Flux

Some items in the game are remarkable in that they are either insanely useful or very powerful. Let’s take a look at one.

Drums of Battle

Profile: You and everyone in your group does damage faster.
Where: Pattern can be bought from Almaador if you are honored with The Sha’tar.
How: Crafted and only usable by leather workers with 365 skill.  Requires 6 Heavy Knothide Leather and 4 Thick Clefthoof Leather.
Loot: Drums of Battle

There are several patterns for leatherworkers to make various types of drums which do everything from healing, increase run speed, or even fear your enemies.  But the drums that give you the most boom are the battle drums.  They are most useful for raiding and give the group an extra 80 haste rating, which is roughly 5% faster attacks and casting.  This is so useful that some players specifically level up leather working to be able to use them in end game raids. Note that they do not work in arena and you have to be a leatherworker to use them.

The buff doesn’t stack, so it’s handy to have a macro like the one below to warn other players so they don’t waste theirs. Note that this macro uses the /in command which is not a standard command. For it to work you must already have a mod installed which enables this, like Prat or Cosmos.

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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.

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As discussed like wildfire in the WoW forums, using a macro, Druids can now drink potions while shapeshifted. This is because of the cancelform feature added in the 2.3 patch. Here is an example macro:

#show Super Healing Potion
/cancelform
/use Super Healing Potion
/use Master Healthstone
/cast Dire Bear Form

Limitations and misconceptions:

• It only works with items that do not trigger a global cooldown.
• You must not currently be under a global cooldown.
• Don’t hit the macro quickly twice in a row.
• You must have enough mana to shift back.
• You WILL NOT get hit out of form.

What does this mean and why does it work? It works because cancelform doesn’t trigger a global cooldown. To understand this let’s look at what the global cooldown is. Most abilities and items in the game trigger a timer that lasts 1-1.5 seconds. During that timer, you must wait before you can do something else. This is partly so you can’t button mash some buttons over and over to high speed victory. But more importantly in this case it’s so the server and the client, blizzard’s server and your computer, need time to exchange information on what’s happening during the fight.

Drinking potions and using healthstones don’t trigger a global cooldown. That means this macro has one line that does, the last one which shifts back to form. So as far as the server is concerned everything in the macro happens all at once. The only time this isn’t true, and the only time you are at risk of getting hit during that instantaneous time that you are out of form, is when your computer takes more time to apply the change than the latency to blizzard’s server. This is effectively never.

There are two risks. You must make sure you have enough mana in caster form to switch back. This is rarely a problem as a bear or cat, unless you are doing a lot of shifting. And the other is that you must be sure you aren’t currently under a cooldown. If you are then the last line in the macro will fail and you will be left in caster form. So wait 1.5 seconds since your last mangle, shread, or other ability before using the macro. And don’t button mash and hit the macro more than one time.

How useful is this? It’s useful as an emergency ability as a tank. And it’s handy for cat form when healers don’t have time to throw heals on you during a fight.