Spell Focus: Dispersion

Once again it is time to check out one of the tools in a Shade’s arsenal. This time the spotlight is on our 51st point talent; Dispersion. While some hail it as the saviour of shadowpriesting, and others revile it as a useless piece of crap (quoted as “one of the only crowd control spells that work on the caster”) I will try and balance these opinions a bit.

The Spell

Dispersion causes the caster to be silenced for 6 seconds, during which the caster will regenerate 6% of their mana per second (36% total) and have a 90% reduction on all damage taken.

• Spell damage does not affect the power of Dispersion
• 3 minute cooldown, 6 second duration
• 36% mana regained
• Can be cast while silenced, stunned or feared
• 90% damage reduction
• No mana cost

Talents

Besides it being a 51 point talent, no talent we have currently affects Dispersion.

General Use

In general, in PvP it is only used to buy a few seconds worth of time, generallyy in BGs, hoping for the rest of the bunch to catch up and help you, or to have a quick getaway. In arenas it is usually shunned, as all you do is crowd control yourself, and leave your team mates open to focus fire. However, it may just give you enough time to hump a pillar and heal yourself up, or to survive through disastrous burst fire.

In PvE, it is a pretty decent mana regaining talent, and I find that I am using it a lot more than I thought. Even though we hardly go OoM in raids, I find myself using Dispersion and Shadow Fiend twice each boss fight, often not even touching a potion. Seeing as you can only use one per combat, I feel I’d rather save the cooldown for when it really hits the fan.

Also, some bosses deal massive burst damage, and then the reduction (and being able to cast it while stunned) comes in handy. For instance, Rage Winterchill in MH, being a target for Morogrim’s watery graves, or Malacrass’ shatter combos when he is duplicating mage abilities. Trust me, even though it is not immediately apparent, you will find a good use for this ability.

Sure, it is not flashy or even cool, but it does have a nice animation. And besides, if it helps you survive even a single attack in a battle, it is worth it. Dead DPS does 0 DPS, remember?

How will it be in Wrath of the Lich King?

In Wrath I anticipate raids to be more mana intensive, but mostly more healer intensive. They cannot save your ass all the time anymore, and then this is a nice little “wait until the healer has time” button. Also, less dependency on pots (rare commodities for us now) is a good thing.

All in all, this talent is a lot better than I first anticipated it to be, and I use it all the time. The slight drop in DPS is worth it to make sure I live to tell the tale.

Shadows of Doom

First came the crates of suspicious grain in Booty Bay, spread to capital cities by workers who were not paid to care for its contents…then roaches fed on the grain and their deaths, unmourned but in large numbers, caused hordes of decaying peasantmen to rise and assault our people.

In Karazhan, the halls of the dead, the Lich King installed a new agent, a forsaken Blood Elf princeling, no doubt attracted and seduced by the power of the undead scourge…

And now, come the citadels.

As the new plague spread by the scourge is increasing in potency, the undead rise in minutes from the corpses of their diseased predecessors. The Argent Dawn mobilizes its forces, requesting adventurers to destroy the leaders of the invasion from their cathedral in the Eastern Plaguelands.

But no matter how many times the undead have been repelled, more are spawned from the unwary and the helpless. Sounds familiar?

I remember the days when Naxxramas came to the Plaguelands, when the shadows of th scourge assaulted the capital cities of the Alliance forces. When the peasants were made into prey and heroes into villains. The wheel of fortune is turning, and history repeats itself.

Prepare for the scourge, visit the Argent Dawn. Take their trappings and their tools as your own and fight the scourge. Seek out also the ancient homes of the dead; Stratholme, Scholomance, and even Shadowfang Keep now hold minions who are set in place to facilitate the invasion.

Those who do not care, who do not stand against the Lich King, shall fall by the wayside or bow down at his feet.

My GamerDNA

Triggered by an older post on WoW Insider, I decided to give the Bartle’s test for gamers a try. This test revolves around a series of questions, which gives an insight in the kind of player you are. While not the most useful test in the world, it can give a clue as to what you enjoy doing most, so that you get a better focus at doing the things you enjoy.

In my case, I was dubbed an Explorer, with equal measures of Socializer and Achiever. While less prominent, I have a stron Killer streak in me. Yes, I can see that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning!

The Explorer motto: “No stone unturned!”

Description: It’s not so much the wandering around and poking about, but that euphoric eureka moment the Explorer strives for. The joys of discovery do not necessarily involve geography, real or virtual. They may derive from the mental road less traveled, the uncovering of esoteric or hidden knowledge and it’s creative application. Explorers make great theory crafters. The most infinitesimal bit of newness can deliver the most delicious zing to an Explorer.

Secondary influences:

• Explorer Killers enjoy seeing the world, meeting interesting people…and killing them. EKs love all discovery, but finding an edge over the competition is best. Always seeking new opportunity, an EK likely knows the ten best places to find certain types of opponents, as well as ten different ways for taking them down.
• Explorer Achievers have been there, done that and have the t-shirt…in fact they have a plethora of t-shirts, badges, trophies and other rewards. EAs are the completionists of the gamer world. They like to find new places, quests, easter eggs, unlocks, maps etc. and check them off as have, visited or beaten. Like real world travelers, EAs enjoy collecting memorabilia that helps them relive their experiences later.
• Explorer Socializers are the glue of the online world. Not only do they like to delve in to find all the cool stuff, but they also enjoy sharing that knowledge with others. Explorer socializers power the wikis, maps, forums and theory craft sites of the gamer world.

So, what is your GamerDNA?

User Interface Blues

Well, as the patch hit, I was prepared to do a lot of fixing for my most favorite addons. Little did I know that the changes in the patch were so fundamental that most of my addons were outright broken. And when I decided to hunt them down, I would often find them to be discontinued or replaced by “a newer, better version”. The latter of course means “more difficult to set up and get used to again”.

As a (raiding) Shadowpriest, there are a few necessary addons I cannot live without. Some of these require a bit of setting up, others are “out of the box”.

Basic design philosophy

Although I love having a UI with a lot of frills, looking good and embellished (like the default UI), it is a strain on your computer’s performance, and a distraction to your eyes. Enough crap is flying around your ears without animated batwings around your minimap distracting you from running out of fires.

My UI should therefore be as clean as possible (slick, futuristic, dull, call it what you will) and should have all relevant information in a fixed place. Contrary to popular belief, this does not all need to be centered as your eyes can easily dart across the screen (yours do all the time without you realizing) but the most important information should be centralized.

To me, this means that I want my Player and Target frames in the middle, along with my threat meter. Somewhere close I want my Focus, Target-of-Target and Target-of-Focus. This is the base around which I work.

All addons I mentioned can be found with a simple search on www.wowinterface.com or www.curse.com.

Unitframes

For unit frames I would pick between Pitbull, Perl/X-Perl or AGuf. Pitbull was not working properly for myself (showing full health bars even as the numbers tick down, disappearing target frames, etc.) so I switched to AGuf. I am still learning to cope with that one, especially since there are a lot of nice “default setups” to be found on forums, none of which work at the moment.

Unitframes should display health and power (mana/energy/rage), as well as the name of the unit and its level. I am less interested what class the unit is, but if you PvP it is very handy. Most unitframes have an indicator for Aggro, usually turning your health bar red or making it flash red. This is almost required, as it makes it painfully obvious when you have aggro, so you can Fade.

This is the most “free” part of the design, because there are so many layouts you can use. In fact, I could write a whole article on the various ways of placing them on your screen. I will keep it to a simple message “do not make it cluttered”. If it is cluttered and chaotic, you will become confused while playing, and you are going to make life hard on yourself.

Also, information overload is bad. We don’t really need “Target-of-target’s-target” or “Target of Party Pets” and such. It might be useful for a tank or healer, but for us it is just needless info 99% of the time.

Action Bars

Bartender has been recommended as a good action bar mod to me, but I have never used it. I used to have Trinity Bars, because of its ability make round buttons and arrange the buttons in a circle or half-circle. In my old ui, that was how I liked it. However, I moved over to Bongos, and now to Dominos since Bongos was discontinued.

All action bars have a very simple function: hold your buttons. There’s not really much more to it.

That said, there are a few nice “extra addons” for Dominos that will save your bacon:

RedRange adds a red shade over a button when your target is out of range for the spell.

OmniCC adds a cooldown timer to your bar, indicating the seconds until the cooldown is finished.

ButtonFacade allows you to alter the way your buttons look; there are a lot of custom skins that plug into this one, allowing you to recreate almost any button style in WoW, previous UIs or even other games.

Threat Meter

The third of the Unholy Trinity of Mods Always Required to be Updated.

Even with our new, efficient threat generation, we’d be idiots to run around without one. Omen3 is updated and works fine, but there are also some inbuilt threat meters in PitBull and the like. KLH Threat meter seems to be updated, but I didn’t like it as it was ugly and clunky before, so I doubt it will be better now.

I wouldn’t trust the inbuilt threat meter in WoW, as it does little more than say “High Threat” and “Changed targets to you” and that is it. Not very useful, efficient or precise. And those are exactly the traits I look for in an addon. I mean, face it: no one’s really using the inbuilt voice chat in WoW either right?

Damage Meter

I personally use Recount, because it gives me a very detailed overview of what I have been doing and what it did to my enemies. Also, I used DrDamage, which gives the approximate average damage caused by a spell as a number on your buttons. I really, really liked that, but it is not yet working properly in this patch. That is to say, it works, but it does not do anything.

Dot Timer

I personally like to have as few addons as possible doing as much work as they can. That is why I use DoTimer, now updated for 3.0.2, which handles my buffs, cooldowns and debuffs all at once.

It does take some time to set up, as it is really split into 3 components: DoTimer (Command /Dot), PlayerAuras (Command /pa) and CooldownTimer (Command /cd). Each of these three components can be separately unlocked and moved.

Note to users of older DoTimer versions: There used to be nice golden rings acting as “anchors” for positioning. Now you can just move the bars themselves. To find this option, after typing /dot for instance, you will see the Addons part of the interface screen opening. Under “DoTimer” are the timer settings. However, the bar settings are under the “Timer Bar” options at the bottom of the list. Confusing? Hell yes.

Just click on “Preview” or cast a buff with a cooldown to see where the bars are, and move them around.

You can also set all of these three to a “simple mode”, which means you will only see the icon for a buff/debuff and the timer for it. This saves a lot of screen real estate.

3.0.2 and UI Positioning

When designing your UI, there are a few important factors to keep into account:

• When opening a bank tab, it has been moved slightly more to the left and may interfere with design elements there.
• Achievements and quest reminders appear to the right of the screen, and may interfere with design elements there, which also goes for the minimap.

I will see if I can get a good design going and post it. I will also scrounge together some UIs that I find particularly well-built, and display those too. A good UI designer deserver credit and publicity, don’t you think?

3.0.2 First Impressions

Well, yesterday was everything but a productive day, I have to admit. Downloaded patch, downloaded the patch-of-the patch, then patched again. Logged in, addons were borked. And not just out of date, but even the updated ones I downloaded did not work.

Now I’m the kind of person who wants a clean and efficient UI, so I had great difficulty getting anything done. Yes, I know that’s a weakness of mine, but I learned to live with it. So I logged in and chose my talents and learned my new skills.

First off, I am trying out Dispersion. As much as the theory speaks against it, it might just be alright in Live. And well, it does have a wicked animation, I have to say. Along with all the other talents I took I made about 1100 dps unbuffed with a borked UI and ill timing due to lag and just plain not being used to the world after the patch. I am pleased I must admit.

Devouring Plague is a charm, although it does not seem to return all that much health. It was probably nerfed in the amount of health it returns, and it was quite a chore to weave it into my rotations. Let’s just hope that Pain and Suffering keeps up SW:P enough so that DP can replace it.

Visited the barber shop as well, but I must say I am not that impressed. Although they will probably add in more hairstyles later, the ones that were available were not that special. Also, when I tried it on my Night Elf I noticed that one of the hairstyles was ill-placed on the model, so that it seems like you have some sort of hole in your head.

I also checked out what Inscription is like on my Druid, just because I wanted to know. It seems easy to level up, at least in the terms of the skill itself. Milling provides an ample amount of produce which can be turned into ink, so that went pretty well.But if you want to max out your profession and get all the glyphs, that is where the investment is. Those glyph research skills cost major herbs.

I do admit I have the feeling that with the continuous server restarts and character resets we had on Steamwheedle that my score went up, but my materials were sometimes returned to me, as I often logged in after the world server was down and found I had Inscription materials in my bags that I previously used up or put in the bank. But, my Inscription skill was not lower than before. Ah well, a little treat to make us forget a bit about the buggy servers.

Anyway, sorry about the short update for today, I will try to get more in-depth info when I have some time this evening. Keep your fingers crossed that the servers stay up. ^_^