Flux

Describing where things are can be difficult. This is partly because you can’t reach your hand through the screen and point. Everything from where something is on the map, where you are when your friends aren’t in the same area, or just describing where to stand during a boss fight can all be deceptively difficult. Fortunately with mods, macros, or even some special items you can make things easier.

Let’s take a look at some.

Flare Marking

There are four different color smoke flares that you can buy or create. What makes these useful is that you can throw them on the ground up to 50 yards away. This is can be helpful for various fights where you need to point out exact placement positions before starting but you can’t get too close. They can all be made by engineers. The red, white, and green ones can be bought in limited quantities from vendors. For the purple one, you’ll have to find an engineer. They can’t be used in the cities but they can be used in battlegrounds where people have been known to make walls of smoke to hide behind.

Coordinates

The game uses a set of coordinates which you normally can’t see. It’s like longitude and latitude but consists of two numbers from 0 to 100. The top left of the map is always 0,0 and the bottom right is 100,100. Many of the database websites use these coordinates to explain where quests and NPCs are. You can either use a mod to display these or use a macro. Mods are a little more helpful since they not only show you where you are but also the location your mouse is hovering over on a map.

You can type this in the chat window or put it in a macro and then on a button.

/script SetMapToCurrentZone() local x,y=GetPlayerMapPosition("player") DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage(format("%s, %s: %.1f, %.1f",GetZoneText(),GetSubZoneText(),x*100,y*100))

Pinging the Minimap

A feature that is built into the game is clicking on your minimap. By clicking, or pinging, your minimap a gold circle temporarily appears. It’s useful because everyone in your group will see it. This is typically used to warn people of incoming groups in battlegrounds or help people find rough placement locations for certain boss fights. It is also unfortunately used to express frustration when people repeatedly click it driving everyone in the group crazy from the ping noise.

Map Mods

There are a wide variety of map mods, two of the more popular ones are Atlas and Cartographer (Ace). Both of these display maps that you normally can’t see. Depending on what features you install with Cartographer you can also display where your friends currently are on the world map in your party, raid, and guild. This can be really useful when you are meeting other people to trade with. You can make notes on the map and share them. And you can even enable a big red arrow on your screen that points in the direction of various map objectives.

And don’t forget that if you are desperate, pointing fingers at the screen can’t hurt.

Tags: macro, mod, skill, tip
Author: aos

This entry was posted by aos on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Games, WoW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.