Bigwigs (please dont derail into RDX6) - Page 2

Hiba · 08/31/06, 5:01 AM

My guild has slowly swapped to use more or less only big wigs, mainly because it provides a good compilation of Naxx addons. The best thing is the constant upgrades. Most of the timers are really accurate, and usually if they are off, you forgot to reset the module after a wipe. The only problem I have had is that while I'm mind controlling Razuvious adds, the distruptive shout always seem to break it if I'm using Big Wigs. If it's disabled, no problems.

Northerner · 08/31/06, 5:31 AM

I absolutely love NECB for personal use. Honestly, I have so much fight data spamming across several windows and scrolling areas and so on that having timers for events quietly ticking away in a corner is simply a godsend. (I guess my penchant for abusing SCT/SCTD doesn't exactly help to unclutter the main area much either.) I've used it in various incarnations in the past but the latest release really does add a lot of functionality for raids.

Mem · 08/31/06, 5:57 AM

My raid uses a combination of bigwigs and the la Vendetta Boss mobs which are maintained by members of the German guild addicted, yet designed for the English client (which is quite common here even though there is a localization availible...the latter unfortunately sucks. We alway have the odd encounter, where one of the two mods fails to work properly. I might give ECB a try though I feel it is a little bit to extreme for PVP use...might shut it off then, feels like cheating imho :)

enshula · 08/31/06, 6:02 AM

NECB is awesome.

Bigwigs is ok and configurable but im not a huge fan of it. Someone mentioned you can edit the timers on the fly, in necb it takes one slash command to broadcast a repeating timer to the raid which is nice too.

Also used aqwarner lavendetta and ctraenhanced.

This is a mod which merges CTRA and /RW messages into SCT which can be handy when running multiple warning mods as opposed to bigwigs filtering system.

http://www.curse-gaming.com/en/wow/a...8-1-rasct.html

• Chicken · 08/31/06, 7:37 AM

Originally Posted by Zyrxil

I started using BigWigs a few weeks ago. The presentation is a huge part of why I like it, along with the BossBlock spam killing, and the ease of updating it through SVN builds. However, BigWigs' timer always seems to lag 1 second behind NECB's timer for the same event, and that's a big cause for concern.

Recently, I also heard of a bossmod called La Vendetta, which seems aimed at being easily updatable, with independent modules for all encounters. Has anyone ever tried that out?

La Vendetta is what my guild is using; it's pretty good. Not as many options for enabling/disabling parts of the mods as BigWigs provides, but fairly easy to work with. One thing which I found nice is that's it's quite easy to start timer bars with it, it's extremely neat to have a macro set up which shows a nice visible bar on the time left on Shield Wall at Razuvious.
It also comes with a very effective aggro warning.

BigWigs generally gets updated a bit quicker, but that's both an up and downside for some people. From a coding perspective I find La Vendetta a bit easier to work with, which along with the fact that as long as one person starts the timer bars the entire raid with the mods get it, means I could, for instance, fix up their C'Thun phase 2 timers despite only updating my code locally. And to not put you off, C'Thun phase 2 has been fixed in it's latest release.

BigWigs is a bit more memory efficient however, so if that's your concern...

• Kalroth · 08/31/06, 8:11 AM

Originally Posted by Thrillho

Originally Posted by Kalman

I'm a fan - the only problem I've run across with it is that if the rest of your raid isn't using it/broadcasting sync events, it can miss some events. However, someone in the UI thread suggested that upping the combatlog range mitigates the issue, so I'll have to try that.

How do you do this? And is there a maximum range for it? I didn't realize combatlog range was something you could control client-side.

/console SET CombatLogRangeParty "150"
/console SET CombatLogRangePartyPet "150"
/console SET CombatLogRangeFriendlyPlayers "150"
/console SET CombatLogRangeFriendlyPlayersPets "150"
/console SET CombatLogRangeHostilePlayers "150"
/console SET CombatLogRangeHostilePlayersPets "150"
/console SET CombatLogRangeCreature "150"

You only need to do this once, it'll be set for all your characters.

I've been running with this for a couple of months and it's awesome. You don't need to worry about synchronizing damage/healing meters, bossmods and I've yet to experience an encounter where you'd be more than 150 yards away from the boss.
The only downside is that your standard combatlog will get a lot more spammy, but who doesn't have a filtered combatlog nowadays?

Pyta · 08/31/06, 8:19 AM

I just love bigwigs. Coming from just CTRA bossmods and not having tried RDX or anything else I can't say it's the best around though.

Our entire guild uses both bigwigs and natur ECB nowadays and it works great. When the C'thun beam in the start was hotfixed it started ~10 seconds late, but ECB dark glare warning was correct so we just used that one instead.

Now I'll go find out how to check people's version of the two mods, didn't know they had that feuture.

• Maestroquark · 08/31/06, 8:21 AM

Originally Posted by Kalroth

The only downside is that your standard combatlog will get a lot more spammy, but who doesn't have a filtered combatlog nowadays?

No noticeable decrease in performance? Mainly worried about it since I have quite a few mods that parse the combatlog, they'll have more events to go through.

• Kalroth · 08/31/06, 10:26 AM

Originally Posted by Maestroquark

Originally Posted by Kalroth

The only downside is that your standard combatlog will get a lot more spammy, but who doesn't have a filtered combatlog nowadays?

No noticeable decrease in performance? Mainly worried about it since I have quite a few mods that parse the combatlog, they'll have more events to go through.

I got a fairly powerful computer, so I'm not the right one to ask about decrease in performance, but in short; not really.
The default is 35-40 yards, which will usually cover most of the the events that your raid generates, a wild guess would be 80-90% of all raid events is caught by the default combatlog distance.

My main reasoning for doing this was back when I wrote a bossmod for Anub, where the main raid is usually more than 40 yards away from Anub during Locust Swarm. This meant that my bossmod would only work if it's the MT or MT healers using it, which isn't always desireable. This was fixed by setting combatlog distance to 150 yards.

Note that this change is entirely a clientside filter, you wont be getting more network packets from setting the distance to 150 yards.

Wong-Fei-Hung · 08/31/06, 10:27 AM

I love BigWigs, but I've also been using naturECB for a while, and when I'm not tanking, or even when I am tanking, naturECB is pretty much all I need... only reason I keep BigWigs now is 'cause of the FF7 Victory Song when you down a boss :P

thingol · 08/31/06, 10:46 AM

Out of curiosity what combat log filter are people using?

• RoboStac · 08/31/06, 11:00 AM

Originally Posted by Kalroth

Note that this change is entirely a clientside filter, you wont be getting more network packets from setting the distance to 150 yards.

This seems a bit strange to me - have you done any testing to see exactly what the ranges allowed are?. For a raid group it sounds ok to be getting all the events, but your post seems to suggest you can do it for all friendly / hostile characters too, which would be a huge amount of traffic that isn't used by 99% of people in a BG, or in a heavily populated area.

• Kalroth · 08/31/06, 11:18 AM

Originally Posted by RoboStac

Originally Posted by Kalroth

Note that this change is entirely a clientside filter, you wont be getting more network packets from setting the distance to 150 yards.

This seems a bit strange to me - have you done any testing to see exactly what the ranges allowed are?. For a raid group it sounds ok to be getting all the events, but your post seems to suggest you can do it for all friendly / hostile characters too, which would be a huge amount of traffic that isn't used by 99% of people in a BG, or in a heavily populated area.

I believe max range is 150 yards, I can't test it at the moment though since I'm stuck at work.

As for huge amount of traffic, you still get movement and actions for all characters and NPCs that your client renders, even if they don't show up in your combatlog. It'd be a lonely game if you couldn't see futher away than 40 yards. :)
Like I said, this is a clientside filter for the combatlog messages, it's not like you tell the server that you want more information, it's already there.

◊ Anias · 08/31/06, 11:34 AM

We're using bigwigs, because it's an easier modular bossmod than anything else atm, and we have some in house lua developers if we need them. We'll see how RDX measures up when it shows up but for the moment bigwigs is the winner out of all the alternatives. I love having candybars instead of random textual message, and the memory use is a nice bonus.

Setting your combatlog to 150 yards only hits your performance if you have multiple combat log parsing addons or you display your raw combat log. Otherwise it's a non-issue performance wise. Since my combat log isn't displayed in the first place (yay transcriptor and /combatlog) I don't notice any dip at all.

Malan · 08/31/06, 11:45 AM

Kalroth that was perhaps one of the most beneficial posts I've ever read.
Thank you.

• RoboStac · 08/31/06, 11:54 AM

Originally Posted by Kalroth

As for huge amount of traffic, you still get movement and actions for all characters and NPCs that your client renders, even if they don't show up in your combatlog. It'd be a lonely game if you couldn't see futher away than 40 yards. :)
Like I said, this is a clientside filter for the combatlog messages, it's not like you tell the server that you want more information, it's already there.

Makes sense I guess. I'm just slightly amazed that something like this is so unknown if its been possible for a few months, especially with so many mods trying harder and harder to sync combat logs / events across players who will probably be well within 150 yards, and that a setting that looks to be purely for ui display purposes causes mods to have their events filtered as well.

Big thanks for the information though, having a bigger combat log range is something I always wished was possible.

Rogar · 08/31/06, 12:00 PM

Three months ago I took a look at every bossmod package available. When I started reporting bugs to the addon devs, BigWigs stood out from the others. Fixes were made available quickly via the Ace SVN. Since then, the BigWigs maintainers have continued that quick turnaround time on bugs. Feature set wise, I've been very happy with BigWigs throughout BWL, AQ40 and 5 bosses into Naxx. Little things like showing Tranq Shot cooldowns during Flamegor for all hunters using BigWigs is a nice touch.

For all the cutting edge content folks, there's an Ace mod called Transcriptor which captures and sorts all events. It's the primary tool used to create a BigWigs profile for each encounter. Even if you don't use BigWigs, it's a much improved tool over parsing combat logs for all event data.

The Ace community (where BigWigs has its roots) as a whole is largely unknown by most players. There's some great addon work being developed there, and the Ace2 libraries are a valuable resource to anyone serious about writing addons. http://www.wowace.com/ One of the devs in the Ace community (Tekkub) was responsible for getting the generic communication channels added, and another was responsible for the 1.12 change with the way raid frames are allocated (memory reduction).

Edit: There's some conversation about BigWigs and increasing combat log range here: http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.p...,1762.280.html
Also, for those complaining about Razuvious shout timers being off, if you have someone with mana in range of the shout (like a Voidwalker), the timer works perfectly.

• Kalroth · 08/31/06, 1:25 PM

Originally Posted by nataku

Kalroth, I'll have to give that combat log distance extension script a try when I get home. Do you only have to run it once or do you have to run it every time you log on?

Only once.
Using "/console SET <name> <value>" ingame is equal to editing "WoW\WTF\config.wtf" and adding the variables manually, it'll be set for all characters on all accounts.

crimsonsentinel · 08/31/06, 1:37 PM

Bigwigs works great for me, except for the fact that it usually doesn't turn on until the boss does its first "event" whatever that may be (since I'm a healer and I almost never have the boss targeted).

Dakous · 08/31/06, 1:44 PM

Originally Posted by crimsonsentinel

Bigwigs works great for me, except for the fact that it usually doesn't turn on until the boss does its first "event" whatever that may be (since I'm a healer and I almost never have the boss targeted).

Have you tried just mousing over the boss de jour before an attempt?

I usually get a DONG* Hakkar bossmod activiated! while he's passive (and no timers until combat begins).

Sorry if that's a bit basic a question, just trying to be helpful.

Derketo · 08/31/06, 2:08 PM

Originally Posted by Kalroth

Originally Posted by nataku

Kalroth, I'll have to give that combat log distance extension script a try when I get home. Do you only have to run it once or do you have to run it every time you log on?

Only once.
Using "/console SET <name> <value>" ingame is equal to editing "WoW\WTF\config.wtf" and adding the variables manually, it'll be set for all characters on all accounts.

Trying this out, when I type those commands I get no visual confirmation that it's went through. Is this standard?

crimsonsentinel · 08/31/06, 2:16 PM

Originally Posted by Dakous

Originally Posted by crimsonsentinel

Bigwigs works great for me, except for the fact that it usually doesn't turn on until the boss does its first "event" whatever that may be (since I'm a healer and I almost never have the boss targeted).

Have you tried just mousing over the boss de jour before an attempt?

I usually get a DONG* Hakkar bossmod activiated! while he's passive (and no timers until combat begins).

Sorry if that's a bit basic a question, just trying to be helpful.

Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. I just seem to have trouble triggering it reliably (aside from manually doing it, but screw that I'm lazy). Also, once we pull and it hasn't turned on, I obviously can't really spend that much time waving my mouse over the boss.

Just yesterday on our BWL clear, the vael mod popped on while we were starting Razorgore, which was kind of screwy. It didnt' really matter since razorgore doesn't really need a bossmods, but I just found it a bit odd.

Malan · 08/31/06, 2:21 PM

Originally Posted by Derketo

Originally Posted by Kalroth

Originally Posted by nataku

Kalroth, I'll have to give that combat log distance extension script a try when I get home. Do you only have to run it once or do you have to run it every time you log on?

Only once.
Using "/console SET <name> <value>" ingame is equal to editing "WoW\WTF\config.wtf" and adding the variables manually, it'll be set for all characters on all accounts.

Trying this out, when I type those commands I get no visual confirmation that it's went through. Is this standard?

If you don't get a console error printed out it worked. Do a reload ui, then inspect the contents of your config.wtf file in your /wtf directory and you'll find the lines recorded at the bottom.

Cordelia · 08/31/06, 2:21 PM

Our guild uses Bigwigs for the most part. I actually think its a requirement. Some people choose to use RDX5 also (sorry to derail :P) but I'm not sure if that's for the RDX boss mods or just the raid bars.

◊ Kalman · 08/31/06, 2:24 PM

Originally Posted by crimsonsentinel

Originally Posted by Dakous

Originally Posted by crimsonsentinel

Bigwigs works great for me, except for the fact that it usually doesn't turn on until the boss does its first "event" whatever that may be (since I'm a healer and I almost never have the boss targeted).

Have you tried just mousing over the boss de jour before an attempt?

I usually get a DONG* Hakkar bossmod activiated! while he's passive (and no timers until combat begins).

Sorry if that's a bit basic a question, just trying to be helpful.

Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. I just seem to have trouble triggering it reliably (aside from manually doing it, but screw that I'm lazy). Also, once we pull and it hasn't turned on, I obviously can't really spend that much time waving my mouse over the boss.

Just yesterday on our BWL clear, the vael mod popped on while we were starting Razorgore, which was kind of screwy. It didnt' really matter since razorgore doesn't really need a bossmods, but I just found it a bit odd.

You can mouseover some bosses from places you wouldn't expect, due to 3D glitches (like being able to /tar Chrom from Broodlord's room) and the bossmod will enable. Probably you were standing somewhere such that your mouse cursor passed over Vael through the gate.