World of Warcraft™

Hello everyone, I've been playing around with macros to put me in hawk and fox depending on the shot I want and like the rest of you that tried it I found the constant CAW CAW CAW sound to be horrible. So I started googling and playing around and figured out how to remove the Aspect Sounds from the game. It's not against the ToS, we're not modifying MPQ files here, just substituting our own sound files just like fonts. This functionality is built into wow, that's why we can just make a folder and the game picks up the substitions on it's own. No addons or hacking needed.

With the latest batch of blunders (i.e. hotfixes) from Blizzard, imo it will be beneficial to switch to AotH for certain shots since AotH will give either 2k+ AP. You should know that aspects share their own weird cooldown system and when spammed can have strange effects on your shots and may delay them slightly. Enough rambling here's what I did:

*4.3.3 EDIT* - DOWNLOAD THIS - https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B8lNE1tKhjzTaGNnUElmQUlTRG1qZy1fLUJuNUxZQQ

*The files changed to .ogg files, this download contains all the working files in .ogg format. If you don't trust this download then find/create a blank .ogg file.

*Credit for the blank .ogg files goes to Kodiack on page 5, thanks man!*

Downloaded this addon to get a proper blank .wav file, Blizz is picky about .wav files and they have to be saved with certain attributes. Not all blank .wav files are equal, don't ask me why, I'm no sound engineer

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/humbuzz-b-gone.aspx

Create the following directory:

YOUR WOW INSTALL\Data\Sound\Spells

Copy the blank .wav file from the addon you downloaded to this folder.

Make two copies of this file

Name the first copy AspectofTheHawk.wav

I'm pretty sure upper and lower case would matter here, but I have not tested it. Make sure you name it exactly as I typed above.

Name the second copy Pathfinding.wav

I think that should do it, I personally went one step further and made more copies of the blank file and named them the following. This was mostly done in my troubleshooting phase trying to find which file was creating the second sound. Renaming AspectofTheHawk.wav removes the CAW CAW CAW, but there's still a whoosh sound every time you change aspects. That whoosh sound is Pathfinding.wav, so here's the whole list just in case you want it. Pay attention to case and spelling:

_HU_AspectofTheFox_01
_HU_AspectofTheFox_02
_HU_AspectofTheFox_03
_HU_AspectofTheFox_04
_HU_AspectofTheFox_05
AspectofTheBeast
AspectofTheCheeta
AspectofTheMonkey
AspectofThePack
AspectofTheSnake
AspectofTheWolf

You'll find it interesting that there are aspects we've never heard of in there! I, only renamed them trying to find the whoosh sound.

Have fun!

EDIT - Shot Macros

Macro Update:

#showtooltip SHOT NAME
/startattack
/castsequence reset=1 !ASPECT NAME, null
/cast SHOT NAME

I've found this to be much smoother, I can't take credit, I think Cupz posted them on AJ.

Substitute the aspect name as needed for steady and cobra macros, I'm playing with castsequence macros too to see if I can make it any more elegant. Thought some folks might want to see the macro, when you spam it, that's when the Aspect sounds become annoying.

Bump so some people can see this before it falls off the front page

Fantastic Post.

While good, I'd like to say I like the annoying sound.

But then again, I'm a big fan of chaos.

Wow, you are my savior!

"AspectofTheSnake?" Hmmm.

I like the sounds. Then again I dont dance aspect allot like most pros or hardcore players do.

*mark post* sorry dont know how else to get back to this post if i dont add reply :P

that squealing raptor sound is starting to get on my nerves and i'm only lvl 63.

definitely gonna look into that, the "pathing" sound doesn't bother me and i reckon it's kinda cool but the main sound for aspects is terrible

02/20/2011 12:58 PMPosted by Raygar

I like the sounds. Then again I dont dance aspect allot like most pros or hardcore players do.

That's the beauty of doing it with macros, you're always in the right Aspect for the right shot. I edited my post to show some macros.

Thank you so much Aranann. I turned muted all the aspect noises but still had that annoying woosh sound. Pathfinding... who would have thought. Now the macro is silent. Mmm...

02/20/2011 1:44 PMPosted by Shaeden

Thank you so much Aranann. I turned muted all the aspect noises but still had that annoying woosh sound. Pathfinding... who would have thought. Now the macro is silent. Mmm...

My pleasure my friend, I had the same experience this morning. Google and I fought for several hours over this one. Finally found a reference to the pathfinding sound on some obscure forum I had never heard of. Everything was typed in 12 year leet speak and I was flooded with "free antivirus" popups. I took one on the chin for the team! :)

I don't understand why the problem even exists. The point of the exclamation point is to not do anything if its already active yet the aspect animation (my arms going up for my worgen and the sounds going off) constantly goes even if nothing is changing. I thought the point of the exclamation was to prevent that.

02/20/2011 1:52 PMPosted by Refire

I don't understand why the problem even exists. The point of the exclamation point is to not do anything if its already active yet the aspect animation (my arms going up for my worgen and the sounds going off) constantly goes even if nothing is changing. I thought the point of the exclamation was to prevent that.

Welcome to being a hunter my friend, we live in a strange land of unfixable bugs, horrible mechanics, ill conceived ideas, and a ignorant development team who thinks we do too much damage. Your logic is welcome, but unfortunately does not apply here in this magical land. And yet we're all here by choice and most of us cannot leave of our own free will, we love this class anyway despite the butchering it receives. :)

02/20/2011 1:52 PMPosted by Refire

The point of the exclamation point is to not do anything if its already active

No, it just prevents you from cancelling the aspect if it's up.

Probably because modifying any of the files under the cover is a red flag, even if it's completely benign. This could probably be done via addon, though.

We're NOT modifying any of the game/sound files in the .mpq here, we're simply dropping new ones in a folder. This functionality is built into WoW, if it wasn't we'd have to insert modified .ogg files into the .mpq, which we're obviously not doing. Why do you think dropping a sound file in the data folder works? They programed it that way, it's the same thing as changing fonts.

to be fair bliz has responded before saying they are not too keen about people playing with default sound configs but afaik they never said you should not do it.

It was to do with gun noise being annoying from memory and people downloading an add on to tone down the sound.

Though I think this is a great idea, I've got some concerns about this. Mainly that even though I won't hear the sounds once I modify said computer files on my own computer, everyone else in my raid/dungeon will hear them and quickly get annoyed. I'm still convinced that there has to be some way to make a macro that will check to see if the aspect is up already and avoid casting it again. If there isn't then its a HUGE oversight on Blizzard's part and is something that needs to be addressed IMO.