UI Additions

The addons I use are linked from the UI and Addons Page,

The latest changes are the additon of Icehud and Power Auras Classic in an attempt to focus my attention on the centre of the screen. I’m still getting used to having a HUD (Heads Up Display)  which is partly why I still have action bars near the bottom of the screen.  Power Auras is set up to let me know when Starfall (the crescent moon) and the treants (the leaf) are off cooldown and available for use. It means I use both a lot more than I did and spend less time glancing down to see if they’re ready yet.

I’ve known about Power Auras for a long time but steered away from it as the screenshots  showcasing it tend to show big  icons that take up large amounts of screen and I don’t like big icons. Then I saw the set up menu and realised they were scalable and movable (which may be added features since the first time I tried it, or may be me not noticing the first time). So I have nice small icons sitting just above my cast bar. I appear not to be casting in this shot but I must have done something recently as Quartz eclipse addon is showing a cooldown. That whole space between the eclipse cooldown & the Power Aura icons can fill up with bars. Probably would have been more useful if I’d taken a shot when it was .

Normally on my alts I try to avoid  anything beyond basic addons such as Titan Panel & Ark Inventory, its bad enough having to rebuild Ari’s when things go wrong but I’ve made an exception for these two. I love that Icehud can be set to show combat points (or runes on a DK) showing up dead centre of the screen not to mention the energy bar, something I look at a lot more than Ari’s mana bar.

The two little power aura icons curving up the outside of the the HUD are there to tell me slice and dice (the sword) is up and rupture (the exclamation point) is doing its thing. If I’m honest it because I was mashing both of them without checking whether they had run out or not and wasting combo points reapplying them

I may have to restrain myself from placing too many buffs/debuffs/dots/cooldowns on Power Auras or I’ll end up with a complete circle surronding the HuD and forgetting what they’re supposed to be for

Enter stage Right….

Her she is in all her revamped feral glory. We raided tonight, three druids and we still all had the same cat skin. As it was a resto, balance, kitty trio it didn’t really matter though. I struggled to spot the kitty amongst the hunter pets, just to used to looking for a purple blue lynx I think.

Thats Ari in bear form, next to a random whitehaired druid in cat form. Seriously couldn’t they have been the same shade of white? They’re not exactly a matched pair.

And of course when it comes to the important view of bear form I think the butt is even bigger!

Calli did have the light blue hair, but after seeing the bear that came with it I popped across to Stormwind and  changed it to dark blue so she now has the black bear  and will soon have a matching (I hope) black cat, screenshots will follow but I’m hoping a black butt will look smaller than a white butt, espcially as I’ll see it a lot more often than I will Ari’s.

Ulduar

Raiding for the first time since my hard drive crashed and on a patch day. My UI was a mess. For some reason Quartz decided to show all the debuffs on the mob rather than just mine. In the Razorscale fight  the column of debuffs went straight up the middle of the screen, blocking my view pretty comprehensively. Damned if I can find the setting to have Quartz just show just my dots on the target.  Revamping your UI as you go isn’t particularly fun and does nothing for your dps, especially if you’re trying to come to grips with a new eclipse rotation at the same time.

I cobbled something usable together by the time we got to XT-002 with the help of Icehud, but all in all my raiding  UI needs some serious work done on it.

Eclipse Rotation

It’s going to take some practice to get used to this, and it still needs proc watching to pull it off, and the gods of RNG smiling down on me to get maxdps off it. I did get a few runs where wrath eclipse procced straight off the last Eclipsed Starfire, then Starfire procced again off the last Wrath. I also got a few runs where I refreshed  MF/IS twice before wrath procced a starfire eclipse. So the dps is still going to be spiky and weaving, and a couple where I missed the proc all together because it seemed too soon – though my messed up UI didn’t help with that as I had DBM bars hiding my castbar at one point (fixed that post raid).

So between checking out he new druid skins,  getting everyone sorted with mounts and raiding I only really had time to do the new orphan daily on Ari & Nia, oh and the cooking daily which netted me the  Delicious Chocolate Cake recipe.  Now that was a nice surprise. I’d pretty much given up on ever seeing that.

I have a job interview tomorrow and a family wedding Saturday so I’m probably going to be a bit slow exploring the latest patch, and talking of job interviews I should be away to my bed

UI Tweaking

I’ve been tweaking my UI since the reinstall. It’s pretty much ended up looking like it did before. I tried some different addons but  in the end went back to what I know.

While trawling blogs looking at UI’s I did come across a really simple & useful tip for saving on display space. Put Omen & Recount on top of each other, set Omen to only show in combat and Recount to only show out of combat. Now if only I could remember which blog I picked that tip up on to give them proper credit.

I know I’ve mentioned OPie before. I love the concept and I  have all my shapeshifts on a ring thats bound to my middle mouse button. It makes shifting so simple and I’m so used to it that I stare at the screen blankly when its not there desperately trying to remember how I used to manage shifting before I found it .

You can set up multiple rings & bind them to any key combination. I do have a second ring, its got my teleport. hearthstone, mounts, and recall scrolls on it. There is one problem I have with OPie and its very much *my* problem. My memory sucks I can’t remember what key I’ve bound things too. I used to have one for trade skills, but by the time I’d guessed wrongly what the keybind might be and finally found it it would have been quicker to open my spellbook or bags, so over time  things found their way back onto my action bars so I could see them.  I found a solution, a new addon called Lunarsphere (of course when I say new I mean new to me, it’s been available for at least six months).

The core of the addon is a sphere with up to 10 buttons encircling it, and each of the main buttons can be set to open a menu of 10 more. Yay visual clues for the memory impaired. It also supports all three mouse buttons. So that camp fire icon you can see on the image at noon, Left click opens my tradeskill menu, middle click is fishing  cast (Because I count it as a trade skill) and Right click actually casts a camp fire. It can be set up to replace your Action Bars completely. I haven’t on Ari because I like my Bartender 4 settings.  Dax may find herself using it as pretty much a complete replacement (It’s an excuse to get back into playing her).

It also has some less visible features that are little gems too

• Reagent restocking – since GOTW went raid wide & we have four druids in raid I’ve got terribly slack about keeping enough Spineleaves in my bag (long long gone are the days when you took 80 to every raid to be on the safe side). Lunarsphere lets me buy them automatically to a predefined max.
• Auto-Repair
• Auto selling Junk
• Speeches – you can assign sayings to actions, something I’m having great fun with as I’ve assigned Warcraft 3 quotes (and a few others) to shifting into flight form or Moonkin form “I ride on the break winds! I am silent… but deadly.” Just doesn’t get old.  I am going to spend way too much time adding new phrases to that little feature

It does even more but those are the ones I’m currently using it for.

I will update my UI page in a couple of weeks, we’re on a summer break so I can’t properly road test the raid options (I’m going to be brave and try to run with just one set of raid frames rather than the two I’ve been used to,) and I’m still tweaking. Trying out and then usually discarding add-ons, well I have to do something while we’re not raiding.

In case of Emergency…

I know it’s Saturday, I had a panic last night. There I was about to kill 30 Frenzyheart and my AOE wouldn’t work.  Then I realised anything that needed me to left click on the game window wasn’t working.

Okay I’d just loaded an add-on so I disabled it, nothing, disable all add ons still nothing.

Go to the  forums to check the techninal, bug and in-game problems to see if anyone else has a similar issue. Nothing

Check on Dax, the problem is only with Ari so not my mouse. Feel a GM ticket coming on so do the pre-emptive deleted Interface/WTF/WDB see if that fixes it. Nothing

Put in ticket and then while alt tabbing waiting for a  reply run a google search on – ‘left click’ wow – Yay I found the answer, well the fix anyway  reset all keybindings to default. Cancel GM ticket

Pew finally I can  left click again. Only all my settings are gone. I probably could have pulled them out of the recycle bin and gone my merry way but I collect a lot of rubbish in my addons folder as I try things out and then decide not to use them, and I’ve been slacking on updating add-ons while leveling so the evening was spent rebuilding my UI.

Of course when I rebuild I forget some addons that I take for granted so I have to go look for them when I notice the lack

So one task this weekend. Get a UI page up on this blog with my addons listed to make the next  rebuild that much easier

Some things I’ve achieved since last week, yes I do get stuff done even if it’s not on the list.

Ari has got both Inscription and Leatherworking up to 400 for the BOP enchants on shoulders and bracers

She also got “Kicking it up a Notch” the Outland daily cooking quest, I’d been checking most nights for the manalicious berries quest since achievements came out to when WotLK shipped and not seen it, slacked off on checking while leveling but been calling in for the last couple of weeks hoping he’d want some berries. Finally done. So thats one more achievement on the Cooking list ticked off. I need to do a bit of focusing on them what I’ve got not got towards that meta achievement is somewhat random, but secondary professions are things to work on when other stuff is done.

We also picked up “That takes Class” I had everyone but a Death Knight before WotLK went live and I was only in the BG’s to test the addon.

Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.

“‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat. ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,” said the Cat. ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’”

I think I’m in a minority, I’m quite enjoying the Zombie invasion and the madness it brings, we have a few griefers but they hang out in populated areas which I can avoid if I want to. Well except when doing the daily quest in Goldshire, that can be completely nuts trying to put out the fires, avoiding infection and zombies & watching out for the horde taking advantage of us ending up flagged.

Having my banker alt in Darnassus probably helps as the legendary quietness of the city means the zombies have next to no one to infect so the invasions are quite short lived & the corpse run from the graveyard to the bank is a lot shorter than the SW run. Though Ari has been using the SW AH and even thats not so unbearable once you know where the Argent Healer is.

“Compulsory PvP” clearly does upset some people though and I guess Blizz won’t push it to such extremes if there’s a next time.

Think the only time I was really annoyed was teleporting into Moonglade & getting mobbed by 5 zombies. Only it turned out they were mobs and whats the point of getting angry at mindless NPC zombies, long long run from the graveyard to the teleport point and they were all gone by the time I retrieved my body.

If I don’t want to “play” I just go off and do other things, you can’t get infected soloing in the wilds. Though I miss skinning on Ari I can’t just go and mindlessly kill things for hours anymore. I knew I’d miss it when I dropped it for Inscription as I’ve dropped it before (for herbalism pre TBC) and reskilled into it the week before Burning Crusades came out. Oddly logging onto Dax to skin isn’t quite the same.

True madness though is logging on and discovering all your add-ons have decided to stop working. I was only offline for 5 minutes for pities sake. Okay I was off line installing new add ons which I think conflicted with existing ones causing them all to explode & die.

I use healbot and ozraid for my raid frames (so yes I have a ‘double dose’ of Unit frames when I raid).

Decided it was time to upgrade to Clique which I thought didn’t work with Ozraid, this is because I was reading clique sites not the ozraid one *sigh* so went for Grid as a much hyped wonderful raid frame. Something broke my add ons, not saying it was Grid or Clique as I updated a couple of other add ons while I was at it. Logged back on and nothing, absolutely nothing was working. Which is why I teleported to Moonglade.

That should give you a feel for what it looked like, though I’d tweaked it since the screenshot was taken, and the rather odd chat window lay out is because the main chat window wouldn’t move, it reset every time I zoned so I worked around it.

I couldn’t get anything back so it was *gulp* time to delete my WTF, Interface, & Cache folders.

Two hours later I still didn’t have it back the way I like it and raid time was looming so I reloaded healbot as I at least understand it’s funny little ways. I still haven’t reloaded all my add-ons and there’s plenty of tweaking left to do, and then learn how to best set clique up and get used to it.

I probably should have got on with it after the raid. Our first visit to Sunwell Plateau where we wiped on Kalegcos. Well no one had read the tactics as we thought we were going to Mount Hyjal.

Instead I went and got myself a worg pup. I meant to kill the End Boss while I was there but well couldn’t find him. I was in the room he was in at one point, but I would have sworn 5 ways to Sunday the boss in there was an orge not a dragonkin. This probably simply shows how many dungeons I healed rather than dpsed in Classic as I only have the vaguest memories of mobs.

I want the Classic Dungeonmaster Achievement. I know I’ve earnt it doing the instances at the proper level (well not Ragefire Chasm) but only Maraudon, Uldaman & the Sunken Temple were recorded. Which I find very odd as they were probably the ones I ran least, but I guess I had quests for them when I did run them.

I now only have the two Blackrock bosses to get. I got “King of Dire Maul” by soloing all three wings. Took forever because I kept forgetting things, like deactivating pylons, and collecting keys along the way, but I did it.

Oh and the cat at the beginning. I really think that should be the zombiefied druid form