Woah! Shortly after finishing Part I of Building a UI, I began work on Part II and saved a rough copy as a draft. Since then I’ve had three more great topics I’d like to write about and have written rough drafts for each of them and saved them as drafts. Without realizing it, I’m sitting here on 4-5 almost complete drafts of posts, but there hasn’t been an update on the front page for over two weeks! So without further ado, let me catch you all up to where Qz is sitting right now.
Qz hit 70 a few days after the last post, with about 4600g sitting in the bank waiting to be spent. I’ve been saving every single gold since level 1, not allowing myself anywhere near the Auction House, and gearing myself purely on items that I’ve gotten as rewards through questing. I also avoided instances since there are only three reasons people go to instances; to get gear, to get experience, and to get reputation. I knew that any gear I got at low levels would be replaced soon (low levels go through gear so fast!), I knew I could get faster experience by questing alone than trying to get a group going and hoping it’s good, and reputation isn’t much of an issue then. I did a few loops around Terokkar for [Terocone], [Felweed], and [Dreaming Glory], and made the last 400g within a matter of a few hours (thank god Terocone goes for 40g a stack on my server for some reason).
Flew to SMV, bought the riding skill needed, and got myself all excited over the possibility of having a swift flight form that night. I enrolled my brother to help me with the questline (I know that some of the lords can be a bit tricky, and he was nice enough to offer his help), and we ripped through all the quests without so much as batting an eye. But alas, I was but one quest away from my swift flight form, but it was Heroic Sethekk Halls, and the instance is not one that’s very popular. Not to mention I was a horribly undergeared (about +800 healing and 90mp5) Resto Druid who was going as an “off healer.” Miraculously (I credit the unique alignment of the planets), today’s daily on my server happened to be Sethekk, so finding a group wasn’t especially difficult. We completed the instance a short while later, and I get to zooooom around Outland in an armored brown crow.
The next day, the guild was shaken up a bit. One of our three Feral Druids (arguably the top one) decided to leave our guild for one that’s more progressed than we are (significantly more). His application was accepted, and he left without drama, and I salute and congratulate him on that accomplishment. However, we were now down one Feral tank. Additionally, our guild recruited a new Resto Druid, who has an amazing reputation (to quote a guild member, “easily in the top 5 on the server”), and was looking for a new guild after his last one fell apart. After speaking with the guild leader, it was agreed that I would fulfill that Feral spot (yeah, you heard me right, back to Feral!). Of course, this happened right after I spent my 25x[Badge of Justice] (from the 20-badge Kara run I did at 68, and the 5 from heroic Sethekk) on the [Tears of Heaven]. And I spent my honor and marks on [Gladiator's Salvation]. Oh well, banked those in case I need to go back to Resto in the future. The Resto set in my bank is now at a lovely +1053 healing.
I’ve been working on gearing up Qz as swiftly as possible as to make him viable for raids, and he’s already progressed quite nicely. It is amazing how easy and cheap it is to gear up a Feral Druid. Tomorrow’s post will go into this concept in a little more depth, but this fact really did take me aback. As of last night, Qz has tanked through Karazhan, and got to tank in Gruul’s Lair as well (eating up hurtful strikes mostly, though the tank did drop the first time we tried Gruul, and I managed to tank him from growth 7 to growth 11, to the amazement of my guild). Qz has also tanked (and DPSed) on Astromancer Solarian in The Eye, and on Hydross (that resist gear is EXPENSIVE!), Lurker, and Leo. I’ll post all the items I’ve managed to accrue in a future post.
Meanwhile, I leveled SaladFork’s cooking to 375 so that I can make my own buff food for raids. There’s a special feeling you get when you’re entirely self-reliant when it comes to potions and food on raids, I like it. After reading BBB’s excellent post on consumables for Feral Druids, I decided upon [Elixir of Major Agility] and [Elixir of Major Fortitude] for Qz, with [Warp Burger] as my buff food. My gear is heavily lacking in dodge (and agility) at the moment as I focus on keeping defense capped and increasing armor, and these buffs help out tremendously.
I’ve also picked up a few new addons. The first of which is one I love tremendously, as it not only makes my inventory look a lot spiffier, but also allows me to organize and find items remarkably faster, as well as quickly recognize the rarity of an item. Of course, I talk about no other than oGlow. This addon will add colored borders around items in your bags, bank, character screen, trades, etc., to allow you to easily recognize an item’s rarity. The glow was a bit too much for me, but a quick edit to glow.lua to change the opacity from 0.8 to 0.6 fixed that quickly. Another addon I’d like to mention is Routes. Routes is sort of the “successor” of Cartographer_Routes (which I mentioned in an earlier post). However, it improves on the Cartographer_ version in quite a few significant ways which have helped me tremendously, and I highly recommend those who use Cartographer_Routes switch to Routes. To quote the forum,
…
What Routes does better than Cartographer_Routes:
- It is not dependent on Rock, Cartographer or any map addon.
- We got rid of the Tourist and Graph library dependencies.
- It no longer uses any Babble libraries because they are no longer necessary. We now rely on the addons supplying us the node and zone data directly.
- It supports creating routes using data from Cartographer_<Prof>, GatherMate and Gatherer
- It has been slightly redesigned to allow extension so that any addon can supply nodes data for creating routes with. This means in the future, it will be possible to make routes with questing data once the relevant plugin files are written for it.
- The configuration and route creation is a lot more robust, shows more information per route, and comes with a FAQ.New Features
- Routes now has a Node Clustering feature which allows you to take a 567 node route and collapse it into a 196 node route by taking nodes that are near each other within a user-specified radius and turning it into a single travel point.…
Go check it out!
Just got out of my first Karazhan run on my druid… who’s level 68. I hit 67 late yesterday afternoon while doing some quests in Blade’s Edge, and shortly before hitting 68, I heard of some guildies who were planning on running Old Hillsbrad Foothills. Knowing I’d need it shortly so I could do BM, I joined them and hit 68 midway through the instance. I’m very impressed with my performance in there, considering I was able to hold aggro at 68 in my OL greenies against level 70 mages who were in tier 5 (though they did throttle their DPS). Immediately afterwards, I went to a druid trainer to learn my new skills (including Flight Form!). Afterwards, I went ahead and started the Karazhan attunement quest (which you can start at 68) and proceeded to solo the first two quests.
It turns out another guildie of mine was working on his attunement quest, and was just a tank short on his SL run, so he sent an invite my way. This one was particularly interesting, as we had to convince a pug that a level 68 should be able to tank this instance without too much difficulty if they just throttled their DPS a bit (which they ended up not having to do). We got all the way to Murmur without a single wipe (I was sure that third boss was going to give us trouble, but alas, we shot right through him). My guildie and I got our key frags, we downed murmur after one wipe (rogue didn’t get out of sonic boom in time), and I was happy with my first frag.
A few hours later, I got a whisper from the same guildie, saying he got himself an Arc group, and that they were willing to clear all the way up to the frag, temporarily kick out one of their members, invite me in so I can get my frag, and then boot me out and reinvite their original member and continue the instance. I thanked them all profusely, and ended up with my second frag, with little effort. I then stealthed into SV and soloed the guardian for my third and final key fragment.
No sooner had I turned it in did my guild leader send me a tell asking what I had left to get attuned to Kara. I told him I just had BM and I would be all set. He asked me what I needed, and said he’d be willing to tank or DPS. I laughed and told him I needed a whole group. He finished up what he was doing, and before I knew it I was in BM with a group of uber-geared (tier 5) 70’s. We absolutely destroyed BM, and I not only got my key activated, but also got an [Epoch-Mender] out of it. Fantastic, I was now attuned to Kara!
Fast forward to today. My guild, which has Kara on farm, randomly throws together Kara groups for those interested. Today was one of those days. One of the guild’s druid tanks sent me a tell asking me if I was attuned for Kara, and after hearing I was, sent me an invite. I almost fell out of my chair laughing. I was level 68, and I was going to Karazhan!
Amazingly, we managed to down Attumen, Moroes, Maiden, Opera (Wizard of Oz), The Curator, Shade of Aran, Terestian Illhoof, Chess, Nightbane, and Prince Malchezaar. I was feral specced but donning green resto gear (+475 healing and 63mp5 total), but we managed to pull it off with minimal wipes. I walked away with [Bracers of Maliciousness], [Forestlord Striders], [Mithril Chain of Heroism], [Signet of Unshakable Faith], and even a [Helm of the Fallen Defender] (oh, and 20x[Badge of Justice] to boot)!
Now to hit 70… =P
This post is going to be the first of a four part series that’s going to get you an amazing UI (or at the very least, a few shiny new addons). I’m an addon-aholic, and at any one time I’m sitting on 250-300 addons. And that’s after I clean up and uninstall all the addons I’m not using any more (which I do every 2 weeks or so). I’ve developed a reputation among my friends and my guild that if someone needs and add-on (or is bored and wants to try something new), I’m the person to ask.
Among the questions I get, two are quite frequently asked. The first of these is the question of what addons I use. Many people ask me for just a list of the addons I use so they can go through it at their leisure and find ones they like. The reason I don’t particularly like just giving people a list is twofold. First of all, my list is dynamic and ever-changing. An addon I may be using now may be replaced by a superior alternative, or perhaps it just gets out of date and is no longer useful. Additionally, I constantly find new addons, so the list would become outdated very quickly.
The second question I get is if I can help someone set up their UI so it’s efficient (and/or clean). The problem with this request is everyone has their own preferences, and the UI’s of different people are often vastly different, often as different as the way those two people dress. A person’s UI can become a very personal thing, especially if one spends a lot of time picking addons, and setting it up. This is also why I’m against just downloading “pre-made addon packages” and throwing it all together. Not only are you just copying someone else and not making it your own UI, getting so many new addons at once is a surefire way of guaranteeing you’re never going to know the full features of many of them.
And so I write this little guide, a tutorial if you will. I recently reinstalled WoW after a short hiatus and had to setup my UI from the default WoW one, and I will be approaching this guide the same way, assuming that we’re starting with a clean slate. There are two things I ask of you, however. One of the most common mistakes of people building a UI is that they will install addons that simply “look good,” or help them in tiny ways they don’t really need, or ones that are very rarely used. If you’re not going to be actively using an addon, don’t install it! Or at the very least, disable it until you do need it. Having more addons increases your loading time, increases the size of the WoW process in memory (and thus can slow down machines and decrease frame rate), and is overall just messy. The second common mistake is when people download an addon on the grounds that it was recommended to them. Often this isn’t a bad thing, but chances are you’ll forget about the addon if you don’t use it frequently, and it can quickly lead to addon bloat, which I described above. So although I’ll be recommending addons throughout this guide, make sure you’re making your own decisions when it comes to what addons you really do need. For example, if all you do is PvP, then don’t download Omen, as it really won’t do anything for you.
This guide will be split up into four parts.
So if you’re interesting in setting up your very own personalized UI, or are simply on the lookout for new addons that could help you out, follow along!
Leave a Comment »
2 Comments »