While World of Warcraft isin’t exactly the most system intensive game out there, there are some gamers who just need the extra framerates or simply like to customize their gaming experience as much as they can. In this article, I’ll be exploring several lesser known tweaks and variables to get the most out of the MMORPG we all love.

Index

1. Add a console
2. Major speed increase for older video cards
3. Increase the level of blood and violence Removed in Cataclysm
4. Stop being a walking flashlight Removed in Cataclysm
5. Increase amount of foliage and the sky’s quality Removed in Cataclysm
6. Interesting Shortcuts
7. Mount Macro
8. Flying mount tricks
9. Check how many archaeology solves you’ve done
10. Scale your UI according to your screen’s resolution
11. Switch to DirectX 11 for added performance
12. Switch to OpenGL for better performance in WINE and some systems
13. Useful websites
14. Anything to add?

Add a console

Add a console that can be accessed via the tilde key (~). Add the following trigger to your World of Warcraft shortcut:

-console

The completed shortcut should look something like this:

"C:\Games\World of Warcraft\Wow.exe" -console

Note that all the commands below that start with the /console shortcut can be applied directly into the console rather than in the chat box.

Major speed increase for older video cards

We can use RivaTuner to force a lower pixel shader value. While this will greatly affect graphical quality, it just might need the boost your aging PC needs. Note that this does not work on many integrated or portable graphic cards as found in laptops, but I do recommend you try it. I won’t go into great detail about what pixel shaders are, but they basically create various effects like gloss, reflections, smoke effects, etc. We can gracefully degrade these for a performance gain.

1. Download, install and Run RivaTuner
2. Next to the “Forceware detected” box, click the arrow
3. Select the DirectX icon
4. Select the Shaders tab
5. Select a pixel shader version from the pulldown menu

Try various levels. The lower you go, the more graphical quality you sacrifice, gaining framerates. You’ll need some trial and error here as it varies from one card to the next but version 1.4 is commonly referred to as the baseline level, but you can go down and use 1.1

IMPORTANT: Forcing pixel shader values may cause graphical glitches and prevent some other games from running completely. You can easily turn this back to its default value at any time in RivaTuner.

NOTE: Rivatuner has not been updated in a while and may require a little tweaking to get working on recent drivers. You can read more about it on the Guru 3D forums.

Increase the level of blood and violence

This setting was removed in Cataclysm.

World of WarCraft too tame for you? You’re damn right it is. That’s why we’re going to increase the amount of blood and gore from it’s default value of 3 to it’s maximum level of 5.

/console violenceLevel 5

The difference is but a few drops of blood and while this won’t make World of WarCraft look like Gears of War, it couldn’t hurt.

Stop being a walking flashlight

Note: This setting was removed in patch 4.0.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but by default, you (and other players) are always lit up by some magical light source. Stop that with the following console command and make it look right. Granted, this is a personnal preference, but it just makes sense to me.

The variable accepts a floating point value between 0.0 and 1.0.

/console characterAmbient 0

Increase amount of foliage and the sky’s quality

Note: In patch 4.0, the foliage and sky variables were changed and now longer apply.

For those of you on faster machines, here are two variables you should set. One will increase foliage by quite a bit at little to no cost, and the other will simply increase the sky’s quality. These are settings that exceed what is available in the ‘video settings’ GUI.

/console groundeffectdensity 256
/console groundeffectdist 120
/console environmentDetail 2

/console skycloudlod 3

Interesting Shortcuts

Shortcut of /follow

/f

Shortcut of /assist

/a

Check out how much time you’ve wasted playing

/played

Check out what instances you’re saved to, and when they reset (now loads UI)

/raidinfo

Out of mana? Quickly let your raid know!

/oom

Need healing?

/heal

Thanks to xchino for the tip!

A better BRB message than just typing “brb”.

/brb

View your guild’s information (creation date, number of accounts, etc.)

/guildinfo

Thanks toswdpwnzdggr for the tip!

Mount Macro

Use this macro to automatically call the most appropriate mount. Very useful. Pro tip: bind this to your middle mouse button for easy access to your mount at all times.

/run if IsMounted() then Dismount() return end local t if IsSwimming() then t={1} elseif (GetZoneText()=="Wintergrasp" and GetWintergraspWaitTime()==nil) or not IsFlyableArea() then t={2} else t={9} end CallCompanion("MOUNT",t[random(#t)])

You’ll need to edit the numerical values to reflect your mount’s position in your inventory.

Flying mount tricks

Land mounts can use the space bar, but for flying mounts, you can use this nifty trick for a special animation.

/mountspecial

You can also perform aerial loops by holding down the pitch up or pitch down keys (by default, Insert and Delete).

Thanks to swdpwnzdggr for the tip!

Check how many archaeology solves you’ve done

Run this script to check out how many solves you’ve performed. You will need to make sure you have viewed the solve log before you run this.

/run print("Total artifacts"); for x=1,9 do local c=GetNumArtifactsByRace(x); local a =0; for y=1,c do local t = select(9, GetArtifactInfoByRace(x, y)); a=a+t;end local rn = GetArchaeologyRaceInfo(x); if( c > 1 ) then print(rn .. ": " .. a); end end

Thanks to Unko for the tip!

Scale your UI according to your screen’s resolution

This nifty little script will scale your interface to a pixel-perfect ratio according to your game resolution.

/run SetCVar("uiScale", 768/string.match(({GetScreenResolutions()})[GetCurrentResolution()], "%d+x(%d+)"))

Note that this needs to be run as a macro.

Switch to DirectX 11 for added performance

Patch 4.0 or greater. With newer video cards, switching over to DirectX11 may, in some cases, greatly improve performance. Open the console as seen in the tip above, and enter the following.

set gxapi D3D11

Restart the game or type gxrestart (Note that restarting the graphic renderer while in-game will cause the client to crash). Once you’re back in the character selection screen, open the console and type the following to check what version of DirectX you’re running.

gxapi

If the value returned is d3d11, congratulations, you’re now running in DirectX 11. The other possible value is d3d9 for DirectX 9, the default. Note that DirectX 11 mode does not provide any graphical changes.

Switch to OpenGL for better performance in WINE and some systems

Running World of Warcraft in Linux using WINE or on an old machine with poor D3D support? Try OpenGL. Simply add the switch to your command line.

-opengl

The completed shortcut should look something like this:

"C:\Games\World of Warcraft\Wow.exe" -opengl

Thanks to xchino for the tip!

Useful Websites

• Gem Finder
  Don’t know which gem is from Cataclysm, or not sure what Blue gems offer? This websites has all the answers is a very slick, easy to use interface and has come in handy more times than I’d like to admit.
• WoW Heroes
  What raid should you be focusing on? Where can you find upgrades and better enchantments? WoW Heroes has all the answers you seek and more. Probably the best website out there to find out how you can improve your gear.
• WoW Professions
  Grind your way up to 525 without the headaches and wasted materials.
• WoW UI Gallery
  Need inspiration for your next UI redesign?

Thanks to bigp3rm, stichflamme and hobblygobbly for the links!

Anything to add?

Got any more interesting tips or tricks? Leave a comment!