Surely, It’s been around on many blogs already I guess, as I hardly check those anymore and it’s a few days old already.

All I can say is that it makes me want to distance me even further from this game. I know it’s just one crazy person and it’s not saying anything about people who play in general. The thing is that it kinda reminds me to that “need” I used to feel to login every now and then: just checking mail, AH, calendar, daily, etc, etc, bloody etc. It wasn’t an overwhelming need (well, sometimes it was), but it was there nonetheless. The need wasn’t because of the incredible amount of fun that I just couldn’t resist anymore, NO! It was only because things had to be done, because a day lost was emblems lost, gold lost, less life lost

I’m SOOOOOO glad that’s gone!

You know, I had 1600 glyphs on the AH when I last logged in.. These are all timed out from my mailbox right now, and I… I just don’t give a crap!

I probably made around 4000g gold from those also, which is what I usually got from a full AH post.. but, no problem.. screw it..

Same goes for 45 mails all maxed with stacks of herbs.. gone! …Not even the slightest feeling of regret.. Well, perhaps that these poor plants were picked for nothing… ah screw it, it’s just pixels!

I guess this is it.. forever this time.. Wow is over for me, I don’t like it anymore, and right now I really don’t want to be part of it anymore.. stopping my automatic payments as we speak..

Glad that’s over with…

So, what’s next?

I’ve been watching more and more video’s from Star Wars: the old republic, and I like it. I like their idea about it too: they think of “epic” battles as where one man beats strong or multiple opponents. Not like wow, where 25 beat one. That’s hardly epic, that’s just ganging up where you’ll always be just another cog in the machine.

Besides, I really like the Bioware games too. I loved mass effect 1&2, they’ve got a real eye for quality. My feelings towards lucasarts have been dropping though, but I just hope they’re only lending their label because SW is their franchise. The Bioware story crew is more than capable of telling good stories themselves, but don’t take my word for it, even the biggest game cynic on the planet says so (at 3:00 if you can’t handle hilarious sarcasm ^^)

The thing is, I’m not even that much of a starwars fan!  Then again, I never was much of a dungeons and dragons fan too (f.e. I stopped playing dragon age, even though the game is technically very good). I know one big starwars fan though, the only RL friend of mine that still playing wow right now, so I’ll get probably him to switch too

Don’t worry, the face on the preview isn’t an in game character, that’s just a developer. The game looks exactly like you’d expect from a SW MMORPG, or any SW game for that matter.

Anyway… That bountyhunter looks absolutely sexy (no, not in a gay way!), so I already know what my first choice is going to be

Guess that’s just me, lots of people tend to annoy me

I’m still not playing WoW, but this is something that popped up, because this can happen in any game… and does… It’s about a situation I come across a lot, because I’m the kind of guy that often needs some time on my own, so I tend to play on “secret” alts, or under different names, depending on the game.

So who are those stealth douchebags? Me? because I like some me time? Nah.. doesn’t everyone needs a break from the social circus every now and then? I’m not hurting anyone.

No, I’m talking about people you know, like guildmembers, or friends (at least you thought they were) that always seem like a nice guy/gal. Always friendly, social, etc. But who have another side which is not so visible…

Until you’re playing on this alt.. Well, I was, many times.. which didn’t have the prestigious guildlabel, or simply isn’t as well known, or well geared as the main(s). You queue up for a dungeon, or raid, and you get into a group with that someone you know… For a second you think about telling who you are, but you remember that you did that before and therefore you’ve got 3 other chars that used to be you’re escape chars, but everyone knows them now, so they’re in your guild as one of your alts now.

Anyway! ..This person has no idea that anyone he/she knows is in the group, and acts like a complete douchebag. Completely different than you ever knew him/her.. Blaming everyone, blaming YOU, complaining about gearscore, the full douchebag package!

And there you are.. biting your lip (well, fingers ), because you SOO want to reveal who you are right now.. but you don’t.. because you don’t want to lose yet another escape char in the process..

Believe it or not, I’ve had this happen quite a few times!

And I still don’t know how to deal with this. I don’t like to tell the rest of the guild I’m playing some alt that’s just mine, so I can tell how I know.. I’m very aware that doing that could (and will) be taken the wrong way. And who could blame them? But nobody is perfect, and this is just my little quirk. I play games to get away, and sometimes I even need to get away from the game (or the people).. It doesn’t mean I don’t like them, sometimes it’s just because I’m cranky myself and don’t want to bother them with it..

Nothing is more annoying than to know the truth about someone, but you’re not able to tell it.. And meanwhile this person is getting praised and loved by the rest of the group, and I’m starting to look like a douche for not congratulating him/her on some drop or whatever..

The big dilemma here is: I could stop having secret chars (at least on the same server) and be able to tell the truth about these people.. But if I do this, I will also never know this truth because they would know me.. Honestly, I like to know this truth, even though it brings me into a not so pleasant situation.. I guess I’ve got this rare mental condition where I would rather be a bit more miserable myself than to unknowingly support an asshole.

Luckily though, the opposite happens too..People in my guild that never/rarely spoke a word in /g or TS.. people who I hardly knew existed, turned out to be very helpful, social people in PuG’s.. For some reason they were a bit shy in the guild, but were actually really nice people.. In those cases I feel like a real jerk for secretly spying on them (even though it’s not intended), but those people have the effect on me that I login to my escape chars much less.

The world needs more of those people.

One of the things that is similar too is the abundance of stupid people and assholes.

Of course, that goes for any game on the planet.

In any game you’ve got three types(*) of players:

• Stupid players (have no idea what they’re doing, and also not listening, or cooperating)
• Abusive players (decent to good players, don’t cooperate, blame anyone but themselves, but never help)
• Normal players (decent to good players, who cooperate, give advice and help)

*) there is a fourth kind: the griefers, who are a combination of assholes and stupid people, but they’re always handled correctly so I’m leaving them out.

In game these work like rock, paper, scissors.

At least they should.

• Stupid people will pester the normal players away.
• Assholes will kick, or pester the stupid people away.
• Normal players.. SHOULD kick the assholes for being an abusive prick.

The reality is, that assholes never get kicked. The normal players just put up with their shit, long after the stupid people have left.

Normal people are (still) in majority in most games. This should mean that the system would work itself out. The asshole will get rid of the idiot before the normal people leave, then the remaining normal players will get rid of the asshole after being tired of him/her.

I consider myself one of the normal players that wouldn’t hesitate to kick an abusive prick (also hopeless stupid people btw). And believe me, I’ve tried each and every time.

It nearly always fails. Most of the time, I get nobody else to vote yes.

What you need to know is that, in left4dead, votekicking is almost automatic. Whenever you votekick some random guy, people will just press yes without going through the enormous trouble of thinking for a split second if there’s actually any reason for this: “it’s probably deserved”, they seem to think. And yes, this get’s abused by funny guys a lot.

In wow, this may be less so, because you’re more aware of your groups actions (3rd person (over)view, out of combat kick restrictions, having to cope with one less (in l4d the computer takes over)), but it still happens.

Therefore I’m so surprised that in the case of kicking an asshole, there’s a clear favoritism for this kind of people. They’re the hardest to kick of all, by a mile.

So, I’ve been thinking about this, but I can’t really find a logical answer.

Why would any sane person want to have an asshole in the group, who’s constantly blaming and calling names? Even when this guy is clearly not THAT good himself?

• Is it because this guy gives the illusion of being a good player, because he criticizes the other people?
• Is it because people are afraid of him? Even though he can’t do much about it, and there’s no way he can get back at you?
• Is it because people automatically see him as leader, and protect him, even though him being around or not does not change anything? because he’s not actually leading, he’s just blaming?
• Is it human nature to respect assholes? Do a lot of people actually LIKE to be abused? Mildly comparable to S&M, where people enjoy being the slave.

That last one might seem extreme, but if you’ve ever heard of the Stockholm syndrome, it’s not that odd at all.

The main concern I have with this is that if people continue to let these guys be the assholes they are, it will only encourage them to keep doing so, and encourage others to become that way. The problem is, there isn’t anything I can do about it alone and I’m predicting that the amount of assholes will only grow more and more, unless more decent people snap out of it and act against those assholes.

Or… is there actually a good reason for allowing these guys to do what they do that I’m not seeing? I can hardly believe it, but I’m keeping all options open, hoping to find one that makes sense…

This has happened before. Three times to be exact. This will be the fourth. I doubt the last, though.

The reason I knew this was coming was simply because I’ve been logging into the game way to often for way too long for just one reason: to do the daily/weekly stuff.

I didn’t do that stuff because I liked to do it. Hell, no. I was happy when my daily boring dungeon was over with. I was happy when my JC did his daily quest. I was happy when I filled the AH again with new glyphs, enchants, gems, etc. I was happy when I was done with all that stuff and could quit the game, because there wasn’t much else to do anyway.

The game simply turned into a chore, a boring job.

I don’t even care about new gear anymore. Ii simply wouldn’t change much. I’m close to being goldcapped, so I could even buy lots of great upgrades easily, but I don’t, because I don’t care. There’s not much to do for me with this new gear, even if I decided to finally join a guild.

In fact, all a long I knew this was the main reason I didn’t join a guild. I got plenty of requests, a shaman, especially a resto/enhancement shaman is probably the most wanted class on my server. Every time someone asked my to join I found some excuse to either stall, or not join at all. The reality was I just didn’t want more obligations/reasons to be online.

How can a game be fun if everything feels like an obligation? Well, it can’t and it isn’t.

I guess blogging was just one of the many things I tried to keep myself interested, but it failed also.

However, I still like to talk about the game, I still follow a bunch of other blogs, so I guess there’s still a part of me that likes it. I guess I’ll probably return sooner or later, like I did before. I might even write a post every now and then in the meantime.

For now, I’m waiting till there are new things that interest me again, like a new patch or perhaps a new raid/dungeon.

Somehow, I almost felt relieved. Disconnected from the internet, games, all that stuff that is costing me way too much time, so I deliberately didn’t do a thing about it for a day or two. I still have a crappy old laptop that can handle mail and a single page in it’s browser, so nothing really crucial was missing.

Usually, I’m easy with broken things. I get rid of it and buy brand new stuff. That’s a lot faster and easier. Especially with electronics, an upgrade is always nice too, so any excuse to get something new and better is happily accepted.

This monitor was kinda valuable to me though. It’s one of the last high resolution non-wide screen monitors around and those almost impossible to get anymore, unless you’re willing to pay 3x as much as a comparable widescreen monitor.

I hate widescreens. I never understood why anyone would wanna buy one (except as TV), but apparently everyone does. I think the name “wide” is misleading. It’s not wider, it’s flatter. I’ve got the same huge left & right borders when I’m browsing as widescreen users have (especially on pages like this, that still focus on 800 width screens), but I don’t have to scroll up and down after every single line I read. I sometimes even turn this screen a quarter circle to get a “high” screen, which is great for blogging, text editing, browsing: anything except gaming, graphical work, or watching movies of course, but I’ve got a big ass TV for that, so I’m not going to watch movies on a TFT monitor.

Gaming on a widescreen is gimping yourself . Definitely if you’re also an FPS gamer like I am, but even games like wow have problems. You need to scan your eyes over the entire screen like you’re watching a tennis match. This takes more time than you might think, and it seems like you see more, you actually see less, because if you see the right side of your screen, you hardly see what happens left. The biggest annoyance however is that the huds leave an even smaller part of screen usable. It’s easier to overlook the voidzone on a wide screen.

But enough of the rant, I realize I’m probably a minority with this opinion anyway. The point is, this monitor will be difficult to replace.

After a long unsuccessful search for a decent replacement for my monitor, I got pissed off and tore the damn thing open. Perhaps something could be fixed. Old CRT monitors usually had loose components, which you could easily fix with €5,- soldering iron (or the old fashioned smack on the side), who knows, perhaps  TFT monitors have similar problems. I couldn’t see anything wrong with this thing though, no smoking parts, black burns, rat nests, nothing.

I didn’t want to give up yet, so I searched the internet (what else?). At first I couldn’t find anything. Everywhere the conclusion was simple: TFT broke, throw it away, buy new… I still kept searching and searching until I finally stumbled upon this page. I don’t even know how I got there anymore, but it promised that TFT monitors could easily be fixed, something that I was hoping to find!

The main tip was: check for broken condensers. Broken condensers are easily spotted because of their bulgy top: these supposed to be flat. For the non electronic experts, condensers look like this:

And I found two that were broken! The pictures shows one of them, if you look carefully you can see it’s not perfectly flat.

I took a gamble (not much to lose anymore), went to the local electrical store, bought new ones, replaced them at home with a crappy old soldering iron. And what do you know, it worked! My dead monitor is alive again! The screen looks so bright again, like new.

It has been running for a few hours now, and still no explosions, regional power outs, or even a broken fuse!

What do you know, I’m an equipment healer too now

If you’re not afraid of a screwdriver and a soldering iron, keep that site bookmarked. Broken condensers seems to be a common cause for monitors to break down, it’s quite easy to fix and can save a bunch of money. And there’s not much to lose anyway… Well, perhaps some burned fingers, or a chance of electrocution, but that’s a small price to pay, right?

Via: Online Schools

I have wondered a few times before what the upkeep of their servers was costing Blizzard. Considering the amount of money blizzard is making from the game, I was curious how much of that was actually going into their server park.

Now I’ve got a number: 50 million per year.

Which is still nothing compared to the revenue, because only US and EU already generate 16 times that amount per year.

So, let’s see, even if those 150 developers made a million a year, which I doubt, and EU/US is their only source of income right now, which it isn’t, that means 600 million is left.. I’m pretty sure the office rent, business lunches, management, the marketing department and the cleaning lady aren’t burning the rest completely. Still, I can only guess how much of that money is profit. Can it be that most of it is profit? I get the strong feeling it is!

A job in game development sounds more interesting each day..

Up till now, it turned out to take up masses amount of my time, while most the readers I’ve accumulated so far seem to either get misdirected from some travel sites (what the hell is up with that?), or got screwed by google while they were looking for some decent information. Sure, I knew it would take time, especially since I have hardly acted out any of the plans I wrote in one of my first posts. I guess I just didn’t feel like it.

Anyway, what got more and more clear to me is that there are a gazillion wow blogs out there. Every day I stumble upon more blogs like this one, small time starting wow blogs with hardly any attention. Some seem to have been around for a long time also, but are still sitting in a small dark corner.

Why don’t they get more viewers? Well, like I’ve explained in one of my earlier posts: people need to know that you exist before they’ll start reading for one, but you’ve also got to catch peoples interest. I don’t need an extensive research to figure that out, it’s how it works for me too. I discover blogs either by a search, or via other blogs. That last one, however, is by far the most effective method. If a blog get’s mentioned on another big blog, traffic will skyrocket. I’ve gotten to know nearly all blogs that way. The first one was via a google search, the rest via links and blogrolls.

So, there we’ve hit the biggest problem.

At the moment there’s a relatively small group of blogs that get most attention from the wow community (whatever that may be). These blogs are the first hits you’ll get when you’re looking for wow-blogs. These are the ones that everyone has on their blogroll, so if you know one blog, you’re likely to find them next.

So, effectively this means that to get your readers, you need to get known on these well known blogs first.

There’s only one way of doing that, and that’s become a regular commenter on theirs. With interesting comments, of course. You’ll get noticed, at least by the comment readers, and they’ll click your name sooner or later.

It shouldn’t pose a big problem if you’re someone very social that also likes to talk a lot, though it does also mean that you’ve got to like these known blogs, or at least, care for their topics enough to react. If you really want to become as big as them, some of them need to like you enough to put you on their list, not only so you reach more people via them, but it also boosts you in search engines.

The fact is, at the moment these blogs basically have an oligopoly on wow blogging. If you’re just starting a blog out of the blue and want to get readers without getting boosted by them, your only hope lies with the search engines. With the gazillion small time competitors out there however: good luck to you!

You can write a lot about specific subjects on which you can be sure to be googled often: like making gold, boss tactics, pvp tips: any interesting guide. Perhaps big news items too if you’re fast with it: my post about elitist armory still gets google hits today, for example, but I don’t have good enough sources to pull this off regularly, I just happened to stumble upon that one.

So, where am I going with all of this?

I just realized that I don’t care enough for keeping a blog to go through all that trouble. I could simply remain one of the gazillion small timers and perhaps over time grow a little while doing what I’m doing. The more important question is: do I really care about much attention? That answer is: no. I’m just not so much a social creature in that way. I just like to put my opinion out there, that’s the reason for having this blog. If it isn’t read however, it’s not really effective. To get it to be read, I need to put in effort that go far beyond my goals. This is my conflict.

My conclusion for now is that I don’t think that wow, a game, is important enough to me to put all that extra effort in. I’m not dropping the blog, but I’m not going to post as regularly as before either. Posting takes a lot of time and I was posting nearly every day, without really trying to get people to come here. That’s just a waste of time.

If I ever change my mind about his, I’m going to put all effort in, not just half of it. For now, I’m just going into relaxed-mode.

Luckily I don’t believe in nonsense like curses. Bad luck just happens. Especially the first time things tend to seem worse than they are.

Why am I telling this?

I just finished a very rough HoR run. I still hadn’t healed that place on the paladin, and now I got it for the daily. While I knew she was geared more than enough for that place, and I didn’t have any problems with the other ICC dungeons, I just didn’t like the thought of having to heal it without any AOE spells.

When I entered that place I first made extra sure there weren’t going to be any surprises, so I checked the tank quickly to see if he was any good. This guy’s gear was looking great. Everything was nicely enchanted and gemmed, his spec seemed fine too (as far as I can tell from a DK, the only class I barely know anything about). The rest of the group seemed like decent dps too, except for the warlock who immediately started tapping and took no effort to drink/eat  *sigh*.

I didn’t heal the warlock and we started the fight.

Ouch, this was harder that I hoped. I was spamming holy lights constantly, while getting knocked back, stunned, interrupted, frozen. The tank got to dangerously low levels quite a few times. I know DK tanks can be spiky, but this wasn’t fun anymore. Also, compared to my Shaman, the greater heals seemed to take forever, which was weird in a way, because I remember healing this place when they were just as fast on my shaman (1.5 seconds). I didn’t remember me having to use that many greater heals before. Earthshield and Ancestral Healing are powerful abilities, though, I wondered if those made the difference.

A tragedy happened: we wiped on the 4th wave. I had a hard time keeping the tank up, and he went down to 5% in the short time I got stunned. I didn’t have time to finish the cast after the stun wore off. The tank died.

I can’t remember wiping in HoR anymore. That hadn’t happened in ages, at least not when I tanked or healed it, so I felt kinda shitty about it. And even though I couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t be able to heal this place, there was absolutely nothing I could think of that could be wrong, I double, triple checked.

The group wasn’t complaining oddly enough, so we tried again. I politely asked the tank to use a cooldown when I was stunned. I knew he would be too busy to notice that and I don’t even know what kinds of cooldowns a DK tank has (he was blood spec I think), but I felt I had to try something.

So we tried again. This time I prepared myself for heavy heal nuking and mentally switched over to my 25Mans tank healing mode. I only focused on the tank, healing others using full holy lights as soon as the tank took the slightest bit of damage. I also used holy wrath every cooldown to create some short time-outs. Every single thing I did was necessary, because I had a real hard time keeping this guy up.

We got to Falric. In contrary to other healers, this is actually a great one to heal as a paladin healer. That might sound strange, because he does massive AOE damage, but having Shadow resistance aura + Aura mastery, and Bubble + Divine protection makes mitigating his AOE’s a joke. So, we downed him without too much effort.

Second set of waves.

Oh no, wipe at the 4th wave again!

I’m slowly starting to doubt my ability to do this. Are there any more abilities I can use? Would hand of sacrifice be a safe thing to do? I didn’t know it anymore.

We started again. I decided to use my bubble as soon as I noticed a rogue, in the fourth wave, because I clearly couldn’t afford one single stun.

I was hating the spikes. This damage was abnormal! I gave it all I had, blowing every cooldown I had, and we got till Marwyn, though I was OOM.

I used Plea while I drank  in the short time that boss came running to us. This boss was never hard to heal, I didn’t need much mana for this.

A few seconds into the fight. Tank loses 70% of his health in one shot! Whaaat??

I heal him up. Bam, again, 20% HP left.

What is this? I heal him to 80%, but now I’m out of mana.

Tank dies, we wipe.

“Ok guys, I don’t get this. I’ve never seen tanks take insane amounts of damage like this on that boss before. Something is wrong, but I have no idea what it is. Everything seems to be ok”.

A moment of silence..

“My gear is broken”.

You’ve GOT to be kidding me…. That never even crossed my mind even ONCE!

I only had such a thing happen to me one time, way back in TBC, after a bunch of wipes on Prince and then Nightbane. I was just as surprised back then as I was now. I always repair every chance I get, mostly because it’s done automatically by my addons (I believe titan panel has it build in). It had never happened to me before also, so I even wrote a ticket about my stats being wrong. Recount was covering the location where the “broken gear guy” was located, so I didn’t have the slightest idea something obvious was wrong.

Since then it never happened to me again, ever. And besides the random “lolwut” dps in pugs that asks for a repairbot after the first wipe, something that always annoys the crap out of me, I never even slightly considered this to be a thing that would happen to a decent player at the start of a raid, let alone a heroic.

But it did.

This whole run I was slowly beginning to doubt myself, even though the voices of reason, wisdom and experience were shouting to me: there is something else wrong, and you know it! You just haven’t figured out what it is!

I knew these “voices” were right, because they’ve always been right, yet without a good explanation I feel very uncomfortable, I have to know everything: I hate guessing.

Anyway, after the tank came back from fixing his gear, his health had shot up with 4000HP compared to when we started the instance. He must have had multiple pieces broken even back then.

Healing got much more relaxed, like it should with our gear. I didn’t have to stress anymore. We ended the waves and fight with me still having 85% of my mana.

The rest of the run was no problem as well, and I didn’t even break a sweat on the final battle. This all made a lot more sense to me.

It’s funny how after years of experience with healing, different classes, specs, roles, basic game mechanics, but definitely also a lot of experience with this particular encounter, I was still able to start doubting my own abilities. I’m always telling other people to never do this, but I still do it myself. Yet again, I got proven that there is no reason to. Will I end up in a similar situation again? Most likely. Will I doubt myself about things in the future? I hope not, but it can always happen.

I just hope this experience shows once again, that whenever things just seem like they aren’t right, they probably aren’t.  Some call it instinct, others call it intuition, but it’s in fact just your own logic being suppressed by momentary fear (doubt), or other clouds covering your judgment.

I actually don’t want to write much today. Yesterdays post took way to much time, so I’m keeping it simple today.

Did Occulus with this tank..

And healing was still very much boring..

Not so much because I am overgeared for it, but just because this guy hardly needed any attention at all.

I played with this one in FoS:

His gearscore was roughly 3k5 (forgot screenshot).

Had no problems healing him also, even though he was actually a bad tank, and I don’t mean in gear (I had constant aggro myself, being the healer).

Just posting it to show the gearscore gestapo that you don’t need a 4k+ tank to do heroics, even if the tank is crap. Perhaps HoR needs a little extra, but that’s it.

I was always blaming my addon mania for this, as I figured a few of them were probably fighting over who got to place their useless information in some unread tooltip first.

But this morning I got the joyful message from my internet provider that they secretly upped my internet speed!

Now, I can hardly believe that the lack of speed was causing the problems before (8Mbit should be more than enough, right?), but I wouldn’t be surprised if those sudden DC’s were caused by them tweaking their routers.

Still, I’m keeping my fingers crossed. It could just be temporary luck and my addons could still be plotting a huge chain-DC on my next run, right after I see the message: “Mainspecs, roll on [Trauma]“.

However, a faster internet connection for the same price is never a bad thing

And I think I already payed my due’s to murphy.. because to be absolutely safe, I decided to updated my router firmware as they suggested. Having my router protected as good as possible, this caused some undocumented updating problems: my password got reset, which not only caused me to not be able to access my router, and internet until I figured out how to reset it to factory default. It also resulted in me losing all the configurations which I meticulously tweaked over time. It took me 2 hours to get everything back as it was *sigh*

But I’m back in business, like everyone’s favorite VH boss would say.

Anyway, enough screen clutter, on to the addon of the week:

RaidBuffStatus

This addon came to replace my previously used BigBrother a while back, and it’s a must have if you’re perfectionist like me.

Unlike the name suggests, this addon does more than just check the status of buffs in the raid. However, that is one of its main purposes.

Who would want it?

Raidleaders mostly of course, but anyone with a sense of responsibility will like it very much. For tanks this can also be very useful. Even in PvP this is useful for the deathwarnings and the CC breaks.

Why would you want it?

To “spy” on everyone and quickly notice if they ate their plate clean, took their (right) medication.. I mean, have their (correct) food buffs and flasks/elixirs, buffs, aura’s, presences, or stances, but also who’s been slacking in giving the rest buffs (yes, I’m looking at you, slackadins!) and who is n0t even inside the instance yet even (regular slackers).

These are not it’s only functions.

For tanks it has the special function of showing interesting information about taunts used, and breaking CC’s. It can give text and sound feedback when your taunt fails, or when someone else taunts your target. When someone else taunts your target, it also recognizes if this is a tank or a non-tank. For example: if a hunter grabs your aggro, it will explicitly mention that it’s not a tank that taunted your target.

The options for taunt warnings are many, like you can see in this configuration screen, there’s not a single kind of taunt not covered. It’s close to too much information, but you can choose what you wanna see and what not, that’s the good thing.

For those that aren’t raidleading or tanking, it’s still useful besides spying on others. It can be configured just to show your buffs, and helps you buffing the right people by simple clicking your buffs in the main overview. CC breaks are also good to know if you’re a CC capable class. If you’re a dps druid it’s also interesting to get deathwarnings too, so you can quickly battleress f.e.

The operation

The main overview screen looks like this if you’ve got it full option:

This page shows the overview of all the information you can get about the current raid. It might look confusing, but once you know the reason for the way this is ordered, it’s get much easier to use.

The screen is split into 4 parts.

First part, the top row of buttons shows basic “readiness” problems, like people not in the same zone, people AFK, low durability, having useless aura’s, people using low level consumables or ammo, or people who are dead… Personally I think 2 things in this list don’t really belong there, but you can all change that.

The second part is a list of bars that show the health of the raid. Average health of tanks, average mana of healers, etc. Personally I only care about healer mana, and healers/tanks alive, but you can choose what you want to see from the configuration menu.

The third part is a grid of all the standard buffs, kings, mark ot wild, fortitude, seals, presences, etc.

The fourth and last part are the buffs that you would use for progression raids, and are interesting if you really want the best from your raid. These are basically consumable buffs like foodbuffs, elixirs/flasks, stuff you wouldn’t use in heroics f.e.

The buffs have colors on them, these colors say something important about the buffs too:

• Yellow means that somebody in the raid is missing this buff
• Red means that somebody in the raid is missing a buff you’re responsible for
• Blue means that you’re missing a buff that someone else is (or could be) responsible for.

You can configure click actions on these buttons. By default they are this:

• Left click turns checking for the particular buff on and off
• Right click buffs people if you’re capable of buffing it
• Shift-Left click reports this to the raid chat (if you’ve got the authority to do so)
• Ctrl-Left click whispers the buffers about what they forgot.

There are also 4 buttons. The scan button on top refreshes everything, nothing spectacular. The bottom 3 buttons are only usable if you have raidleader or assist status, and can be used to report to the raid about the missing buffs (if you don’t have this status, it can report to yourself only, but that’s a bit senseless, as you have the overview in front of you). The Trash and Boss button do basically the same, except that the Trash button ignores the fourth part of buffs. The Boss button shows everything. The R button is simply a readycheck.

Sometimes it’s a shame that it only allows you to report to the raid as leader/assist, especially in pugs. You can however always make it whisper to the responsible people what they’re forgot to do.

Update:

I forgot two windows that pop up if you press the little two arrows on top of the addon.

The left one gives an overview of your group, showing what specs and abilities the players have. Very useful to quickly see who are the tanks, healers, melee, and ranged dps, and what they bring to the raid in abilities.

The right one let’s you configure which buffs you consider a buff, or a warning, and which ones you want to show, or report. This basically configures the RBS display. Here you can change the buffs that you think are wrongly placed, or are just not interesting to you. Those slacking buffs that were wrongly placed in my opinion can be replaced or removed here.

The options

The latest versions comes pre-configured for three options. Just press the button and the configuration will be adjusted to your role:

Personally I would’ve liked to see the “tank” option too. but it’s not hard to configure that manually.

Manual configuration is simple btw, even though there are lots of options.

Consumable options configures whether you’re ok with lower level consumables or not.

Reporting configures to whom you want to report the information, and how.

Raid Status Bars show what bars you want so see in the bars overview.

Mouse buttons configures the click combinations you can use

Tank/CC/Misdirect/Death Warnings (see pictures at the begin of this post) configure if you want these warnings, and if they should be audial, visual, both or even reported to the raid.

Food announce can automatically throw a raidwarning when a fishfeast or any other interesting buff source is dropped. You can configure it to whisper people when these items are about to time out too if they still haven’t used this. I like this option a lot, because especially fish-feasts are easy to miss.

The other options are quite self-explanatory or just small operational options.

…And finally

I think it’s a very useful tool. As tank I love the taunt warnings, the misdirect/cc warnings. Simple functions like who is still not in the zone is great for summoning people to their raid, you don’t need to have them all ask for it.

The authors claim it’s lightweight, but it’s still a pretty big addon (1.2 MB). Processor usage seems to be low though, and that’s most important with wow being such a CPU hungry game.

Oh, I haven’t tested this yet, but if you would like to be able to use the reporting function even if you’re not a leader, the following “hack” should fix that *evil grin*

Open the Core.lua file in the RaidBuffStatus addon folder, and add this to the end of it:

function IsRaidLeader()
    return true
end

Good luck raiding!

P.S. Funny picture of the day

…after he dropped from his mount into the depths

Updates: I completely forgot to write about 2 very interesting views. Weaved it in the middle of the story. I also got a new DC again *sigh*, though I can’t complain, because a wow bug caused me to be able to do the weekly raid twice, how nice!

Another update: I discovered the proof reading option in wordpress, which pointed out quite a few mistakes. I was actually a bit shocked by the amount of errors it found. English isn’t my native language, but I still thought I had a better grasp of it. Guess I can use it’s help. It’s not unusual for me to revise a post a few times after I updated it (I’ve got a mild form of dyslexia, which makes me put words in the wrong order sometimes, or simply skip them), but this one needed it badly a few times. My apologies for the bad English I used before, I hope this will improve it a little in future posts.