In the Wowphiles podcast #54, Modem mentioned three add-ons to help us archeologists, but they didn’t get linked in the show notes,  so here’s where you can get them:

Archy (pronounced like the perennial comic book teenager, “Archie”) is an assistant for Archaeologists that want information at their finger tips.

GatherMate2 and GatherMate2 Data collects Herbs, Mines, Gas Clouds, Artifacts, Fossils and Fishing locations and adds them to the worldmap and minimap. Updated for Cataclysm.

Archeology Helper Draws HUD with GatherMate2 pins, and shows Dig Sites on the Minimap and Battleground Minimap

If you find you need help getting Gathermate working, check out this thread on MMO-Champions.

Happy digging! Oh, and Modem – I wear adamantium-toed boots. No worries!

EDIT: Thanks to Chesterfield, 85 Worgen Druid on Drenden.

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Segment 31: Panda and Xloot

Xloot is a replacement for the default loot frame, with a few options. The one we are specifically interested in here prevents the loot window from appearing at all if you have autoloot turned on. The slash command is:

/xloot behavior swiftloot

Panda is another of the many add-ons from Tekkub. Originally mean for disenchanting, it has been expanded to include prospecting, gem cutting, herb milling, glyphs, flasks, and elixers, and a quick view of AuctioneerAdvanced prices. My tests were performed using the disenchanting function.

When you launch Panda, it will present a window the size of the Auction House window, containing everything (that will fit) that you can disenchant (or brew up, or whatever, depending on your professions). There is a checkbox to include soulbound items. Then you simply click on the items to disenchant. However, unless you have Xloot installed, the window will close each time; with Xloot, you can disenchant every item in the window, one after another. This is where you have to be very careful; if you have “show soulbound items” checked, you could accidentally shard your best gear if you aren’t paying attention.

You can get both Panda and Xloot from wowinterface.com

Music for this segment is from FreePlayMusic.com and is entitled “China Wall” by Jim Klein and Scott P. Schreer.

Download the MP3

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Guest voice by Victoria Tietjens

Advanced Trade Skill Window (which I herinafter refer to as “ATSW”) is a complete replacement for Blizzards tradeskill window with more overview and special functions.

This replacement, which works for all tradeskills, including enchanting, provides you with:

- a better overview
ATSW is bigger than the standard window, resulting in a much better overview over the thousands of items you can produce. Additionally, it lets you sort your recipes either by groups (as in the standard window), alphabetically or by difficulty. Alternatively, ATSW even lets you create your own groups and sort the recipes the way you like!
ATSW also has a filter function: enter something into the filter line and ATSW hides all recipes that don’t contain the text you entered. But this filter function can do more: it’s a powerful search function that can filter for minimum/maximum level requirements, producable item counts, item rarity (color) and reagents necessary. If, for example, you wanted to search for recipes for items made from iron, at least level 20 but no higher than 40, and green or better, you could enter a simple formula (explained in the radme.txt file) and have just those recipes displayed.

- more comfort
ATSW has a production queue: you can queue several different items and have them all produced automatically by just clicking one button. If you’ve ever had to wait for a number of parts to be made before you could make the item you really wanted, you’re going to love this.

ATSW is able to consider items you have to produce in order to use them as reagents in the production of other items. So: if you need item A to produce item B, you don’t have to manually produce first item A, then item B. ATSW does that for you: you just tell it to produce item B and it automatically queues the production of item A and – afterwards – item B. If you are missing some reagents to produce both items you get a message telling you exactly which reagents you need.

ATSW helps you when telling your friends what reagents you need for a specific item: just click on a recipe with your shift-key pressed and the chat line opened and the reagent info will be added to the chat line.

ATSW shows you what reagents you need to process the whole production queue. It even tells you how many of each reagent you have in your bank, on alternative characters on the same server (in this case, it can even tell you on which characters) and which reagents are buyable from merchants. In case of buyable reagents ATSW can automatically buy all missing and available items from a merchant when you are speaking to him.

Most of ATSW’s functions are available from buttons in the Gui and are self-explanatory. There are also some commands you can enter from the chat line:

You can enable (or disable) a specific trade skill; for example, if you don’t have a toon that knows blacksmithing, you’d probably want to disable blacksmithing in ATSW.

The “reagents” command will display a reagent window that displays all reagents needed for all saved queues on all characters. It also allows you to fetch all necessary reagents from your bank. This window can also be set to appear automatically whenever you are at your bank in the ATSW options. Imagine not having to take notes about what to buy for your engineer when you’e on your bank alt!

And you can delete all your saved queues. This might come in handy if you have, for example, saved a queue with a character you deleted.

You can download ATSW from WoWinterface.com or Curse.com, or get it with WoWmatrix.

Download the MP3

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This post comes to us courtesy of our listener Kurg from the Kargath server. He has some ideas on how to make fishing more interesting.

I have noticed a big question lately has been: how can blizzard make fishing more interesting? One suggestion might be to make fishing more in depth like a crafting profession. For example, fishing lures could be created by recipes. A player could make certain lures with recipes and those lures will have an effect on their fishing such as: an increased chance at catching a certain type of fish or an increased quantity of that type of fish, catch special fish that give you abilities such as: water breathing, faster swimming, water walking, etc.

There could also be epic lure recipes that can drop from dungeon and/or raid bosses. The epic fishing recipes could do things like give you the ability to fish faster, fish with greater accuracy, fish up artifacts associated with archeology, or other items that are vendor trash but sell for a lot gold so that fishing can be a viable way of making gold other then putting fish on the Auction House.

Some lures could be shallow lures that will fish up certain fish and items, and other lures could be deep running lures. With this idea fishing will be more in depth and a potential way to spend time advancing your character with archeology or some other trade skill tie in, as well as catching larger quantities, fishing faster, and making gold.

As far as the fishing mechanic Blizzard could give more control over the cast. Blizzard could allow you to control the strength and accuracy of the cast. Perhaps when you begin to cast, a small slider bar pops up with moving markers; one marker moves up and down the slide scale, and one left to right, each controlling the strength and accuracy of the cast. The closer you get these marks to land in a small identified range the more accurate your cast is and the better your catch is. The Epic lures could affect this mechanic also and could slow it down to give you a better chance to get the mark to stop where you want, or make the margin for error a little bigger to obtain the perfect cast.

With the addition of more water in certain zones in Cataclysm, more water mounts could be introduced. Players would also be able to fish from the backs of these water mounts. Fish pools may spawn only in areas accessible to people with water mounts.

It’s possible that some or all of these ideas will either make or break fishing for people. If the process made less people fish, fishing becomes more valuable seeing as the fished up items that could be sold on the Auction House would be rare and most expensive. The downside to less people fishing is that Blizzard would probably not like this–seeing as how they like to get as many people involved in as many facets of the game as they can–and would want to find a way to get more people involved..

Fishing does however, need some sort of makeover to help make it a more rich and rewarding experience. In it’s current state it still feels to much of a grind without enough fun and variety to make it worthwhile.

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The first change being made is that my lovely Dragonseyes, the Jewelcrafter only gems, will no longer be prismatic. They will matchup with whatever socket color they normally would. For example, Solid Dragonseyes will match Blue sockets.

The second is the addition of Epic Gems.

Right now, I’ve been using my Solid Dragonseye in Red slots to get a bit of stamina and still retain the socket bonus. It’s been a nice bonus, but that’s going to have to change.

Off topic, but I’m completely torqued that I’m not the first Honorshammer that pops up on the Armory anymore. I used to the ONLY one. Now some guy from the guild Conquest on Vashj shows up first. It look likes it sorts by Guild Name, so all I’ve got to do is get Ellevis to rename our guild All Suspects or something.

I examined my MainTank set.

Helm : Yellow slot, 12 stam bonus, 16 Def
Shoulders: Red Slot, 6 stam bonus, 41 stam Dragonseye
Chest: Blue Slot, Red Slot, 9 stam bonus, 24 stam, 8dodge/12stam
Shield: Blue slot, 6 stam bonus, 24stam
Gloves: Red Slot, 6 stam bonus, 8 dodge/12stam
Belt: Prismatic slot, no bonus, 24 stam
Legs: Red Slot, Yellow Slot, 12 stam bonus, 41 stam Dragonseye, 16 def
Boots: Yellow Slot, Blue Slot, 9 stam bonus, 8def/12stam, 24 stam
Trinket: Blue Slot, Yellow Slot, 9 stam bonus, 24 stam, 41 stam dragonseye

Whenever you start mucking around with gems, you have to keep the Defense minimum in mind. After all my changes I need a minimum of 689 +def rating.

I’m currently sitting on 717 rating which means I’ve got about 28 rating points to play with.

4 yellow, 4 red, 4 blue and one prismatic. That’s a fairly balanced gem slot layout.

My choice of gem will be Solid (Stamina) for Blue, Enduring (Defense and Stamina) for Green and Shifting (Agility and Stamina) for Red.

Let me explain the Red choice just a bit. We know that Dodge is being nerfed in 3.2, but so is Agility. They will work out to be about the same ratio as they are now. So why would I choose the Agility gem over the Dodge one?

The Agility gem will scale with buffs like Kings and Mark of the Wild. It also provides additional benefits in Armor and Critical Strike. So Agility is avoidance, mitigation and threat, whereas Dodge is just avoidance.

Were I just a mere mortal and only had access to ‘normal’ epic gems, and if used a simple formula above, these gem slots would yield 40 Defense, 270 Stamina, and 40 Agility. I would be able to replace my two pure defense gems with defense/stamina hybrids and still wind up with the exact same amount of defense rating. So despite adding two gems with stamina that didn’t have them before AND upgrading to epic gems, I would actually have 9 stamina LESS than my current set due to not using Dragonseyes.

I’ve looked at two approaches for my Dragonseyes. They aren’t prismatic anymore, so in order to get the socket bonuses and their yummy stamina, they need to match. Somehow, I have gear where EVERY socket bonus is Stamina. Dragonseye are only available in single colors, no hybrids.

The first approach was to cut all Solid Dragonseyes and place them in Blue sockets in the Boots, Chest and Shield. That would give me 40 defense, 333 stamina, and 40 agi from gems. That’s an increase of exactly 63 stamina over my ‘no Dragonseye’ load out. So my ‘JC only’ gems give more stamina than Mining (60) or Blacksmithing (60). Your milage may vary.

The other option I looked at was placing my Dragonseyes in my two Red sockets with a ‘weak’ 6 stamina bonus, and placing the third in a no bonus Prismatic socket in my Belt. The result is 40 Defense, 363 Stamina and 20 Agi. But we lose socket bonuses so we need to look at stamina from the socket bonuses in addition to stamina from gems.

Using Dragonseyes in my Reds and Prismatics, and sacrificing the socket bonuses still yeilds an increase of 18 stamina over using them in my Blue sockets. This makes sense when you consider that a Dragonseye in a Red slot is an increase of 36 stamina over the red gem that would normally be there. A Dragonseye in a Blue is an increase of only 21 stamina. However this will also cost me 20 Agility.

So would you give up 20 agility for 18 stamina. I would.

TLDR

Non JCs

• Replace all your Rare gems with Epics
• See if any Thick (Pure Defense) gems can be swapped for Enduring and still maintain the Defense Minimum

JCs

• Replace all your Blue and Yellow Slots with Epics
• Place your Dragonseyes in Red or Prismatic Slots

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