TUTORIAL - Creating your own private profiles: the easy way.

Public profiles are a great contribution to the honorbuddy community, but their usage is so widespread that often you'll find even 3 or 4 bots using the same profile in a specific area.. the result is what I call the "botty love train" where you can see a string of bots flying in the same direction and trying to harvest the same nodes. Do I need to explain how this is bad?

HB is a great program, but profile making isn't user friendly as it should be and this is the scope of this guide: helping you to build your own efficient profile that will be unique to you.

WHAT YOU WILL NEED:
1)addons:
- GatherMate2
- Gathermate2_data
- Routes

those addons are hosted on Curse and are so easy to find that I won't bother linking them, their purpose is to provide node spawns and draw a line that connects those location while flying the shortest distance possible.
Copy their folders to the wow addon folder or use curse client, whatever fits you best.

2) HB plugin named ZapRecorder
I want to thank its author (Zapman) and give credit to him/her for this awesome plugin.
The installation works like it does for the other plugins, just copy the ZapRecorder folder inside the Honorbuddy's plugins folder and reload the bot, you'll find it in the plugins list if it installed successfully.



SETTING UP GATHERMATE
1) Activate your addons and log into your toon.
2) Type /gathermate you should see a window like the one in the picture below
3) On the left column click on Import



4) Select an expansion data (cataclysm), select the nodes you want to import (fishing pools, herbs, mineral veins and so on)
5) click on the Import Gathermate2.. red button, you should now see the gathering nodes on your map and minimap


CREATING YOUR ROUTE
1) type /routes and move to the area where you want to record the new route
2) On the left column click on Add
3) As you can see from the picture below here you'll be able to create your route, select the nodes that you want, name the route and click on okay



4) Now you can click on the create route button, do it and your map will turn into a mess made of white lines... it's working as intended
5) On the left column click on the red "+" near the menu "routes", it should open the list of all the zones for which you have created routes (for now just one in the area you chose)
6) Click on the red "+" near the name of your area (in this case Uldum) and select the route you created



7) Click on the "Optimize Route" tab
8 )Now you will be able to cluster nodes to make only one node out of a group of close ones, I suggest a clustering radius between 85 and 100, if you open the map you should notice a bit less lines on your map



9) After you clustered the nodes it's time for the addon to calculate the most efficient route that will connect all the nodes; you can leave "extra optimization" off if your cpu is a slow one since calculating a route is very taxing on your processor

10) Click on Foreground and wait until your route is ready, the client will freeze completely, but after 40-60 seconds you'll be able to open the map and see the end result of all the previous work



If your client disconnects then your computer is too slow to run the calculations in real time and you'll need to click on "Background", it'll take much longer, but the result is the same.


CREATING YOUR PROFILE WITH HB AND ZAP RECORDER
1) After you installed ZapRecorder (download it from the honorbuddy forum thread) and downloaded the empty profile. open Honorbuddy.
2) Set HB to GrindBot
3) Load the Empty Profile
4) Click on Settings and Tools then on Plugins
5) Enable ZapRecorder and then click on Show Window



tool with the settings until you're ready to record the hotspots
6) Start the bot
7) Move your toon over a node in the map and then click on "Start Recording"
8 ) Fly around following the route in the minimap until you run a complete circle (Stop yourself a little bit before the first node to be sure that you don't record "overlapping" hotspots); it will take from 10 to 30 minutes depending on how big is the area you're recording
9) Click on "Stop Recording"


ADDING VENDORS AND MAILBOXES
1) Go near a repair npc and select it
2) On the Zap Recorder window click on "Add Vendor", confirm on the pop up and there you go, your profile will have a repair vendor.. insn't simple?
3) move your toon near a mailbox and click on "Add Mailbox", confirm the popup request and there you have a mailbox too


ADDING BLACKSPOTS
Blackspots are areas where your bot shouldn't go for any reason (lava pools where you cannot mount, areas where there are mobs that leave you stuck in combat), they are very important if you want to achieve the same quality of those tested profiles you see on the forums.

1) Move your toon over the area where it shouldn't go (herbs and minerals contained into a blackspotted area are ignored! blacklist bugged nodes or badly placed nodes!)

2) In the ZapRecorder window you can set the radius of the blackspot and then click on the "Add Blackspot" button

Be sure to have a good coverage of a given area while not choosing a too wide radius, you can place several smaller blackspots to cover a non circular area.

HIT THE SAVE PROFILE BUTTON: JOB'S DONE!
You'll find the profile you recorded in the Honorbuddy folder, it's a xml file named like the area where you recorded it.
The profile can be moved and renamed without issues.
Wasn't that hard? Wasn't it.



ADDING BLACKSPOTS FOR CHEAP AND LAZY PEOPLE (LIKE ME)
Adding blackspots can be time consuming and you can waste precious farming time while figuring them by yourself, so why not taking advantage of other people work?
Tested profiles come often with pre-made profiles and the only thing you need to do is to open the .xml file with notepad and scroll until you meet the blackspot tags
<Blackspots>
</Blackspots>

if the profile has blackspots it should look like this

<Blackspots>
<Blackspot X="1032.52" Y="1884.273" Z="312.5463" Radius="131.7129" />
<Blackspot X="937.517" Y="1904.928" Z="319.069" Radius="134.2367" />
<Blackspot X="844.3289" Y="1924.143" Z="327.6388" Radius="110.4761" Height="14.28387" />
<Blackspot X="699.5487" Y="1742.267" Z="328.5147" Radius="105.8181" Height="13.03302" />
</Blackspots>

all you need to do is copy all the blackspots from the public profile and paste them into your profile.
It's easy and saves a lot of work, but remember to thank the creators of the original profiles.
If you want to learn more about blackspots consult the honorbuddy wiki.


Thanks for reading.

 

Ty for the tutorial. I just can't seem to get the gathermate2 to work properly on the import. It won't import mining nodes. I have it selected to import the data, but again seems simple enough I'll try again later.


I figured out what I was doin wrong. Great post btw finally got to make my own profiles very quickly!

 

This is a very helpful tutorial. thanks!

 

Dude this is awesome, very helpful

 

wow, i read it all and it was very good stuff. great guide!

 

It's just perfect!.. Should be sticky or something... great for nubs at HB/GB... Gettin a feel for what the bot can do and minimize risk of detection.

 

thanks guys

 

You deserve much more for that post!
Amazing work +rep

I strongly believe this should be a sticky post!

 

Good job here Clu! I've added a link to this guide from my ZapRecoder plugin page!

 

Or if you're even lazier than this (which I am)...follow the guide until ZapRecorder is needed and use RoutesBuddy (http://www.thebuddyforum.com/honorb...imports-data-routes-addon-exports-gb-gb2.html) instead to import the route and instantly pop out xml hotspots for it. Then do as Clu said and add blackspots and repair/mail from a tested profile such as Tony's, ect.

 

Thanks and this is was written thanks to your work, I just put together some little pieces

It works well, but I don't like how the bot looks expecially when figuring out height changes the bot will move using a "ladder" mode that looks 100% bottish.

The stucks in trees are much more likely too (nothing that the bot doesn't manage to fix, but each second spent unstucking it's not spent gathering).


Need a fast profile to farm a particular herb? Routes buddy works good enough, but if you want a bit more natural looking profile then you use the tool from zapman.

 

Just the guide i needed, was getting rather nervous running the same public profile as everyone else.. Kept running into the same 4-5 people on my server using the same profile.

 

OUTSTANDING!!! (( Stands up and claps!)) That was probably the best tutorials I have read in a while. It was flawless in that you never lost the reader/ me and never skipped a step.

[FONT=&quot]Thanks Clu for the outstanding work.[/FONT]

 

great... /like and rep

 

how would i get the profile to attack along the way? my rogue is in stealth mode all the time. sub rogue

 

Has nothing to do with recording a path.

I usally use these well in a q or what to burn time and less chance of getting farmer banned all at the same time.

 

What are you trying to achieve?

This tutorial is mostly for GB2 profiles.
If you need a grinding profile (kill mobs in an area) then zap recorder isn't the tool for you because grinding profiles have different tags in them.

 

Awesome guide, TY! Took me an hour to do all the things and now I have rather good private route. Making profiles now is really easy

 

Awesome plugin, just used it for making mining levelling profiles, did one for Ashenvale for Tim, and netted over 200 Tin ore in under an hour.

Gonna make a load of very private profiles to use now. No longer going to be part of the express train mi
ning crew...

 

Where does it save the profile to??