Add-on awesomeness or mod madness? You decide!

I've been meaning to do it for, well forever it feels like, and the questions of a guildie who reads this blog *waves to Mckildy* have given me further motivation. Therefore I present to you the various mods I use within my UI. Some time ago now I posted about the development of my UI over time and mumbled something about follow up posts on the specific subject of add-ons. You can see a full screenie of my UI there or in my previous Vashj post if you are so inclined. I use a lot of mods (hence the title of this here post) so I suspect that this post will get too ridiculously long before I've covered them all hehe and I may need to do a couple of posts on the subject.

To recap what I'm looking for in a UI and mods:

1. Low memory footprint
2. At a glance information that doesn't require me to click on panels to see it
3. Minimalism in layout (which is tough given my above penchant)
4. Mods that are well-supported - ie. regularly updated
5. Easy to update

So straight away I'm going to tell you - ACE - get it, use it, love it. Ace framework based mods are generally lightweight and using the Ace updater utility makes updating and installing a breeze. It's possible to run the updater while logged in and then /reload ui to get immediate effect. Handy when you're about to start raiding and there's a new Omen update *grin*. That said, I do use a bunch of other mods that aren't Ace based but which I find I can't live without. As it is many non-Ace based mods do have Fu-Bar plug-ins and FuBar is Ace based.

Fu-Bar can be classified as an 'action bar' mod and allows you to place thin panels at the top and bottom of your screen (or both at the top, or more than 2 etc etc). You can then download an absolute plethora of fu-bar mods and plug-ins for other mods which you can place in your panels. I'll list out all the ones I use later, first I want to cover some of my other mods.

• 

  X-Perl UnitFrames

  Replaces the default unit frames. For you character, party, raid, focus and etc. I like them because you can get quite granular with their appearance, they have support for an MT and OT pop window which is great for quick focus fire targeting in raids and there is a fu-bar plug in available. Some people swear by Pitbull and it looks good but so far X-Perl is working for me.



• 

  Bongos2

  Action bar mod that replace the default in game bars. You can arrange them however you want including number of columns in a bar, size and have access to more bars than the standard UI allows. You can control their visibility and they also have built in stance/form changing for druids and the like. Bongos3 is now available but since it requires re-building your bars since it's structure has changed so much I haven't gone there yet.

• 

  Quartz

  Beloved by hunters everywhere this mods displays a shot timer with a 'swing' bar for auto shot and also displays latency which is important for me as a player in Australia experiencing higher than typical latency. Especially since I'm a hunter and getting your shot rotation right is key to maximising your DPS.

• 

  Baggins

  Replaces the default bags including for your bank. Separates items into different categories, including allowing you to define your own. I particularly like the 'new' feature which shows you all items that are new to the bags since log-in, very useful for when I 'borrow' Emelin to do some disenchanting. I don't think feign death would save me if I accidentally DE'd a purple.

• 

  Elk Buff Bars

  Highly configurable display of your buffs, debuffs and also things like mana oils. You can configure to show just the icon or include the name, rank and of course, a timer. The bar size height, and font can be set to whatever you prefer.

• 

  Countdown Timers 2

  Display bars showing as many types of cooldown as you want. I find if handy to display this information - particularly for things like traps, Misdirect and TBW. I have recently started using Omni CC again which shows a timer on the actual bar button so I may reconfigure Countdown to only display for those buttons I don't have displayed on my bar (I have them on a bar set to invisible and hotkeyed). This is an Ace mod, it doesn't have a wiki page but you can grab it using the installer.

• 

  Omen2

  One of the 'if you don't use any other mods use this one' types. In a raiding situation it's crucial to know what your threat is compared to the tank. Omen2 has a bunch of different views but since I'm a DPSer I just use the single target view. It's also great for me when soloing, I prefer Snaggle to get beat on rather than me *grin*

Phew ok that's it for now. I have plenty more mods to talk about though! It's taken me a while to try and make this post format how I would like it to. WYSIWYG editing tools plus HTML interfaces = teh devil! I'm still not happy with it either. Time to learn about divs :P

Journey of a UI part one: in the beginning

I do a lot of reading of various WoW related stuff around the interwebs and see a lot of screenshots of different user interfaces (UIs). This has inspired me to both rework my current UI and write a series of posts discussing the evolution of my UI over the time that I have played Warcraft. Perhaps my experience is one shared by others.

I'm not a highly technical person and prior to playing WoW my greatest exposure to user generated content for a game was with the Sims series of games where I downloaded a LOT of user created objects to use.

When I first started playing WoW I was less concerned with how I could adapt and customise my UI as I was with learning how to play the game itself.

Unfortunately I don't have any examples of my UI back when I first started playing, however I do have some screenshots of Emelin's UI. Before Emelin was Emelin he was Broichan. The druid that Jez grew and learned with as we both explored Azeroth together.
So here it is, the default UI in all it's glory. You may remember it from when you first started playing. Not much going on yet, no need for extra action bars or any extra information. I still remember this moment. Broi and I had just ventured into the Wetlands and we stopped to rest on a hill top at Whelgar's Excavation and take in the view. We were as yet unaware of the delights ahead of us - the lush vale of Stranglethorn, the wilderness of Feralas. Of course I shouldn't forget the desolation of the Western Plaguelands and the buzzing humming irritating expanses of Sithilus.

Fast forward and here is Broichan at 60. The princess boss in UBRS successfully downed and a UI that is becoming more cluttered.At this point one mod has been introduced - CT Mod. Remember when CT was the bees knees? The mod that you had to have? More action bars are in play, but of course with the standard UI you only get to choose to have more, not where you want to place them. At this point play has become more complex but our raiding career has not yet begun and we haven't started to need information exposed that we don't yet know can be. Ah yes those days of innocence before I, at least, became a mod junkie. In my next post I'll explore the post TBC environment and focus specifically on my UI and the changes I've made.

Game freezing when porting to or from Isle of Quel'Danas?

If you're a heavy mod user like me you may have experienced issues with porting to or from the Isle of Quel'Danas. I could fly straight with no problems but any time I tried to port bang game lock up that I could only get out of by ending task on WoW.

It seems the issue is caused by a library used by certain mods - Astrolabe. So if you too are having this issue check out which mods are using the Astrolabe library and get an updated version. Gatherer is one example and the developers of the mod have released a new version which resolves this bug.

The huntard unleashed

I've really been looking forward to getting into the new patch 2.4 content. So many lovely new things to see and experience and my first opportunity to participate in a server wide effort to open new content since the gates to AQ were long opened on my server by the time I started playing.

I thought last night was the night but no. I'd just got in the door after work when the phone rang with our weeknight Kara raid MT asking whether the spousal unit and I would be logging on for the raid as everyone was ready to go. Righto then. Log in without taking the time to update my mods and head straight into Kara. We did almost a full clear only skipping Netherspite and by then it was laaaate and I logged pretty much directly after we downed Prince. As an aside it was a great run - probably our best yet with the Aussie group. Most probably since we had a larger than usual balance of over geared players and the other guys are getting well geared now too. DPS was totally off the wall although no one had a working damage metre to confirm it heh.

I did have one spectacular huntard moment though which the title of this post refers to. There are many excuses I could give like being tired, feeling rushed and so on but I take full responsibility for one of the worst f**k ups I can think of in my WoW career to date. We were clearing the trash before Moroes and as usual I had the MT set as my focus and smacked my assist focus macro key to focus fire on whatever mob he was wailing against. Normally I pay attention and make sure that the mob has a sunder or similiar on it so I know it's the right one (not to mention the appropriate charm mark). Not this time, no sirree, I sent the pet off to attack then realised my error, called him back and brought 2 mob packs back with him including the elite pack of dancers. Can you spell wipe? I was soooo embarrassed hehe.

So Kara done and tonight's the night I'm thinking but it seems it's not to be as not only was Curse running slow as molasses with log ins disabled - it's now completely down 'for maintenance' as per the picture. In my opinion having a 'click here to try again' link is madness as you can guarantee that people will just click spam and that ain't going to help the poor old server. So mod updating is not going smoothly. I could just log in right? Wrong. Feathermoon is down and has been for at least 30 mins as I write this although according to the log in news all servers are having rolling restarts applied to correct the apellation of server names in name plates for BGs. Seems things aren't running smoothly for the Blizz peeps.

Working in the IT industry as I do I can empathise with the pain of problems with deployment. There's nothing quite as stressful as a live roll out going wrong and with Warcraft that's some massive scale we're talking.

Fingers crossed that both Curse and Feathermoon come back online soon and I can get in some gaming. Otherwise I guess I'll... um.... I'll...

/blink

make an animated avatar about how I survived a WoW outage?

look at some lolcats?

get a life?

EEK! Elune forbid!

/wink

Guess I can go drool over some of the awesome new hunter badge loot. I like the looks of the Crossbow of Relentless Strikes yes I do precioussss. It's got a hefty 150 badge price tag but I'm pretty much almost sitting on that amount currently and there are definitely many more badge gathering opportunities in my near future. If I can log in that is.

/sad panda

Hope the rest of you are having a smoother patch 2.4 experience.

Hotkeys or Clickity?

If you've been following along up until now you may have noticed references in my posts to key bindings and what not. Basically I am a hot key fiend. I like to have as much as possible bound to my keyboard. It is for this reason that I have the lovely G15 gaming keyboard.

It's interesting to me that Emelin who has been playing FPS style games since forever has a completely different playstyle from me. He ascribes to the 'clicker' school.

Clickers
Move around using the the WASD keys - plus strafing using Q & E. Points and clicks to activate spells etc.

Butan-stabbers
Move around using the mouse and bind keys to use different abilities and macros.

Since I'm firmly in the butan stabbing camp I'll give you my reasoning for why I prefer this style

1. Quick reaction times.
   I don't have to move my cursor to the point I want to click except for some out of combat things that I haven't bothered to hot key - like activating profession windows and the like. I can pretty much touchtype so I don't need to look at my keyboard while playing and keep 'like' items grouped so that I don't need to move my hand around too much while in combat.



2. Cleaner UI
   Because I can bind so many things to hot keys (especially with the G15 swoon) I don't need to have all those buttons appear on my screen. I use the bongos2 mod and set up some actions bars with abilities and etc which I bind keys to and then set the bar to invisible. This is great when you are using several macros as well.



3. Better movement
   When using the mouse to move you also have the ability to use the camera independent of the direction you are facing/moving. For instance I do this in BGs a lot when I'm on defence and scanning my surroundings for possible 'incs'. I also have the button 'v' bound to reverse camera so I can quickly see if X mob/horde toon is still chasing me.

Since I happen to have 3 toons that have reached a reasonable level this works well with the 3 different 'slots' for the 18 extra keys you have per slot with the G15. My slot for Jezrael is completely full with each key bound to an ability or macro. I have more macros key binds I want to set up too! Recently I've decided I want a hotkeyyed macro to turn growl on or off as I have been finding I am doing this quite a bit lately via clicking.

/play Intermission Music

I started this post about a week ago and since then I've been playing my mage a fair bit which has got me thinking.

I'm wondering whether the efficacy of clicking vs hotkeying is also impacted by the class you play. What I have noticed with my mage is that I will move around a lot more - in particular running in and out of melee range to drop arcane explosions and frost novas before returning to range. I've found it more effective to use the WASD keys to move around in this fashion - which therefore means I am using my other hand to trigger the keybound effects. This means I don't have that hand free for utilising the camera via my mouse.

On my druid I have found hotkeying to be fine - and especially good when I am tanking and need to use the camera to keep an eye on other mobs around my big bear butt (yes that is a purposeful reference to BBB one of my favourite feral druid bloggers).

I wonder what thoughts other people have? What's your experience? Do you think I'm smoking crack or just playing it? Teehee. Get it? Warcrack?
...
bah
...

Arena awesomeness

Thanks to Kotaro's blog Lone Bowslinger *waves* I've found the site that I was looking for but didn't know existed. SK Gaming has a wealth of information on the top arena teams - the specs, the class composition and etc. I'll be spending a bit of time over there doing some research that's for sure and it's definitely getting added to my resources sidebar!

Speaking of arenas - one of my team has started using a mod called Control Arena which from what I know so far sounds awesome. I'm going to be trying out this mod asap and will report back on how I find it.

While the title to this post is 'Arena Awesomeness" I cannot with any honesty state that this is applicable to any of the teams I am currently in >.>

I am currently a member of the following teams:

2v2 BBQ Drop Bears
3v3 Drunken Beachcombers
5v5 Drunken Aussies

Anyone notice a theme or two there? ;)

Across all teams the ratings hover in the 1450 - 1590 range. Not disgusting but not really any good either. Then again quite of few of the team are still building up our PVP gear and not speccing for PVP specifically so I'm not feeling too badly about it.

I'll post some more soon on how we are going specifically.