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.
Were you in Ardenweald? It has some really weird vignette behavior -- most importantly, the vignettes are (a) visible on the backend from the entire zones, and (b) "flicker" everytime someone loots one, which triggers the alert again. Latest alpha will put that on a timer more like the rares, which should make it less shouty.
The sound preferences are a bit confusing, I'll admit -- the checkbox is for whether to override the default sound. I should make that clearer.
In reply to Kemayo:
I were, yes, it was fine in Heart of the Forest but went nuts when I ported over to talk to Marasimus. I'm still probably going to leave it "off", but I'll pop it back active next time I'm in there and post if Ikiss starts yelling at me again. :-)
I've changed the sound preferences in the new alpha so that the checkboxes do what it sounded like they should. :D
I totally love this addon. I do get the popup thing and alerts, but I have a couple issues. When that popup nameplate thing appears, I left click on it and it does nothing. Isn't it supposed to highlight on the minimap where it is? Also, the alert is fine, but it could be anywhere within your minimap border area. So I get the alert and have no idea how close it is. How can I fix these please? Oh and that's an ongoing thing not just shadowlnads. But I did notice more mouse stuff for that popup.
Clicking the popup will target the mob, assuming you're close enough to it. If you have targets turned on in your minimap settings, this'll have the effect of highlighting it. (It's not the default, but it's very useful -- it's buried in the little magnifying-glass icon on the minimap.)
Control-clicking the popup will give you some sort of pointer to it, assuming we know where it is. Which isn't guaranteed -- there are plenty of ways to learn a rare is near without also learning coordinates for it.
Would it be possible to have clicking on the WorldMap icon enable/disable the map overlay icons?
It already does that, so... yes.
In reply to Kemayo:
This icon?
I tried left, middle, right
ctrl+left, middle, right
alt+left, middle, right
shift+left, middle, right
and none of those made these
go away. And I tested with no other addons running. Could I have disabled the ability to toggle their display? Is that an option?
Make sure you're updated? That only got added in v90002.2, which was released yesterday morning.
In reply to Kemayo:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I deleted my SavedVariables and deleted the addon then reinstalled it and didn't work. I tried the latest Alpha build and the release build and rolled back to the 90001.1 version to no avail. It also doesn't say it's an option in the drop that appears when you hover over the World Map icon.
I found this "Mobs on the map overlay can be shift-right-clicked to immediately hide them" here https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/silver-dragon/files/3112994 but I'm looking to hide all pins
Hi Kemayo,
I was wondering if you were planning on adding options to tune SilverDragon's pop up frame (scaling, opacity and skin options)?
Thanks in advance.
I don't have specific active plans for it, though I'll probably be touching some things about the popup soon. Rare density in the Maw is ridiculous, so the one-at-a-time system we have no isn't really cutting it.
Also, what do you mean by "skin options" specifically?
For more technical people, the existing themes system is entirely accessible from outside of the addon. Making a tiny "SilverDragon_MyCoolTheme" addon that just registered a new theme set up exactly how you'd like would be fairly trivial.
In reply to Kemayo:
Well everything that would allow players to modify the appearance of the SilverDragon pop up by replacing its default silver dragon skin by something else, even just a regular rectangle for exemple. I ll take a look at how this is handled currently as you mention that this is something that can already be tweaked but the purpose of this question/suggestion is to have something very simple to configure to modify the SiverDragon pop up skin inside of its configuration panel. The same way than most unit frame addons offer ways to modify a unit frame skin to the player liking.
But right now my biggest 'issue' with SilverDragon is the fact that i can't rescale it. I don't need a that big pop up and, in fact, just having the name of the rare mob that has been detected would do the job for me. The less congested my screen is by the UI the better.
If you just want a compact one, the "LessAwesome" theme is the closest to that. I can probably add some scaling options at least.
Scaling is in the alpha.
In reply to Kemayo:
Fantastic news! 👍
To demonstrate... this is a totally viable theme-in-another-addon that just makes the silverdragon popup bright red: https://gist.github.com/kemayo/c62be7fde9575dde1f1e1bf05504ac75
(It does require the latest alpha, because I realized I was wrong. The list of themes was being generated right when SilverDragon loaded, so it wasn't able to get in on that.)
In reply to Kemayo:
Thanks, this is very good to know.
There's also a "minimal" style now, which will probably work out better for you...
In reply to Kemayo:
Amazing, thanks a ton Kemayo!