Actual UI update!

Click to enlarge

Well, there she is! At least as she stands. I had the presence of mind to put omen in test mode for this one, so you can see where it is. Some of this is just moving things around so they fit together better. I also changed my watcher settings so watcher tells me when my ISS buff is going to fall off - that's the icon you can see sliding in along the timeline from the right. I also got around to reinstalling tipsy, so although you can't see them, I've moved my tooltips to the upper left-hand corner of the screen, allowing me to tuck grid back down in the lower right. Chat is still using blizzard default, as are buffs/debuffs, although I've enabled durations on those. Oh, and I hid the top-most action bar, which just had mounts on it. It still exists and I still press those buttons to mount up, I just can't see it.

Oh, and in case you didn't notice it, I updated my banner image!

UI update and some other stuff

Making the post yesterday finally motivated me to try to fix more of the issues with my UI, so I added tipsy, WiM, and SexyMap to my list of mods, as well as moved some stuff around and changed some of my settings in Watcher. I won't do another full post, but I'll take another screenshot of it and post that. I also still need to add some functionality to my interface - pretty much watching for the longer cooldowns to come available. I think I can do that with Watcher too, though, so that's cool.

On an unrelated "yay, Cataclysm!" note, I'm sort of frozen with indecision right now. Which is fine because it's not coming out until December 7th, but I'd really like to have reached some sort of conclusion by then. Essentially I want to add a third real alt to hang out with my hunter and priest, not least because I really (really!) need an herbalist/miner. I am considering three directions to go for this:

1. Dwarven male enhancement shaman.
2. Worgen female druid.
3. Worgen female fury warrior.

Option 3 wasn't on my radar at all, but for some reason when I mentioned the things I was thinking about to my boyfriend (in addition to being sad about not being able to have a troll druid), he said "wouldn't a female Worgen fury warrior look really cool?"

And I was like dot dot dot while imagining a badass wolf-lady cuttin' off heads with two enormous axes.

And then I was like "yes, yes it would."

SO. I have no idea. One of the tangles in this particular knot comes from the fact that I have all the heirlooms necessary for an enhancement shaman or a feral druid, but I have zero of the heirlooms for a warrior. But I'm almost done re-doing the whole Argent Tourney thing (just a couple-three days of valiant dailies left to go) and I have a fair amount of champion's seals, so I could absolutely buy the plate heirlooms with those if I wanted to. And the advantage of starting up a Worgen character would be getting to see the Worgen starting area. And then, since you can mail heirlooms cross-faction, I could make a little goblin rogue and take a look at their starting area. So yeah. I'm leaning towards the fury warrior option, I think, but still firmly in the clutches of indecision.

More Lich King practice tonight. Sadly, since my BF has an unavoidable work thing, I'll be coming on my priest to heal instead of on Pradzha. I mean that's fine - the priest, after all, has all the initial kill achievements from like April and March - but I'm just not as confident on her any more as I am on Pradzha. We're actually having to fill in two of our regular spots with, er, irregulars though, so it probably won't be a kill until Thursday anyway.

Finally! Veritas Aequitas of Thorium Brotherhood - US is recruiting for T11. The website is obviously a work in progress and isn't really in use yet. I promise we do have people in guild chat though, and we are making our raid nights happen.

UI in progress

Prompted by a post on WoW Ladies, I thought I'd update my old UI post. Since the last post I've taken two breaks from playing as well as spent several months raiding as a discipline priest so: quite a lot has changed. Further, although I've made my UI functional, it's not really where I'd like it to be. Heck, after having taken a look at my old UI post, that one wasn't where I'd like it to be either. But part of my vision for this blog has always been that I want to talk as much about the process as I do about the results. I know it's intimidating to just like... jump into the front page of Curse or whatever and go OK GUYS I'M GONNA MOD MY UI NOW without really having any idea of what or how.

To begin with, the biggest part of UI modification is paring your screen down so you only see the things you want to see. And to get to that point, you're going to have to spend some time deciding what those things are. What information is important to you? Focus? Cooldowns? Raid status? Ability to see if you're standing in fire? And so on. Then you try to figure out how to change your UI to get the results you want. Let's take a look at what I've got so far:

As you can see, I don't have a whole lot going on there so far. I'm still using the default minimap. I'm using the default chat window. I'm using default buff frames. Already, though, it's pretty far changed from what you might expect to see. I'll go through what I've got, and why I'm using it, just by the numbers.

Click to enlarge

1. Quartz. This is a highly customizable castbar modification. It lets me move my castbars around, resize them, add a GCD monitor to them, and (as you can see) add timers that monitor my debuffs on my target. You can see that right now I've applied the Marked for Death affect to the target dummy, as well as having the Piercing Shots and Serpent Sting dots ticking on it. The castbar for my current target appears just to the right - directly over the target's healthbar. Which brings us to:
2. PitBull4. This is another very powerful, highly customizable addon, but this one takes care of what are called frames. You know how, in the default UI, you get a portrait and healthbar, your party members do, your pet does, your target does, etc? Well those are all unit frames, and you can't do much with them in the default UI. Pitbull4 lets me (much like Quartz with castbars) move them around, resize them, add little 3d portraits, and decide exactly what gets displayed on which frame. You can see my kitty (Yann) right above my portrait, and if my target had a target, it would be another small box to the right of its frame. My target will also display a power bar if it has mana, rage, or whatever.
3. Watcher. Watcher is a really cool little addon that, as you can see, adds a scrolling timeline of your abilities. To be honest, keeping chimera shot on cooldown is not as important as it was pre-patch (I will frequently delay a chimer to renew my ISS buff), but I can also do things like add Rapid Fire to my priority list in it, so I'll know when it's available. Something like Watcher is almost required to play Survival, though, because it's honestly the best way to try to keep all of your dots and short cooldown abilities lined up. It would be a huge help with BM managing bestial wrath as well.
4. Bartender 4. BT4 lets me move my action bars where I want them as well as resize them (are we starting to detect a pattern here?). It also, as you can see, lets me keep things such as my mini-menu, pet bar, and stance bar mostly hidden, although they pop into full opacity when I mouse over them. I only rarely need to interact with those menus, and never during a boss attempt, so keeping them transparent frees up a lot of screen space. I also always open my bags just by hitting "B," so I have that menu totally disabled.
5. Grid. Grid is actually another unit-frames addon, but this one is geared more for use by healers. Nonetheless, having a compact and very clean raid-frames area lets me do things like target people for summons, monitor readychecks, and cast misdirect on the fly. My priest, of course, has a separate grid profile, and hers is located right in the middle of her screen and takes up more space, because she needs it to heal.

I've also outlined the location where Omen shows up. A raiding necessity since forever, Omen keeps me from pulling off the tank and wiping the raid.

You can see how, just by looking at my UI, you can tell what information is important to me and what is not. In the future I'd like to find a way to reduce the watcher/portrait/quartz bulky lump in the middle of my screen, and I'd like to make my minimap hideable as well. The chat box does a decent job of fading out when I'm not actively using it, but it still eats a pretty decent-sized chunk of space. Overall, though, I think this gives a pretty good sense of how to start modifying your UI: decide what you want to see and what you do not want to see and find mods that help make that happen. Of course, it's a WoW truism that, for some of us, our UI is always a work in progress.

Archery and Alchemy

Today's MMO-champion update on alchemy has some exciting stuff for me, personally.

• Turning into a dragon and carrying friends around will be pretty cool (although it makes the pressure to buy 310% speed flying even greater). 
• Having a pure agility flask means that the profession bonus from alchemy will be just as good for raiding hunters as the bonus from jewelcrafting or blacksmithing, which is awesome.
• However, I'm seriously going to need to level an herbalism/mining alt, because I'm going to have to have stacks and stacks of the 1200 agility potion so I can add it to my cooldowns macro.

All in all, I'm really looking forward to it. I started playing after (I think) patch 2.3, and I stopped playing for several months a month before Wrath was released, so this will be the first time I'll have been actively playing when an expansion comes out. Jumping in to leveling, and then trying to get a small guild assembled and ready to raid is going to be a challenge.

Woah!

I just realized: now that hit is a blue gem property, we're going to be reforging most of the hit off of our gear. That way we can get as much hit as possible from gems and actually make good use of all of those blue sockets. And that, in turn, might make gemming for socket bonuses a more frequent choice.

Hm.

The Warcraft Civilization

I've been reading The Warcraft Civilization by William Sims Bainbridge. I'm not quite done, but mostly, and it's sort of a funny book. Professor Bainbridge is clearly a very erudite, very thoughtful gentleman. He has spent much of his life thinking about human relationships: how they form, for what reasons, and what they mean to us. He then spent a couple years playing WoW (with two accounts!) and a total of something like 20 characters, all of whom made some progress towards the level cap. Two of them hit 70 during BC, and one of them made it to 80 after the Wrath release. I'm fairly (but not totally) certain that he no longer plays, but it's been a strange experience reading through the way he interacted with the game that's so different from the way I have and do.

On the most fundamental level, he takes the world just much more seriously than I ever have. I mean - I like the WoW lore. I read through summaries and stuff, I really enjoyed the lore aspects of Ulduar, I like reading about Illidan fighting with Arthas and then having fought Illidan and Arthas myself, all that stuff. But Prof. Bainbridge reads significance into the quest text of level 8 NPCs. His book contains in-character essays about the Blood Elf civilization as a whole based on the initial quests on Sunstrider Isle and a little ways into the Ghostlands. His DK (with the pretty cool name of Annihila) never made it past 57 because he refused to kill the same-race former friend when told to. So on and so forth.

It's also a strange book because, although it professes to be about social science within WoW, it's more about the potential for social science in the game. What I mean by this is that he spends a lot of time talking about the roles played, the interactions that occur, the social depth, the ways in which it reflects and doesn't reflect our world, and so on. He spends very little time actually drawing any concusions from all this potential. He's essentially saying "check out all this cool stuff! You could totally do science here!" Which is, I think, true, and some people have already done some work in the field (albeit mostly economists rather than sociologists).

The other part that makes it so strange to read through this book is that he does a lot of the roleplaying with himself. He imagines there to be a psychic link between all of his characters, through which they form relationships. He assigns all of them personalities, which vary in their similarity to and dissimilarity from his own personality. Various of his characters become friends with each other, argue amongst one another, and even form what he considers to be a family unit. Since he has two accounts, he's able to have pairs of his characters in proximity to each other and then take screenshots or invent tales about their adventures together. All of which was impressive in its inventiveness, but often it was like nothing so much as reading fairly dry, academic fanfiction. Surely a strange discovery to be made in a hardcover book in the science section of the bookstore shelves.

That said, I've definitely read most of it and will quite possibly finish it today, and I've certainly been enjoying it. It's just a very peculiar volume.

Months Behind

My little 10-person guild first started working on the Lich King in the late summer, right in the worst part of the summer slump. We were increasingly having to pug 1-3 spots, and then the Ruby Sanctum patch came down and broke everyone's addons, and the raid pretty much disintegrated. We've re-assembled since the 4.0 patch hit, and we're once again working on the Lich King.

It's a pretty tough fight, I must say, even with the 4.0 changes and the buff at a full 30%. We were at the point before where we were getting a pretty consistently clean phase 1, but we've had to pretty much entirely reconstruct that. Our previous OT had almost every drudge ghoul ever cemented to her face the second they spawned, which meant managing the horrors was a snap. Ah well, these things take practice and work. I think we can get him down before Cataclysm hits. I know that killing 10-person normal difficulty Lich King this late isn't a huge deal, but you know what? We first stepped into ICC as a guild wearing a bunch of stuff from heroics and item level 232 stuff, which was what you could farm from heroics at the time, and we've raided all of two nights a week. So I think we've done pretty well for ourselves.