Life of Brian

Read it and weep!  I have actual in game proof that my mage, Wyclif, (now 80, more on that later) has leet dps.

A good addon is one that doesn’t take up too much memory, doesn’t draw attention to itself, is regularly updated and maybe most importantly works without you having to spend hours setting it up.  One addon that meets all of those requirements is EquipCompare.

For me this is arguably one of the most essential addons that I use.  It’s very simple, takes absolutely no setup, just install and you’re done.  After you get it loaded you probably won’t even notice it’s there, not until you get some phat lootz and you mouse over to see the stats and BAM! there’s EquipCompare doing its thing.

You can see a comparison of the gear you have on along side the tooltip of the gear you pick up.  No more having to memorize stats on your shoulder piece and getting headaches trying to recall whether it had 200 spell power or just 185.  I know, I know, it’s not that hard to remember a couple of numbers, but the entire structure of World of Warcraft is all built around getting gear and getting better gear.  Anything that helps you decide quickly which stats are better will get you moving along leveling or throwing out bids during raids.

I highly recommend EquipCompare for any WoW player whether you’re just starting or you’ve been playing since the first beta release.

Today over lunch I ran a couple of instances with my wife to see if I could get some DPS gear for my paladin.

The first one we did was Halls of Stone.  We were with two warlocks and a mage doing DPS and I was tanking on my paladin and the strange part was I was doing more DPS as a protection paladin than the two warlocks.  It was a breeze.  Took about 30-45 minutes and I got nothing out of it except for Stone Keeper Shards and Relics of Ulduar.  Oh well.

Halls of Lightning went no different.  I was disappointed to say the least because I’m sooooo close to reaching the hit cap so I can start raiding as a ret paladin.  Maybe I can get some 80s and just keep resetting the instance until I get what I want, especially in Halls of Stone.  The first boss is a cake walk and there’s not that much trash to get through.  I bet I could solo up to the first boss

Early this morning, I was cruising Elitist Jerks trying to see what I need to do about a DPS set when I ran across this awesome program.  It’s called Rawr.  It’s runs completely independent of World of Warcraft and for now it only runs in Windows but it’s still worth taking a look at.  I’m not going to go into mass detail because there’s a really good tutorial on the website who developed the program and it’s more informational than I could ever be.  I will say this, it’s got a very complete set of features that might be a little daunting to those less experienced with WoW.  But a day of tinkering will get you some fairly decent results.

Check it out.

The weekend went fairly slow.  I ran Nexus with some friends and it went smooth except for the first boss.

Ok, seriously, what the hell am I doing?  The only people to read this are the people I run with every GD night.  You three know how my weekend went.  I logon, we ran Nexus; Sunday I logon don’t do shit.  Well, point in fact i did actually level my Leatherworking to 350, but we as a group didn’t do a thing.  Which was actually ok .  Just a lazy weekend.

Monday I’ll probably warm the bench in my raiding guild because they seem to be busting at the seams with tanks.  Tuesday-Thursday I’ll be making excuses to run my alts and then on Friday-Sunday I’ll be absent due to a wedding.

On a much more interesting note, I was thinking out loud as I usually do when no one else is around, just so I don’t feel crazy, and I had this idea, related to WoW obviously, that I felt was unique.  And as always It’s not.  I always have problems finding a repair guy or a mailbox and I thought, “Why not just record the x and y position of each one in the game and then make a website to search that information?”  My idea was simple enough, just create an addon that would let you click on an object and record that object’s name, coords, zone and anything else that would help locate and identify an object, preferably stationary, within the game.  After you click on it or however you record the object’s information, it dumps all that info into a database that can be sorted and then uploaded to a website that can then be searched and ultimately helpful.

I have 3 problems with this “idea” of mine:

1.  I don’t know enough Lua to program the addon.
2.  I don’t know enough about php and databases to build a website like I want.
3.  Wowdb.com, Wowhead.com, Thottbot.com, Allakhazam.com.  You get the idea, there’re TONS of sites that already do this.

However, even those Big Four won’t do what I want.  It won’t tell me the location of just a mailbox/boxes in a certain zone.  I can’t search Repair and it show me where I can go to repair.  At least I don’t know how to coax that information out of those sites. So, if you know Lua and XML, MySQL, the WoW API, php and play WoW, wanna help me?  I am dead serious about this.  I’ve always wanted to design something useful for the web and know it helps others as well.  Hell the domain name is even available   I’m so desperate to start this I’ve been toying with the idea to just walk around Azeroth and do it with pen and paper