Bertrand Dunogier

As a long time user of GemHelper, I kind of felt unable to do without this wonderful addon.

GemHelper is an addon that assists, a lot, in handling your world of warcraft gems crafts. It allows you to search for gems by material, color and bonuses. Definitely a must have, given the huge amount of time it takes to search for gems… the thing is that the author unfortunately didn’t have time to update it. It works, but just doens’t have any of the Wrath of the Lich King gems… kinda useless then !

This is why today I decided to start adding the missing gems. It’s a long task. Trust me. You have to add the missing raw gems, along with their translations (there are 6 green quality gems, 6 blue, 2 metas, and an epic one. You also have to add these 15 gems to the top panel, to allow filtering by material. And of course, it doesn’t fit in the interface… then you have to add ALL the new gems, with codes detailling their colors, bonuses, and source item, these codes being numeric values referenced somewhere else in the code.

So far, I have added support for Huge Citrine and Monarch Topaz based crafts. I’ll work on the other gems later.

I kind of feel like writing a wowhead.com parser to extract the gems data… but I don’t have the courage nor the time for this yet. On the other hand, it would be a VERY good idea on the long term, since gems are going to evolve as patches are released.

Once this is done, there are a few things I’d like to do as well:

• Fix the caracteristics. Currently, GemHelper is still using the Burning Crusade ones: Spell damage and Healing, separate Critical strike rating, hit rating… and it didn’t support expertise yet, for instance.
• Cleanup the UI. It’s too wide now (about 800 pixels). Maybe it’s time to organise things better: separate gems by extension (vanilla WoW, Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich king)

Once this is done, I’ll feel satisfied ;)

In the meantime, you can download the current version of the extension here:

http://fortress.ankh-morpork.net/~katana/GemHelper-WotLK/GemHelper-20081226.rar (Huge Citrines & Monarchtopaz added)

Please do post any missing gem among these two raw gems !