PowerAuras: Linking Auras

So hopefully by now you, dear reader, have discovered the wonders of the AddOn PowerAuras. This wonderful little mod has an incredible array of usefulness from buff and debuff tracking to cooldown, health and mana monitoring. If you aren't familiar with the basic setup you can check out my other entry on the subject, PowerAuras: The Best AddOn You've Never Used! for a quick rundown.

As I mentioned above, this incredibly versatile mod can help you out with a lot of tedious or hard to monitor UI elements, but each aura can only track one thing in one way at one time. The mod works like binary, meaning an aura can only be on or off... there's no in between. But what if you want an aura to display under a slightly more complicated set of conditions?

For instance, you may hear from a member of the Hunter class from time to time how clunky Aspect of the Viper is as a mana regeneration mechanic. Often a player will go through several pulls or even entire boss fights not realizing Viper has been left on long past it's usefulness! Unfortunately the only thing PowerAuras will be able to tell you with a single aura is whether the buff is on or not on. It won't tell you when your mana is full and Viper is still on - at least not with one aura!

This kind of complexity can be achieved, however, by linking multiple auras together. Think of each aura as a single condition. In the case of the Hunter's example above there would be a single condition for Aspect of the Viper being on and another condition for your mana level being at or above a certain threshold. By linking these two conditions together you can effectively use a single texture to display only when both of these conditions are met i.e. "Display my aura when Aspect of the Viper is on and my mana is above 90%".

I recently started DPSing on my Death Knight whom I specced into unholy some time ago. One of the more unintuitive aspects of unholy DPS is Bone Shield. The spell provides an increase to DPS while it's up, but can fade with damage and has a cooldown. A single aura to track this spell is impractical as the buff may have dropped, but the spell may still be on cooldown. This is another situation where linked auras can come in handy.

Linking Auras

First you'll want to set up an aura like normal. Pick a texture and color, then place and scale it to preference. For this example our first aura will be for activated by the buff Bone Shield.

Since I want to know when the buff is not active the invert checkbox is ticked and this aura is for my second spec so I've unchecked spec 1 down at the bottom of the page.

Next we'll close this aura and return to the main window. Click the copy button and then the character specific page currently highlighted on the top left to paste this aura into the same area. Now that you've copied the aura shift click the original to disable it(More on why we do this later). It's also helpful at this point to make note of the number in brackets in the tooltip for this disabled aura. For my own setup this number is 8.

Now open the newly copied aura (the one that wasn't disabled) so we can change the settings to match up to our second condition. For this example the second condition will be activated by My Spell Cooldown with the activating spell being Bone Shield once again. Make sure to uncheck the Invert box for this aura.

Now comes the part where we link the two auras.

You'll notice in the image to the left there is a highlighted text box. This box is unlabeled in the aura configuration, however on mouseover the tooltip will explain that this box is used to link the aura for multiple conditions.

This is where we'll enter the number of the aura we wish to link it to, in my case the aura number is 8.

That's it!

Now, earlier on we disabled the original aura. We do this because otherwise both auras would be displayed simultaneously. Since we copied the aura in the first place they'd be identical and the aura would simply appear less transparent as it's been doubled up. Disabling the first aura will prevent this from happening. Since the second aura is linked to the first it will not be displayed unless the conditions for both auras have been met.

PowerAuras, the Best AddOn You've Never Used!

Some time back I was doing research for the boss Prime has been stuck on (and is still stuck on) for the past couple months: Yogg-Saron. Now that the new raid is out we've been getting even less time with this old God and our attempts lately have been... well... see for yourself.


To be fair though, that was a wipe and we were running around purposefully tapping the clouds to see how many we could spawn at once! We are actually finally making solid progress on the boss, which makes me happy.

But I digress. In the video I watched, there was an AddOn that periodically flashed on screen that caught my eye. Here is the video in question, and the flash I'm talking about is the red swath that periodically frames the person filming at around 1:55.



Meghan helped me identify what was going on, since she also plays a mage named Fawynd. It turns out the mage in the video was proccing free pyroblasts and the indicator was meant to warn her so she could react without having to watch a buff list like a hawk.

The AddOn(mod) providing these warnings was called PowerAuras, and it can be found here.

So I went about setting these up on a couple of my characters. The menus weren't exactly user friendly but with a little exploration I was quickly able to figure them out. The end result is that I can focus more of my attention on what is going on in the game and less on my interface.

For my shaman, I set up a blue indicator midscreen to warn me when my mana regeneration buff, Water Shield, was inactive and a smaller fiery indicator on top of my screen when my weapon was no longer buffed with Flametongue weapon. I got even better results with my death knight tank, setting up a large indicator for when Rune Strike was usable, when a free Howling Blast procced and another to warn me about when Horn of Winter wasn't active much like the Flametongue warning for my shaman.

The uses are endless, really. You can configure them to warn you about anything from being stunned or silenced to when valuable procs are active like Clearcasting or a trinket buff. The most creative of uses I've seen was posted in the UI section of the official World of Warcraft forums.

If you've ever played Gears of War you'll recognize what he did with PowerAuras in the following image links:

Light Damage
Moderate Damage
Heavy Damage
Dead

The different indicators were displays of how much damage the player had taken. This would be an excellent means of tracking health without having to constantly glance back down at your unit frames. Odds are slim that a player would miss that giant red splotch midscreen on low health, but it can be quite a surprise when you get your face planted in the dirt after neglecting to check a player frame tucked away in a far corner of the screen.

I feel that the only real drawback to this mod is the configuration. It has an amazing number of options packed into a small space and it can be offputting in the beginning, but once you get it set up properly it can be one of the most unintrusive and informative mods at your fingertips. To that end, I've set up a short tutorial below.

Tracking a Buff With PowerAuras

Once PowerAuras is installed and you've loaded up the game, type in the slash command /powa to open the list of effects. You'll see that I've already set up a couple for my shaman but I'll be setting up another here to display when my Water Shield buff is not active. This is a simple and easy use for PowerAuras as Water Shield is a buff I like to have on myself as much as possible. The spell itself does have a visual cue in game in the form of an orb of water orbiting my character, but in the heat of combat when the spells are flyin' it's much easier to see a PowerAuras indicator than the in game orbs.


To create a new effect click the new button.

The options can be confusing at first, but I promise there isn't much here that isn't some other AddOn's configuration menu. Whenever you are at this window it will only affect a single effect, so you'll need to edit each one individually to your tastes.

Effects are also saved on a per-character basis so you won't see a warning you set up on your mage clogging your screen on your rogue.

Focusing on only the top half of the menu first, I'll pick a texture. You can adjust the highlighted slider to scroll through the available textures or, for more advanced users, set your own textures for use. The textures have the .tga extension and can be edited in GIMP.


For this example I'm going to use a shield texture, since it will be the Water Shield Buff. I'll also adjust the color to blue to represent water.

On the bottom half of the options menu is where you link the texture to the correct conditions. For this example I'll set it to display when the buff called Water Shield is not active.

And the end result is that when the Water Shield buff is active nothing is displayed. But when the buff needs to be re-applied a blue shield centered on the screen will display. This will be an easy visual cue during a heated battle that my mana regeneration buff has faded and should be recast when I have a free second to do so.