Wowpedia talk:Village pump/Archive06

Critical hit formula error?
→ Discussion moved to Talk:Formulas:Critical hit chance#Cirt hit formula error?

Deathwing the Black Dragonflight and Nether Drakes
This is something that has been bugging the hell out of me. I may not be posting this in the best place and I can’t think of anywhere else. I’m new to posting on the wikki and I won’t have a WoW account till a couple of months. Anyways.

This is from the BC site and also on this website in the Nether Drake section.

Near the end of the Second War, the black dragon Deathwing traveled through the Dark Portal to Draenor. Believing the world to be a relatively safe haven for his offspring, he secreted away a cache of black dragon eggs. Following the war, Ner'zhul recklessly opened multiple portals on Draenor, and the magical stress tore the planet apart. The energies released in this catastrophe altered Deathwing's eggs, resulting in the nether drakes: partially corporeal and partially ethereal dragons who possess the ability to shift between the astral and physical planes. Without Deathwing's guidance, these otherworldly nether drakes are just now finding their own way among the blasted ruins of Outland.

Going by the Time Line the Second War - Warcraft 2 occurred in the years 6-8. Which means that Deathwing placed the eggs on Draenor about two years before "Day of the Dragon." Which leads me to ask several questions.

If he had eggs why did he want Alexstrasza's eggs?

Where the heck did he get the eggs from?

Why did he abandon them?

Are they even his?

I'm also wondering about a few things in general about the black dragonflight. Apparently they were all killed or something leaving only Deathwing. What happened to them? In WoW there are lots of them, how did they come back?

How old are Nefarian and Onyxia? Does Deathwing know of they're existence? If he does why did he not get their help in Day of the Dragon or even mention them. They seem to know that they are Deathwings children. Who is the mother?

Nathanmaxtro 00:50, 3 September 2006 (EDT)

Suggestion - Random Lore Page
I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but here it goes anyway. (How many times have you heard that one, huh?)

I really like the "Random page" feature to let me just randomly find out new tidbits about WoW, but my main interest is WoW lore (including lore characters, places, events, etc.), and I know many people that feel the same way about the wiki. Would it be possible to add a new, additional link (not replacing current "Random page" link) that gives you a random Lore page? It could be set up to only return pages that have one or more of the "lore" categories tagged onto it, such as "Lore Characters," "Major Characters," "Organizations," etc. - basically, it just leaves out articles that are labeled as purely loot-oriented, only contain "trivial" Quest or Quest-giver info, etc. Some loot info is okay if there's some backstory to it. I don't know; it might be too difficult to pull off since so many categories could apply. What do you think? -- Tuhljin 03:01, 4 September 2006 (EDT)


 * That's an interesting idea. It would be nice if it could be implemented, and I would think it would attract people who are into that (which would be many by my guess). However, I know little about wikis, so I wouldn't know if it could be done. Pzychotix 01:05, 4 September 2006 (EDT)


 * I think the logic would be fairly easy to implement, but I don't know what kind of access the admin have in creating their own special pages.--Ralthor 01:10, 6 September 2006 (EDT)


 * I like the idea of random lore page. I like lore too. --InvincNerd

OK ... Many questions, answered on the Wiki but it doesn't matter. He wanted Alexstrasza's eggs to create a Chromatic Dragonflight, with different dragon blood and abilities. His first trial happened on Black/Red dragons, so he stole Alexstrasza's eggs. He got the eggs from his prime consort. He abandoned them cause he's not their mother and had much more things to do (rule over the world, for instance). Yes, these eggs are his, qs it's told on the official website. The Black Dragonflight wasn't particularly raided nor destroyed, the Dragons just hide because of the Blacks who have killed and exhausted all sentient races all over the world, beginning the era of great adventurers and dragon hunters. They were always there, they just weren't showed in all games & books. We don't know how old are Nefarian and Onyxia, though they must be over a thousand years, maybe much more. Yeah, Deathwing knows them of course, but maybe they were wandering around the world, probably with their mother. Their mother is Deathwing's prime consort.--Kirochi 01:08, 4 September 2006 (EDT)

Upgrade Status
Good news: new CPU, new MediaWiki, new Squid, etc. are all set up. Bad news: I didn't have time to set up itemstats or the few other plugins that people had requested. I didn't want to keep the wiki down further though, so it's back up, but I'll just drop those plugins in at some point. I also haven't had a chance to look at the effect of user css on pageload, but I can also do that without taking the wiki down.

Things should be running smoothly, but if something starts to blow up (severe page load delays), or images are broken, etc., please drop me an email from my user page. Thanks! -- Rustak 16:09, 4 September 2006 (EDT)


 * Looking good so far :) Yay! -- Kirkburn (talk) 18:50, 4 September 2006 (EDT)


 * Fantastic! I'm looking forward to some of those plugins. :) Thanks for all the hard work so far. --Rahskala 11:31, 5 September 2006 (EDT)

Whoops, figured it was too good to be true. I saw a problem where some pages were being cached as already logged-in-users; I've done some things to try to fix this (it might only have been me as well, so don't panic!) I'll keep an eye on it. -- Rustak 19:47, 4 September 2006 (EDT)

News articles
I see a major problem incoming (and already present). See Talk:News and contribute your views! -- Kirkburn (talk) 10:35, 3 September 2006 (EDT)

Changes due to the MediaWiki 1.7 upgrade
First out, the upgrade caused some problems that need to be fixed and/or worked around.


 * For a list of current problems and workarounds, see MediaWiki Quirks. (Is kept updated)

On the brighter side, MediaWiki 1.7 lets us do some new things we weren't able to before. I'll try to summarize some of them here:


 * We can now "#redirect" from regular articles to category pages properly. (Note: never redirect a category page to anything else though)


 * Default values in templates now work like they should, so you can use e.g.


 * You no longer need to re-edit talk pages when doing . You are automatically added as the first vote. You can also give your reason directly with


 * We can now control who gets to mark pages as patrolled. If you are a member of the NP patrol or RC Patrol, you can. Otherwise, you cannot. This prevents vandals from marking their own edits and pages as patrolled. Both teams want more members though, so if you've been around for a while, don't hesitate to apply ;)

--Mikk (T) 20:44, 6 September 2006 (EDT)

To Stub, or not to Stub?
→ This discussion has been archived to the stub info page. Very illustrative in my opinion. --Mikk (T) 03:20, 13 September 2006 (EDT)

No images!
Seems like the image server (or the permissions on the image directory) is down and out. No images is working at all. --Leethal 12:20, 7 September 2006 (EDT)


 * Yep, same thing is happening to me. I am getting:


 * Server misconfig? --Bendyr 11:10, 8 September 2006 (EDT)


 * Okay for me now - still occuring for anyone? -- Kirkburn (talk) 11:36, 8 September 2006 (EDT)


 * EDIT: Fixed now. Ambelen 12:42, 8 September 2006 (EDT)


 * Still happening for me Jaxdahl 13:00, 8 September 2006 (EDT)
 * Ok, I got it: images are broke if you use wowwiki.com - they work fine if you use www.wowwiki.com - I've sent an email to Rustak Jaxdahl 13:11, 8 September 2006 (EDT)


 * Yup, confirmed. For now: workaround - use WWW.wowwiki.com -- Kirkburn (talk) 14:00, 8 September 2006 (EDT)

As this is an apache server, putting this is .htaccess should do the trick until you make the images work without the 'www' subdomain:

RedirectMatch ^http://wowwiki.com/$ http://www.wowwiki.com/ --Leethal 11:54, 9 September 2006 (EDT)


 * I doubt Rustak will fix that redirect. Linking from external web sites to images stored on WoWWiki is bandwidth theft.  --Mikk (T) 22:19, 10 September 2006 (EDT)


 * maybe he could add a plain redirect script on http://wowwiki.com that just redirects you to http://www.wowwiki.com no matter the pathinfo part, or do the rewrite a bit different - should be something like
 * RedirectMatch ^http://wowwiki.com/ http://www.wowwiki.com/ [R] (tho this really is completely untested of course ;)) -watchout 04:15, 12 September 2006 (EDT)

ServerAlias wowwiki.com ServerName www.wowwiki.com I think the above would work Jaxdahl 05:00, 12 September 2006 (EDT)

IMO this would reenable deep links wich was what Rustak wanted to avoid? Anyway I just got a way better idea... just rewrite direct image links to their appropriate wikipage! like  to    # Skip if no referer info at all RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)wowwiki.com [NC] RewriteRule ^/images/[^/]+/[^/]+/(.*)$ /Image:$2 (Or at least something close to that...) Of course this breaks any embedded images linked from outside, since they're no images anymore but html pages but at least links will work and anyone trying to pull the image directly (without embedding, via 'view image' commands and alike) should show it - if my rewrite rules are correct.
 * 1) Referer info other than wowwiki?

If you skip the first condition, it should redirect any accesses without referer info, this however can cause problems with some browsers that do not send referer info, but I'm not really sure on that -watchout 06:22, 12 September 2006 (EDT)

Wowpedia:Reference desk
So like, this is dead isn't it. Should we even bother trying to revive it? I see no reason to. -- Kirkburn (talk) 14:41, 8 September 2006 (EDT)


 * He's dead Jim -- Gryphon 19:26, 8 September 2006 (EDT)


 * :(--Ralthor 19:34, 8 September 2006 (EDT)


 * I don't say this to cause offence to those wishing to provide answers, but questions are best asked on the relevant articles pages now, since we cover pretty much everything. The reference desk was a good idea, but really doesn't fit in with the wiki's style any more. It was also far too complicated. -- Kirkburn (talk) 19:37, 8 September 2006 (EDT)


 * I'm not offended, the truth is just sad. I liked the idea, but even knowing how it worked it was particularly hard to use to get/give answers, I can't image being new to the wiki and trying to ask question on it.  --Ralthor 19:44, 8 September 2006 (EDT)

Vote to delete the reference desk is up at Wowpedia talk:Reference desk. --Mikk (T) 19:49, 8 September 2006 (EDT)


 * The WoWWiki Reference Desk is now officially decomissioned. Sub pages that actually had answers are kept for archival / external incoming link purposes. All pages that were kept have well-visible notices that they are, in fact, archives and decomissioned. They are placed in Category:Archives.


 * If someone feels that these archives need to be deleted also, feel free to fire up another deletion vote; I just felt that this was the right way to deal with it.  --Mikk (T) 02:22, 13 September 2006 (EDT)

Why are there
Gold selling ads here and epic selling ads?


 * Because google put them there. We don't advocate it, but it just happens anyways, even if we try to block them. Pzychotix 15:34, 10 September 2006 (EDT)

PNG background color hint for IE6
I just realized that even though IE6 (which is way common and will continue to be for some time) doesn't handle PNG transparency correctly, you can coerce the default background of the PNG to be #333333 just fine, which makes it display OK in the standard skin (which is what all unregistered visitors use) - as long as you don't need it to be TRANSPARENT to something that's supposed to show underneath it, that is.

In the GIMP, you just set the current background color to #333333 before saving, and save. Done.

Other drawing programs? Dunno. I do know that Inkscape doesn't save its document background color to the specific "PNG background color" field when exporting PNGs (it just draws the right color in the image - no visible difference except in buggy IE6 that doesn't know what PNG transparency is), so you'll have to fix it after exporting.

--Mikk (T) 21:19, 10 September 2006 (EDT)


 * Ah, well I already tried that in Photoshop, but it didnt work. So Photoshop, seems to be a bit less standard conformant (or at least my version of it) than GIMP, but it should really be possible to import all icons to gimp and resave them with #333 background coloring. Think that's a nice solution -watchout 10:21, 11 September 2006 (EDT)


 * It definitely is. I've done it to plenty of other images. Just load em up and save in batches. The background brush color doesn't change when you load new images so you just have to doink ctrl+s and you're done :-)  --Mikk (T) 02:23, 13 September 2006 (EDT)

Other Languages
What exactly is our policy on foreign language pages. It seems most of them get deleted, but they also don't have much content... Discuss.--Ralthor 12:19, 18 July 2006 (EDT)


 * I've submitted a policy proposal to outright DNP non-English content: Wowpedia talk:DNP policy.  --Mikk (T) 08:10, 4 September 2006 (EDT)


 * Note the talk on User talk:Rustak which resulted in me creating the template. Please keep followup talk here at the pump so that we don't clobber poor Rustak's page :-)   --Mikk (T) 22:29, 10 September 2006 (EDT)

Images
Some of the images aren't working for me, why is this? It only has a link in place of the image, and if I click the link it says "403 Forbidden". -[Saimdusan|User:Saimdusan]


 * see Wowpedia talk:Village pump -watchout 04:07, 12 September 2006 (EDT)

Add-Ons
Hello there, I'm a total NOOB when it comes to add-ons and I would like to know where I can get them? I was told to go here to find them, but so far I've had no luck. How do I get them? XXX tankespind84


 * See UI FAQ/AddOns.  --Mikk (T) 03:41, 13 September 2006 (EDT)

Black Citadel/Black Temple
I may have been a bit hasty in changing everything from Black Citadel to Black Temple, but the name of the place has been changed (though I am unsure as to the particular reasons). Someone mentioned that it also used to be called Shadowmoon Fortress. How do you suggest we deal with the Warcraft III references to Black Citadel? --Jaxdahl 18:16, 13 September 2006 (EDT)


 * I recommend the WC3 references should remain "citadel." That's what it was known as during Illidan's conquest of the place. Admittedly, that building is where Hellfire Citadel now, but the name "Black Temple" could have just changed because the Naga and Blood Elves worship Illidan in certain ways. --Ragestorm 20:52, 13 September 2006 (EDT)

(Deleted guild name) - Cross Realm Recruitment
''Deleted. WoWWiki general pages is NOT the place for guild recruitment ads! --Mikk''

Funeral Raid
Is there, (an if not, should there be) an article regarding the (infamous) funeral raid?

--Zerstoren 00:35, 15 September 2006 (EDT)

I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. The guild was Serenity Now, on Illidan, the video is on | google.

Well, I don't know much about it myself (just whatever can eally be gleaned from a video floating around) but this was more of a "Should there be one?" thing, or should it just be left alone? --Zerstoren 22:39, 16 September 2006

Need help
is there some kind of game u can play on this web site cuz im new and dont no much

--Mr man7 19:25, 16 September 2006 (EDT)


 * Hello Mr man7. I'm afraid there's no playable game on this website. This is meant to be an encyclopedia, an information source from all Warcraft games for Warcraft games players, especially World of Warcraft. This website works with a system of articles, pages that contain information about NPCs, locations and useful stuff like quests, items and instances. If you'd like to play the game that's driving crazy almost six million players around the world, main topic of this wiki, you'll have to purchase World of Warcraft, if you haven't bought it yet. If you still wish to be a member of WoWwiki I'd be glad to answer your questions and introduce you to the WoWwiki community. Anyway, if you don't want to contribute you can still use this wiki as the prime reason of its existence : we are here to upload as much information as we can and as we are allowed to help English-speaking WoW players.--Kirochi 19:41, 16 September 2006 (EDT)

Weapon damage formulae
I have searched the game mechanics section of WoWWiki and have failed to discover how weapon damage is calculated. I'm aware of the DPS forumla but this doesn't really answer my question.

What I would like to know is: How exactly is damage calculated per successful strike before the armour value of the recipient is taken into account? The reason I ask this question is that it hardly seems worthwhile upgrading to a weapon that only does a few more points of damage if the total amount of damage done in any given strike is far greater than the base-weapon-damage when damage bonuses are taken into account.

For example, if a warrior is doing an average of 1000 damage per successful strike then it hardly matters whether he/she is using a pocket knife or a two-handed sword.

--Cdfreelancer 10.44, 18 September 2006 (GMT)


 * It's not overly clear, but it's something like this. More info in Attack_Power for some reason. I think a page devoted to one giant formulae might be best, we might be able to grab it from some of the more accurate damage calculators and make a new page off of game mechanics. Most upgrades are slight, you upgrade primarily for a higher average per-hit damage for your instant attacks. If you're looking for pure white damage, go by DPS. Here's a single white attack damage formulae. --Bhodi 15:28, 22 September 2006 (EDT)

((Random Weapon Damage Number between Max/Min + Damage Enchants or enchancers + (Attack Power / 14)) * Talent Modifiers * Offhand Penalty

Do not repost Burning Crusade alpha material
Blizzard are taking action against sites posting screenshots of the Burning Crusade alpha. See Burning Crusade DMCA Takedown Notice. --Mikk (T) 12:42, 29 August 2006 (EDT)


 * I suggest that from now on all images related to TBC have their sources identified or risk speedy deletion. -- Jaxdahl 08:47, 18 September 2006 (EDT)

Magical Resistance Decreases
Hi, i am currently leveling my warlock, 25, and i recently recieved the Rune of Perfection. Now i looked all over the site but could not find anything that had to do with Decreased resistances. Anyone have any info or ideas about it? --Tidebreaker 18:30, 24 September 2006 (EDT)


 * See Formulas:Magical resistance and Formulas:Spell hit chance. Basically, it increases your damage output a bit by making your spells not resist as often - IF the target has nonzero resistance against the school of magic you're using (shadow and fire for warlocks). However, at your levels, mobs basically don't have any resistances so it doesn't matter much.  -- Mikk  (T) 09:01, 26 September 2006 (EDT)

guild
→ Moved to Talk:Server:Terenas US --Mikk

Blood Elf Paladin (Blood Knight) Mounts
→ Moved to Talk:Blood elf/Analysis --Mikk

Class-specific resistance gear articles
IMO, WoWWiki has far too many seperate, redundant articles about resist gear. In addition to a set of class-specific resistance pages, we also have a set of armor type-specific pages. There's also some FR gear listed at Fire resistance. I propose that the handful of class-specific resist gear lists we have be deleted, since all resist gear is generic (cloth, leather, mail, plate, misc). There are a few exceptions for class sets, but they're easily noted. --Rahskala 11:00, 22 August 2006 (EDT)


 * My take on it would be to order it according to when you can get the gear. Ordering by class has problems as you noted. Ordering by armor type is also problematic; a healing paladin doesn't say no to leather or mail with +fr and +heal stats, for instance.
 * I'd order it something like this:
 * Resist gear you can get pre-raids (though including UBRS, obviously)
 * Fire resist
 * Nature resist
 * etc
 * Resist gear you can get from MC, ZG, AQ20 ("Tier 1 hard to get", sort of)
 * (resist types...)
 * Resist gear you can get from BWL, AQ40 ("Tier 2 hard to get", sort of)
 * Inside pages, gear could certainly be sorted according to armor type and roughly grouped according to stats (+spelldmg,+heal,+attackpower).
 * Welpz.. that's my take :-)  --Mikk 16:35, 22 August 2006 (EDT)


 * That's a good system, but it kind of suffers from the same problem that we have now, which is too many seperate pages for the total combined amount of information. It's easy enough to tell at a glance which pieces are aquired by raiding, and which pieces come from elsewhere, considering there are maybe 10 (at most) pieces of gear for each slot. This makes splitting the lists up further a bit redundant. --Rahskala 13:53, 23 August 2006 (EDT)


 * You could certainly put it all on one page I suppose, and split up in the future as needed. I was mostly trying to come up with a grouping system that makes sense, and never needs to have duplicate entries.  --Mikk 14:14, 23 August 2006 (EDT)


 * Perhaps sorting resist gear of a specific type by slot, and then on the page sorting it by armor proficiency (if any)?

WoW Icon Organization Project
Hullo there, I've started the groundwork for organizing all the WoW In-game Icons that are used in the Wiki to make it easier to see if they've been uploaded, and how to name them if not. The root of it all is currently here at Wowpedia:WoW_Icons, and I've categorized the icon lists into three subcategories, each of which is further categorized. My goals are as such:

1) To comb through all the icon filenames, comparing against in-game icon filenames and see if they're uploaded to the Wiki and confirm the filename (checking for .png/.jpg varieties) and if not, either upload or correct them. 2) To match up each icon to the entry for the ability/spell/item/buff, so, in the end, one can view the entry for an icon and have a full list of abilities/spells that use that. This would also help alleviate the previous issue of linking icons in-line from other sites, helping make sure they're all native to the Wiki server.

Basically, before I get any deeper I'm looking for input for the project if it's worthwhile, and if it would make sense to start suggesting people to check the icon filename lists before throwing up icons, so we don't have fifteen of the same icon floating around on the server. I'm more than happy (as evident by the work so far) to continue working on this if deemed needed. Cheers. --Tusva 03:30, 29 August 2006 (EDT)


 * Excellent idea! -- Kirkburn 03:42, 29 August 2006 (EDT)


 * Yea sounds like a very worth endeavor. --Ralthor 07:55, 29 August 2006 (EDT)
 * Looking at it the layout needs some work. You might want to use actual categories and then just tag the image pages rather than keeping a manual list.  --Ralthor 08:11, 29 August 2006 (EDT)
 * Aye, a good idea, especially for when content patches come in and new ones are added. I'll start working towards that, thanks. --Tusva 13:18, 29 August 2006 (EDT)


 * With the added benefit that you actually get to see what the icons look like :-)  - And it's easy to put images in multiple categories where relevant. Nice one!   --Mikk (T) 14:35, 29 August 2006 (EDT)

Sets Pages
I was checking around the Sets categories and I found out it is quite a mess... In my opinion we could merge some pages. For example, the Category:Item Sets and Category:Weapon Sets

Also, we could remove either the Class specific sets categories or Class specific sets pages (Some articles like the Category:Hunter Sets are missing it all, but the Category:Druid Sets is rather complete).

Any idea? --Adys 06:24, 13 September 2006 (EDT) Duh, Edited for external links, somehow internals aint working Adys 06:27, 13 September 2006 (EDT)


 * I've edited the links to show you how to link to categories without categorising the page :) Just stick a colon before the Category bit - e.g. Category:Item Sets :) As to the suggestion, it does look like some of the categories could be merged. -- Kirkburn (talk) 07:56, 13 September 2006 (EDT)
 * Duh, silly me. Thanks :D Adys 08:50, 13 September 2006 (EDT)

Image Category Styles
Hello again! As you may or may not remember, I'm slowly but surely going through and organizing all of the in-game WoW Icons. I noticed that, in categories that are only images, they are displayed in a nice table, but the colour/style-sheet seems to be mis-matched with that of the WoWWiki in general. For example, see Category:WoW_Icons:_Inventory_Hammer, the image name is a light blue on white and the image size (while not really important) is completely white on white. I'd suggest perhaps changing the white background to the dark grey that's on the rest of the site (or another shade of grey) and also perhaps changing the padding space around each image as it tends to waste space. Just my my two cents. Keep up the good work! Cheers. --Tusva 09:25, 19 September 2006 (EDT)


 * Good point. The color we can definitely do something about. The padding I'm not so sure about. It might be that that's the size that images get scaled down to if they're larger so it's hardcoded. I'll check into it.  -- Mikk  (T) 09:50, 19 September 2006 (EDT)


 * Right. I sent Rustak updated CSS files that fixes the colors. The size I can do nothing about - the layout is hardcoded. The only thing I could do was reduce the width but that's pointless since it'll always be 4 columns wide anyway.  -- Mikk  (T) 10:43, 19 September 2006 (EDT)

Boilerplate for Class Talent Builds
I recently updated the rogue talent builds and completely retooled it's look. I'd like to create a boilerplate or at least standardize thet talent build layouts for the different classes. Since an effort has been made to create the Classnav template, I think we should standardize all the pages emenating from it. I'm offering to do the talent pages. Comments? Suggestions? I'm thinking of using a cross between my rogue talent page and the druid/paladin page. The Shaman/Warrior pages have a lot of unnecessary information that is also in the talents page and the mage page is very noisy. I think we can steamline the information. --Bhodi 15:08, 22 September 2006 (EDT)