So I dusted off my old elemental shaman, clicked the “you ain’t played this toon since multiple stat squishes ago bro, here’s some green gear that doesn’t suck” button, and now I’m zapping some target dummies to relearn all the proc interplay.
Anytime I’m playing a spec that I’m no longer familiar with, I turn on this small utility addon:
The downside of the builtin Spell Alerts is that for new players, there's no easy way to tell which flashy thing in the middle of the screen corresponds to which flashy button on their action bars, especially when their talents are proccing often in a short period.
What Just Procced is a training helper for the builtin alerts. When a spell alert is shown, it will print the name (and link if possible) that procced the alert, along with where in the HUD the alert is displayed.
I turn that on, begin flailing at dummies, and get a bunch of
[Lava Surge] at position 9.
[Lava Surge] at position 9.
as expected (9 used to be “left + right” until DF/TWW broke it), but once in a while I get a hazy spell alert in the middle top position, and see
There don’t seem to be any particular buff effects at the time.
Nothing special is showing up in the combat log.
The spell alert goes away within a couple of seconds without my doing anything extra.
I don’t believe any of the spell buttons get the shiny border effect, but it goes away so quickly I haven’t had a chance to investigate closely.
I have a vague memory from the last time I played this toon that Lightning Shield used to build up charges, and then there would be this Fulmination! proc, at which point we would… yell FROST SHAWK? It’s been a while.
It still works just fine though, barring the change to the “position” string/numbers. All it’s doing is triggering off the SPELL_ACTIVATION_OVERLAY_SHOW event, and displaying the spell ID sent with the event. (I’m looking at the addon source now, it’s like 20 lines of actual Lua code once you get past all the localization. There’s nothing class- or spell-specific in there.)
The game is sending that event with the Fulmination! spell ID, else there’d be nothing to trigger off of.
Besides, something is still triggering the spell alert at the middle-top position. Addons generally react to the game alerts, they don’t cause them.
I’ve disabled the addon to make you happy, lol. The spell effect is still triggering. Still appears on the screen, still goes away a few seconds later. I think you’re getting distracted by an addon that doesn’t change.
Here’s the addon code:
local on = false
function addon:OnInitialize()
self:RegisterChatCommand("wjp", "ToggleEnable")
self.OnInitialize = nil
end
function addon:ToggleEnable()
on = not on
if on then
self:RegisterEvent("SPELL_ACTIVATION_OVERLAY_SHOW")
else
self:UnregisterEvent("SPELL_ACTIVATION_OVERLAY_SHOW")
end
self:Print(on and L["Activated"] or L["Deactivated"])
end
function addon:SPELL_ACTIVATION_OVERLAY_SHOW(_,spellID,_,positions)
local spell = C_Spell.GetSpellLink(spellID) or C_Spell.GetSpellInfo(spellID) or spellID
self:Printf(L["%s at position %s."], spell, positions)
end
Do you see there’s nothing spell-specific there? It’s been working just fine all these years, that’s why the author doesn’t need to update it.
I am not sure what you are talking about when you reference a spell effect still triggering on screen when the add on is disabled. A spell effect that afaik was removed from the game nearly 8 years ago?
Well that’s the question I posted to ask. The spell name and description is certainly no longer in use, but the alert is very much still active. It’s obviously meant to alert us to something, and I was trying to find out what that something is.
I suspect – because Blizzard has done this quite a lot over the years – that they’re still using the old 190494 spell because all of that particular class mechanism remained implemented even after the [spec aura or talent or passive or whatever it was at the time] got removed from player visibility. The game client is still triggering the SPELL_ACTIVATION_OVERLAY_SHOW event because that’s simply how the builtin UI is told to display spell alert effects, and the graphic shown is tied to spell IDs.
Usually the spell ID accompanying that event corresponds to a class passive or a talent choice, so looking up the spell name & link will show a tooltip for that passive or talent choice. (That’s the point of the reminder addon, after all.) In this specific case, it looks like they’re continuing to use an older spell ID because its implementation already worked, and they didn’t bother to change the ID’s name or tooltip because… well, most people won’t see the name most of the time.
So what’s happening is
Some combat condition is (briefly!) met.
It’s really closely related to the stuff that the now-defunct Fulmination! effect used to use, so Blizzard continues to trigger the event for “show the spell alert for 190494”.
99+% of the player base gets a spell alert. One random dweeb with an under-the-hood addon gets a spell alert plus a message saying “that spell alert you don’t recognize is from [Fulmination!]”
Clicking the link doesn’t work because the player-facing stuff all got removed even though 190494 is still in use under the hood.
But its not referencing any active spell information.
I mean.
Are you really just trying to say that something is in the background and bugged and sending out a spell alert that no one sees unless they have a 10 year old add on? Something that has no effect on gameplay otherwise? No actual use in todays gameplay?
I would take a screenshot if the problem weren’t already solved.
No. I’ve told you exactly what’s happening. It’s clear the graphic is a perfectly normal part of modern gameplay, the under-the-hood spell ID is an old one being reused, and therefore trying to identify the graphic by its spell ID (which works in other cases) was misleading.
I would have had better luck identifying it by the texture ID of the spell alert graphic – it’s the third parameter to the event handler. As you can see from upthread the WJP addon doesn’t use it, but the number’s still a known constant. It’s been a while since I dug into the texture files but it would’ve been easier in this case. Oh well, next time.
That addon doesn’t show alert graphics, it listens for them. I’ve disabled it and the graphic still appears. I’ve shown you its entire code and it should be obvious to anyone familiar with addons that it’s not displaying a graphic – and if you don’t understand how game client event listeners or their addons work, then please stop digging yourself in deeper trying to guess. (Or, you know, extract the built-in UI code using Blizzard’s documentation and learn from it. It’s not difficult. It’s been the same command for twenty years now.)
But hey, don’t take my word for it. Feel free to paste that same code – or hell, download it from wherever you found it earlier – and then ask in the UI & Macros forum how it’s the cause of everything. They’ll probably be polite in explaining to you that you’re barking up the wrong tree.
I would love to see it just so I would know what you are even talking about.
Then show a screen shot.
Because it sounds like your argument is that we are currently receiving a spell graphic when fulmination is triggered. An ability that does not exist in current WoW.
No, you’re either badly misreading or deliberately misinterpreting.
I’m saying there’s a spell alert when something else is triggered, and it’s reusing the old fulmination graphic. Graphics get reused all the time.
The fact that they’re also reusing the old fulmination spell ID and mechanics under the hood to get that same spell alert graphic was unhelpful, but fortunately we have things like the /eventtrace command, and addons can make SPELL_ACTIVATION_OVERLAY_SHOW hooks to see what it’s doing. And with that information, it’s very obvious that it’s being reused and why. You’re welcome to see it yourself; the /eventtrace command has been built-in for several years now.