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Thursday, October 21, 2010

Power Auras DOES work with Holy Power

In my previous post about 4.01 retribution paladins I was bemoaning a lack of support for our new Holy Power resource in the amazing addon Power Auras. Now mind you, I haven't used Power Auras before patch 4.01. After the patch I found the need to use it on my discipline priest and, of course, I would have loved it for my paladin. If only it could tell me when my 3 stacks of Holy Power were up.

Well, it looks like I was mistaken. The first time I looked through Power Auras' configuration option I could have sworn I didn't see anything that would help me set it up for Holy Power. Last night I decided to look at it again and this time it jumped right at me. It was so obvious. So here's a step-by-step guide to help you configure your Power Auras (if you haven't already) to display a notification in the form of an icon above your character's head when you have accumulated 3 stacks of Holy Power. It also shows a counter under the icon for how much HP you have at any given time.

Open Power Auras by typing /powa at the console.

The main window will pop up. Pick New to start a new aura. A bigger window (called Effect Editor) will open, with a lot of options. On the lower half there are a bunch of tabs. You will need to change some options in some of these tabs. Here's what I did for my own configuration.

Activation

  1. Pick a "texture" for your icon, in other words pick how you want your icon to look. There's a large variety to choose from.
  2. Change the opacity if you wish. I set mine to 80%.
  3. Pick a color. I chose a shade of yellow/gold.
  4. Size and positioning are important. I set mine just a bit over the character's head, with some space below it for the stack counter. I also made is smaller than the default.
  5. The most important part comes next: pick Rage/Energy/Power from the Activation by dropdown.
  6. Next, make sure to check the Threshold checkbox and set the slider to 3. You want to be notified when you have 3 stacks of Holy Power.
  7. Finally, from the Power Type dropdown pick Holy Power. That's the part which apparently I missed the first time I checked out this addon.

Animation


Next you'll probably want to change the default animation. You have several options there, for the various stages of existence of the icon. I changed the following:

  1. I set Main Animation to Pulse. This causes the icon to pulse during the time it is active. Helps to draw my attention to it more.
  2. I increased the Animation speed slightly to 120% so it pulses faster.

Sound


Adding sound to your aura is entirely optional. I chose to add a sound to mine so that it hits me over the head when it activates (figuratively speaking).
  1. From the Starting Sound dropdown I picked RaidWarning because that's one of the few sounds I am partial to.

Stacks


A final enhancement that you can add to your Holy Power aura (and I think it's a nice enhancement if I say so myself) is a real-time count of your Holy Power stacks. This will show up in the space between your character's head and the main icon. The beauty of it is that it shows up whenever you have at least 1 stack of HP and updates in real time.
  1. First make sure to check the Show checkbox. This activates the stack counter.
  2. Change position/size/opacity to suit your needs.
  3. You can change the font to a more readable one from the Stack texture dropdown.

Aaaaand... that's it folks. You've configured your Power Auras addon to work with Holy Power in patch 4.01!

Here's how it looks in action,

1 stack of Holy Power.

 3 stacks of Holy Power.


One more thing. You don't even have to go through all these steps to set up your aura. Instead, you can import the settings I used directly into your own Power Auras and you can either start using it right away or use these settings as a stepping stone to customize your own crazy aura. From the main window click the button called Import and paste the following:

Version:3.0.0W; b:0.1725; anim1:4; g:0.8; thresholdinvert:true; icon:Spell_fire_meteorstorm; bufftype:10; texture:19; alpha:0.8; speed:1.2; sound:11; threshold:3; PowerType:9; size:0.3; y:87; stacks.enabled:true; stacks.Relative:BOTTOM; stacks.h:1.7; stacks.Texture:AccidentalPresidency

The moment I started using Power Auras I realized that this is a very powerful addon, limited only by your imagination. My initial disappointment was instantly replaced by joy when I realized that the developer(s) had actually included support for Holy Power and that the addon is indeed compatible with patch 4.01.

Enjoy!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Excellent work! I had been using CLCRET to track the HP bars, but did not want the rotation - since I have some macros to help with that. I just needed something to see the HP aside from looking to my toon icon.