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Gararf of Sylvanas (EU) has successfully translated the work I’ve done building the Mana Regen Calculator into a UI addon entitled Spirit Guide. In Gararf’s own words:
Spirit Guide is An unconventional mana regeneration calculator that cleans up previously shady aspects of the relationship between mana regeneration and many complex factors such as item procs and talents.
What does Spirit Guide do and why doesn’t it give me my actual mana regen when I put in all my stats?
Spirit Guide calculates predicted mana regen over the course of a fight and uses it to give advice on the value of Spirit compared to Intellect. This is different than your “mana regen” in your character sheet for a number of reasons: first of all, the mana regen shown in your character tab is an idyllic situation where you gain 100% of your Spirit-based mana regeneration all of the time, whereas in combat this isn’t the case. Spirit Guide calculates the benefit from items and talents, uses your mana pool as “bonus mana” and spreads it out over the course of the fight. In this way, it allows you to calculate the value of Intellect as affected by fight duration.
Once installed, the addon is accessible by typing /sg or by using the minimap button that it adds. You can see a screenshot of the addon at right. Many of the options will likely seem familiar from the JavaScript-based Mana Regen Calculator, but there are a few additional things to take note of:
In addition to the Intensity/Meditation/Arcane Meditation classes, Spirit Guide can also be used by Hunters, Paladins, Shamans, and Warlocks.
- To automatically populate several fields from the data in your character sheet, press the button labeled Get My Stats at the top of the screen. This does not include stats like % Time in 5SR or Cast Frequency but does include things like talents and item bonuses.
- Class options such as mana regeneration affecting talents can be toggled on and off under the Class Options screen. This is a great way to determine how a potential respec is likely to affect your effective mana regen.
- Item Based MP5 is the total pure MP5 you receive from items. This is not something currently included in the Mana Regen Calculator.
Once you have your stats, talents, and item effects entered into Spirit Guide, click the Calculate button. You should see a screen similar to the one shown below:
Most of the data shown above should be familiar to anyone who has used the Mana Regen Calculator. Note that it doesn’t include the optimization data with recommendations of how you could more efficiently leverage Intellect and Spirit to maximize your regeneration/itemization point. This sort of analysis was deemed to be less relevant within the game, but you can still use the Mana Regen Calculator to find this information.
» Download Spirit Guide from Curse.com
About the Author: Gararf is a Restoration-specced Tauren Druid and a member of the Euro Krem guild on the European Sylvanas server. As this is his first addon, he’s learned a lot in the process of building Spirit Guide. We look forward to the (hopefully Druid-themed) addons he will create in the future!
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*hugs* .-= Softi´s last blog ..Dum di dum di dum =-.
I might just add this to my addon collection. The selling point is definetly the added item based regen, at least for an addon. ^_^
Sorry to shatter your dreams of complex item mp5 calculations, but its just a flat modifier so is preety much superficial. I added it to fill that gap between the mp5 in your charcter tab and the one you get when you put in all the correct options
and i’ll let you in on a little secret if you click the get my ststs button the item mp5 is caculated from the difference between your expected mp5 without item mp5 and the value in your charcter tab… so you will always get the right mp5. this assumes the calculations work perfectly (which they do). there was no API function to get item mp5 or get stats off items your wearing (very annoying) so it was either that or learn how to anazlyse item tooltip text and extract the value off of that. oh buggerit im rambling on again…
Well, what can I say? I’m a fan of the mana regen calculator, so chances are I’ll be a fan of this as well – downloading it now.
Thanks for going through the work for this addon, Gararf
Curse lists it as Beta, so I’ll let you know if I run into any issues when trying it out.
Im intrested to know if it makes an error when you log in, it happened to me, but i beleive my error catching addon was abit oversensitive and the error dosent actually come up otherwise.
currently im trying to find the motivation to clean up & refine the code, but every time i look it i feel daunted
I have my last school exam tomorrow so i’ll have more time to work on it then.
All suggestions for improvement / expansion welcomed!
Hmmm, i tested it out. Get My Stats tells me i have 87 mp5 but when i went over my gear i have a total of 80 counting Vitality. Maybe im just missing something.
It took quite a heroic amount of effort to get it that close, im quite sure it should be a maximum of 1 out with rounding errors. I’ll have to go check it on myself now.
could you re-check that for me, making sure you include anything gained from gear & talents only if they arent in the addon.
this is probably the main reason its still Beta, so if others could check this too and you could post the results on my Curse page, i dont think Phae would want the comments plastered with all your results
You can see the creation process and screenshots of the addon to see how it changed and devolped along with all my ideas and abit of guild banter on a post on my guild forum:
http://www.eurokremguild.net/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=195
@Gararf: I don’t get any error messages when I first load into the game, either.
Also, I certainly don’t mind if readers want to comment here with bugs or what have you. As far as I’m concerned, posts like this are pretty much the property of the person whose work I’m highlighting. If you want, you should be able to easily monitor responses to this thread by subscribing to this link: http://www.resto4life.com/2008/06/14/featured-addon-spirit-guide/feed/
well thats funny, i’ve always thought Spirit Guide was like voluntary work i was doing for you, I only thought of making the addon myelf after suggesting to you that you could get some one to do it
Anyway, my exams are finished now, but i still have to go into colledge which is a bugger. I’ll be working on it more now though.
@Gararf: I really appreciate you converting these calculations to a UI addon. But while the math may have been ours (Mr. and Mrs. Phae), the programming is yours. So thank you. =)
I’ve Added a Graph Drawing function! im reallly excited about this, the programming is tough but i’ve succeeded thus far and you can draw a variety of graphs that illustrate the different relationships between the factors. The Curse version has also been updated, but that went out of date the next day. you’ll see what i mean when i upload version 1.3
I had to revise all my old code to get to this point, so its all up from here.
its getting to be quite a mammoth addon :>
I’ve started work on another addon, have no fear though i’ll still keep this one updated, i want to make somthing more generic, mana regeneration is a preety specific area that not many people are interested in.
Its going to be a request system for buying and selling items to and from the guild bank.
so what do ya think? in theory: a worthwhile addon for guilds to use?
@Gararf: The graphing function looks pretty cool, but it’s not really clear to me what it’s intended to be graphing?
well i thought it was preety obvious, the vertical axis is Mana regeneration, and the horizontal axis is whatever you checked in tick boxes. so you can see the different relationships between mana regeneration. when you choose the MRC the heroizontal axis is automatically on a scale of 0 to 1 and cant be modified, but you can easily adjust the scales with the other graphs with the slider bars.
im very proud of that graph function.
you can get some intresting effects when you add in an innervate, because the mana gained from innervate is also dependant upon the intellect.
and fight length graph is abit deceptive, the base mana from intellect causes it to be that shape, if you remove it from the advanced options, then its just a flat line as fight length dosent affect mana regeneration.
@Gararf:
Your new addon sounds like it could be cool, but how would it be more beneficial than the current system that allows a guild to make tabs with withdrawal limits? It seems like if it were something that needed to be handled on a special basis, you could set a tab that only officers could access and then members could just send them an in-game mail with their request?
The graphing function was not obvious to me. It would probably be worthwhile to label the vertical axis. Is it possible to make each plottable value a different color?
Ahh well the benefits of my new addon are:
1. You Can see the contents of the guild bank wherever you are
2. The contents of the guild bank is shared between guild members so that even if you havnt been to the guild bank, you still have an up to date list of everything in there
3. You can set additinal information like whether the guild is buying / selling each item and for what price
4. The list is concise unlike the guild bank where quantities are limited by stacks , in my addon the items are shown with a single quantity per item
5. The items may be filtered and searched for
6. “Requests” allow for more than one person to veiw your request
7. Requests promote an easier system of getting things from your guild bank, which i think currently nigh impossible short of having a guild bank open to theft.
8. Requests provide a way for transactions to be recorded where everyone can see them, letting the general populace know officers dont just steal everything in sight.
it dosent actually do all that stuff yet, but i know how to do it and im well on my way,
was that enuff for you?
oh i do like this addon!
Heres the creation blog along with alpha versions for download
http://www.eurokremguild.net/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=263&p=1535
and yes i would concider doing that stuff, but not immediately, im abit obsessive about this addon atm, been working on it two days straight.
@Gararf: That sounds really great! The link you’ve provided appears to no longer exist, though! New link?
link still works 100% for me, i’ll add some direct links to screenshots so you can see what i’ve done so far. i might even upload my alpha version to curse today so i can give ppl liks for download, it needs lots of testers because of the way it works i cant test it on myself. screenshots:
http://i261.photobucket.com/albums/ii71/gararf/My%20Addon%20Pics/WoWScrnShot_070808_203608.jpg
Scanning in progress (the writing flashes)
http://i261.photobucket.com/albums/ii71/gararf/My%20Addon%20Pics/WoWScrnShot_070708_040110.jpg
splash screen flashes when you login, (can be disabled):
http://i261.photobucket.com/albums/ii71/gararf/My%20Addon%20Pics/WoWScrnShot_070608_200654.jpg
im getting a huge amount of bugs as i have to do lots of validation from shared information, there has to be a kind of version number for each peice of data otherwise you end up with alot of incorrect data being shared.
scanning the guild bank works perfect though! im thinking of getting it to scan item tooltips too, but this will be performance intensive. unfortunately toolips provide all the information about items, there is no API command to get information about items.
@Gararf: NOW the link is working. ^_^ Sorry. Anyway, that looks really cool, and the features sound promising. Best of luck.
P.S. Is there any way you might consider adding a toggle to the minimap button of Spirit Guide? I hate minimap buttons personally, and I have to disable the addon when I’m not using it as a result.