How to Stream WoW - Setup Tips and Advice

Chat CommandsNightbotAll of the above is great advice. Keeping your stream safe is a priority so that you can keep streaming. Having commands set up to deal with repeat questions in chat, or to display a message you want to share with viewers is great and will be extremely helpful as your stream starts growing. This can be a great way to promote your other social channels, discord, or new YouTube videos releases to your audience too. Using the stream deck you could easily trigger a message to be displayed in chat and at the same time show an animation or image on your stream overlay to increase the impact and engagement of the message.Open Broadcast SoftwareOpen Broadcast Softwareclick hereThere is so much you can do with OBS that it would be difficult to cover it all but here are a few tips that have helped me out over time:

1. If you find your sources tab becoming cluttered you can save key elements in their own scene and import that entire scene to your sources, for example; create a scene with all overlay elements and then add that entire scene to your usual gaming scene by add > scene.

2. If you find yourself travelling around a lot, it’s possible to store key overlay elements on cloud based services and accessing them with the ‘browser’ source. This means they will always work computer to computer as your graphics aren’t being accessed locally.The three basics of OBS you should know are adding your game capture, adding your webcam, and adding a Browser source to display alerts and/or your Top/Recent supporters of the stream. To do this just right click and and add a scene, then right click under sources and add either game capture, video capture device, or browser to get started. More in depth OBS guides can be found over at their website.Alert ServicesStreamLabsStreamElementsI currently use StreamLabs but have experimented with StreamElements as well and both services do the job completely fine.For Alerts I am using StreamLabs. There are a bunch of default alerts you can use to quickly get set up but what I would recommend is taking some time to set up custom alerts. Through custom alerts you can build upon the theme you are going for with your stream, and change the alerts based on things such as how long a person has been subscribed to your channel. If your alerts are good it can be an incentive for people to interact with your stream via following, subscribing or via other support methods. Viewers like to be noticed and alerts are a great way of doing that.Cam LinkElgato Cam LinkThe Elgato Cam Link (and the camera I used with it) was a big stream upgrade for me. In this clip you can see the difference between my new camera via the Cam Link and my old web cam:

Better quality cameras that can handle higher FPS & resolution provide a much clearer and more fluid picture and this is very noticeable when your stream is on full screen camera (you will also notice how much better the lighting is handled).

A list of recommended cameras for use with the Cam Link can be found here: https://www.elgato.com/en/gaming/cam-link/camera-checkThe Cam Link takes the quality of my camera tiers above normal USB webcams. This gives my community a closer look at me which enhances the personal feel to the stream.Stream DeckElgato Stream DeckIt is crazy what you can do with the stream deck now and I have seen lots of videos showing off great uses of the new multi action feature. The multi action feature basically lets you assign as many actions as you want to a single key and you can then play them all with just one tap or play them one-by-one separated by time intervals. I need to get on that too, as the limits are basically only your own creativity – and believe it or not I am quite a creative person! For me personally I am still using the stream deck for quite traditional things such as playing sounds on stream, displaying graphics or gifs on stream and using it for automatic go-live posts on Twitter and similar. Here is a video from a while back where I take you through some of my uses:

The Stream Deck and Cam Link has helped take my streams to the next level. Stream Deck allows me to easily link my World of Warcraft macros, addons, and guides easily with one button when anyone asks. This is critical because when hundreds of people ask per stream where they can find certain things one you become increasingly grateful for 1-click responses. HD60 ProElgato Game Capture HD60 ProWhen I got my hands of the HD60 Pro this was my motivation to finally try out the 2 PC setup route for streaming and gaming, something I had always been curious about after seeing other streamers doing it. WoW can be very CPU intensive and so can OBS which can lead to noticeable FPS drops when running both on the same system (unless you have a monster PC!!). I installed the HD60 Pro capture card in my old PC and start using that to host my OBS and all my stream settings, allowing me to use my primary PC only for gaming. This led to some good FPS improvements in game for sure and it wasn’t as hard to setup as I first thought! I found this setup guide useful: https://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1988680-broadcasting-with-two-computersWorld of Warcraft Stream TipsLive streaming a role playing game is definitely a huge learning curve, here is some general advice. Covering your chat with your webcam or chat blocker is important to keep your friends privacy in mind. Not everyone wants every whisper or real id message broadcasted to a live audience, trust me. Having a way to cover these private messages doesn’t take away from the stream and allows you to keep some friends in the process. Finding a niche and doing something unique within World of Warcraft is important. In other words, finding something no one else is currently doing or working on. What was this for me? In 2013 I started doing 1v2s, 2v2s, and rank 1 2v2 pushes live on stream when there was no one else doing this type of content and my community loved the content. Asmongold popularized complete domination of the game by achieving most of the mounts/achievements/transmoggable items. What is your niche?ExtensionsWowhead's Twitch ExtensionWorld of Warcraft Armory ExtensionAddons

Deadly Boss Mods (DBM) or BigWigs/LittleWigs - Used to present the player with timers/bars for boss abilities in raids and dungeons, as well as other useful information regarding instance encounters.

AllTheThings - Acts as a huge database for collectibles such as mounts, toys and pets, and gives the user information on how to obtain them.

WeakAuras - Used to customize timers, bars, visuals and triggers for a variety of things such as both player and boss ability timers, procs, cooldowns and similar.

Details - One of the most important addons for a player and a must-have for a streamer (which will help keep your viewers engaged). It collects data for every encounter and tracks everything, such as damage dealt/taken, healing done/taken, buffs/debuffs, deaths and more.

I don’t use any additional WoW addons specifically for streaming. People can generally see on my UI when I am using a certain spell – good old Sco UI btw! On that topic, I would encourage people streaming WoW to make their UI as viewer friendly as possible, try and show off the beauty of the game and not just buttons, weak auras and timers everywhere that looks like you are in a command centre and not actually playing a game... When it comes to addons that people are interested in seeing, a big one is the damage/healing meters and this is especially true on new content patches, a lot of chat discussion is orientated around “wow look at x y class topping the meters, that is going to be my new main…”Growing an AudienceSocial PlatformsMost of your community will be active across various social media and communication platforms, primarily Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Discord and Instagram. These platforms provide a great way to interact with your community and can be used as a further way of letting your community get to know you – what do you get up to outside of streaming, what other hobbies do you have, or do you have opinions you want to share? With people getting to know your character better this can build stronger community relations which may also translate onto your stream, influencing the direction of the stream chat and potentially growing your audience. If you can build up a multi-platform following, there is the added benefit of reaching more people than you would otherwise, you are going to get more eyes on your stream when you go live – on that point make sure to post you are about to start streaming!

YouTube is a particularly good platform to grow alongside Twitch, and while original content will always do better, stream highlights alone will still provide a good way for your community to catch up on the best moments from missed streams. This is also an opportunity again to attract a new audience who may not have seen your Twitch stream before but end up checking it out as a result of seeing a particular YouTube video. Use the stream deck to help capture these highlights while streaming live! If you can find an editor to help you put together some videos then that would be the best-case scenario, maybe you can find one within your own community who would be willing to help out.Live streaming is essentially creating and forming a community so it is important that you have a wide array of social platforms for your community to find you on. Having a Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Twitch, Discord, etc. all go hand in hand. I would recommend having a presence in all of the above even though naturally one of these platforms will generally take off more than the rest and be your ‘main platform’.Stream ThemesFurther advice I can give would be to try and come up with a theme for your stream, lots of streamers do this extremely well and make their community feel as though they are a part of something bigger. This again is a perfect way to tie in custom animations or graphics via the stream deck, or just by doing something on the web cam each time someone subscribes or similar. Taking this a step further it is always appreciated when you recognise your loyal viewers, try and think of ways to show your appreciation for them, make them stand out in your community and use the tools at your disposal to do this.SchedulingFinally, I would recommend establishing a schedule, this will be good for your time management but also great for your community who will know when you will next be online and possibly also what you will be doing on the next stream. For example, if you are planning to do a viewer raid with the stream let people know in advance so they don’t miss out on the opportunity! Another point on scheduling that isn’t talked about too much is to consider when exactly is the best time for you to stream. What I mean by this is how similar is your stream to other streams currently out there? Do you share a similar audience? If the answer is yes you should consider streaming during a time slot that is less contested to make sure you get the most eyes possible on your stream and you are able to grow your community. Getting an audience on Twitch is hard and this is just one way to try and boost your chances there!Some of the best advice I can give new streamers is finding a time they can devote to streaming on an almost daily basis to begin growing a community. Learning people's names in chat, asking them about their life, and begin chatting about yours. The first few viewers 1-10 can be difficult but often times as you climb the viewer list to higher and higher ranks you begin to sort higher on the directory and get an increasing amount of new faces. Having a professional looking stream can help people stay, and this is what Elgato has helped me with using the Stream Deck and the Cam Link.

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