Minipost: My terrible malfunctioning power auras


Way back when I was learning how to Frost DK, I had a really difficult time getting used to the default game auras. You had one giant icy blue glowy thing, and...some other giant icy blue glowy things.

And what made it even worse was that the proc names didn't have anything to do with the abilities they were supposed to indicate. Killing Machine gave the buff Killing Machine, which meant to Obliterate, while Rime gave the buff Freezing Fog, which meant to Howling Blast.

Considering I'd never played Frost at all before, these were way too many new names to remember all at once. So I designed some power auras that screamed at me in giant letters which ability I was supposed to use. A little training-wheels, but it worked for me, and that's what counts, right?

However, some time into Cataclysm my auras starting completely freaking the hell out. (click for larger version)


I don't know what happened (I assume some patch incompatibility) but my beloved text auras started growing in size every time they activated. So at first, the text would be fine. The next time, slightly bigger. The next, even bigger, and so on, until they were literally covering my entire screen.

I tried changing the fonts, but that didn't work either.


In the end, I had to scrap the text auras and resort to some more conventional choices - a big "SLOW" to indicate it was time to Howling Blast (because in my mind, Howling Blast = Chilblains, thus "slow"), and a simple timer on the other auras for my Obliterate alert.


Of course, the ironic part is that since Power Auras was incredibly late in updating after patch 5.0.4, I've since switched to Weak Auras. There's some things I like, some things I don't (less auras available to choose from, and inferior large-text options in WA are both BIG negatives, in my book), but I doubt I'll go back to PA now. Even if they DID fix the text aura glitch.

3 Responses Subscribe to comments

  1. gravatar
    Anonymous

    I love Weak Auras. The initial reason I switched was that it was much less memory-intensive than Power Auras.

    Then, after I got over the learning curve, I realized it could do some things Power Auras couldn't. Never looked back!

    September 17, 2012 at 8:04 PM

  2. gravatar
    Hysteria

    I hate you ok?

    I thought you played on EU :(

    Was reading your blog for some time now and wanted to roll a char on your server when I noticed you are on US.

    I'm sad panda now.

    OT: I had same experience with PA and had to disable them. Instead I got addon which moved my buffs to the middle of the screen so I could track them without any issues.

    Took me some time to get used to it (tracking those old shadow orbs and empowered shadow buffs was a pain) but now it's like a piece of cake.

    September 18, 2012 at 8:33 AM

  3. gravatar
    Dreamy

    Haha. I don't know but for some reason this just makes me laugh. The fact that there is a addon bug that makes the text freak out and slowly take over your screen. I am looking at the one screenshot here that says "OBLITERATE OR..." and I'm thinking "OBLITERATE OR DIE" "OBLITERATE OR ELSE" "OBLITERATE OR YOU'RE GONNA BE SORRY" "OBLITERATE OR BE OBLITERATED" I know nothing of power auras or if you type in what you want to say, but I'd totally do something like that. Oh I just glanced back at the screenshot and see that in fact you can type stuff in, you have the addon up right there. AND it says obliterate or frost strike. Well, don't I feel silly now. >_>

    September 19, 2012 at 10:54 AM