A UI worth considering

I usually just glance over the WoW Insider UI of the week, but this week's caught my eye. At first glance, without reading anything, I thought it was a good, clean, likely DPS UI. I liked it. Little did I know...

Hi! I have been reading the UI of the week column for a while, and since I just redid my UI for Cata, I thought I would try and share it. I started with what was essentially a blank slate, a need for simplicity and clean lines, and a desire for a functional and fairly minimalistic UI. I play a resto/boomkin druid as well as a ret/holy pally, so versatility is also very important. I need to be able to switch specs and have my UI be usable for healing as well as DPSing.

I try to stay as UI free as possible to minimize the impact of client upgrades, with only Auctioneer running as a general practice. I'm adding Recount now, but this one looks functional enough I might be induced to try it on my gaming tower.


In other news, I'm behind on posting. I hit level 84 a while back. Ding! post to follow when I'm back at home. For a second, I missed that the Tanaris quest was a breadcrumb (thought it was just for an archeology intro) and was stuck going to Vash'jr, which still, for whatever reason, doesn't do it for me. Finally got the Tanaris quest, enjoyed returning there and the start of that area, and then lucked into 84 and the mission board's move to Twilight Highlands. Things are enjoyable again. And the new headpiece for the Ulysses siren quest was both a nice upgrade and a good break from the standard quest gear sets.

Pretty high sys reqs in Highlands. I'm consistently getting 20 fps at everything set to Fair except draw distance at Ultra. Still, I'm loving the new tower's power. Anybody got $200 I could sink into a new video card to go with it?!

And, finally, I listened through all of the first podcast from Team Waffle. Not bad. A little overly hardcore for me. Talk about getting to 85 in 36 hours is, obviously, not what this blog (or my gameplay) is about. I was surprised how little time they spent on leveling -- most of it is about 45 minutes in.

It's worth listening to if you're a druid with a commute. I'll probably submit a question or two from your friendly-neighborhood part-timer. Support your local druids, d00dz. You know it takes three times as long to put together as you'd initially expect.

Rawr: Dr00d gear optimization utility

While googling around to find a list of WoW enchants in XML, I stumbled over Rawr, an application that is designed to help optimize your gear. Here's the description from the site.

Rawr is a program for comparing and exploring gear for Bears, Cats, Moonkin, Warlocks, Mages, Retadins, ProtWarriors, and Healadins, in the MMORPG, World of Warcraft. It is currently in public beta testing, and is being developed by by Astrylian, of US-Eonar. Rawr has been designed from the start to be fun to use, and helpful in finding better combinations of gear, and what gear to find.

It's a Windows app, written in C# for .NET, and at least marginally works in OS X using the Mono project (and, therefore, I assume, Linux). I've played around with it a bit, but have yet to be particularly impressed with its "Moonkin model". The upgrades seem to be all about upping damage without any real consideration for anything else. They should call the model "Clothkin," because that's what you end up with for upgrades. Oh well.

Still, it remains in development, is open source, and I suppose I could get in there and write a Panzerkin model... Might be worth your checking it out, so I thought I'd pass it along!

WoW Blog Itemizer

Pre-alpha USE AT YOUR OWN RISK software!!!!

Okay, here's a really ugly, pre-alpha, not ready for primetime application to help those of us who can't stop blogging about World of Warcraft. Right now, it's Mac-only, though any Mac that can play WoW should be able to run the WoW Blog Itemizer without any trouble at all. The benefit is that you can type a bracket "[" and the first few letters of an item and *poof*, up it pops. If you see the item you want, hit "return" and it'll fill in and you can keep typing. Once you're done with your blog, you'll be able to hit "Alt-D" or press the button at the bottom left to put it all in your clipboard, which you can then cut and paste into, say, Blogger's "Create Post" window. Instant WoWHead supplied mouse-over item information.

Things to remember...
* It doesn't save right now. Cut and paste and save into a text editor often if you write a long post.
* It doesn't update the item list, so items Blizzard adds that aren't in there won't show up until you manually update the item list file (btw, you *have* to keep itemlist.xml in the same folder as the application for now)
* It IS case sensitive.
* It *doesn't* get item color right (green, grey, purple, orange, blue).
* No spellcheck. No real amenities at all, actually.

That's enough for now. I'd be interested in hearing if you give it a shot. rufwork (at) gmail dot company. Enjoy.

Download it here.

Take the Nether off the AH, blogging items, and Illdari-Bane

A belated, quick update... First, thanks to terroxian for the comments. I'm glad the Druidic Helmet of Second Sight panned out well. I'm annoyed that wearing it means you've got more pats and mobs to worry about in Shadowmoon Valley, but otherwise it's a nice headpiece for the short questing that's needed to bag it.

I'm still playing, and recently added a Windhawk Belt to my proverbial arsenal. It would seem the best pre-instance drop armor set a balance druid can pick up is the Wyrmhide reputation gear combined with the Windhawk set. There are five pieces to the Wyrmhide, but you gain both set bonuses with just four. This is good, because wearing the Windhawk Hauberk means I've got to drop my Wyrmhide Robe. Luckily, if I replace the Druidic Helmet of Second Sight with a Wyrmhide Helm, I'll keep the Wymhide's awesome Starfire proc.

I also found out that Primal Nether isn't BoP any more, and one can grab some at the AH for about 85g, iirc, on Proudmoore. I've got mixed feelings on that change, as it makes it very easy to built the Windhawk set without running instances. Take, for example, the Illidari-Bane Mageblade I just bagged. It's not a bad weapon against demons, and remains a good improvement over my Seeker's Gavel for those demon mobs, but it's really nothing insanely special. (Contrast this with the Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian that I just "discovered". It's a very old world, level 60 item that still beats the pants off of what I'm carrying, including the Seeker's Gavel, Seer's Cane, and Braxxis' Staff of Slumber, all on their own respective turfs). Sure, it's an Old World epic, but you get the point... To get it, you had to run Naxx like mad, certainly a very time consuming and memorable experience. The reward -- an item that remains useful 10 levels later to a certain degree that has an especially impressive animation and some in-game procs, like a mob that comments that you're carrying it -- matches the work it took to earn it.)


But what makes the Illidari-Bane Mageblade special is the memorable quest chain that went with it. It's also a pretty k3wl looking weapon; the geekiestly impressive I've got. It's a good reward for those patient enough to wade through what's required to get it, which included four instance runs. I'd never run so many instances in so little time as I did for this one decent but not spectacular weapon. Enjoyable, memorable, fun.

Now that Primal Air isn't so difficult to get, it takes some of the memorableness from my pursuit of Windhawk.

Oh well.

One final bit -- the reason this post is so WoW Head item information floater heavy is that I wrote a quick app to make slapping items into posts a heck of a lot easier, promising myself I wouldn't post again until I had a rough version of the app done. I wasted waaaay too much time digging up item descriptions and numbers in past posts, time I could've been running dailies, right?! So here we go.


Right now it doesn't check on color, which explains why an epic item (Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian) was blue, not orange, when I first posted. I'll hopefully be fixing that and adding a few more minor features down the road, like saving your files, posting directly to Google, spellcheck, etc. Still, so far, it's an enjoyable app to have. I'll clean it up a bit more and release a Mac version of what I'm using right now into the wild soon if this post works! My luck requires that I find out that someone has already created a better version of exactly this app soon after I post, however. ;^)