Ard’s UI

I’ve long wanted to post something about my UI and last night I grabbed a screenshot so I can finally do so. I’ll get a few basics out of the way first. Recount and Omen, sitting just above the chat on the left and, on the far right, Pally Power, made quite small (a great, almost essential, Paladin addon that I wish would either hide in combat or allow casting in combat.) I use Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text and SexyMap. The tooltip I moved with MoveAnything.

I use AG_uf unitframes, displaying minimal information for myself and a bit more for my target and the target of target. I use Bartender to allow me to place my main action bars where I want them and how I want them. There’s one action bar on the far right, above Pally Power that’s almost entirely see-through so you can’t see it very well.

Next is NeedToKnow. Just above the action bars and to the right of my unit frame you can see three little bars displaying Holy Shield, Increased block (libram proc) and Divine Plea, also the bigger bar tracking Avenging wrath further right. NeedToKnow allows you to specify a buff or debuff that you want to track and displays a little countdown bar for it. You’ll notice all my cooldowns on the right, each one has a bar of it own that appears when I use it.

My buffs and debuffs are organized with Satrina buff Frames. It has lots and lots of options and took me a while to setup but I ended going for something quite simple. The top row of buffs are my own and all auras and totems. The second row are buffs cast on me by others. The third row are debuffs.

Lastly, Grid displays my raid info, who has agro, who has debuffs and the health and mana of each unit.

My UI is something that changes quite a lot, as I thnk of other things I want displayed or hidden and I tend to rearrange things a lot : )

Better late than never

Last week our little hard mode team (put together for Ulduar 10 hard modes) threw themselves at the Vezax hard mode for a couple of hours. We learned a lot but were unable to down the General. Yesterday we were at it again. We warmed up with a speed kill of Ignis which was probably our smoothest ever. I tanked Ignis and our warrior tank took care of the adds.

We moved on to the Descent of Madness, cleared some trash and then started on Vezax. Our first attempt had some problems that cropped up during the Animus phase - when kiting Vezax in the that phase we had some Shadow Crashes hit the melee group (due to kiting) and some ranged (because warnings were not getting through.) Just to clarify, in the hard mode no Saronite Vapors are killed and they coalesce into a Saronite Animus, a mob with 1.6m health that needs to be killed while still dealing with most of Vezax’ normal abilities. Our second attempt went really smoothly, we had Vezax down to less than 20% when the Animus spawned, we finished the Animus with no problems and downed Vezax – another step closer to Rusted Protodrakes.

Next we faced an Old God – Yogg-Saron. Our guild had not managed to kill Yogg on either 10 or 25. We’ve had some attempts on Yogg in the past. I thought we lacked either healing or coordination then but now I think we lacked the melee dps/experience to take out the brain room in the second phase. Experience there really is the key. We probably had more than enough dps all along. Most of our attempts last night were effectively spent learning the portal/brain room – getting that right is what made it possible for us to beat the encounter. Once we got that down (literally the first time we reached phase 3) we downed Yogg-Saron as well.

Three achievements remain – Flame Leviathan with four towers up, Firefighter (Mimiron hard mode) and Yogg-saron with only 1 keeper assisting.

Ard Impersonator Caught Redhanded!

My saturday morning session started out funny and a bit weird at the same time.

As you can see in the screenshot a mage on my server named Waika whispered me and asked if their was an officer online. (I was playing my shaman alt, now level 64 btw ^^)

I can only guess what 'Waika' was thinking, or trying to achieve. He had whispered my friend Fey and asked if there were any officers online.

My first guess as that he had applied to out guild and wanted to talk to someone about it.

When he said 'oh ye ^^ could you invite this char (my alt - Ard)' I didn't really understand what he meant.

Did he mean to say 'his alt' to me, Ard? So I asked and then he claimed to be 'Ard, human pallie.' It's highly unlikely that he would've gotten away with that with any of the other officers but what are the chances he asks ME for a sneaky invite!?

A screenshot to frame in my opinion :D

The Joy

I have times when I really don’t enjoy playing Warcraft. Usually this is sometimes around the end of the summer. It tends to be quiet online, raids are hard to fill up, the auction house looks like a flea market. At those times I log on, stand around in Dalaran for a while, realize I don’t feel like dailies, running dungeons or PvP and just log back out. I felt like this just a few weeks ago.

Well, summer is over and I’m really enjoying Warcraft. I’m leveling a Shaman alt, now 62, which is highly enjoyable as elemental really comes into it’s own in Outland, mainly thanks to gear. Raids are back to full and progressing. Our hard mode team is back in swing and attacking Ulduar 10. Last Monday we cleared Thorim hard mode, which went faster than some of our normal kills, this also got our guy-on-the-Algalon-key-quest the item he needed from Thorim. We Absolutely nuked down Hodir hard mode (yours truly delivering nearly 8k dps… in offspec!) We had to get past Mimiron so no hard mode there but our kill on normal really showed our progress, there were quite a few deaths, it had been a while since we had done Mimiron, yet we cleared the encounter quite comfortably. We also tried some tactics that should help us when we do start trying this on hard, just taunting the bomb bots and eating the damage instead of controlling it and a good tank switch tactic on the Plasma blasts in fase 1.

Then we threw ourselves at General Vezax. We don’t have a lot of experience with Vezax, we’ve only killed 3 or 4 times. This time we tried for the hard mode. We had many attempts but were not able to down him and the Saronite Animus. We did however learn a lot about how people should be positioned, the use of tanking cooldowns, kiting strategy etc. The evening was a display of progress each attempt being better than the last, getting as close as 20% left on both Vezax and the Animus. It’s seeing everyone hard work and effort slowly, but surely, paying off that is so enjoyable.

Last night we cleared Onyxia 25. She was kind enough to drop our first 25 version of Quel’serrar, which went to our warrior tank. Then we headed for ToC 25. On Anub’arak last phase we just let the burrowers go underground. As I was tanking the boss I could see and offtank with 1 burrower move about but it would not burrow. He moved again, still not. Then I hear him on voicechat “Mine doesn’t want to burrow” he sounded so sad. It made me laugh so much, it was worth raiding the entire evening just for that moment. We’ve got our Anub strategy down now, this was our third kill on 25, so I think we can call it farm!

I love this game!