SilverDragon - Rare Scanner
SilverDragon tracks rares. It will try everything possible to notice them and tell you about them.
How does it search?
Vignettes
Those little skull icons you see on the minimap. If one of them is a rare SilverDragon knows about, it'll yell at you.
Targets
If you mouse over or target a rare mob, SilverDragon will notice it.
Nameplates
If you have enemy nameplates turned on, SilverDragon will keep an eye on them to look for the names of known rares.
Macro
SilverDragon can also create a macro to target any rares that are known in the current zone. You can stick this on your actionbars as a button to spam while chasing after a rare, or bind it to a key. This is sort of a last resort.
How will I know when a rare is seen?
Frame
When a rare appears, SilverDragon will pop up a frame that you can click on to target it.
Warning: If you're in combat, secure action restrictions mean that it won't show up until combat finishes.
Sounds
You can choose from assorted sounds to play when a rare is seen. The sound can loop for a while, to make sure you don't miss it.
There's special settings for rares that drop mounts and world boss rares which you might want to call up a group for. If you're sitting mostly-AFK on a Time-Lost Proto Drake spawn, you probably want the sound that plays to be utterly ridiculous and go on for a good long while, to make sure you don't miss that sucker.
Messages
A notice can be sent to a number of places:
- your scrolling combat text
- your chat frame
- a channel in your chat frame (announcing it to your party, for instance)
- a popup window
- etc
Other useful things?
Custom mobs
In SilverDragon's options you'll find a "Mobs" section. In the "Always" section, you can add any mob you want to be scanned for. All you need to know is the mob id.
So, let's say you wanted to keep an eye out for Lil Timmy in Stormwind, to buy the kitten he sells. You would...
- Go to his wowhead page.
- Grab his id from the URL. It's
8666
. - Enter
8666
into the "add" field, and click "okay". - Play with your new kitten.
Yes, this example dates me.
Ignoring mobs
If there's some mob you don't want to hear about for whatever reason, just go to the "Ignore" section of the options. Again, enter the mob's id into the "add" box, then click okay. Bam! You will never again be told that Vern is up.
(Actually, Vern is ignored by default. But you get the idea.)
Syncs
SilverDragon will talk to itself. It can communicate with other copies of itself run by people in your party / guild, and tell you when they see a rare mob. (If there's a group of you camping all the Time-Lost Proto Drake spawns, say...)
You can turn this off completely, if you want to be private about it.
Tooltips
Some rares are part of an achievement. When you mouse over a rare mob, SilverDragon will add to the tooltip whether you've already killed it, so you know whether you need to rush for it.
Broker
SilverDragon includes a Broker plugin. It'll attach itself to your minimap, or a Broker container you have installed, and show you a list of the mobs it knows about in the current zone.
Other addons you may find useful
- AppearanceTooltip integrates with the SilverDragon loot popups and shows transmog-known status.
- ServerRestartSound: plays a sound when the server's about to restart. If you're AFK-camping for a rare spawn, you probably want to know about this.
- ObjectScanner: A few rares are hidden away behind interacting with world-objects like the Edge of Reality. These have to be localized individually, so you need to work out what they're called in your language and set up a watch for tooltips mentioning them. This addon does that bit.
- ButtonBin: a broker display. SilverDragon's minimap icon will show up on it (or any other addon like it) instead of cluttering up your minimap, if you have it installed.
Will silverdragon still alert me if im afk? Theres no way i know how to test that with out spending hours on a hit or miss scenario. Ive seen something about using a npcscanner with your plugin ability...but all the scources i found was dated back in 2016 so...Im just wondering man and thankyou for your time and effort.
It'll try to play sounds etc regardless of whether you're afk.
You can also configure it to be more aggressive than it would be by default -- if you go into the
outputs > sounds
config you can tell it to try to unmute your game sound, and to play sound while WoW is in the background (even if that's disabled in your settings).In Maldraxxus, the rares that give out zone wide yells, such as Sister Chelicerae, are coming up in my chat as being at coords 0,0
So, that's because technically at the moment of the yell we don't know where they are. We know where the player is, but because it's a yell the mob could be anywhere in the zone. We also know some locations from the database for the rare... but lots of mobs have multiple locations or wander around, so just saying "that mob must be at its closest known location" could backfire.
e.g. looking back at Mechagon -- Gear Checker Cogstar could spawn over most of the zone and yelled when he appeared. Trying to announce helpful coordinates for him was guaranteed to fail unless you happened to be close enough to see him.
Next version'll improve this a little by explicitly saying "unknown location" rather than "0,0", at least.
Is there a way to remove the treasure chests that cluster up the minimap? Its so annoying
If you mean the transparent ones that I’m range-extending, that’s in the options.
You should really put rare scan or rare finder or something like that in the title name for this addon (SilverDragon (Rare Finder) or something).
Nobody new is going to directly search for silver dragon and will just use Rare Scanner instead because it comes up in the search.
This addon is much better but rare scanner is more popular because it has a sensible name for searches.
Mm, not a bad idea
Is there a way to set the "Click Target" window location per profile, rather than per character?
Not at the moment -- it goes entirely off of the built-in Blizzard "remember where frames are" system. I'm thinking I might need to allow multiple popups at once soon, with how rare-dense places like Maw are, so I may move to a "place an anchor and the popups will grow from it" system, which would be more amenable to that sort of position-remembering.
When I used to click the macro on my bar it used to display a msg which let me know what was in the area. This seems to have stopped working and i have no idea why, I deleted the addon and reinstalled it but this continues. I am using the classic version of the addon.
Is there something i need to do to have it work like it used to??
Depends on what you're seeing. If you're still seeing "Scanning for 17 nearby mobs..." when you click it then it's just had verbose mode disabled and you should reenable it in the config. ("Scanning > Macro > Announce")
If you're not seeing it print anything at all, that'd be something else going wrong.
In reply to Kemayo:
I used to get a scanning message when i first installed it, but now i dont get any kind of msg at all. I have tried it with the announce enabled and disabled and it still shows no message i have already tried deleting and reinstalling the addon is there something else i can try??
It should be noted that the pre-patch rares' original bosses (from the Wrath of the Lich King dungeons and raids) also trigger a warning from SilverDragon. Not a huge issue, but unintended I assume.
Mm, it's probably unavoidable at the moment -- I assume it's happening because of the chat checks. Blizzard doesn't give us unit IDs when a mob says something in chat, so all that can go on is names.
I'll think about whether I want to restrict it to "I have seen a known mob say something in a zone I know it can be in", though that'd stop it from working for use-added mobs.
That said! It's definitely a bug that the chat-scanning isn't respecting the scan-in-instances preference, so I'll fix that.
In reply to Kemayo:
Yeah, I was thinking it could potentially be filtered by zone, but considering the temporary nature of these rares I wouldn't go through the trouble of doing that for this set of rares at least.
I should also note that I do have the scanning in instances option enabled, so it's not even necessarily a bug.
Interesting issue since v90001.4
I'm not sure which addons are the culprit so posting this here and over there.
Leatrix Maps and Plus minimap buttons show up at login, \reload ui, and sometimes zoning.
They are set to not display.
With SilverDragon enabled they are displayed even when set to not display.
To hide them I have to go into their settings then toggle them on and back off.
Then next "event" makes them display again.
If I disable SilverDragon they behave as set -- off.
I've tried several things including disabling Shadowlands and Overlay.
I've tried many combinations of settings in all 3 of them.
Nothing seems to affect this other than disabling SilverDragon.
I will try some other stuff later.
I'd guess it's a library issue -- the next version of Leatrix says it's going to update the library that we're both using for minimap icons, so I'd try that.
What the heck, all my icons are green now!
Joke aside, I think the step away from HandyNotes is a good one. TBH, before, I liked it that you used a “well established/quasi-standardized interface” (=HandyNotes) for your displays. But I’ve also seen that other add-ons (RareScanner) make way better use of visuals. For example, coloring the most recently seen on the map.
I’m really glad you keep improving this add-on the way you do! You have an eye for UI design and for what is needed and what not.
Though this is still not clear to me.