Jindi Ysera

I’ve heard of dual-boxers… people who run around controlling more than one character at a time, usually through the use of fancy keyboards. It’s often legitimate, as the person is paying for multiple accounts, and controlling them all manually (i.e. no bots involved). I’ve even heard of somebody doing this with *five* characters at once, though I’d never actually seen it.

Tonight I saw it, at the end of an Alterac Valley run. Here’s a short video clip.

We were doing ok on this boss for a bit. See if you can spot what goes wrong ;)

Quicktime Video

This thread describes how to configure Vent for windows to normalize all incoming audio, effectively making everybody’s voice the same volume to your own ears. Unfortunately, the sound effects features of Vent are not (yet?) implemented for the mac version. I’m a little tired of dealing with either not being able to hear somebody, or getting my ears blown out, so here’s a solution for mac users. 

 

You’ll need Garage Band from Apple and some free software called Soundflower. Soundflower is a virtual audio device, and can be used as a conduit of audio between different applications on your mac. Think of it like plumbing. We’ll send the Vent output to the virtual device. Garage Band will be configured to listen to this virtual device and receive audio from it. We’ll use one of Garage Band’s audio plugins – a compressor – to normalize the audio levels received over the virtual device. Throw GB into ‘monitor’ mode, switch back to WoW, and you’re all set.

 

Here’s the breakdown.

 

First, download Soundflower here. Install it. Restart.

 

Next, fire up Garage Band. Make a new empty song file. Open the preferences from the Garage Band menu, click Audio / MIDI, and set the input to Sound Flower 2ch, as shown below.

 

  

 

Now make a new ‘real instrument’ track in GB. This will be used to receive audio from Ventrilo by way of the Soundflower virtual audio device. 

 

 

On the right side of the GB window, enable monitor mode (this allows you to hear what’s coming through the input without actually recording). Click the triangle next to “Details” to reveal the audio plugin configuration. Enable the compressor, and choose the ‘extreme compression’ preset.

 

 

 

Done with GB, now all that’s left is to configure Vent to send audio to the virtual device. Click Setup in Vent, and set the output to Soundflower 2ch.

 

 

 

That’s it! 

Some changes for Shaman; to both Earth Shield and Water Shield (again). 

 

 

 

This is kinda nice. The 2.3 changes were already quite good, giving us the spell as described above, but with a 1 minute duration instead of 10, and no passive mp5. Also, any remaining globes at the time the shield expired would automatically proc, which means a free 600 mana per minute, (roughly 50 mp5), and more than that if you’re taking damage and refreshing the shield. Also, no casting cost, it doesn’t trip the five second rule, which means casting it isn’t actually a cast, which means it won’t mess up your mana regen. Now in 2.3.2 PTR, it’s back up to 10 minute duration with the addition of a passive 50 mp5.

 

Some shaman complained after 2.3 that having to refresh the shield once per minute was a pain / annoying / whatever. Personally, I tend to refresh it a lot more often than that in combat anyway (pvp), so it doesn’t really bother me. In an apparent move to appease this concern, the cooldown was changed to 10 minutes and they added the passive mp5, roughly equal to what you would have received by refreshing it once per minute after the expiry procs.

 

Then of course there’s Earth Shield. Funny story about that. There was a blue post somewhere on the europe forums describing the 2.3.2 changes… it looked very much like the change list that was present on the US forums, and the one on the main ptr patch notes web page.  They all described the new reduced mana cost of earth shield (cut in half from about 900 to 450), but the europe version also listed the addition of a 30 second cooldown on earth shield. Predictably, the forums erupted. Meanwhile, on the PTR, earth shield has been changed according to the US notes (half cost, no new cooldown). For a good while, no official response was given, which sort of inflamed the issue, on the forums anyway (which is not entirely like real life). Then finally an official response comes, saying only “we’re aware”, and that more info is forthcoming, etc.

 

This still leaves some questions, such as “aware of what?”. Aware that there’s a very odd typo on the europe version? Aware that they intended to add the cooldown at one point, then removed it, but forgot to update the europe notes? Aware that everybody thinks it’s an absurd idea? I suspect somewhere, somehow, somebody at blizzard actually *did* think this was a good idea. I’m eagerly awaiting an explanation, as I really can’t think of any good reasons to add a cooldown to earth shield. It’s a 41 point talent, it’s already uber expensive to cast, and it’s the primary component of survivability against the remaining 5/9 classes that can’t dispell it (yet). It also has zero dispell resistance, unlike many other magical effects of other classes.

 

*** 

 

So anyway, the realms all go down for weekly maintenance. But not the PTR! So I do the updates, hop on, try to get my UI straightened out… fortunately the bigger mods I use can all import profiles from other toons, so it wasn’t hard. Water shield is sweet, definitely 50 mp5. Earth Shield is half the cost with no cooldown. 1.5s casts seem a lot smoother to me now, they did some stuff with the GCD (which is also 1.5s). Specifically, it’s easier to chain-cast without ‘missing’ (I don’t spam).

 

Did a bunch of duels in front of Org, won most of them. At one point somebody mentioned something about killing some alliance… I’m always down for some pvp raiding, but I figured the type of folks on the PTR wouldn’t be into it. I was wrong. I was able to assemble a raid of 9 people to go wreak some havok… as it happened, as I was recruiting on /2, some dude responded who was already in stormwind… apparently major cities join you up to trade channel regardless of faction :) This unfortunately meant that ally probably had some notion that a plan was afoot… I grouped everybody out of visual range of the front entrance, then we all ran straight through the front gates, grouped up tight… and headed for the tram.

 

 

All but 2 of us made it, and those two just happened to be a rogue and mage… both of whom can stealth / invisi, so we all regrouped in the tram. We rode it over to IF.

 

At that point I remembered that this is the test realm, but I still have all my stuff, including roughly 300 herbs, 60 vials, some [item]Savory Deviate Delight[/item], and a 5 stack of [item]Invisibility Potion[/item]. And 5 [item]Flask of Mighty Restoration[/item]. Like, in my bags, on my person. Since it’s all free / doesn’t matter, I started handing everything out. This is the first time that being a pack rat has really paid off :)

 

Coked up and ready to rock, we began to explore inside of IF a bit and found some resistance around the outside of the tram portal. That’s when it turned ‘bad action movie’. We got a reasonable assault, but retreated into the tram with no deaths. Then, alliance proceeded to send a slow stream of between 1 and 4 people through the portal at a time… each of whom were thoroughly cooked by us. Maybe their computer speeds are really that different that the variation in zone times accounts for it… or maybe they were just being dumb. Eventually there were more dead corpses than there were people in our little raid… somebody had the bright idea to get the hell out, since they would likely all pop together. We took the next tram back to SW. One guy was screwing around and didn’t get on the tram in time, so was left there alone. He was dead about 5 seconds after the tram left.

 

Then we headed out of the SW tram and into the church, figuring we’d need a spot to hide out for a bit. We started killing stuff in the church, but it wasn’t long before alliance found us. We had the ‘boss’ in the church (some priest lady) down to like 60% maybe before we got killed. Fun times, and we definitely had way more kills than aliance, so gg :)

 

 

Another PvP honor reward: [item]33922[/item], replacing [item]33068[/item] in all sets.

 

Also some booty from a recent heroic slave pens run: [item]27683[/item] to play with in the dps set.