FAZ 51 – “War of Thorns”

by | Jul 30, 2018 | For Azeroth | 0 comments

This week on FAZ, Joce and Manny cover the start of the War of Thorns, the Warbringers short, parts of the Dev Q&A, as well as take a close look at ElvUI, a complete UI replacement add-on. They then take a listener email about how to find a raid group in Battle for Azeroth.

War of Thorns has begun

The first of three quest segments is now available, along with 4 daily world quests available in Darkshore. They award a base gear level of 210. Worth noting, once you have played through the story once, you can tell Sylvanas you’ve already completed it, and you are ported directly to Darkshore. Important to note, this is not the burning of Teldrassil week. That happens next week, and we still don’t know who is responsible.

BfA Ad Blitz

Blizzard has released some short tv spots and some teasers for Battle for Azeroth

Warbringers

Blizzard has announced that we will be seeing a new trio of animated shorts featuring key lore characters involved with BfA.

Developer Q&A

Last week on Thursday, Community Manager Josh Allen and Game Director Ion Hazzikostas sat down and took questions as we head into BfA.

  • Ion apologized for the difficulties with the Prepatch launch and stressed they are working to address bugs and issues.
  • Azerite Armour is not tradable!
    • Team doesn’t want people to be pressured to give away potential upgrades.
    • Combination of traits is too complex to make a snap decision
    • Collect multiple sets without guilt
  • MDI format to change to be more representative of live servers.
    • No cherry-picking affixes
    • Balance changes to avoid single best class for a role
    • Some specs being better at dealing with certain affixes
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPaPsBAXdzs

PvP Disqualification Policy Update

Community manager Bornakk advised player that any player who is disqualified will no longer be able to queue for rated PvP matches.

Epic Battlegrounds

Game Designer Phalanx posted on the forums regarding changes to the large-scale battlegrounds.

Community Resources/Add-ons

ElvUI

  • Important point, don’t get the version on Curse. The official version is available on their website, which is linked in the show notes
  • You have to extract the files into your Add-ons folder. If you’ve never done this before because Curse does it for you, it’s in World of Warcraft > Interface > Addons
  • There’s a setup that gives you basic options that should run when you first boot in with the addon enabled, if it doesn’t, open the main menu and click the ElvUI button. There is an Install button at the top of the window that opens
  • General
    • This is where you have a lot of your overall UI choices and automations. In particular, you can turn off your order hall button, announce your interrupts to a specific channel, automatically sell grey items, and set up auto repair
    • Choose your font and general UI sizing
  • Action Bars
    • All your action bar options are here
      • General: Turn things on and off like keybind text, macro names, and key up or down, change colours for things like range, on cooldown
      • Includes all bars, pet, stance, and menu, with their own settings and visibility
    • All bars can be enabled or disabled
    • You can change the size, shape, and location of all your bars individually
  • Bags
    • There are many alternative bag addons, I use ArkInventory, but ElvUI has some interesting features
    • Auto-sort, or “Clean Up”
    • Show Upgrade icon. This can be used in conjunction with Pawn. It shows what WoW considers an upgrade for your character, so might be useful in dungeon/raid settings as it will essentially show you things you can’t trade
    • Junk Icon – puts a gold coin on anything considered junk (i.e. your greys)
    • Icon and bag size are adjustable, so it can be as big or small as you’d like
    • You can choose the way it sorts, putting the important items at the top or bottom
    • There’s a lot of info in here about search syntax, but I couldn’t find any way to actually add filters to your bags
  • Chat
    • Straightforward, with some cool features like adding clickable URLs to chat, and emoticons
  • DataBars
    • XP, Rep, Honor, and AP call all be made into progression bars
    • Mouseover will hide the bar until you mouse over it
  • DataText
    • This is where you set up what info your UI will display to you under your chat windows and mini-map
    • You can use text instead of minimap buttons
      • You have to enable the panels in the Panel pane, as well as choose what you want to link to in each position
    • Small panels are everything tied to your minimap, left and right chat are tied to the chat windows and are the bottom corners of your screen by default
    • The Friends tab allows you to hide specific activities in your friends list, as there is a tooltip that shows when you hover over it
      • I hide App, D3, SC, Mobile, SC2, and Dst2, basically just showing people in my favorite Blizzard games WoW, HS, and HotS in case I want to jump in with someone
    • Custom Currencies are where you add currencies if you want to track extra items not listed in the base options, i.e. Wakening Essences
      • You have to find the currency ID, name won’t work. Search the name on WoWhead, then grab the ID number from the URL
      • You can then add that specific currency to any section
  • NamePlates
    • I use ThreatPlates
    • There is an option at the top of each nameplate type to copy the options from another nameplate type, so this can save you some time
  • Skins
    • This is basically where you decide what windows will have the ElvUI skin applied to them. This allows you to run addons like Auctioneer that do the heavy lifting, but still have the ElvUI look to them
  • Tooltip
    • Choose if you want the tooltip to be anchored to a point on the screen or to your mouse
    • You can decide what to show on your tooltips and when it’s visible, as well as add keybind modifiers to show tooltips (i.e. If I hold shift and hover over my spells their tooltip will pop up
  • UnitFrames
    • These are your main info frames for your character, target, party, and boss
    • You can choose a mix of Blizzard frames and ElvUI frames, just make sure to enable one and disable the other otherwise you will have both show on screen (one doesn’t override the other)
      • Disabling Blizzard frames is in the general section
    • Disable both if you’re using another addon for things like party or raid frames (i.e. healers with Vuhdo)
    • There are lots of colour, font, and size options
    • Heal prediction – Show incoming heals/overheals in party/raid
    • Threat indicators – text, glow, icon options
    • Role indicators – You can turn them on or off for each role
    • You can add any custom text you would like
    • Display Frames – This lets you see the frames you’re working on, even if you aren’t in a party, raid, etc
  • Profiles
    • This is where you choose which profile to use. I do all my customization on my main character, then just choose that character’s profile for my alts
    • You can also have profiles that change based on spec, so you could have a tank, damage, and healer profile that switch automatically
    • You can also import and export profiles, so it’s possible to find some on the web or possible from your favorite streamers!

Tips and Tricks

  • You can access the config window at any time by typing /ec in chat
  • This is a modular add-on that replaces every part of your UI. If you are using any other add-ons (i.e. Threat Plates, Vuhdo) make sure you find the section they control in the ElvUI interface and disable it to prevent conflicts
  • Disable your addons to try the ElvUI equivalent. Disabling saves all your settings, so if you don’t like the ElvUI version, you can disable it in ElvUI and re-enable your add-ons to go back to your old setup
  • You don’t have to reload every time you make a change. Finish tweaking your settings, then reload!
  • Toggle Anchors is your friend! It’s in the main config window at the top and allows you to move anything in your UI
  • There is a toggle tutorials button in the main config window as well, which pulls up a tooltip at the top of the UI that gives you information about how to use the add-on (ie more tips and tricks!). You can set this to pop up every time you load into WoW. Click the Disable button to toggle the tutorial tooltip.
  • AFK Mode: Under the general tab, gives you a closeup of your character dancing as a screensaver when you go AFK
  • When editing the visibility state of your bars, any state in brackets followed by hide means that the bar will be hidden when you’re in that state, i.e. in a vehicle. These commands are followed by ; show or ; hide, which is basically the default state you want your bar to be in, and needs to go last
  • Important to note, when you get into a vehicle for questing with abilities, this overrides Bar 1, so don’t make this one invisible when you’re in a vehicle
  • To add something to a bag sort ignore list, open your bags and shift-click on the item when your cursor is in the proper field. This will add the item to the search syntax without you worrying about typing it in properly, just like you can do when placing items or quests in chat
  • Tracking/sorting currencies
    • Open your character screen (default C) and click the currency tab
    • On the far right, next to the icon and the total, there’s what looks like blank space
    • Click it, and it will give you the option to flag the currency as unused (move to the bottom of your currency list) as well as a Show in Backpack option
    • When you open your bags, you will see totals for all your tracked currencies (max 3)
  • If friendly NPCs aren’t showing up when you configure nameplates, rerun the install just far enough to click the setup CVars button. Don’t ask me what it does, but it fixes the problem!
  • Main Download Page
  • ElvUI Plugins
  • Exported Profile Forum

 

Podcast (faz-pod): Download (Duration: 2:07:59 — 117.2MB)

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