Game Mehcanics - Altoholic

I don't have a lot of alts compared to some people. I have Elionene who was my first high level character, and then I made Salthier to level with Lal and we got them to level 80 first. I started a character of every class to try them out, but left most of them dwindling on odd servers around level 10. I do have my future Shaman healer up to 50 now, and my bank alt, Frelon, languishes at level 15 while doing the economic bidding of my other characters. That's a total of four toons I log on regularly.

Compare that to other people in my guild with dozens of toons above level 50 and 60 spread across multiple servers, accounts and factions.

However, even with a limited number of alts, they have different professions, banks, gear, etc. that I sometimes need access to and need to mail around or "alt hop" to find what I need at any given time. Often I get asked if I can make a LW pattern while on Salthier, of if I can do a flask on Elionene. Having to alt hop just to check these can get tiresome.

Enter Altoholic from Thaoky.

Altoholic keeps a record of each of your toon's professions, the contents of their bags, their banks, their guild banks, their gear, their quests, and a few other things. I can't tell you how incredibly useful this is. By opening up Altoholic you can browse basically any information on any of your characters while on any of your characters. You can also search your inventory or recipes to see if you have a certain one, and link them to chat from the Altoholic window.



In addition, if any of your guild mates have altoholic or show you their professions through linking it in chat, Althoholic will store that information so you can look up other people and what they can make. There's also a section for looking at achievements, and tracking how much time you spend on each of your characters.



It's a lot of information. I find it most useful for looking up quests, recipes, or items that I might have on other characters but that I need on my current characters. Or just to check my current guild bank without actually having to go to the guild bank. I do this on my Shaman alt who is in my vanity guild to see if there's anything in there useful for her leveling.



So I highly reccomend this addon for anyone with a ton of characters, or even just a few. It's a great tool that can prevent having to hop around from alt to alt too much.

Tanking with a Tenacious Pet

So I briefly mentioned how I took some friends to Hellfire Ramparts with my new pet Bear. Let me tell you a little more about that.

First, with the new hunter changes, several families of pets are now known as Tenacity pets and have a talent tree with pet talents designed to make these pets excellent tanks. Some of the talents revolve around generating threat, or increasing pet health and armor, or even give taunt and intercept like abilities. Very cool. Now, the first thought would be that these would make great pets to solo with so that they can both hold the aggro of whatever you are killing and also withstand most of what is thrown at them. But I had read in various blogs and places on the internet that you may even be able to tank instances with just a hunter pet and no other tank. I wanted to try that out for myself.

So Elionene went out and trained an Ashenvale Bear in Ashenvale. He's nothing special. Just a plain brown bear. I chose a bear because Elionene used to live in Ashenvale, and it would make sense for her to have a bear from that area. It's the same reason she has Lethan, her owl. I also got her a moth from Netherstorm for various reasons. Perhaps I'll post on that later. Anyway, Bears are Tenacity pets and have a unique ability similar to what Bear druids have. They can swipe up to three targets in front of them. I talented him with armor and health, and a bonus to healing so that my mend pet and other healers spells have a better effect on him. He can also taunt once every 3 minutes and has an ability similar to last stand that raises his health by 3000 or so temporarily for those "danger" moments. When I trained him, he auto leveled to 65, 5 levels below my current level.

A couple of my guildies had recently turned 60. A paladin and a warlock team that were leveling together. I asked them if they had yet been to Hellfire Ramparts and offered to take them with my bear tanking. I offered for others in the guild, and an adventurous level 70 rogue decided to come along to see if I could actually tank with my bear. He was skeptical to say the least.

I got to the instance first and went inside on my own to test it out a bit. The bear was able to keep one mob occupied, but I somehow aggroed the second mob and had to Feign Death. I was a bit slow on my abilities, but I managed to get the mobs down solo. I started to think this might not be so bad.

So when all four of us got there, we prepared and I made the first pull. Initially I thought it would be simple enough to misdirect mobs to the bear to start off a pull where I wanted to, and not necessarily where the mobs were standing. However, the changes to Defensive mode for pets made this a bit awkward. For example, if I MD my bear, and then shoot the mob so that the mob runs to the bear, if the bear is on defensive, he'll start to run after the mob as soon as I use a shot to MD. What this means is that I have to keep the bear on passive, and then wait for the mob to get to him, then manually tell the bear to attack the mob. It's not that big of a deal, but it does mean a lot more button pushing.

The second pull went bad. I didn't pull the mobs back and so we pulled a patrol, which in turn pulled a second group of mobs. For one, it's hard for me to see all of what is happening around the bear since I'm back a little bit doing ranged damage. By that same token, it's harder to maneuver the pet than it is to maneuver yourself. We didn't wipe thanks to the superior attack power of a level 70 rogue and hunter, but it was a messy attack process.

I took a little bit more time on the pulls after that, marking them and laying down an ice trap, and having the rogue sap mobs. Things went generally okay as long as people stuck to kill order and didn't attack things that the bear wasn't directly attacking. His swipe was working, but it didn't seem to build that much aggro on the mobs he wasn't directly attacking. Little by little we made our way to the first boss of the instance, Warkeeper Golgalmar.

The first boss has two healers that you have to kill so that they don't heal the boss. I marked them in kill order and sent the bear in. After the first mob went down, I moved the bear to the next one and killed him. Then I put him on the boss. I don't think the bear lost aggro on any of them at all, so I was pretty happy about the way it worked out. As far as the bear's health, I usually could just throw a mend pet on him and not worry about it too much. Our paladin was also throwing out occasional heals, but he said he wasn't seeing the need for many heals in general. Awesome.

On we went to the second boss, Omar the Unscarred, who is a demon that throws out some curses. This is where the bear truly shined. I put him on the boss and then we spread out and just laid into the guy with DPS. The bear kept aggro the whole time and the boss went down quickly. A battle well won I thought. All that was left was the dragon rider boss, Vazruden the Herald.

This fight would be a bit complicated since you have to attack the Orc boss first and then pick up his dragon when it lands. You also had to make sure and maneuver out of the flame circles that cause a lot of damage. With maneuverability being a big awkward with the pet, I was a little worried. We started off on the orc and he died pretty quickly as before I knew it, the dragon was landing. I moved the bear to the dragon and picked him up pretty well. With the orc dead, we only had to concentrate on the dragon who was belching flame on my bear. I hit passive to move the bear back to me and pull the dragon, but as soon as he was out of the fire, I ordered him to attack again, but this time not in the flames. The dragon soon died and we celebrated our run of ramparts with 4 people and a pet bear tank.

What I learned:
It's difficult to tank with a pet because it's a little harder to control, but with practice could become much easier.

He was able to hold aggro on single mobs really well. He's only level 65 but I think as far as single target aggro went, I didn't have to hold back on DPS too much.

Things that are not the direct target of the bear can be pulled off pretty easily if people are attacking the wrong target. Occasionally I would see a mob start attacking another person or the void walker or something. I couldn't always tell what the cause was, but it just showed me that the bear is not the best multi mob tank, which I sort of already knew. If you want a pet that tanks like a paladin, get a gorilla.

All in all it was a lot of fun, and the two level 60ish people got a lot of neat loot from the dungeon. Our rogue wasn't completely convinced that pets made good tanks, but was at least a little impressed at the boss fights. The trash pulls were sometimes really messy though.

I'm going to continue doing instance runs with the pet tanking. I'd like to get him to level 70 and try some of the harder dungeons, maybe Steamvault since I'm pretty familiar with that place. I feel that at level, he could definitely be an awesome off tank and hold his own against almost any equally leveled mob with just a mend pet going. And if that's the case, then I could effectively CC two mobs at a time. One with the pet and the other in an ice trap. But that's going to take a whole of of concentration. I think I'm up to the challenge.

Game Mechanics - Favorite Addons

((I apologize for the lack of links. Later I'll update the post with links to each of the add-ons and some screenshots of my UI))

I use a lot of add-ons. A lot of them I forget I have and take for granted things they do. Like Prat 2.0 which is a chat box addon that lets me do a lot of things with my chat window that I take for granted, like link items in created channels, and scroll up and down with my mouse wheel. Speaking of linking items, I have one called Linkerator that allows me to link items by just typing the name in brackets ( [] ), even items that I've never obtained. It keeps track of items that I've seen on the Auction Hall, linked by other people and dropped in dungeons, even when I don't get that item, and items that I see in Cartographer dungeon maps with Atlas Loot.

Oh hey, there are two more great add-ons. Cartographer replaces your regular map with a customizable map you can change the size and transparency of, and make notes and markings on it. It also contains maps of Dungeons which is nice because the default map does not. Blizzard should really think about adding that themselves. Atlas lists loot for all of the dungeons and raids so you can see in game what might drop from that next boss.

Another one that is commonly used is Auctioneer which keeps track of the current market for items on the auction hall. I use this one on Frelon mostly since he's my bank alt now. He keeps track of the scans and puts all of my stuff up for auction that I need to sell with accurate pricing.

Recently I've been experimenting with Bartender3 and Ag UnitFrames. Using Bartender I got rid of the default action bars and replaced them with smaller bars all at the bottom of my screen. I did this for both Elionene and Salthier. I used the unit frames to put Salthier's frame and the target frame down near where the character is on the screen so I could keep better track of my health when tanking. So far it's been okay, but my main purpose was to make more of the screen for viewing the world, and less of it for the buttons and frames. I don't know that this saved me any space, so I may go back to the default soon. Honestly, what I could really use is a bigger screen. I'm currently using a little 13 inch macbook pro, and a bigger screen would give me lots more space to work with.

A wonderful add on, especially for Druids or any class with multiple gear sets, is the Outfitter add on. It basically let's you create an outfit and save it. Then you can switch to that outfit with a couple clicks or a button push, making changing clothes a breeze. It's even set to change automatically based on a setting. For instance, it will automatically put my tank gear on in bear form, and my dps gear when I switch to cat. Smooth. I don't know how I would function without it as a druid.

And then there's Titan Bar. I think this was my first add on. I really like having my bag space, ammo count, gold, experience numbers and latency information available at a quick glance on the bar. It also let's me adjust UI and Sound options at the click of a button. This is the first one I plan to update with the oncoming patch.

Of course, with Wrath looming on the not so far away horizon, add ons are quaking with fear. With any big patch, it usually takes a few days for the add on developers to update the code of the add on for the new patch. I can only imagine it's more so with a big patch like an expansion. Hopefully, a lot of the bugs can be worked out with the 3.0.1 update, and then when we actually install the expansion pack, it shouldn't be a big deal.

Mouse over Macro

Here's a short post about a handy tool. When making targeting macros, you can use a number of modifiers to the macro so that it does different things when you click, right click, alt-click, shift-click, etc. But you can even modify it to do something when pressed while you hover the mouse over something.

For an example, as a Druid Bear Tank I may want to Lacerate my secondary target while staying on my main target when tanking. I could make that secondary target my focus and use a macro that does this:

/cast [target=focus] Lacerate

But what if I want to lacerate something besides my focus? Enter the mouse over macro.

/cast [target=mouseover] Lacerate

Put this macro on an action bar, and assign it a key binding such as J or whatever you want to use. In my example while targeting and tanking the main target, I can hover my mouse over the secondary target (another mob on me) and hit J to lacerate him without switching targets, and then go right back to gaining aggro on the main mob. This is really handy for holding multiple mobs aggro as a bear tank, but it can be modified for a lot of different classes and spells.

Have you used a mouseover macro before? If so, when and where?