If you have, somehow, found your way here I should inform you that you are in the wrong place.

Wherever you were going, this isn’t it.

Whatever you were looking for, it isn’t here.

Unfortunately I have too many projects and too little time. This is one of the things I don’t feel I have time for any more. Sorry.

kthxbye

Euripides over at CriticalQQ covered the attitude thing the best. Basically – you’re not special so quit whining that other people can get similar gear to you.

I also wanted to say this: Just because T8 gear will be available to anyone who can run Heroics does not ruin your raids! Your guild cleared Ulduar 25 Hard Modes and has Algalon on farm because you are good players – not JUST because you have great gear. Ulduar might be full of noobs a month after the patch – but none of them will get much further than Flame Leviathan. Why?

Because gear does not maketh the player.

Your gear enables you to play to your fullest potential, but I’m guessing you’d still be a good player in my gear or worse. A crap player is a crap player – won’t matter if they are wearing T8 or not. It will mean that the good players who are still up and coming will get a chance to shine.

There are already 10,000 people wiping in Naxx every night despite being in full 213 gear – because they think purplz = 733t (And because they can’t spell, but that’s a whole other bias).

Skill > Gear and always will be. If someone is crap despite their gear, don’t play with them again. Problem solved.

http://occama.mybrute.com

Palithras UI Solo

As promised, I present to you my UI. Commentary and addons after the break.

Visible addons are:

• kgpanels (for the background)
• Dominoes (Action Bars)
• PitBull (Unit frames)
• VuhDo (Healing mod and raid frame replacement)
• ElkBuffBars (For buffs/debuffs – right hand side)
• Sexy Map (Because its sexy, baby! In the right hand panel)
• Recount / Omen (In the left hand panel)
• Chatter (Chat mod)
• CowTip (Tooltips)
• FuBar

Not visible in the screenshots:

• Carbonite (for questing)
• Gatherer (for farming)
• MikScrollingBattleText (much better than Blizzard default)
• Power Auras Classic (graphic alerts, only shows in combat)

Recount and Omen share a space on the screen. Recount is up out of combat and is replaced by Omen in combat. I don’t really need either on Palithras but I share this UI across all of my toons and the info is nice to have on some of them.

I use VuhDo as my healing mod and raid frame, incorporating click-to-cast, buff monitoring (upper right), and health bars. They are set up to look kind of Grid like, filling out to the right as the raid gets bigger, and health bars being vertical.. My personal preference is to have all boxes green rather than using class colors but everyone is different.

PitBull is there for me (left middle), my focus (left), my target (right middle) and target of target (right).

Palithras UI 10 Man Raid

I’ll get a 25-man screenie posted as soon as I have a tidy one – like where half the raid isn’t cybering the loot master for preference on “The Turning Tide”…

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a clicker – always have been, always will be. I tried mouseover keybind macros and could not get used to them, but they can be very useful if you’re a keybind type of person.

I have two main action bars on screen, in the middle. Bottom is for combat – daily quests and so forth – top is for healing related stuff. I met a healer in Naxx 25 last weekend who used Healbot (nothing wrong with that) but did not have her healing spells on a bar because they were bound in Healbot. So we ended up wasting time at Instructor Razuvious while she got that set up. That’s why those are there – for those occasions when you need to heal something that does not show up in your normal frames.

Some of my layout stems from the fact that I’m working on a 17″ CRT monitor and screen real estate is precious. If I had a widescreen monitor some of this stuff would be spaced out horizontally, meaning I could lower the height of the UI and move raid frames to a central position. With that in mind, I have tried to keep all of the important information central or to the right: Buffs/debuffs, VuhDo, unit frames etc. Chat and Omen are off to the left as I usually only glance at them in combat.

At the end of the day, one’s UI is a personal thing. Everyone has different needs and ways of doing things. The Wife has no idea how I manage to even play the game because my interface is so different to hers. I think, though, that one’s interface should evolve and adapt to one’s playstyle – not the other way around. If you find that you are being shoehorned into playing a certain way just because “that’s where things show up on my screen” or “I don’t have enough buttons”, then change! We have an excellent and talented pool of people who are making these addons – I bet there is something to fit the way you want to play.

UI Resource Links:
PlusHeal UI Showcase (healer related for the most part)
NoStockUI
Elitist Jerks UI thread.

1. VuhDo: This is the most popular search that leads people here. I will try to do a post explaining how I have mine set up, which leads me to…

2. …a post about my UI. I spend a lot of time trying to get the perfect balance between form and function and I think I have finally got it right.

3. An update on Wolfsorish.

Coming Soon(tm)

Patch 3.1, eh? Argent Tourney, Ulduar, two talent point refunds (caught more than a few people with their proverbial pants down that one). Lots of stuff going on but, since it has already been covered by far better bloggers than I, I will focus on what I have been doing.

Palithras has been getting a lot of love lately. Our guild has allied with a number of other guilds to help getting raids together. There is a great bunch of folks from Heaven’s Breach that tend to raid 10 mans at a time that suits both me and The Wife, so that has been fun. Plus our home guild has been scheduling 25-man Naxxramas for our weekend which means I have managed to log a few hours in there as well.

Not to mention a quick jaunt into Ulduar for the first boss, where I got to drive a demolisher. Most. Fun. Ever. Here is a small excerpt from the battle:

Raid Leader: OK, so are we clear on the strat?
Palithras: Yeah…but just to clarify something: I get to fling my passenger at the boss?
RL: Yes.
Pal: Literally hurl my passenger from a catapult?
RL: Yes.
Pal: And he’s just going to climb into the catapult voluntarily? No whips or cattle-prods?
RL: Yes.
Pal: And my passenger is a Warlock?
RL: /sigh Yes. In this case. Any other questions?
Pal: So I get to put a Warlock into a catapult, aim him at the side of a giant metal steam-tank and hurl him bodily at the boss…and then someone is going to pick him up and give him back to me so I can do it again?
RL: YES!
Pal: /weep. It’s like all my Christmases have come at once!

Thanks Jaydizzle – you were awesome! You can be my wingman (or catapult ammo) anytime

ERRATA: Jaydizzle is a Warlock, not a Hunter as I had first posted. Mucho apologies, amigo.

I did have a strange thing happen last weekend though, playing on Palithras. We had a guild group of five decently geared level 80 characters. We had a tank, a healer and three good DPS. We could have rocked the house in any Northrend Heroic we wanted to do. But, instead, we stomped through Magister’s Terrace, Steamvaults and Slave Pens. Why? Just because! Yeah, we were aiming to hit up some achievements, but no one, even once, mentioned heading off to do a level 80 instance…

I like that, sometimes, we can have fun on our max level toons without feeling the need to “progress”, or “upgrade”. So thanks to my guildies for an enjoyable afternoon.

Of course all of that content is obsolete now and you get better green gear going into Outlands that most of the epic drops in the vanilla raids. So the closest I had ever been to that stuff was a Molten Core raid after I was already 70. It was fun, but there was no sense of achievement.

Yesterday though, the guild got together for a raid on Blackwing Lair. They had been farming Onyxia for a while and had something like 40 Onyxia Scale Cloaks on hand. We hit the place Star Trek style – an attuned Warlock and two others going in first and then summoning the rest of the raid. Down go the bosses and then we hit Nefarion.

While the fights were pathetically easy, we know for a fact that not many guilds on our server have been able to pull it off. This is due to the Shadowflame (I think that’s the name) that can easily wipe even a raid of 80′s. Unless you have your Onyxia Scale Cloak equipped! So a little bit of planning has given us an achievement that still means something on our server.

Mad props to my guild for taking the effort to put that event together. It was all sorts of fun and I’m super glad I got to be a part of it. I won the roll on the head and was able to bask in the adulation of my peers in Orgrimmar. And I picked up the Judgement shoulders too!

It would definitely be cheaper on the ol’ bank balance to do the quest, plus probably infinitely more satisfying in the long run. But can I be bothered? It looks like a lot of work compared to the Paladin equivalent, which I did for Palithras. Plus I’d need to have The Wife run me through Scholomance and Dire Maul. So the time investment is much higher.

It would make more sense, time-wise, to have Palithras farm saronite or titansteel and sell it and then level Wolf to 61. I’ll have to sleep on it, I think. It would be nice to be able to say “Hey, I got my epic mount by working for it”, but when I have pair of level 80′s backing me up, how much work would I actually end up doing?

In other news, the guild’s 25-man Naxxramas raid got delayed by a few hours and I managed to sneak in for 4 bosses. We downed the Arachnid Quarter on first try (collecting “Heroic: Momma Said Knock You Out” along the way), and then headed to Patchwerk. Took three attempts but we got him as well. Unfortunately I had to leave after that /sigh.

No purple love for Palithras from Naxxramas, but I finally managed to hoard enough Emblems to upgrade my shield. Picked up the Protective Barricade of the Light. So all in all it was a good weekend for me. Yay!