't check their front page). The new 3D system I wrote about previously has gone live, featuring improved quality, NPC models, armor models, and the ability to preview items on any race or gender character model. Quest tooltips are now supported for sites powered by Wowhead, which includes us. This allows me to mention, for instance, that Sunfury Attack Plans is a good quest to group up for, since the Plans are a group drop. Most NPCs now have a tab listing their abilities. A few NPCs are missing them due to a couple of reasons: no data has been collected on them yet (e.g. Techbot), or there are two (or more) mobs with the same name (e.g. Kael'Thas). This latter difficulty has been fixed, and NPCs affected by it should have abilities listed the next time Wowhead parses data. This last one is what I'm most excited about. It's nice to be able to see what a boss (or just a random mob) can do ahead of time, or, in the inverse, to see what mobs use a given ability. If this had been around a while back, I wouldn't have gotten all excited about Holyform, since I would have been able to tell right away it was just used by some Sunwell trash mob.
Hunter changes in 2.4
When information began to trickle down about patch 2.4, hunters, like most classes, were groaning. Which nerf bat would we be hit with next? Fortunately, it seems that we have slipped under the radar. For now. Maybe Aspect of the Beast finally did us some good. Let's break down the changes and see how this is going to be affecting us. With no major patches between now and Wrath, we might be living with these changes for awhile. Bug fixes: Equipping a thrown weapon while in the middle of an Auto-Shot will no longer cause animation issues. Since no one likes animation issues, I'm filing this under "win." Not that I've ever tried to equip a thrown weapon while already shooting, mind you. Casting Flare while in any way not visible, will no longer cause your flare to be invisible to other players. To me, this sounds fair. Also, I want to be invisible. Rogues can, so why not hunters? Right? No? Hunter's Mark: Hunters with Improved Hunter's Mark will now properly overwrite Hunter's Mark cast by Hunters without the talent. This used to be, but then was not. Now, it will be again. While it might rub your ego the wrong way always reading the message "a more powerful spell is already active," it is better for overall DPS this way. The stamina tooltip for hunter pets will now display the proper health increase. Personally, I find that most of my tooltips on most of my characters do not reflect the changes made by my talent points. At least one more will appear correctly, and I will try not to be sad about the others. Hunters will no longer spin around if they cast Aimed Shot or Steady Shot while facing away from their target. So this was a nice little bug we had for awhile, but let's face it; it wasn't fair. It also doesn't help the "huntard" image any when hunters are caught whining that now, we will have to learn to actually face our targets; and that's just too hard. What does this mean you ask? Do note that these are our two channeled shots, and as such, if another player sees us channeling, they need only run around us far enough to interrupt the channel. Prior to 2.4, we would have spun with the runner.
WoW Insider: Now with Wowhead tooltips
The more observant among you may have noticed something neat happen to the site over the past few days: all item links that point to Wowhead now have tooltips! In case you hadn't noticed, here are a few examples: Primal Mooncloth Arcanite Steam Pistol That should save some people a click or two, and more importantly, it looks cool (in my opinion, anyway). And the most exciting part is that this is really easy to get going on your own site. All you have to do is include this one line anywhere in the page:<script src="http://www.wowhead.com/widgets/power.js"></script>That's it! Now all Wowhead item links have tooltips.If you want to jazz the links up a little by making them show up in the appropriate color, you can put "class=q#" in the <a> tag, where # is the number of the quality level of the item: 5 for legendary, 4 for epic, and so on down the scale. As an example, the code for the Arcanite Steam Pistol link above looks like this:<a class="q4" href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29949">Arcanite Steam Pistol</a>But your tooltips will still work if you don't want to bother with the class attribute; the links will just all be the same color. Now you too can be powered by Wowhead!
