Power Aura's - Read and Consider

[Azunai]

In light of TL's huge write-up on Grid in the healing section, here's an addon I want to discuss that I think is a *huge* benefit to raiding. I've seen it in alot of video's by the win guilds on the planet, like Tankspot tactic video's etc. and I would say it's almost mandatory to give performance a boost. Personally I have found it has upped my performance alot as it allows for easy assesment and acting upon of a lot of situations. So let's go.


What is Power Aura's?

Power Aura's is an easy to configure addon that projects a texture of your choice anywhere on the screen when a certain situation comes up. And when I say situation, I mean it in a very very broad sense. Think here of buffs or debuffs coming up on a target, a certain action being ready for use (like overpower) or even a certain ammount of combo points being ready for use. This is a much easier way to see if something needs to be done or is ready to be fired than having to check your buff or debuff list or read an onscreen warning. You can even create custom textures to use so if you're handy with Photoshop the textures could even be a word or an arrow or whatnot. Endless options, in short.


So how does it work?

For starters, you can get it here. Once downloaded and installed, go into the game and type /powa to bring up the addon main menu, which looks like this:



As you can see you can configure 24 x 5 = 120 unique effects per character, and an additional 24 x 10 = 240 unique effects globally. So let's create a little effect here. I'm going to create my Maelstrom Weapon effect. Maelstrom Weapon is a shaman talent that reduces the cast time of Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, and all the non-talent heals by 20% per stack. It procs on a melee hit so as an Enhancement Shaman you have this effect stacked to 5 quite regularly. The problem is that it makes no sound, and I don't want to be checking my buff lists all the time to see if it is up. And even if it did make a sound, I don't want to go over the hassle of keeping count in my head. So here's how I make Power Aura's do all this for me and notify me when I reach 5 stacks.

Click the New button. This brings you to the menu below:



Step 1: Setting up the Texture to be shown
First let's have a look at the texture that you want to show up when you hit 5 stacks. You can select the texture by dragging the Texture bar left or right and a color for it using the color swatch below it.

If you find nothing you like you can tick the WoW Textures box for some extra premade textures, or Custom Textures. This opens up a path bar where you can enter one of 2 things. First, you may enter the name of your custom made texture that you put in the Custom subdirectory of the addon (needs to be .tga format), like mytexture.tga. Second, you can also enter spellnames such as Feign Death for the icon of that spell as a texture.

The sliders below all speak for themselves. I tend to scale the effect up a bit to about 150% so it fits nicely and hugely around my character. The advantage beside being clear to see is that it clogs up my screen to such an extent that I want to act upon the message to make sure the icon disappears. Extra motivation to move from fire or use a proc right there


Step 2: Setting up the conditions under which the texture will appear

The next step is setting up the conditions which will trigger the effect. The first option is Activation By. This dropdown menu lets you set the activation type. Buff or Debuff are very common ones but as you can see there's more options there. Some explanation: AoE debuff means a debuff that you get from standing in a certain area, like in the Green Circle on the Assembly of Iron fight. Debuff's Type refers to Magic, Poison, Disease etc. Spell Alert I haven't tried yet but I believe this to be a check if a target is casting something. You can use this to warn you when you need to interrupt that cast.

In case of Maelstrom Weapon, we can leave it at buff, it is after all a buff on me. In the Stack field we enter 5, since I only want to use the buff once it has reached 5 stacks. In the Name field I enter Maelstrom Weapon. The other options all speak for themselves, although a handy one to note is "Show when not active". This reverses the effect to only show when the type you set above is not present. On my paladin I have an effect set up to trigger when my Divine Plea (a constant and easy to refresh mana regen and 3% dmg reduction buff)  is not active during raid combat. I set the buff to be Divine Plea and I tick this option, so it shows the texture only when DP is not active, as an indicator that I need to refresh it.

The other tabs that you see at the top of this section let you add an animation to the texture, like a pulse or a zoom, a sound effect to be played along with it, and a timer to indicate the duration of the buff/debuff/whatever that the effect is referring to. In the case of Maelstrom Weapon, this would show me the texture with a 20 second timer next to it.


Finalization

When you're done setting up the effect the way you want it to, close this window using the X in the upper right corner and you return to the main menu of the addon. 2 more buttons that I want to discuss here are import and export. These let you compile the created effect into a code string that you can copy and paste. So if you created one that is useful to other people, don't hesitate to share. Post in this thread even! I believe Necro did it a while back but I had no idea what it meant at the time.


Conclusion

So I hope this was helpful to people and that everyone can find something out of this addon. I personally find that since I'm using this addon I have started acting upon the textures more than the actual abilities. If you use this right your timing will go up alot since you rarely have to take your eyes off your toon to another part of the screen for a status update; they will just pop up right next to your toon. Some more examples to use it for:

- Water/Lightning Shield gone on you
- No Earth Shield/Bubble/Beacon Of Light/etc. on your focus target
- Overpower/etc. being ready for use
- Standing in Fire of any kind or shape (although you should really notice this w/o the addon)
- Low health or mana (so you know when to stop standing in Vapor puddles for example)
- Ability/Trinket proc like Missile Barrage for mages or Maelstrom Weapon for shamans

And the list goes on...

Good luck! Any questions feel free to pose them.

[Baylien]

A very nice explanation of the merits of this addon. I already have macros to remind me when CD based abilities are available, but will likely use Power Auras as a mana reminder, as my original reminder addon seems to be broken.
So why not give it a try, if it does not help then it's only five minutes lost, but it looks highly beneficial for proc dps abilities for example.
/Baylien

[Tirkad]

Can someone explain me how to set the addon so that it shows you the Maelstrom Weapon buff like in this video?
Thorim fight with Ehn shaman point of view
Thanks

[Azunai]

Looks like it's 5 different seperate effects. Quite simple actually.

You set one effect to check for 1 stack of Maelstrom, and set its position to an X value (horizontal) and a Y value (vertical).
You make another for 2 stacks of Maelstrom, and set its position to the same Y value but a slightly higher X value.
Then again one for 3, and 4 stacks, again slightly higher X value, etc. These 4 effects have a zoom out animation upon disappearing.

The 5th effect has an animation to it, a zoom in on appear and a zoom out on disappear it seems, and a pulse while active. Quite an effective use of the addon, using multiple effects for 1 event ^^

[Tirkad]

Is the scratch animation used for the 5th stack ofthe addon built in or imported? Becouse i didn't found it.

[Azunai]

Then I reckon it's imported =)

[Bellanie]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgRtc6joRbo

there you go Tutorial on how to do Power Aura for Maelstorm

[Tirkad]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgRtc6joRbo

there you go Tutorial on how to do Power Aura for Maelstorm

Thanks Bell! You're teh win!