Raid UI

Every few months or so I get an itch to start fiddling with my UI. It’s a major mistake because it then takes 2-3 weeks to get used to. Once I’m really comfortable with it, I screw it all up again because I just saw something really cool that someone else is doing!

Well, as requested by Dangerla, here’s an explanation of my current UI.

1 – X-Perl – This is my Unit Frame Addon. Highly recommend it. I know some people like others, but find one you like. I like X-Perl because it’s clean and nicer looking than frames like Grid. I have it set up so that people who are in range of my buffs show up nice and highlighted like it is now. If someone steps out of range, then they become slightly greyed out. This way I can avoid using up a lot of reagents. Also fantastic for healing! 🙂

I have the raid down below, pets off to the side, and the standard me, target, target’s target up above. I also like the way that looks compared to some of the other addons I’ve seen. Although you can’t see more than five groups, I have all eight set up down there as well for 40 man raids. You’ll also notice that it isn’t showing my party off to the left. I have the option set up so those disappear during a raid. It frees up more area to see what’s going on.

This set up was based primarily for my pally healer, but I keep the same setup for all my toons because I believe it’s important to know how many people are still alive, who’s dead, and what the general situation is at all times. I’ll never understand DPS or tanks that don’t have unit frames set up for the entire raid. How do you know if you’re about to wipe? How do you know if it’s best to just throw in the towel or when to kick it up a notch? We can argue it’s importance and how others tell us when, but I don’t like not knowing.

2 – Bison is a buff bar addon. I leave the buffs up top, including the two weapon buffs just underneath where the food buff is shown. They never show up on Maedchen, but they do show up on my shaman. The debuffs are down below. I’m not so concerned about buffs. I can look at those before combat, but the debuffs I need in a location where I’m looking more often.

3 – Sexy Map – Customizable look. Kind of pointless, but I like it.

4 – Icehud. There’s others, but I kind of like this one. Generally speaking, there’s no real point for me to use this, because I often ignore the bars there anyway and look elsewhere, but it does remind me if I don’t have something targeted because it’ll disappear after something dies.

5 – Quartz is that faded bar you can barely see. I’ve just finished casting Mind Blast. Quartz is fantastic for any spell/ability that requires a cast time. It attempts to calculate your lag and show that as red on the bar. Once the timer hits the red area you should be ok to begin your next cast without interrupting the current one. This should be an absolute must for healers and caster dps. Not sure how it works exactly with non-caster dps as I haven’t played one.

6 – Deadly Boss Mods (DBM) and Big Wigs are both boss timer mods. It still surprises me how many raiders still don’t use one of these. I use both and for the life of me cannot remember which one is which. I believe the one below is Big Wigs and the one above is DBM. Regardless, the one to the top right is set up so that as the countdown gets closer, it’ll move the bar down next to the other addon’s timers.

Why do I use both? I remember once long ago that depending on the boss fight one timer was better than the other. Last night it appeared that DBM didn’t have timers for Grobbulus, which I can’t imagine why. 

7 – Recount is probably the most popular damage meter out there. I always like checking it to see how I’m doing and normally don’t have it opened during boss fights and trash pulls. The reason why is because I don’t want to find myself concentrating on climbing the charts and ignoring what’s really going on. That’s when dps usually do stupid things like pull and die.

8 – Omen3 is a threat meter and most everyone has it. If you don’t, shame on you!

9 – kgPanels is the addon that puts those shaded boxes behind the lower half of my screen for the chat box, raid frames, etc.

10 – Autobar‘s basic bar is here.

11 – Although not shown here, I wanted to explain this gap here. During a raid I turn off the addon. That addon is Qbar. It’s a handy quest bar that puts all of your useable quest items on the bar so you don’t have to search your bags to use them. Has made life so much easier since I found it.

12 – Bartender4 is my button bar mod. I have it set up so that I actually have 10 bars, but the other 5 are not visible until I hold the Shift key. Believe it or not I used to use another addon and showed all 120 keys on 10 bars. I used to have all my daily quest items on those bars along with spells, etc. This nifty feature and Qbar has saved me a lot of screen space.

13 – Autobar‘s Trinkets, Class, and Extras bars are here. There are more bars for you to use, but I don’t use them.

14 – Again, not shown here, but this is where I put Pally Power for Ky. Obviously not needed here for Maedchen. 🙂

15 – Deadly Boss Mods has a range check feature (at least I think it’s DBM). When I type ‘/range’ a nifty box appears here that let’s me know whenever anyone else is within 10 yds of me. Absolutely essential for boss fights like Kel’Thuzad.

Other Raid Related Addons Not Shown

Those are my main raid addons, but I use a lot more. Other addons I use related to raiding are:

Xloot – although I don’t need it anymore, it’s still nifty. (Did I just say nifty?!) Really good tool for Loot Masters! Can be set up to announce those who receive loot in various chat channels.
BigBrother – when one of the Raid Leader’s admits he always forgets to use food buffs so never does, this is kind of pointless to use. 🙂 Still a ‘quickcheck’ to myself let’s me know who’s got their A-game and who’s shooting themselves in the foot.
ClassLoot is a great addon to assist you in determining who really benefits from an item the most. It uses a 5-star rating system and categorizes the class/spec combos that benefit the most. I believe it’s a must for any Loot Master.
Atlasloot – When you need to research gear upgrades.
VisualHeal – Fantastic tool to judge overheals on a target.

Other General Addons Not Shown

AckisRecipeList
AdvancedTradeSkillWindow
Align
AuctioneerAdvanced
Carbonite – Personally don’t like the addon, although the minimap is nice, but it’s less of a resource hog than QuestHelper.
Examiner
Gatherer
InventoryOnPar
LootDB
Possessions
RatingBuster
SellFish – For when your bags are full and you need to make a choice.
Titan Panel – Whoops! This one is shown. It’s the bar at top and bottom. /facepalm
TotemCaddy – For the Shaman obviously.

How Do You Tell Someone ‘You Suck’ Politely?

Last night I got invited to a PuG EoE group on Ky. Inevitably I always scan people’s gear to get a feeling for how it might go and one ret pally in the group looked as if he had just barely dinged 80. He was in quest greens/blues with one pvp epic that he obviously got in VoA. I recognized most of the items because they were the items I had when I hit 80 while leveling as ret. I groaned, but thought maybe the others will make up for it and in fact they did have much better gear.

We got to the 3rd phase relatively easy. There were DPS issues, but that was primarily due to a DK that hadn’t done this before and was having a hard time stacking buffs in first phase. The Raid Leader also let the ret pally go, but he did it in an interesting way for a pug group.

I wish I had a screenshot of exactly what he said, but he said something along the lines of “I hate to uninvite you, but you really need to be in at least Naxx gear to do this. As good as you are, sometimes gear is just absolutely necessary.” In all honesty, he really wasn’t that bad for his gear. He was pulling roughly 900 dps, which obviously isn’t enough for EoE, but given his gear still not bad. Anyway, there was a pause for a little while, but the pally agreed and no drama ensued.

We replaced the pally and were successful in downing Malygos. The Ice Spire Scepter dropped and for a moment I thought about not rolling for it. I have the mace from Heroic Nexus and it’s served me well, besides the Ice Spire Scepter has Spirit on it and I’m a pally. There was a priest in our group who wanted it as well. But then I thought, this is a pug group. I have as much right to it as the priest, because regardless of the Spirit the other stats are indeed an upgrade, so I rolled. I won! 🙂 Pretty happy about that. If it’d been a guild group or at least a guildie I was rolling against, I’d have passed.

This also led to my necklace upgrade from the 10 man quest given to me by Keristrasza after getting the EoE key. So two upgrades in one night as well as finishing Champion of the Frozen Wastes and getting my title**.

That's a long @$$ name!!!

Our guild leader was wanting to run HoL on his level 78 alt. I still need the achievements for that and to be honest wasn’t thinking and wanted to run that on heroic, but oh well. Either way, I was getting rep and some Wintergrasp Shards so it was all good. While in vent a question came up…

“I have a friend that plays a warlock and she wants to get into raiding, but she has no idea how to play her toon. How do I tell her she sucks?” It’s not verbatim, but that’s the gist of the question.

It appears our guildmate has tried to help her friend several times and has even gone as far as buying her equipment only to realize a few days later she’s replaced that equipment with downgrades and items with stats not applicable to her spec. Why? Because it looks pretty.

The advice that I and others gave was that she should approach her friend and ask her how serious she was about wanting to raid. If she’s serious about it, then she needs to be told that she needs to reach a certain standard or chances are she will be ridiculed quite rudely. A casual guild might be more forgiving, but raiding guilds and definitely pugs are not. I told our guildmate she should point her friend to the right websites for talents, gear, and stats.

Either way it’s a tough thing to handle, especially with your friends. How do you tell someone you like that they suck?

Higher Learning

Finally got the last book for Higher Learning!

Hey, I remember you!

Archmage Vargoth was nice enough to give me a pet.

Diamonds In The Rough

There are people that can list off by name all of their current gear. There are people that can list off by name all the upgrades that they are looking for, where it drops, and at what percentage. There are people that know every last detail of every last spell available to their class regardless of spec. There are people that know what stats different color gems primarily give. There are people that know what all the different names of the different gems mean (i.e. Accurate, Shining, Pristine, etc.)

I am here to tell you I AM NOT ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE!!!

Gems have always been a sticking point for me. I cannot for the life of me remember from one day to the next which color gives me what, except I know that yellow has crit. I cannot tell you which is the best one, but I know because I gemmed everything I had on Ky with yellow crit gems.

So several weeks ago when I was trying to figure out what gems to buy, I did the old thing of scanning the auction house through each color to see what was there. It then occurred to me that I’m an idiot.

WoW Gem Finder

Many of you probably already know about this. I did a quick search and WoW Insider did a post on this several months back, but in case you missed it like me, check this site out.