Quick balance update

Synopsis
Balance results.

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Not raided yet, just been trying on a heroic target dummy. At the moment (only me) I have 2.9k dps on the dummy and non stop casting (no out of 5sr) I last about 7 minutes.

Is that ok? (Not using treants though)
Basically I spam wrath till eclipse, then starfire for the duration of eclipse. Then 3 or 4 more starfires (depending on when I have to refresh my dots), followed by wrath spam again.

I want one thing though, I want to see when eclipse is off cooldown. Meaning when I should stop starfire because I want the eclipse that is triggered by wrath, not the one triggered by starfire.

PS, on general vezax today I did 5.9k DPS and at some point was at 107% of the DK tank's threat :P We can use a bit of a nerf (patchnotes).

Game within a game

Synopsis
At the moment I never ever fly from point to point on my own. I always use flightpaths. I even go out of my way to find a flightpath to fly to the closest flightpath near my destination... why? Here is why.

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It cost you a few flightpath gold but...



Curse Bejeweled link

My highscores are:
- Timed 580 (about)
- Normal 111k (about)

Also check out Peggle!

Curse Peggle link

Currently got 6 / 12 completely cleared.

Great addons have lazy people behind it.

Synopsis
Go RPB if you are not hooked to TMW yet.

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I have told you about TellMeWhen in this (link) post.

I have told you about macaroon being bugged, and the lazy programmer finally making a new version that now in 3.1 works (though there was no working version for the first 2 weeks of 3.0.8.

The same thing happened to TMW. The programmer was lazy. I posted on curse 2 weeks before 3.1 went live the following bug (on PTR);

The setting: Show me only if casted by myself was bugged. It should show Rip and Rake only when I casted it, but instead it will show any Rip and Rake casted by anyone. However if mine is active it will show mine before any others.

It really pissed me off because I got subbed from Mimiron because I was doing low dps. I got back in though after the other druid had to leave and we killed him! There was no other druid so the buggy addon didn't bother me much then, though my dps was still low because of me soaking bomb bot blows in phase 3 and doing little else.

This is the supposed fix: (didn't get a chance to try it yet).

elseif ( isMine or not icon.onlyMine ) then

replace it with:

elseif ( (isMine and UnitIsUnit(isMine, "player")) or not icon.onlyMine ) then


Also TellMeWhen doesn't always show Mangle (Cat)/Mangle (Bear). I need to test that and see if it works with what I posted in my previous post.

So if you are looking for using TMW or RPB, go for RPB. TMW is a great addon, but the programmer behind it is not really interested in making his product work.

My UI and Addons

Synopsis
How I have configured my UI and what addons I use.

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So here it is, my "long" awaited post on my UI and what addons I use. first of all if you are not using it yet, install the Curse Client. It is so easy to download and install it is unbelievable. All addons I use are available on curse.



First of all I am using a widescreen monitor. If you are not, get yourself one if funds allow it. The UI backgound picture I designed myself, see my previous post: The art of the UI. Here you can also read about the bars I use and why there are 18 buttons to the left. It has also info about macaroon (which you can now also download via Curse).

I marked nearly every addon with letter and they'll be listed below here. What I didn't mark is Fubar, of which I am using a bar to the top and 1 to the bottom. It holds a number of addons which for the most part are self explanatory. If you wonder what it is just ask!
One very important mod that is missing is Baggins. It automatically organizes all items and gear in the right place. It does the same for your bank. It allows you to create sections. I made a Tanking Section holding tanking gear (added by item id, which I can see using the addon iteminfo which is also not shown). I made sections for pvp gear, cat gear etc, etc... Really can't do without!

As for the numbered items (I suggest not to read all, just what you are interested in from looking at the screenshot):

• A: Autobar. Configurable bar to hold consumables and other often used (preferably not in combat) which folds out. For instance the section Battle Elixirs folds out on mouseover to show you all battle elixirs you have.
• B: Elkano's Buffbars. Better then the default icons blizzard gives you. Readable time left and readable names. It however when raiding gets really huge and in my case disappears behind grid. But I use that only to watch for buffs before I start a bossfight anyway. It has 3 default sections; buffs, weapon buffs and debuffs. I have placed my debuff list to the right of the buffs list. (At the time of the screenshot I have 0 debuffs). That way they are always in the same place (very usefull at Thaddius).
• C: Cooldown monitor (I belive this is ora2?). It is not part of fubar, I just placed it there.
  
• D:Deadly Boss Mods. In my opinion way better then BigWigs. Ecspecially Blue text in the center and for the sound effect at the moments you need to pay extra attention. Example: A sound played when polarity shifts at Thaddius, and the soundclip "Run away little girl, run away" at the moment a firewall comes on Sartharion. It jumps to the center of the screen at 10 seconds left.
• E: Grid. I tried a lot of different raidframes but Grid, though not really pretty is the best imo. Ofcourse you need to add some grid addons. I use 3 different texts, devided each corner icon into 4 icons (as you can see on me, Mone, I have 2 of 4 icons active to he bottom left of my frame). It also shows mana/energy/rage/runic energy and I have raidicons active on it. It is mostly configured for healer still (together with Clique) but not that much needed for feral druids though. The big benefit of grid is that you can configure height and width of each frame yourself. And because it is so minimalistic it doesnlt loose space for vital information.
• F: Archud. Nice headup display to see energy and combopoints (none were up at the moment of the screenshot, but it shows 1, 2,... 5 in big yellow numbers in the center).
• G: TellMeWhen (see previous post Tell Me When).
• H: Decursive. Not often used when you are feral though.
• I: Main Tank Targets (part of Ora2)
• J: AG_Unitframes. With some addons also shows castbar (though that is on archud too). It is easy configurable and clear. I don't show buffs or debuffs (only minimalsitic). What I do show are debuffs on target of target so I can keep track of debuffs on the MT to know when I need to taunt to start tanking.
• K: Cowtip
• L: Chinchilla. One of the minimap addons I like. I really dislike minimapicons and unless I forget to disable em only gatherer is active (to be able to easliy share nodes with others). I have no gethering skills on Monedula, but it still get the info from other guildies.
• M: Space reserved for recount. Though recount made me crash a couple of times. At least I didn't crash as often with recount disabled. So it is empty for now.
• N: Omen2 Threatmeter.

Forgot to mention I use prat to modify my chatframe, and I use OmniCC to display seconds on a cooldown.

That was pretty much it. Any questions, suggestion or compliments are always welcome.

The art of the UI

Synopsis
How to make your own user interface look like something completely different by using eepanels.

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This is not the expected post about the different addons I am using. This post is about one of them, name eepanels.

Basically eepanels adds square pictures (tga files) to your interface. For some parts of the file the seethrough has been set to 100% so you just see the normal game.

The first interface I did with this:

I thought it would be fun to have gaps in my UI. Well I can advice you, don't! The text is often unreadable. A unicolor background (dark) is best. For this design I took a picture of lightning, added some effects in photoshop and cut it out.
Note I was resto at that point.

The second design.

I got myself a logitech G11 keyboard. If you ever need a new keyboard. Get one of those as well! (Link to logitech). That resulted in me wanting to have a visual representation of the 18 extra keys to the left. So I did that. I used some screenshots I made for this. Me in breaform and a huge barely visable closeup of flightform in the center. Didn't really like the colors and I wanted to use redesign my UI with having myself and my target in the center to the bottom. So I made a frotsmourne/WotLK themed UI as you can see below.

This is the first version. I edited it all a little bit later, like the chat font. For this I drew the stalactites with my bamboo and added some shade effect to them. The snow is also some photoshop effects layers thing.

At this point I found myself wanting more buttons. I was short on bars (2 bars for caster form, 2 for bear and 2 for cat) leaves you with only 4 more bars to use. Since I wanted 3 different sets of buttons to the right it required stance bar, and 2 extra bars. I had button paging (ctr) on the center bottom left bar. So that was my last bar.
I really wanted to use my F1 to F12 buttons to set general (also not often used) spells in. I dont use F1 to F12 for anything so why not utilize that?

by that time I was pointed at Macaroon. It is a great, or rather was. The thing it does, it allows you to make a large number of bars having x columns and y rows, or even in circle form (around a round map for instance. You can drag icons in it and instead of a real button it creates a macro, but it works exactly like a button even with keybinding. You have to look at how to use it because instead of a macro the button can also represent an original button. Anyway with some tinkering you will find it out.
This lead to the following UI initially. Every button was macaroon.

The design isn't that great, I just didnt feel like investing a lot of time in it.
However, don't use macaroon for everything. If you jump on a vehicle macaroon will stick there. You won;t be able to use the vehicle. So the main bar(s) 1-12 (in my case "1-6/alt1 - alt6"-bar and the "7-=/alt7 - alt="-bars). should still be bartender.
The rest can be macaroon, no problem... wait yes problem.
When I want from 3.0.2 to 3.0.8 it crashed. Aparently I had to backup something in the WTF folder before installing. To repair it i had to edit the addon;s code but it was way to irritating to me. Not that I am too stupid, I just thought this was bloody idiotic. So instead of trying to repair I hoped for a new version. I eventually gave up. In 3.1 I might try and install it again. Hopefully it works.
So I replaced all with normal barender again which lead to the current UI as seenbelow.

Now you might be wanting to use eepanels yourself but have no idea how to do that. Here is a manual I used. Enjoy!

Tell Me When

Synopsis
For cat DPS I use the addon TellMeWhen to have a good visual of buffs and debuffs. This is on how to set it up and my experiences with it.

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When I started this blog a few days ago I had a lot of thoughts about what I could write here. Karthis and I seem to inspire each other. He made a post on his user layout which I also had in mind. Since he is on that subject I'll add to that and tell you what I find so great about the addon TellMeWhen. Btw, credits on this go to a poster on Elitist Jerks who first introduced me to TellMeWhen.

First of all a screenshot.


This is the setup screen. Don't mind the things in the bottom. They are part of my own fully customised UI. The only thing important is what is above my unitframe Orange bar Monedula, which is if you must know ag_unitframes mod. It is pretty much in the center, maybe a bit too much in the center for some, but at least it is obviously there and can't be missed.
First of all it is made up out of 4 different bars. In the standard game inteface > addons > TellMeWhen you can set those up. Either enable or disable them, how many columns they have and how many rows. You can easily resize them (right bottom corner) to make them bigger or smaller.
For each button you can set the following:

• The name of the spell. Note: It must be the full name (i.e. Mangle - Cat, not just mangle)
  
• The type of the Icon. I only use cooldown or buff/debuff.

For buff/debuff (which is the most used option) you then can set whether it is a buff or a debuff, on you or on your target, you want to show it when it is active or not active, whether you want to see a cooldown timer, and last, most importantly, whether it should be shown when it is the debuff you applied or a debuff applied by whomever.

I myself have it setup as follows:
4 bars:

3 columns:

• Tiger's Fury (cooldown: show if ready)
• Berserk (cooldown: show if ready)
• Lacerate (debuff on target, for when I tank. It shows stacks also + clock timer)

2 columns:

• Clearcasting (buff active on me + clock timer). This one is huge, I don't want to miss it
  
• Twilight Torment (debuff active on me). Also huge, I don't want to hit and stress healers unless necessary on the sarth 3d fight.
  

5 columns:

• Savage Roar (buff active on me + clock timer)
• Rake (debuff active on target + clock timer)
• Rip (debuff on target + clock timer)
• Faerie Fire (Feral) (debuff on target + clock timer, done by anyone)
• Faerie Fire (debuff on target + clock, done by anyone)
  

3 icons:

• Trauma (debuff on target, done by anyone)
  
• Mangle - Cat (debuff on target + clock timer, done by anyone)
• Mangle - Bear (debuff on target + clock timer, done by anyone)

Positive things:
You can track other peoples debuffs on target so you don't need to apply them (Mangle).
You can add any debuff you got so you can be carefull if needed.
Compared to a bar system each icon has its own place. If an icon is missing you know which one it is!
Important icons can be HUGE!

In action it would look like this:

You can see the clock timers active on the icons (for instance Savage Roar here is a 14 second buff that has 13 seconds left till it is gone). I also installed OmniCC which displays the seconds. In PTR this will become really important if you have TellMeWhen. Why I will explain later.
To continue, here you can see both Tigers Fury and Berserk are ready and I have all my debuffs active on the target. A huge Clearcasting proc int he middle (kinda over my character, but that is ok, I don't want to miss my free shred!)
As you can (not) see, there is no lacerate (to the right of berserk) active ont he target. Something that is not active will not be shown.

One more thing, some spells (as can be seen int he first screenshot) are depicted by a watch. This is a default Icon for when the icon is not available (yet). For instance Faerie Fire (Feral) is a spell you don't have in normal form and is not available. Also TellMeWhen does not know what Clearcasting looks like. However after combat it does know these things and when going back to the configuration display you will see those spells have the correct icon now.

One last thing I promised on why OmniCC will become important.

The new Glyph of Shred in PTR will add 2 seconds to mangle every time you do shred (max 3 times). So max 26 seconds. Currently if you are not using OmniCC you will see a clock timer on Rip that will have made a complete circle in 20 seconds. When you look at the buff and see it is half way you know it will take 10 seconds before it is finished.
Now the way Shred increasing Rip is implemented on PTR is this.
You do Rip. Rip lasts 20 seconds:

• Rip debuff 20 seconds, time left 20 seconds.

When you then shred at 8 seconds rather then doing the following:

• Rip debuff 22 seconds, time left 10 seconds. <- this is not the way it works!

The implementation is as follows:

• Rip debuff 10 seconds, time left 10 seconds.

If you were to use a clock timer only the clock timer cooldown would be reset to 0 and now go at double speed. The clock timer half way done means 5 seconds left! So without OmniCC telling you exactly how many seconds are left it will be very hard to keep track of Rip duration.