Brajana’s Interface and Addons

Alright, it’s time to go into detail about how my UI is set up.  It’s not perfect, and I’m not completely happy with my unit frames mod… but it works for me for right now.  It’s taken me years from when I first downloaded Cosmos to get my UI to the state it is in now, which is pretty much how I like it, despite it’s quiddities.

I haven’t yet perfected the look of Ferguson’s UI, in fact, I spent a good amount of time between pulls in my last Karazhan run trying to get it set up how I like it.  I have decided I like to have my raid/party frames right in the middle of my screen, because otherwise I tend to not pay attention to what’s going on, just watching health bars, or the other way around.

First of all, I must recommend WoWMatrix.  This program will manage your addons for you, giving you a very easy way to install and uninstall addons, and most importantly, it will auto-update them all for you!  Just run it before you run WoW to make sure all your addons are always up to date!

WoWMatrix says I have 123 mods.  But that’s including all the modules and stuff… so here is the list, trimmed down to the major components.

Ace2 - AddOn development framework. I find that the Ace2 mods work smoothly together, I have switch a number of my addons to Ace2 versions of them.

AceProfit - Makes it easy to sell junk items to vendors. Necessary.  Goodbye grey items!

Atlas - Instance Map Browser. I don’t use it all that much anymore, but it’s handy for instances you don’t know.

AtlasLoot - Shows the possible loot from the bosses. I love Atlas Loot, you can find almost any item in there from crafted ones, to drops to rep items!

Auc-Advanced - AuctioneerAdvanced, An addon to help keep track of items values. I’m not that great at playing the auction house, but still, no one should be without this.  I only keep the whole thing enabled on my bank character, but it’s handy for figuring out which items to toss or sell.

Bagnon - Single window displays for the inventory and bank. I like how Bagnon works, my favourite feature is probably the search functionality, and being able to see what my other characters are carrying without switching over.

Bartender3 - Simple and Advanced combined. My action bar addon.  i’ve used a number of different ones, this one seems to do what I need right now.

BigWigs - Modular, lightweight, non-intrusive approach to boss encounter warnings. Required for raiding!

ChatMOD - General Purpose full featured Chat Enhancement Collection. Adds nice little features like moving my chatbox to the top of the chat window and highlighting names in class-colours and keeping a history of what you’ve typed.

CooldownTimers2 - Shows Status Bars that you can drag around and group up for your cooldowns. In the screenshot, this is the one on the left right above my action bars.  It’s handy for keeping track of how long til I can retrap or use my trinkets!  It pops up a message to inform me when cooldowns are finished as well!

Critline - Saves your high normal and critical damage records and flashes a message if you break the record. Can anyone say e-peen?

Decursive - Affliction display and cleaning for solo, group and raids with advanced filtering and priority system. I like having this on my priest, it really does help out for dispelling stuff.

DoubleWide - Make QuestLog a DoubleWide! Ahhh, so much easier to read.  It puts the list of quests and the quest text window side-by-side, so neither is squished.

EquipCompare - Compare items easily with ones you have equipped.

FuBar - A panel that modules can plug into. Used to use Titan, but I switched to FuBar.  These are the modules I have:

• FuBar_ClockFu
• FuBar_CritlineDmg
• Fubar_CritlineHeal
• Fubar_CritlinePet
• FuBar_DurabilityFu - Keeps track of durability and pops up a dialog to repair when you go to a vendor who can.
• FuBar_ExperienceFu
• FuBar_FactionsFu
• FuBar_LocationFu
• FuBar_MoneyFu - Keeps track of current money and all your characters on one realm.
• FuBar_PerformanceFu
• FuBar_XPerlFu

Gatherer - Displays stuff you gather in your minimap and world map. Also lets you get nodes from other players.

IHML - Switch macro depending on zones or BigWigs boss modules. “I Have Macro LOL” is what it stands for, if you were wondering.  As long as you have BigWigs installed, this will change to the appropriate macro depending on which boss you are fighting, like “/target Demon Chains”.  Also works for doing dailies and stuff!

KHunterTimers - Times hunter buffs/debuffs. This is the one above my action bars on the right.  Keeps track of things like how long my trap is going to last, how long Ferocious Inspiriation is lasting for, whether my pet has Frenzy up or whatnot.  It’s not a necessity but I find it helpful.

LittleWigs - Boss warnings for 5-man instances.

Ogri’Lazy - So easy a Dwarf could use it! Put away that pencil and paper and get this mod!  It does the same thing.  It doesn’t auto-track which colours are pinged, but you click on them to make a list.  It does help a lot.

Omen - A lightweight, flexible, multi-target threat meter. Handy for avoiding “OMGWTFFD!!” situations.

oRA2 - A CT_RaidAssist alternative. Assign maintanks and do raid checks and stuff.

Quartz - Modular casting bar. Shiny casting bar that has a swing cast bar and a global cool down indicator.

QuestLevel - Shows the quest’s level. Pretty simple.

RatingBuster - Item stat breakdown, analysis and comparation. Very handy, although sometimes I find myself relying on it too much.  It’s good for a quick comparison, but make sure you really look at the stats if you are deciding on whether you should need or greed!

Recount - Records Damage and Healing for Graph Based Display. <3

XPerl - Replaces the normal unit, party, target, pet frames and adds target-of-target. My current unit frames.  I’m not 100% happy with them, but they do what I need for now, so that’s what I’m using.  Maybe I’ll try out something else when I get a chance, if anyone has any recommendations, they are more than welcome!

Gender-specific Blogging

The topic for this post was sparked by my realization during the “Subscribe-a-thon” that there are a lot of World of Warcraft blogs that are written with a title based on the fact that the author is a) a gamer, as well as b) a female.  Many of these are great blogs written by wonderful bloggers, even some of my favourites.

The thing is - I don’t see what the big deal is about being a female geek.  I (obviously) do not have a problem with female gamers OR female bloggers.  But I don’t understand why some women seem to think this is such important distinction for their blog.

Okay, so there are less females than males that play World of Warcraft.  This is a fact.  But does this really affect how or why you play the game?  When I am playing, I don’t make decisions like, “I’m going to spec BM because I’m a girl.”  Or “I’d rather quest in Terrokar than Blade’s Edge because I have woman parts.”  The fact that I am a female does not affect my in-game life on a day-to-day basis.  Sure, I’ll have the occasional person who thinks I’m a guy playing a girl (not very often, Trolls are much less likely to be cross-players than Elves)  or that I’m a guy playing a guy (in the case of Ferguson, which is a reasonable assumption to make.)  The thing is, I don’t take offense from it.  There is no way for someone to know if I’m a lady or a guy until I either tell them or they hear me talk.  I’ll correct them if necessary, and then move on.

Can you really base an entire blog on this?

I am of the opinion that your blog title should either be terribly clever or be informative about the subject matter (preferably both… see Secret Agent Cat).  I also believe it’s important to have something special, some quiddity, that makes your blog different from others.  Which I guess is where the girl blog thing comes from.  However, the “I’m a girl who plays WoW” blogs I’ve seen are rarely actually about the fact that they are a girl.  They are no different from blogs written by guys. In fact, I could title my blog about the fact that I’m a Troll (since Trolls are a minority in WoW) but it would be deceiving, because I don’t really blog about the fact that I’m a Troll.

Maybe a blog that actually discusses the topic of being a female in the gaming world on a regular basis could justify the title, although I can’t really see there being enough to discuss to keep an entire blog afloat.

Maybe I’m just used to being a minority.  I work in a very male-dominated field.  At my current job, I’m the only girl on my team (of about 15) and there are only 6 females in our company (about 60 people total).  Again, it doesn’t affect me.  I don’t care who is a male or who is a female, if they can do their job right - that’s great.

I also don’t think women are as much of a minority as some may think.  In my guild, our 25-man raids are always at least 1/3 female, and 3/4 of our guild leaders are female.  Many of our most active players are female.  As WoW becomes more and more mainstream, it becomes more and more common to run into a female character that is -actually- female.  Actually, when I see a female toon, I always assume it is a female until I’m told otherwise.  Like I said, there is no other way to know!

So I guess what I’m wondering is: is it really THAT big a deal that you are a girl that plays games?  Does that make you any more/less important/knowledgeable?  Must you really rely on your gender to get people to visit your blog or find you interesting?

No! You are a great writer.  You are a passionate gamer.  You are a good and fun person.  That is why people read your blog and play games with you… so why focus on the fact that you’re a girl?

My new friend!

Meet Sparkle:

She is my new pet.  I’ve never had a wind serpent before, but I’d heard great things about them… so I thought I’d give it a shot.  Took me a while to chose which skin to get, I do like the quiddity of the rare wind serpent from Feralas, but I am just too darn lazy to level something up that far.  I decided to go with this bluish one to match my troll,  Brajana’s skin is about the same colour, although you can’t tell because of the bucket on her head.

I tamed Sparkle in Netherstorm, and she’s level 69.  I took her out to the Bone Wastes to try her out while farming up some Netherweb Spider Silk, and so far, so good!  True enough, the mobs I was fighting are only level 64-65, but she was doing a pretty good job of killing them quickly and keeping them off of me, even without having the highest rank of Growl or any other trainable abilities.

Gonna have to figure out where to shove Lightning Breath into my macro though, I hear that is a good idea!

Oh, and one strange thing:  When I went to my stable to release Yoshii, my level 30-something raptor who was part of my Mario costume from last Halloween… he wasn’t there.  I had an empty stable slot.  I don’t remember releasing him, but I also know that if you never feed a pet, they can up and leave.  Can they do that from inside the stable?  I don’t think I EVER fed him.  Not once.  Anyone know if that’s possible?  Maybe Yoshii is back in Stranglethorn with his buddies.

WoW Word of the Week: quiddity

This word isn’t quite as interesting as hugger-mugger, but it’s a good solid word!  Don’t poke fun at it!

quiddity

\KWID-ih-tee\, noun:
1. The essence, nature, or distinctive peculiarity of a thing.
2. A hairsplitting distinction; a trifling point; a quibble.
3. An eccentricity; an odd feature.

Example: I love my guild for the friendships I have built, the good times I’ve had, despite or even especially because of the quiddities of its members!  /hug

This week in raiding… Frost traps FTL!

Kara on Monday.  I was really hoping to go give it a try on Ferguson, see if I’m up to the task - I have almost 1300 +healz, which as far as I know means I am geared for it, but it was not to be :(  I got rostered on my Hunter instead, even though I don’t really need any badges or gear from Kara.  Oh well, maybe next time.  It’s not very often that I’m available for a Kara night, but hopefully I’ll be able to give Ferguson a chance soon!  At least I got to be raid leader, which made it a bit more fun.

Things went pretty smoothly in Kara, but we were going a little slower than usual, not sure why.  Only had one wipe on Nightbane, but still by the time we got to Chess, we were already 45 minutes past normal raid time.  I was so tired, but people be needin’ their badges, so there was no rest for me… it would be rude of the raid leader to just up and leave.  Luckily we managed to find a replacement for Tigerfeet for Prince, so at least someone got to bed on time!  I got pretty scared when we got to Prince and one person had never seen the boss before and another had never played the role they were doing… I was not looking to have a wipe, I wanted to go to bed!  Luckily we got him down pretty smoothly on our second attempt, with probably THE best infernal placements I have ever seen!

Tuesday was SSC… had a few new people there, which always makes things interesting… we had a few people that got to learn first hand what the spout looks like!  Leo took us three tries, since we were having problems with people remembering to stop DPS during phase switches, and also a few people having problems getting their demons down.  But the third attempt made up for the trouble of the first two - it was going much more smoothly, but our DPS was still a little slow… at 2 or 3%, Leo hits his enrage timer - but we still manage to get him down.  He took out almost the entire raid in the few seconds that he was enraged, but we didn’t wipe!  It was quite a sight to see!

Wednesday was my birthday!  So I was not available to raid.  And from what I hear, it was probably a gift in itself that I wasn’t there to see it!  It was Gruul/Mag, which usually means we don’t have an ideal or adequate composition signed up.  From what I’ve heard, there was lots of wipes.  Never pretty.  No DST, either!

Thursday… Tempest Keep.  Probably one of the worst runs we’ve had in a long time!  I was a little late getting there, because I went out and bought myself a birthday present, but I made it back before pull time.  There were still a bunch of people missing at that point, and we didn’t even make the first pull until about 20 minutes in to raid time.  We were missing a tank and a CC or two, so the other hunter and I had to try to do some trapping.  Well, first pull… we BOTH used Frost traps instead of Freezing traps.  Whoops! And after that, it was resist, after break, after resist, etc… There were mobs running this way and that, making our raid look like a real hugger-mugger!  Trapping in 25-mans is a lot harder than trapping in 5-mans.  A lot.

We took way too long on trash, and we kept having to bring new people in and switch other people out… in the end, we had 2 and a half hours of raid time, and only managed to get Void Reaver down.  Yuck.  Not a pretty evening at all!

Friday was Kara again!  But this time… Fergy got to heal!  Oh man, I was soo nervous!  I have only healed 5-mans, and only 1 heroic (although it WAS Shattered Halls…) but I had no idea how to heal a 10-man.  Luckily we had a great group of people!  Tigerfeet and Houda, my FAVOURITE tanks were there and I asked the other holy priest to keep an eye out and give me any pointers she could.  Tigerfeet and I, along with a few other people in the group I think, were still learning the encounters (from the roles we were in, at least), and we made Tiger run the show so she could shine as a leader!  We only got to Curator, but I think it was a great experience.  Unfortunately, the only drop that I got was an offspec pair of gloves… but badges are always tasty.  I had a lot of fun, and I am pretty happy with the healing I did - I don’t think anyone died because of me, which is more than I can say for my Hunter this week in raiding!

The Ghost of Patches to Come (Wrath of the Lich King)

Yep, I’m doing a Wrath of the Lich King post.  Surprise!  Well, I had a theme going… I had to finish it!

I’m going to take this opportunity to actually read through the patch notes for the beta, I’ll highlight all the changes I am interested in or excited about.  This will be the first time I’ve actually looked at them, so it should be fun, but my naivety about the upcoming expansion will be apparent.

Patch 3.0.1 (beta)

Barber Shop - This is a neat idea… not sure if they have decided if they are bringing in brand new hairstyles and such, because that would be great, but I don’t think I’d changed my look right now.  Besides, you can’t see my hair - I’m wearing a bucket on my head!

Achievement Points - I think this will be fun.  I hope they make the points worth something - tabards and titles and such… but even if they don’t, I don’t see why anyone would have a real problem with this.  Sure, you might not really be concerned with achievements, but they aren’t going to hurt your game.  Well, maybe it will be a bit annoying for people to be bragging about them or whatnot, but they’ll do that with anything.

Death Knights - I look forward to trying out my own Death Knight.  I probably won’t do it right away, and I doubt I will level it to 80… probably won’t even get it to 70.  But it’ll be neat to see!  I’m afraid of the over saturation of Death Knights that is inevitable… we saw a lot of Blood Elves and Draenei with the release of Burning Crusade, but this time, it will affect group composition.  I’ve never really been into melee type classes, so I probably won’t be a big fan of playing the Death Knight.  But, at least Blizzard has added a new class to the game!

Pet Talents - Woo!  This is awesome, adds a whole new dimension of customization to the Hunter class.  I really look forward to playing around with it and figuring out the best way to spec my pet.  I also hope this helps with the always present “pet can’t hold aggro” issue.

If a hunter tames a pet that is more than five levels beneath their own level, the pet will then have their level increased to five levels beneath the hunter’s own level. I must say, I’m probably going to go looking for new pets because of this.  I’ve always been waaay too lazy to level a pet up.  I think I can deal with 5 levels though.

Improved Shadow Word: Pain (Shadow) - Now increases damage done by your Shadow Word: Pain by 5/10%, but no longer increases the duration of your Shadow Word: Pain. I think this is a nice move.  I know when I was leveling, I’d usually have a mob dead before the SW was worn off, making the talent point a little useless to me.

Wand Specialization (Discipline) has been removed. I don’t know, I always took this when leveling my priest.  Saves me mana if I can just wand the mob down the last 30% or so… Am I the only priest who used this?  But I guess they had to remove it to make room for other things.

New Calendar feature - Neat, but I think this might go the way of the voice chat… just a bit too late to be used, and it is something that either everyone or no one will be using.

Players will now be able to access their non-combat pets and mounts by clicking on the pets tab in the Character Info panel. *cue the beam of light from above and chorus singing*  I would buy the expansion for this alone.  Seriously.

There are a few other little changes that I think will be handy to have, even if they don’t make a big difference in the game:

• Quests can be shared with party members at any distance.
• Quests can be shared with party members by linking the quest into party chat.
• Shift-clicking to loot mail: You can now hold Shift and click on mail in your in-box to automatically loot any items and gold without opening the mail.
• A 5 minute timer will appear over the player’s unit frame showing the countdown until your PvP flag is cleared.

Well, I really am looking forward to the expansion.  I don’t really want to hear more detail than this stuff, but I don’t mean I want to be all hugger-mugger about it… I just like surprises and experiencing things first hand.  It’s nice to know the big things to expect, but I don’t need to know how much spell power is going to be on my gear and all that.  That is a discussion for another day… in about 5 or 6 months, I suppose!

The Great Blog Subscribe-a-thon

Phew.

I feel like being informed.  I feel like getting to know the other bloggers of the WoW community.  I feel like being overwhelmed.

So, I’ve just subscribed to almost every WoW (especially hunter) blog I could find that’s been updated a least a couple times in the last two weeks.  Mostly found from links of the blogs I already read.  I’m up to… 122 blogs!

That’s a crazy number!  At least for me.  Before today, I had about 10-15 WoW related blogs to read, maybe 25 blogs in all categories of my RSS reader.  This is a big undertaking, but I’m going to see what I can learn.   I’m hoping I can draw connections and inspiration from the creativity of others, since my creativity is… limited.

I don’t know how many updates there will be, but I have a feeling that when I get up in the morning tomorrow, I will be greeted with a real hugger-mugger Google Reader!

I’ve made a list of all the blogs I’ve subscribed to.  It’s not organized by anything other than alphabet, but that’ll change.  If you have a blog that’s not listed, or know one I should add to my extensive list, let me know! :)  I’m sure I’ve missed a few good ones.

If I find really informative or interesting posts and/or blogs, I’ll be sure to write about them.

I’ve already got something I’d like to talk about - Female Gamers.  I have found more blogs with “Girl” or “Lady” or “Women” in the title, than I have blogs about Mages.  I have also noticed that at least half of the bloggers I have subscribed to are females.  I have nothing against female gamers (being one myself), but I would like to bring up the issue of why females feel it is necessary to focus on the fact that they are female, rather than just blogging about the game.  The only “male” oriented blog I have found is WoW Dad, which isn’t really about being male, but about being a parent.  But this is a topic for another day!!

I won the bid!

More adventures from the Unemployed Shoutbox…

I paid 400g for this, and I’m going to enjoy it!  Now, where is my steak knife?!

Now I’m just working on getting me the kidneys of the Hugger-mugger Agent Cat!  (See, I even managed to use it in a 3 line post!  Go me!)

This brightened up my day.

Not much of a post today, it’s barely past noon on my birthday and already the day has been a big hugger-mugger of a bad day.  But when I saw this screenshot on our guild forums today, it made me smile.  So I thought I would share!  Thanks Ferous!

Dance, chicken, dance!

Unemployed Does Onyxia!

Okay, so we are a couple years late to this one.  So what?  We had a blast anyway!

A group of us spent the afternoon finish up our attunements, which we had 3 weeks to do, but didn’t get a chance to get together until the day of.  The funniest part is that our attunement took us about 4-5 hours of running Upper Black Rock Spire and flying from this quest giver to that one… but the actual raid only took us about 30 minutes!

Eight enter the cave...

But both parts were a lot of fun.  Teiya, Guinesa, Pilsner, Boostah and myself did the attunement run… which would have been SO much easier if we had a mage for ports!  But we took advantage of our Hearthstones whenever we could (at least 3 times, since all of this took so much time).

"Pew pew!" says the space chicken!

All of this attunement got me thinking about how much I appreciate the simplicity (in comparison) of the Burning Crusade attunements.  Yes, I know they are extra simple now that they don’t exist - but even when they did, they were nothing like this one giant chain for such a short raid.

Anyway, we were almost 2 hours late getting started on the raid, but we had a good number of people who were around… a special thanks to Aeriola and Tigerfeet for being on the ball and getting their attunements ahead of time!

Victory!

We had 8 people present - Tigerfeet, Aeriola, Boostah (as his Warrior), Magazid, Teiya, Pilsner, Guinesa and myself.  It was a pretty good breakdown, considering it was just everyone we could pull together!  Couple of healers, a tank and an off tank/melee dps and some ranged.

When we did get her down - which took us a little less time than we generally get Gruul down, I’d say - she dropped a butt-load of stuff.  I’m not even going to list it all.  But the most important one… 20g each!  Man, why aren’t people farming Onyxia more often!?

Onyxia buff, courtesy of Unemployed!

I never got to raid Onyxia back in the old days, but I can barely imagine having 40 people in there working on her.  I’m so glad they did away with the 40-man concept! I went to a couple, but they were such a hugger-mugger that I just couldn’t do it!