Hi, since I've seen some people ask whether it's still possible to change the visuals of your spells since cataclysm, I'll let you know it IS.
Essentially the old method still works but it got a bit trickier due to game changes.
What you will need:
- An MPQ archive program (personally I use MPQ editor)
- DBCtoCSV.exe and dbcutil (normally dbcutil alone will do, however for reasons I will explain later it's better you have both. You can get dbcutil here :
http://www.mmowned.com/forums/world-...ndows-mac.html
It's included in Demonkunga's tools)
- Notepad or Excel, notepad is cleaner and easier. If you're one of those few unlucky bastards who doesn't have notepad, you can google "notepad++" for a free pimped up version of it.
- Signature and MD5 protection remover, get it here :
http://www.mmowned.com/forums/world-...n-remover.html
Guide :
There are two big differences compared to how it used to be.
1) The wow.exe now performs a check which rates the validity of patches and does not allow any patchnumber greater than that of the latest official patch to prevent home cooked patches from being injected into the game. Signature and MD5 protection remover to the rescue. Follow the guide provided here : http://www.mmowned.com/forums/world-...odel-edit.html , it's of vital importance that "Disable 'signaturefile" and "Maximize patch number limitation" are both checked for your wow.exe
2) The structure of the Spell.dbc file has shifted since the introduction of cataclysm. A lot of fields aren't there anymore and other new fields have been added. This causes dbcutil, dbc editor and most other dbc tools to not handle the file properly, making it hard to load, and even harder to modify without corrupting it Solution? We are NOT going to try and modify the spell.dbc file any more. However it still contains information that we will need.
a) Open MPQ editor or another MPQ program of your choice. Look for the following file in your wow directory : World of Warcraft/Data/enGB/locale-enGB.MPQ and open it. Depending on your location you might have a different subdirectory than enGB (enUS being the most common one I suppose)
b) Browse to the DBFilesClient directory inside the MPQ. And extract the following files : Spell.dbc and SpellVisual.dbc
c) Convert both files to a CSV using your dbc conversion tool. I prefer using DBCtoCSV.exe over DBCutil because the latter tends to lose big pieces of the spell.dbc file during the conversion (I'm not sure if the pieces that were lost are vitally important, but I'd like to be as complete as possible.)
d) Go to wowhead and search for your two spells, the one you want to change, and the one you want to make it look like. From here on, I'll go on by example changing Fel Armor into Shadowform.
e) Get their spell IDs and write them somewhere down.
You can get the IDs by hitting the link button at the right. Inside the string look for hspell:<number>, this number will be your spells ID. For Fel Armor that would be 28176, and Shadowform 15473.
f) Great, we've got the numbers, now lets browse inside our spell.csv using notepad.
The first value is the ID of our spell, we've looked up the ID of Fel Armor, 28176 which was provided by wowhead. As the tooltip information pointed out by the gray arrow confirms, we're looking at the right spell. However as said earlier, it's nearly impossible to edit this file without making it impossible to convertback to a .dbc afterwards. Instead we'll be modifying another file later on. But for that we need to know the visual ID of our spells first.
The visual IDs are the 17th and 18th field (usually there's only one on field 17 and 18 is left as a zero).
An easy way to recognize the 17th field, is to pick the field 4 blocks before the spell name.
Now we found out the visual ID of Fel Armor is 7578. If we rinse and repeat the process for Shadowform, we find its visual ID to be 3619.
3) And that was all we needed to know from our spell.csv, we no longer need it. Now let's open our SpellVisual.csv. The visual IDs which we got earlier are basically references to the IDs in this file. The classic way to change spell visuals was to change the referencing id in our spell.csv. But since that isn't possible any more we need to modify the data inside the SpellVisual.csv instead.
We've looked up the visual ID of Shadowform( 3619 ) which we found earlier in our spell.csv. In this file, the visual ID is the identifying key, thus it's in field 1. The information following are all the graphic parameters the id uses. For more information on the SpellVisual.dbc file: SpellVisual.dbc - WoW.Dev Wiki
a) So we're going to use that information and copy it to Fel Armor. Copy everything but the ID, as marked by the red line, beware you don't mess up with the commas during the copy paste.
b) Now we'll look up the visual ID of Fel Armor( 7578 ). And delete all information which follows :
c) And we paste the information we copied from Shadowform.
Eh voila, the magic has happened. We've done what we came to do. Save and Close the file.
4) now convert SpellVisual.csv back to SpellVisual.dbc by dropping it onto dbcutil.
5) Time to wrap this baby up into our own patch. Notice how we do not require spell.dbc anymore for our own patch. However don't toss the spell.csv away yet, in case you want to modify more spells later. Make sure the SpellVisual.dbc is in the right directories as shown by following screenshot :
Again, change enGB if necessary to your own local code.
6) After creating the MPQ, rename it to wow-update-xxxxx.MPQ With xxxxx being any number higher than the latest patch. Make sure you put show file extension on in your map options. And that your extension .MPQ is in all CAPS. If not, your patch may not work.
7) Drop the patch in your data directory. In previous screenshot, the two marked MPQ's are homebrew and have a higher number than the latest official patch (13623). If you're smarter than me you'll use more margin though, as I'll probably have to rename these come next patch.
And we're done! If you've removed the patch protection as told at the beginning of the guide, these patches should now be absorbed by the game next time you start up WoW, and you can see the modified spells. Once you understand the tree structure behind these files and the mechanism of referencing IDs, you can pretty much change every aspect of a spell without having to mess with the spell.dbc file. Good luck!