Tweaking my UI (and my spec, again)

So a couple of days ago, I got this random urge to mess with my UI again. So off I went in search of new addons...

My first stop was actually Bartender3. However, I didn't like it very much... it just seemed sort of confusing and counter-intuitive to use. (I do acknowledge the likely possibility that I just gave up without trying for very long!) Anyways, I dumped Bartender for now and began using StellarBars instead. Now, StellarBars doesn't offer a whole lot of customization... basically it's for people who like the general "look" of the default UI but want it to be a bit cleaner and maybe have a couple extra options. But it works for me I think.

Next I installed FuBar and a couple of plugins for it. I imagine most people know what FuBar is already, but if you don't, it basically adds a couple of thin "bars" to your UI which you can plug various "mini-addons" into. Also some stand-alone addons, such as Omen, plug into FuBar as well.

So now my UI looks like this:


I think I like it overall, but I would still like to do some further tweaking and maybe give Bartender another go sometime, if I ever feel like it. Oh, and I'll definitely also be keeping my eyes open for other FuBar plugins too.

Also, I respec'd again. Back to Beast Mastery. I'd been sort of planning to return to it at some point, but I originally didn't want to for another few levels, after I'd hit 60 and got an epic mount and all that. But the other day my brother dropped by for a bit... he's a 70 troll warrior on another realm, and he informed me firstly that "There is nothing scarier in battlegrounds than a beast mastery hunter and its Night Elf pet" (heehee), and secondly that "Outlands will be really fun for you, especially if you're beast mastery." I'm not sure how he came to that conclusion because as far as I know he hasn't leveled a hunter himself past 30 or so, but anyways, he managed to convince me and not long after that I was running to the Dwarven District of Stormwind, throwing down gold and respec'ing back to BM.

The Big Red Owl is back!

To be completely honest, like the recent comment I left over on BRK's blog, the different hunter specs are like my kids (well, I've yet to try Survival, but I love the sounds of it) and I can't just pick one. I think maybe I'm doomed to respec all the time for the rest of my hunter career. Ah well.

My interface and addons

Firstly, I would like to say thank you to all of you reading this. Recently I have been garnering quite the little group of people who read and comment on my blog or who link to me. I really, really appreciate it. When I first started this blog, it was mostly so I would have a place to ramble to myself, so my non-WoW friends wouldn't have to see so much of it at my personal journal. But a lot of neat people have started reading and leaving me comments, and I've discovered a lot of your great blogs as well, so I'm very happy with the way this has all turned out. =) And thank you again for reading and linking!

Anyway, I decided to make a post detailing the addons I use.

Here is a screenshot I took today, of Tux and I taking on a moonkin in Winterspring:


As you can see, I largely just use the default UI. I have a few addons to make a couple things a bit prettier, and a few to make my WoW-life easier, and a few that are there just for fun. But overall, the default WoW-look is functional to me (for the time being, anyway!) so that's what I use.

Now, my addons:

The lovely 3-D animated frames addon (you can't tell they're animated in the screenshot, but they are) is X-Perl. X-Perl comes with a lot of other bonus things that I really like aside from the pretty frames, including but not limited to aggro/low-health warnings. This is a very deep and endlessly customizable addon and I love it to death.

The threat meter is Omen, which I have come to really prefer over KTH (which is what I used previously.) It looks nicer and is more customizable, and is still compatible with KTH if other people in your group use it.

The scrolling combat text addon is SCT and SCTD, the former showing what moves you and your pet are doing and the latter showing the damage being done. I also installed the "options" addons for both which let you customize it quite a bit.

Those are the addons of mine that you can really "see" in the screenshot. There are others I have, though, and they include:

FlagRSP2: A roleplaying addon that allows others with this or similar addons to view additional information that you include about your character (backstory, appearance details, your own roleplaying details, etc.)

SWStats: The good ol' damage meter!

Census Plus: I love this addon because I'm a huge sucker for statistics and graphs and things. This will run a census on your faction and server, and you can check out exactly how many night elf hunters there are! (turns out, on my server anyway, there are more night elf druids than hunters. Maybe we aren't so ubiquitous after all!) You can also sort the results by race, class, level, guild... all sorts of fun options. And then upload your information to a global site and compare! I love it.

Auctioneer: Cause really, does anybody not have it these days? =P Even though I wouldn't call this a vital add-on for me... those many days of Neopets restocking taught me well enough how to price things on my own (I'm a geek, yes)... this is still a very helpful price-tracking addon that speeds things up and all and all I'm glad I have it installed.

Gatherer: This one is only "sort of installed" at the moment-- basically a lot of things started acting weird for me, so I shut off Gatherer which was out-of-date and things started working again. Since then I've tried re-enabling it and it seems to work fine again, but at the same time, I don't see this addon as being super vital for me. If it helps you out, that's great... but I just sort of remember where the herbs I need are, they like to change where they are everytime I go looking for them anyway. It does have that nifty guild-send feature though. I may just re-enable this one for that.

And I do believe that's everything! I'm always on the lookout for new helpful or fun addons, but I also don't like to go overboard so come patch day I don't have to go scrambling for hours for newer versions of them all. Heehee.

Initial Thoughts On and Issues With the New Patch

So, the biggie patch 2.2.0 came out today. Initially after getting the patch installed, I actually couldn't log into WoW, because it froze up on me. It wound up being a sound issue, presumably because of all the new sound stuff in this patch (such as voice chat). And "Linux and sound", particularly sound in non-native games, is a very finicky thing. Fortunately I was able to go into winecfg and apply a temporary fix, but here's hoping I can go back to ALSA instead of OSS soon because until then I can't play mp3s while playing WoW without jumping through hoops.

Now that the jargon is out of the way... (sorry non-Linux-geeks!) here are some other general thoughts.

- The UI was a bit messed up and it took me some tweaking to get it back to how I liked it... but it wasn't a big deal overall.

- The sound is really quiet for me now... I have to turn my speakers up considerably higher than I used to in order to get it to a normal level. I also had to adjust the sound volume in-game quite a bit. I don't know if this is a Linux/Wine thing or if maybe some other people are having this problem too. A lot of people are indeed having sound issues now if the WoW "technical support" forums are any indication.

- "Sale pending" mails from things I sell on the Auction House... I don't know much about this yet, so I'll pass on judgment for the time being. =P

- Raptors get dash!! Time to pull Wash out of the stable and have some fun (and if you get the reference to his name, cookie for you!)

- A bunch of random stuff from my bank wound up in my bags. o.O Yeah, I have no idea how it happened. It was completely random stuff too, I couldn't see any rhyme or reason for what it chose to put into my inventory. Fortunately that one was easy to fix, I just went to the bank again.

- Everybody can talk in World Defense now... I think. All I know is that nobody has ever talked in that channel before and today a bunch of people were in there talking up a storm and alternating between reactions of "wow we can talk in here now!" and "...okay, leaving this channel would be a good idea now." So I'm assuming it's a patch thing, or maybe the people on my server just figured it out today. =P I don't know how much I like this idea yet, I really like having World Defense on so I can see what's going on but if it turns into a big global spam channel I won't be happy. We'll see how it goes I guess.

- The biggest issue for me I think is the whole "time to upgrade all my addons now that they're out-of-date and giving me error messages" thing. But this isn't a patch problem so much as it's my problem for being an add-on junkie... not as much as some people, but a junkie none the less. I think at some point I'd like to make a blog entry about what add-ons I use and why I use them, and then decide if I can live without some of them. I already had to disable Gatherer because it was acting up the other day and to be honest I don't miss it that much... yet.

Overall, I think I am mostly sad that the new voice chat feature will very likely not work on my computer (refer back to the "Linux and sound being finicky" bit.) Why does this sadden me? Well, because the big joke going on currently on my server is that voice chat will prove that all night elf females are actually played by guys. So I think it would be hilarious to show through voice chat that there is in fact at least one night elf female on Silver Hand actually being played by a real live girl. Heehee. Hopefully I can in fact get voice chat to work so I can be all devious and stuff. =P

Sorry for another long entry! I know I talk too much.