Would you race change if it would improve your dps?

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

zomg I'm a TROLL!!!


I'm not ashamed to say that one of the first things I did today was get a race change for my druid.

The old Gali
 
Gali's old cat form



Gali's a troll!
Gali's new cat form

I'm full of squee.

Farewell to the park

I've been spicing up the time before Cata by leveling up some little Alliance lowbies (not so lowbie any more - the hunter's nearly 50 now!) on another server. I only have a few slots left on my main's server and those are reserved for gobbos. So we picked another RP server to level Alliance toons on and this will be the home for our eventual worgen toons. My first worgen's going to be another druid, I think.

Anyway, as we were running around Stormwind avoiding elemental invasions and doing our leveling thing, my friend pointed out that the Stormwind Park was going away or at least was going to be drastically altered by the Shattering. So I decided that we had to have a picnic to say goodbye before it went.

The Pilgrim's Bounty holiday event provided the perfect means - a delicious Bountiful Feast and some drinks from The Blue Recluse provided the refreshments for my hunter and a few friends I browbeat persuaded to join me.

Delicious!

Goodbye, Stormwind Park. You will be missed.

With the Shattering landing today, what will you miss about the old Azeroth? For the most part, I'm excited about all the changes and new content but I'm sure that I will suffer the occasional nostalgic pang for the olden days.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Deus Vox Encounters and Mik's Scrolling Battle Text: A Love Story

Working on Lich King 25 today with my raid alliance and decided I needed to rearrange some of my ui elements to make it a bit easier to track defiles and such. I haven't done Lich King on 10 or 25 that much on my druid and I was finding that while my ui on her is fine for most fights, it was hurting more than it was helping on LK.

For boss mods, as I mentioned before, I use Deus Vox Encounters, which I love for its configurability. Today I found another reason to love it - it works with MikScrollingBattleText (which I admit to being a relative newcomer to - I felt like I was doing okay with the default floating combat text but enough people recommended MSBT to me that I figured I should give it a shot). After playing with it a bit (plenty of wipes and DCs today which gave me plenty of time to tweak things lol), I think I'm pretty happy with what I came up with.


Monday, November 8, 2010

The State of my UI

This will be a regular (monthly?) post regarding the state of my UI and any changes made to it since the last State post.

A few months ago one of my hard drives died. I thought I had a backup on my external drive but I was unable to restore from it (tragedy!) and so I had to rebuild my UI from scratch. It's still not quite where I want it but it's coming along. The truth of the matter is, I'm pretty much constantly tweaking my UI and have been practically since I installed my first addon (I don't remember what it was called - I know it was an action bar mod, though) back in Vanilla.


Friday, November 5, 2010

Raiding Essentials

So let's talk about a few addons I consider essential for raiding.

Obviously I'm a big fan of Power Auras Classic for tracking cooldowns, procs and so on. (I also use GTFO, which is designed to work with Power Auras - it yells at you when you stand in stuff, which is pretty awesome. When I'm doing my mad kitty deeps sometimes I get lost in my rotation so it helps to have that little bit of extra "hey, stupid, gtfo" yelling at me.)

Some sort of boss mod is pretty much mandatory. I know most people use DBM - I used to use BigWigs (plus LittleWigs for 5 mans) but then after reading an article about it on No Stock UI, I switched to Deus Vox Encounters. I like the customization options and the boss health bar display. It provides arrows for certain encounters (pointing you towards or away from things like Lord Marrowgar's Bone Spikes and Malleable Goo) which I really appreciated until I started using HudMap.

Speaking of which, HudMap is another addon I consider essential for raiding. What it does is create HUD (heads up display) showing where you are in relationship to everyone else in the raid. An optional feature adds an arrow pointing to your target (assuming you're targeting another raid member) - this is GOLDEN on encounters like BQL where you need to run to someone to bite them or something. (I'm a kitty so I like to bite things. XD) It has encounter specific indicators as well, so you can see on the hud range indicators for shock vortexes, blood bolt whirl and similar mechanics. As far as I'm concerned, there's no replacement for it as a range indicator - even without the specific encounter mechanics it still works much better than anything else for seeing where you are in relationship to your fellow raiders.

(Note: The release version has had some issues with encounter visualizations for some users - the fix for me was updating to the alpha version, which you can download here. If you're using the Curse client, you should be able to just change your preferences to install the alpha for it.)

If you're playing a class that can cleanse, Decursive makes it much easier, though it doesn't do anything you can't do with mouseover macros or something similar. The downside to Decursive is that it lends itself to mindless cleansing which is dangerous on encounters where you want to control when and where people get cleansed. (No, I've never cleansed Mutated Infection on my priest when I wasn't supposed to. Not ever. >.>)

oRA3 is handy, especially for raid leading - it tracks cooldowns, checks durability, etc. I was using oRA2 but it's no longer in active development. I still haven't really explored all the features of the new one but so far I'm liking it.

And obviously some sort of threat meter (not so necessary for healing but essential for dps and tanking) - Omen is pretty much the standard for it, though some people really like Skada (which dual purposes as both a threat meter as well as damage meter). I played with it for a bit but it didn't quite have the display options I was looking for.

For raid, frames, I am a HUGE fan of Grid - yes, it takes some work to get it configured (though the most recent updates have dramatically improved the configuration interface) but once you have it set up, it shows you what you need and nothing more. For healing, you will probably also want GridStatusHots (it works not only for druid HoTs, but also spells like Prayer of Mending, PW: Shield, Beacon of Light, etc). GridStatusRaidIcons is essential for raid leading, esp if you feel the need to know if people are actually attacking the designated target and helpful for healing when you're dealing with a specific effect that DBM or other boss mods use raid icons to indicate. I also like GridManaBars and all the extra indicators I can get - text, icon or otherwise but I don't think they're necessary to make effective use of Grid. Most of the relevant Grid plugins can be found here. I will make a post later on explaining my Grid setup - for now, BobTurkey has written an excellent post on setting up Grid that I highly recommend (as well as his followup post).

What do you consider essential? Leave a comment here and let me know.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Power Auras Tutorial pt 5: Warlockery and skullduggery

Been trying to get the warlock up to par and so I've made a few Power Auras for her.


Power Auras Tutorial pt 4: Chakras and Wings and ICC Oh my!




I've been playing with Holy on my priest and I'm having a lot of fun with it. I struggled a bit to set up a Power Aura for my Holy Word spells though, so I looked around a bit and after looking at some advice on the forums and on the Power Auras Wiki I managed to figure it out.


Power Auras Tutorial pt 3: Spell Cooldowns & Disc Priesting

On my disc priest there are a couple of significant cooldowns I want to monitor, so that I make sure and use them when I can. So I've set up Power Auras to monitor them.


Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Power Auras Tutorial pt 2: Monitoring poisons

Another handy thing you can do with Power Auras is monitor weapon enhancements like poisons.


A Power Auras Tutorial pt 1

This is going to be mostly copied from a post I originally made on our guild forums. It's from an older version of Power Auras Classic but the options interface is mostly the same for the examples I give. The Power Auras Wiki is a great source of information and export strings for Power Auras.

Anyway, here's the first part of the tutorial.