Setting up Power Auras to remind you to backstab

Hi, my name is Dinaer, and I forget to backstab.

At first I was excited about our new Murderous Intent talent, giving us a change in our attack rotation when the boss is at low health (like Execute and Kill Shot have always been for warriors and hunters).

If you’re like me, then you have spent a lot of playtime in your spec of choice, and changes don’t come easily.  I keep forgetting to switch to Backstab when the target is low on health.  I don’t mean once in a while.. I mean I’ll do an entire raid and realize afterward that I didn’t Backstab once.  Grrrrr.

This is the ideal use for Power Auras.  Power Auras is basically a reminder add-on.  It gives you a visual cue when certain conditions (that you define) come up.  It can give cues for buffs, procs, debuffs, health, mana, or just about anything else you can imagine wanting to know about during combat.

Its been around for a while – long enough for Blizzard to incorporate their own version into the basic game.  I never used it because I thought it cluttered my screen.  However, this is a perfect use for it.

1.  Install Power Auras from Curse or WoWInterface

2. Open the interface from the minimap button or from the add-on list in the interface menu.  You’ll see something like this.

Well, yours won’t have any auras in yet.  Click New to make a new Aura.  A configuration screen will come up.  The Power Aura configuration screen can be a little intimidating.  There are a lot of options.  It looks like this.

Here are the key parts of this screen.

The top section is where you pick a graphic.

The checkboxes at the top give you choices of which set of graphics you want to use – ones that already exist in the game, others that you downloaded with Power Auras.  The slider bar right below the Text Aura checkbox is the selector.  Slide that back and forth to see the array of different graphic choices.

The three slider bars below that will set where on the screen your aura will appear.  I chose a crossed sword picture, and it appears off to the left of my character.  You can also click on the Animation tab further down and set the picture to pulse or grow.

The key section is the bottom part.  That’s where you define the conditions for the Aura.

1.  The first part that you have to set is the “Activation by”.  In the pull-down menu.  Choose Health, since we want the aura to happen based on the health of our target.

2.  Next you need to click the Enemy Target box at the bottom.  That tells the aura that its your target’s health and not your own health that is being watched.

3.  Move the Threshold slider to 35%.  That tells it to start the aura when the health gets to 35%.

4.  At the very bottom you see both Spec 1 and Spec 2 boxes checked in the picture above.  You only need to have it checked for your assassination spec.

That’s it.  The other things you see checked are not as important.  It the box above, it has Mounted, In Vehicle, and Resting X’ed out.  That means that the aura will not activate if any of those things are true.  That’s not likely to come up, except maybe on the Flame Leviathan fight when I can’t use Backstab anyway.

Also you see the Alive box checked so that the aura will only activate if I am alive.  Duh.

Once you are familiar with Power Auras you can probably thin of a lot of uses for them.  Trinket procs, boss buffs or debuffs – most of them are pretty straightforward to set up.