Almost a year ago I posted a screenie of us wiping on Sarth-3D and talked about the various elements of my UI. It seemed to me that an update was in order, so for a change here is a screenie of us wiping to Heroic Anub!

The style is pretty strongly inspired by the Parasol Edition of Tapestry UI, but the fundamental elements haven’t changed over the last year. I have a middle stack of buttons, Grid, and user frames, and a big black text box in the corner. There are a few changes under the hood, however.

Out: Pitbull, In: Stuf
Pitbull was always a huge memory hog, so I was happy to find a suitable replacement in Stuf. One thing both mods suffer from is too many options — given infinite time and patience, you could make your user frames look like almost anything. Pitbull addressed that somewhat with the in-game template features, while with Stuf you just overwrite the LUA file. It can be tough to source attractive frame files, though, and it’s a little intimidating for someone with limited mod experience. Once you get it set up, it looks good and has very low overhead.

Out: Buffalo, In: Satrina Buff Frames
I enjoyed my cute tiny buff/debuff icons for years, but at some point during a couple tiers of LK raiding I got tired of having to squint to see how long I had left on Thaddius’ polarity and such. I could have just set up Buffalo to do that, but I figured I may as well take the opportunity to finally update to a more current add-on. SBF does everything you would expect, with low overhead, and a few extras. (I like being able to turn off things like Heroic Presence, for example.)

Out: BigWigs, In: Deadly Boss Mods
Huge upgrade. DBM has, in my experience, more complex timer available and gives more information to the player than BigWigs. Additionally, DBM works in some 5-man situations (it will time Make It Count for example) and by default has timers for important events in Battlegrounds like graveyard captures. No contest, DBM wins.

Best in Show: Power Auras
Oh, Power Auras. Tough to set up, but once you do you will possibly never find a mod that is so useful to every class in so many ways. “All” Power Auras does is put the symbol of your choice (including size and color) on the screen at a pre-set time or condition. For example, see that little green symbol to the left of my body in the screenie? That means I have three stacks of Serendipity up. It’s just a simple graphic that goes red, yellow, or green appropriately, but it makes a huge difference as to the next spell I cast. The flexibility to add even more clear, concise symbols to my game play in the future, in any way I need, makes this a pretty powerful add-on.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Hmm, one tiny change in my philosophy of add-ons I guess: I just noticed that I’m not running a DPS meter in the 2009 raid screenie, whereas it has a place of prominence in my UI now. How odd. Did I turn it off for the shot in an attempt to be modest? Or was I actually not running one? Perhaps I’ve gotten more numbers-focused in the last year.

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Technical Issues mods

So remember when I posted a couple of weeks ago declaring that I had forsaken all alts and alt leveling? Ironically enough, writing that post got me thinking about alts, and how I’ve always wanted a paladin. Truthfully, I think female characters look really awesome in most plate gear. More importantly, though, paladins are a great class for PVP, both battlegrounds and arenas. While I adore Liore and the priesthood, I’m saddened sometimes that I am destined to get chewed up and spit out in arenas, or that battleground achievements like Ironman are a million times more difficult with my chosen class.

Of course, I level like a turtle, and paladins are not renowned for their quick leveling anyway. I pondered my options, did a little reading, and then decided to join a whole new level of WoW-geekery: I was going to two-box a couple of characters and boost them using the Recruit-a-Friend bonus. It’s a little extra money for a couple of months, but it held the potential for fun and I love deciphering new toys.

Getting the account started was very easy. I mailed myself a Recruit-a-Friend code from my Blizzard Account, signed up with my own name and credit card, and voila! Starting up technically was a little trickier. I use one computer with two monitors and two accounts, rather than multiple computers. To start with this setup, follow the first six steps on this page. You’ll also want to install the mod Jamba on both accounts.

Getting the hang of dual-boxing is.. tricky. Set a master and a slave in Jamba on each character. Get them in a group, make each other their focus, and set the slave to follow the master. With Jamba you have to manually open dialogs such as quests and flights, but once you have it opened on each character the slave will follow the master. So, for example, if both have the flight dialog open, when the master hops on a bird for Dalaran the slave will automatically pick the same thing.

HotKeyNet (which you set up in the earlier guide) allows you to send a key press to both characters at once, which you can toggle on and off with the Scroll Lock key. (Type  in chat on the master char without deselecting the Scroll Lock, and your slave will start freaking out and opening windows and whatnot.) From here you want to write macros and keybind things. For example, the “2″ key on my paladin is set to “/startattack” and “/cast [target=focustarget] Wrath” on the druid.

This is where the really neat aspect of multi-boxing comes into play. You get to look at the combat styles of two classes and figure out how they can mesh. My favorite is the button that casts Moonfire and Judgement of Light (with Seal of Righteousness, at the moment). A big burst of damage with a dot for the mob and health back to the pally — love it! Figuring out macros and spell rotations is like a puzzle, and great fun.

The XP bonus for RaF is ridiculous. It’s a flat 150% on everything. Killing a mob that usually generates 70xp will give you 175xp, and that adds up quick. In about 8 hours of play (excluding AFKs and just fiddling with the interface) both characters hit level 20. Watch out though — make sure you hit the auction house at least every 10 levels for gear upgrades, since you’ll be getting fewer quest rewards than usual.

Not only is RaF fast, but I ENJOYED those 20 levels like never before. Leveling is easy in WoW now, even without a huge XP bonus. You’ve got leveling mods to tell you where to go and when, quest items sparkle, and lowbie elites have been nerfed. But trying to move a duo through the content was a really fun challenge. I’m learning two classes at once, plus advanced macro writing, plus the puzzle-solving of how to mesh the two in combat. (As I joked in guild chat, I can blow away mobs 4-5 levels higher, but sharp corners have become my greatest enemy!)

Of course, I’m already planning on ditching little pally Miercoles and druid Suiyobi for the time being and focusing on leveling up a couple of Hordies. Feral Druid and Shadow priest, maybe? Suddenly, I’m looking forward to going home and leveling alts. How things change.

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Random, Technical Issues mods, quests/dailies

My recent treatise on How to Quit Your Guild seems to have gained some notice, and this morning was linked in a retort by Gevlon. He recommends that people in most situations refuse to go quietly, decline to talk to their officers, call specific people out, and basically try and cause as much unrest as possible. Perhaps it’s my Canadian politeness, but I just don’t see the point. If, as in his example, one feels that their guild is not strict or focused enough, why not just move to another guild that better suits the player? Doing that and having a hissy fit against the machine seems .. selfish, to be honest. Your old guild will, ideally, continue to be happy with their old ways, and you will be happy with the ways of your new guild. Everyone is happy, and basic social niceties still stand. Hooray!

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My fledgling shadow UI is atrocious. Witness the horror that is currently my playing area (cropped to show just the center):

Blargh! So first on the left and top right of my character I have ClassTimer. I added it on the right just so I could see when Shadow Weaving was fully stacked, and my Inner Fire timer and a few other things show up there. I’m starting to think that I should just move it back down to my user frame. I don’t need to check on Shadow Weaving THAT often, and running around out of combat with an Inner Fire timer floating in the middle of nowhere is making my OCD side crazy.

Since I was already using ClassTimer, and I’m used to how it looks, I’m still using it on the top right for debuff bars. I should, really, eventually switch this over to DoTimer, although it kind of intimidates me. (I unchecked the “Simple Mode” setup for DoTimer, and my jaw fell to the floor.) I DID manage to get it set up correctly as a cooldown timer, which you see on the lower right of my character. The biggest adjustment I made was having the “ghost bar”, like Mind Blast in this image, last 15 seconds so it will definitely catch my eye.

Right above my user frame is Quartz. Quartz is, as many people know, an awesome casting bar. The latency and GCD information is stuff I need to see — while I was quite good at anticipating the GCD on my healing spells, for some reason I am terrible at it with shadow. Quartz has little extras that pop up every so often during combat (debuffs? something..). Usually this happens in the middle of fighting a rather cross dragon, so I just shout rude things at my monitor and promise to look into it later.

Right now I’ve kept my old Pitbull user frames, complete with the totally unnecessary casting bar.

I played around a bit with IceHUD as a replacement for Pitbull, but I’m not sure my brain is ready for that big a switch. I also tried EventHorizon as a replacement for both ClassTimer and DoTimer, and while it’s a really neat way to view spell priority it just didn’t groove well with my playstyle. It’s worth a test for the unique “Guitar Hero”-like display if nothing else.

I am usually so careful about my UI, moving elements one pixel at a time until I am satisfied, and this is a dog’s breakfast. I’ve already noticed an overall improvment in DPS, though, so I suppose I’m just breaking a few eggs to, eventually, make a sleek face-melting omlet. Right?

On a seperate but also mod-related topic, I have never ever found an Auction House mod that I liked until No Stock UI recommended Auction Lite. It is quick, light, and adds some pretty awesome functionality to your buying and selling. It even inspired me to try my hand at “playing the AH”, and I’m pleased to say that thus far I’ve made 10g profit from buying low and selling high. I will try to not spend it all in one place.

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Guild Management, Shadow DPS, Technical Issues guildleading, mods

UIs have been a busy topic on the guild forum lately, prompted in part by the gross lag in Naxxramas. Minimalism is the hot new trend. Every bit of mod clutter you get rid of is, ostensibly, a little less you’ll be asking from your computer when it’s trying to process Thaddius charges.

My general philosophy on mods is simply that they’re good. If you don’t want to use them (beyond the three required by my guild) then fine, but I think you’re crippling yourself. Would I heal poorly if my UI suddenly defaulted back to the basics? Absolutely. I would also perform poorly if my N52 game pad stopped working, or my keyboard macros disappeared. Hell, I would have problems if my in-game macros disappeared too. So what? I use all the tools available to me to hone my game, and I admit to being baffled when others refuse to do the same.

Anyway, enough on the philosophy of mods. Let’s get on to the actual screenie, shall we? Here we are wiping on Sarth 2D (click for full screen version):

The big mods used here are pretty much the standard: Grid for raid frames, Pitbull for unit frames, Dominos for button bars, oRA2 for intra-raid communication. I not only participate in raids, I sometimes lead them, so I need a bit of additional information. A good example of this is the tiny “Cooldowns” window on the far right. This is an oRA2 feature, and shows timers for things like battle rezzes and soulstones.

Chat Mods
So much happens in that tiny chat window. You talk to your guild, window shop Trade Channel, whisper friends, communicate with your party or raid, and get status updates. So why not make it more attractive and efficient. I use Fane to change the chat window tabs because.. they just look so much better. Chat Timestamp lets me know exactly when someone said something (handy for those times when I’m half-afk), and PhanxChat adds all the little extra features, like mousewheel scrolling, shortened channel names, and hiding the side buttons.

Unit Frame
So, okay, Pitbull 3 is not exactly a paragon of minimalism. True to its name, it is in fact a bit of a dog. I like all the options, however, and although I am looking for a suitable low-memory replacement, I haven’t really liked anything else I’ve tried. I’m picky about my user frames. The health bar must be large and ideally change color if my target’s health is at critically low levels. The mana bar should be bright blue. I need to see debuffs on my target. One funky thing I did a while back is use this DogTag code to monitor the raid debuffs on the Target of Target (for a healer, usually the boss). This is pretty out of date now — “Why isn’t CoS up!!” — but an updated version is very helpful when working on a new boss.

Buffs
I have approximately 18,000 buffs during a raid now, and they all had to fit somewhere. Enter Buffalo, which makes all my personal buffs and debuffs nice and tiny, to the right of the chat window. There are a few things you want to take special notice of, though, such as Surge of Light procs or Loatheb’s healing inhibitor. For those I use ClassTimer, which you see on the top right of my own user frame.

Information Organization
I use a number of little mods to just present information in a more efficient manner. For example, StatBlock provides the framework for the line of data at the bottom of my screen. Livestock is an awesome mod that not only makes sure you always have a pet out, but also manages a smart macro for your mounts, selecting random ground or air mounts as appropriate. OverAchiever improves the achievement interface and adds relevant details to your tooltips, such as whether a critter needs a little /love. Reputation Montior prints out a detailed little report in the chat window every time you gain rep, reminding me how much I need still for the next level, and how much I’ve gathered so far in one session. Oh, and for bags I just started using the lightweight Combuctor, and it’s rad.

Basically my UI design principle is that as a healer and occasional raid leader I need to see everything in an organized fashion, but still have lots of screen space available to keep myself from standing in the fire.

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Technical Issues mods

So clearly there was a pretty major change to the caster gear system with the introduction of Spell Power in patch 3.0. I didn’t worry about it too much at the time — with a month to go in TBC, gearing up was not a great concern, and I already had my +healing gear wishlist set.

Of course everything changed once we entered Northrend. Where once I felt pretty sure about my gearing decisions (if it has healing and spirit, it’s probably good!), suddenly the nuances made me nervous. Haste vs. crit. Int vs. spirit. And what separates mage gear from warlock gear from priest gear?

I like optimizing my gear and technique, but when people start pulling out math with elaborate Greek symbols and graphs my eyes start to cross. Fortunately there are people out there much smarter than I am who can help work this stuff out, in this case namely the clever person at A Dwarf Priest. I took their stat weights, and put them into the mod Pawn. Now when I look at the tooltip for gear there is a little number at the bottom labeled “Holy” with a figure based on my weighting system. It’s easy for me to see on the fly if something is an upgrade or not, and I don’t have to keep a raid waiting while I ponder haste vs. crit.

I’m still a little unsure about the spell power change, and I miss having my holy priest gear niche. Plus I just don’t feel I have a true handle on the current gear and stats. I’m willing to learn, though, with the help of a mod or two.

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Technical Issues, WotLK gear, mods, priest