Patch 5.4 is here, and that means it’s time for a WeakAuras update. The first and perhaps most important piece of news is that WeakAuras has moved. The original author quit updating it two years ago, and Stanzilla has been generously maintaining it for the community. He’s decided to move the project to WeakAuras 2 from this point forward. The good news is that you won’t need to change anything; WeakAuras 2 uses the same folder structure and files as WeakAuras, so updating to WeakAuras 2 is as simple as downloading and extracting, just like you would for any other new version of WeakAuras.

Special note if you’re using Curse Client: You’ll want to add WeakAuras 2 to your addon list and uninstall the old WeakAuras, which will no longer be updated. Make sure you uncheck the “Also delete the in-game settings for this addon” box when removing WeakAuras. If you leave that box checked when uninstalling, Curse Client will remove your existing WeakAuras setup and you’ll have to start from scratch!

Paladin

The basic layout of my Paladin setup hasn’t changed much at all since 5.3. However, there is one new element I’m toying with. A Youtube user messaged me to ask if there was any way I could construct a WeakAura element they saw elsewhere:

The weakaura in question is something I saw on Riggnaros’s stream over at http://www.twitch.tv/riggnarosbl/b/434932264 – you’ll find it at the bottom of his UI to the right of his action bars. It appears to be a WeakAura group consisting of 3 progress bars. The top bar displays his current vengeance, the 2nd bar displays the current vengeance of his other tank, and the final bar shows how much vengeance would be gained by the other tank if he was to taunt.

For reference, this is the UI element he’s talking about.

And when there’s a Vengeance gain to be had by taunting, it looks like this:

It also seems as if he’s got it color-coded. In the above screenshot, Rigg would gain Vengeance by taunting off of Absalom. But in this one, Absalom would gain Vengeance by taunting off of Rigg:

The third bar that the Youtube user described is actually just another bar for Absallom, Absalom’s alt tank:

In other words, the bars for the off-tanks are probably hard-coded to the player’s name, hence why he has one for each tank he frequently plays with. It also seems sort of glitchy, in that it shows up midway through their Council of Elders kill, so the triggering may be a little funky.

Trying to replicate this in WeakAuras is not too difficult, but does require a lot of custom lua code. We need to create a progress bar of “Custom” type and write custom lua functions to handle the triggering and untriggering (i.e. display/hide) as well as to set the length of the bar and the text showing the player’s name and the AP gain. The difficulty is compounded slightly by a bug in WeakAuras that I stumbled across and subsequently fixed.

If doing all that yourself sounds like a tall order, you’re in luck. Here’s my version: WeakAuras Vengeance Bars. I’ve taken a slightly different approach than Rigg has.

The bar for your own Vengeance is more or less identical to what he has. It shows your name on the left and the numerical value of Vengeance on the right. I’ve taken the liberty of converting the text to pretty-print format (i.e. converting 10000 to 10k) to make it easier to read at a glance.

However, rather than capping it at a fixed 300k as Rigg has, I’ve set it up to dynamically adjust in discrete steps based on your current Vengeance. In other words, if your Vengeance is less than 80k, it will set the bar’s maximum at 100k. If you exceed 80k, it will reset the maximum to 200k, and so on in 100k increments. Every time you exceed 80% of the maximum, it will reconfigure the maximum. It’s also got a 15-second decay timer on that functionality, so that it won’t twitch spasmodically when you’re near a threshold.

The bar for your co-tank’s Vengeance is a little more versatile than Rigg’s. First, it’s coded to use target-of-target, so that it will automatically adjust to whoever currently has aggro. That way, you don’t need to hard-code a name in there. And it will automatically hide if the boss has no target or is targeting you.

The downside, of course, is that you can’t see the other tank’s Vengeance level when they don’t have aggro. But since you can’t get any Vengeance by taunting when the boss isn’t targeting that tank, that’s mostly irrelevant for the majority of players.

Since some players might like to monitor their co-tank’s Vengeance, there’s also a third bar for that. However, it’s hardcoded to the name of my co-tank (Agwyne). To change it, go to the “Off-Tank Vengeance” aura, choose the Display tab, and click on the “Expand Text Editor” button next to “Custom function.” In the editor that pops up, you’ll need to change the following line:

THECK_VBAR_OTNAME = “Agwyne”

Change “Agwyne” to “YourOffTanksName” and it should automatically display your off-tank’s name and Vengeance values for this bar.

I should note that all three of the bars automatically adjust size together, so that you can always make at-a-glance comparisons between them.

On the target-of-target bar, text showing the potential gain you stand to receive by taunting shows up when there is a gain to be had. In other words, if you won’t gain any Vengeance by taunting, it will just show the target-of-target’s name. If you can gain Vengeance, it’ll show “(+X AP from Taunt)” after the name. It won’t ever show you when another tank will gain Vengeance by taunting off of you, since that’s not something you can control anyway.

Finally, there’s another set of green underlay/overlay bars on top of your bar to tell you the Vengeance level at which your current Sacred Shield or Eternal Flame was cast. If you’re at higher AP than you were when you last cast SS/EF, the green bar will be shorter than your (red) Vengeance bar, and the text will also tell you the potential AP gain in a similar fashion to the Vengeance gain (“+X AP for SS”). If you’re at lower AP than when you last cast SS, the green bar will be in the background so you can see that fact visually. Since all of these bars are fairly complicated, and not everyone will want the SS/EF overlays (most other tanks wouldn’t use them), I’ve split them off into a separate group: SS/EF Vengeance Bar Overlays

Here’s a video of it in action with Sacred Shield:

I’ve also updated the older text auras that display Vengeance and SS information to include Eternal Flame, since there’s a good chance we’ll be using it in 5.4. There’s now indicators that tells you how many HP you spent on your last Eternal Flame and how many Bastion of Glory stacks were consumed in addition to the usual Vengeance and Haste indicators. That group can be found here: Vengeance / SS / EF text indicators.

Here’s another video showing the Eternal Flame indicators:

Note that I have them set up to load only for Protection Paladins at the moment (easier for testing), so if you play another class you’ll need to change the Load conditions. If you play multiple tanking classes, I suggest using the bottom condition for dungeon role, though this means they won’t load when you’re soloing.

While you won’t see them in either of those videos, I’ve also added greyed-out SS and EF indicators for when you’ve cast the buff on other players (for example, if you put SS on your co-tank while you’re off-tanking). You’ll have to go in and change the name of the player it’s checking to your off-tank’s name for them to work, but they use standard WeakAuras triggers so there’s no coding required. Just find the appropriate aura (“Sacred Shield On Off-Tank” or “Eternal Flame Duration On Off-Tank“), go to the Trigger tab, and change the “Specific Unit” name from “Agwyne” to your off-tank’s name.

Mage

The other notable change is that I’ve been playing my Frost mage a lot since 5.3, so I’ve got a fully-functional Frost Mage aura set now. It shows icons for Frozen Orb, Frostfire Bolt, Ice Lance (along with Fingers of Frost charges and your Water Elemental’s Freeze availability), and of course Frostbolt as a GCD monitor. It’s also got cooldown icons for Evocation, Invocation, Alter Time, and Time Warp, and icons to warn you of the absence of Arcane Intellect, Water Elemental, and Mana Gems. I’ve also updated the “Mage – Any” profile to level 90, though the Fire and Arcane setups are still the old level-85 versions.

All Classes



Rather than continually re-posting links to all of my auras in every update, which then requires that I update forwarding links on various sites, I’ve decided to work smarter and not harder. The links to all of my WeakAuras strings for all of the classes that I play can now be found at this address:

http://www.sacredduty.net/weakauras-strings/

Since the links to pastebin are static, the links on that page will automatically reflect any changes I make to the auras on pastebin. I’ll generally update them incrementally as I level or play new classes.