Making Those Debuffs Work For You – SBF

upyursh — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:39:43 +0000

One of the most important things when raiding is awareness, you can not and should not rely on DBM/Marks to know when to move, when to stand still, when to jump out of green shit on the ground etc. There is a number of ways you can increase your awareness but one of the most simple and affective ways is to ensure that your Buffs and Debuffs are in positions that make sense while raiding.

My Buffs are always off the the right, and are generally pretty small as I rarely need to track a buff during a raid.

My Debuffs on the other hand are critical in many boss encounters

One of the recent examples of this is during Lord Jaraxxus, where there are two debuffs being thrown around but they require completely different responses from the raider. This is in fact what has inspired this post, we have many melee making similar mistakes but for some reason kitties used to do it a bit in our first raids (I’m looking at tourn,boom,kat & johnie ). On this fight the issue is Incinerate Flesh vs Legion Flame. Now DBM marks up peeps however we have seen marks drop off quickly for various reasons leaving nothing but your debuff frames to help you know what to do. If you have Legion Flame and you dont move, you really screw over people near you (obviously a bigger prob for melee). If you have Incinerate Flesh and move you risk going out of range of heals and either dying or even worse not dying and due to range the debuff isnt healed off causing massive raid wide damage for healers to pickup.

So enter Satrina Buff Frames, now I know their are plenty out there but this is my choice and it’s my blog so

Install the addon found here: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/satrina-buff-frame.aspx

In game type /sbf config and the following panel will open and by default you will have 2 frames. “Buffs” and “Debuffs”

Buffs

Lets start with buffs, generally these are a lot less important so I move these off the the side of the window

Current Frame: Buffs

General

Frame Unit: player (we’ll look at how this can be useful later)
Show buffs: ticked
Blacklist: ticked

These should all be defaults so no big changes here

Layout

Ok we can set our scale to be something nicer on the screen realestate, I set to 0.7
This is also where you can set the direction of your frame and a number of different options.

If I set the Number of buffs to 40 for example you can see that it now has 2 columns, to avoid this drag the Buffs per collumn to one and the new max will be 30. Set it to that to create 1 long vertical buff frame.

Timers

Set your font as you like and I like to also set an outline, I also like to enable “Color debuff timer by type”

Counts

I set my font to 13, select my font and outline

Bars & Names

I dont use Buff Bars and Names, don’t really see the point.

Ok that should be our buffs done.

Debuffs

It’s important that these are central to your vision so you optimise your awareness. I put mine just above you unit frames (which are bottom of the screen).

Current Frame: Debuffs

General

Frame Unit: player (we’ll look at how this can be useful later)
Show debuffs: ticked
Blacklist: ticked

These should all be defaults so no big changes here again

Layout

Scale is important you need these debuffs to be clear. I set mine to 1.5

Ok now for some smarts, click the “Rows” checkbox and your frame should now be vertical. I also set my number of buffs to 12 (cant imagine a fight where you would have more than that).

Now you can also set where the buffs will grow from. I slide the Buff Growth to the middle so my first first will land there, then progressively get wider as I get more.