Monday, August 31, 2009

Instance Servers and You

Now that I'm gearing up my new druid, there have been some things I've taken notice of. Namely, this Too Many Instances nonsense has GOT to get taken care of. I could be in Ulduar gear already, but no, I have to spend 20 minutes humping an instance portal just to get in. Gearing up for Raids has never been harder. At least you can "Usually" get into Trial of the Champion without too much hassle and the gear there is fantastic for the budding tree, however, there's only 5 loot items available and of course, we share them with everyone.

How the TMI issue works:

Every battlegroup shares an instance server. With Wrath, a lot of people returned to WoW. With 3.2, they gave us reasons to farm certain instances for pets that are worth quite a bit of money. Everytime someone farms an instance locks 1 single instance slot. Assuming you have 5 people farming at least 1 instance per server, be it for ZG mounts, Dino pets, Raven mount, whatever, that means 5 locked instances PER realm. There are 18 realms in my battlegroup. 18*5=90 instances being locked out. Assume you have at least 3 major raids going on per day and you add 3*18=54 instances to the lockout. So now we're at 154 locked instances. Double that for the other faction for 308 locked instances. Now you also have to account for the heroic daily and the reg daily, which although they can be the same instance, we'll assume they are separate. We'll go ahead and assume 5 groups running one of those two dailies, times the realms and the factions, brings us to 398 instances being run at the same time. Heroic ToC and Reg ToC also add in because they are more likely to get you in, we'll assume 5 groups doing the heroic for another 180 instances being locked and then assume 5 groups for regular, even though everyone is farming the instance for drops/rep double that to 360. Bringing our grand total to about 758 instances. Throw in a few lowbie groups, runthroughs, solo runs, rep grinds, 10mans, and VoA runs, and you can hit well over 1000 instances being run per day.

1000 locked instances. Blizzard is in the process of upgrading their instance servers to handle the increased usage, but their timeframe is pathetic to say the least. 3 months? I'm supposed to gear up for raids when I'm fighting for instances for 3 months?

So what is a tree to do? How can YOU get the gear you want without the headache of 20 minute waits? The answer is as easy as TBC. Three little letter: P V P. I know, I know. Not everyone likes BGs, BUT, you can always get in them, even if you lose, you still get honor, and you can use that honor to buy PVP gear, which isn't as good as the PVE gear, but it is MosDef better than quest rewards. So, unless you want to farm up the money to get you some nice crafted gear, which is still an option, unless you are saving for epic flying, start hopping in those battlegrounds and make sure you hit up Wintergrasp every 2 hours.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

5 more points and a treekin?

Keeva has a really good write up on Resto talents that most people ignore or otherwise say mean and dirty things about here. On her heels:

The contemplation as to what I will do at 85 has me perplexed. I don't get any new spells, only new talent points. Okay, I suppose, but I already have more points than I REALLY need. Or do I? 5 more levels means 5 more points. That means I could max out CF AND still get ET and NP, or maybe put more points into TS. I could even get IT if I wanted or IBS.

Then another thought dawned on me, with the proper spec setup you could be a boomkin AND a tree. You could swap to boomkin and help on trash without using Dual Spec. Sure, your boomkin may not be epic leet and all, but it just makes things go faster. You lose a DPS and now you aren't going to beat the enrage? /boomkin /pewpew.

You may lose some of your other talents, but with the upcoming changes to the talents overall, you may not notice. Though it does make one wonder as to what they are going to do to our trees. Too much speculation. Makes my leaves get all frizzled.

As a side note, they are nerfing 4pcT8 by 50%. It makes sense. Kinda stupid to have a 4pc so good that you don't stop wearing it. Ever.

Friday, August 28, 2009

Finally 80

W00t! Hoshiko is finally 80. That makes, what? 2 80 druids and another one coming as soon as I can be a Worgen. I really AM turning into Keeva. I think she's contagious.

When I went to respec I realized that I hadn't gotten any gear yet, so I just kept my MS Feral and my OS Resto. I'll just run dungeons as a kitteh and use the drops and badges for resto gear. She'll be as equally geared as Nota whitin the month. Kinda sad when ya think about it.

Some things that make me say, hmmm:

I know I'm strong and all, but serisouly, where do I keep these car partts I keep picking up? 30 Car parts seems like they would be heavy, and I just flew over and grabbed up a plane engine for Hemit that I'm not sure where I put.

How are there still mobs in the game? Hemit has hunted every single animal on Azeroth AND the Outlands. I was revisiting Nagrand just yesterday and thought it was very peaceful, until I realized there wasn't a living thing in the entire zone. I suppose that's why he's in Sholazar now, nothing else left to kill. I bet if we tell him the Lich King is a giant Rhino, he'll kill Arthas for us.

Why do I still have lowbie bags? >.<

Friday, August 21, 2009

2 Things

2 things for now.

1. My g/f farmed me a deviate hatchling yesterday. It took her all day long to get it. I love her so much (^_^)

2. I was not excited about the xpac until I got to SEE it in relative action. I may add Female Goblin Priest and Worgen Druid to my arsenal. I don't like trolls.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

KHAAAAAAAAN!!!!!!!

So. There I was: farming the Deviate Hatchling. I'd been farming him for 3 days now. That's over 40 runs. I was doing it on my Death Knight because my druid needed to level and had places she needed to be.

As I was coming around the back wall for the final stretch... it dropped.

I was so excited that I immediately opened my bags to verify that he was in there and without thinking about it... clicked on him.

My cheer of "whooo" immediately caught in my throat and changed to a loud AHHH!

My heart sank as I opened my pet tab and saw that, Yes, I am that stupid.

Now I have a stupid Death Knight with my little dinosaur while his TRUE owner sulks in Northrend.

I immediately opened a ticket to the GMs and tried to farm up another one, hoping my luck would come back. It did not. Quite the opposite in fact.

Too Many Instances. Additional Instances Cannot Be Launched. Please Try Again Later.

My last hope was the GM.

When the chime sounded and I realized there was a GM wanting to talk to me, I grew excited and let hope build up. Unfortunately, it came crashing down mere moments later when I was informed that, due to the fact that pets are tracked by achievements, they cannot replace a pet that has been learned. I even offered to delete the stupid evil Death knight Thief, but Alas, Andorhol, there was nothing he could do.

So, sulking I returned to my evil Knight of Darkness to resume her duties and farm up another Dino.

TOO MANY INSTANCES. ADDITIONAL INSTANCES CANNOT BE LAUNCHED. PLEASE TRY AGAIN LATER.



Fuck you, too.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

So close yet so far.

I should have been 80, again, already, but my g/fs comp decided to have a nervous breakdown and warrants a new power supply. So we've been down to one computer again for the last few days. This means that I haven't leveled since Saturday. It gets fixed today and hopefully this won't set us too far back.

So with that, I'll begin leveling again today and will be 80 in plenty of time for my Moose Hat. Oh, Moose Hat, how I have missed you. I guess that means anyone who kept their Moose Hat in the bank can now DE or Sell it.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Problems in Loretown

Half of the supposed leaks have me fuming, the other half have me excited. Let's start with my pent-up anger, cause you know, it's what I do.

Goblins. Really? Like the Horde really want their own Gnome race? After years of jokes about them being so small, now the Horde get a pint sized snack all their own? Here's the problem: Goblins are business... erm... things. They can't do business by aligning with one side or the other and if only PART of the Goblins merge then where does that leave the others? It is a stupid idea that lore does not support. Not to mention the fact that the lore that is supposed to work with this is flawed. According to various "leaks", Deathwing hunts the Goblins down and they run for their lives only to come across an Alliance ship which "apparently" has a captured Thrall on board. Yeah, we'll not focus on the fact that the Alliance managed to capture the leader of the Horde for a moment, but instead will focus on the ludicrous idea that the Goblins would even stop to help him by fighting off the Alliance while running for their lives to save a single orc and then siding with the Horde. There's also the fact that Thrall leaves the Horde, which makes one wonder why the Goblins would stay aligned with a faction when the leader they chose to follow leaves said faction. Apparently, Goblins get stupid in the expansion.

Worgen. We all know the Worgen are coming. Choosing a side is logical. Why they chose Alliance is a little... dumb, I guess is the word I am looking for. The Alliance hate foul creatures created by the dark magics of the world. The Horde seem to love them. Unless the Horde creates war on the Worgen and they turn to the Alliance for help, and then King Douchie-Douche, decides NOT to be a Douchie-Douche long enough to align with the forces of darkness that wiped out an entire city of humans just so he can fight with New Horde leader Douchie-McDouche. Good game plan.

Hellscream. Seriously? Thrall loves his people so much he abandons them and leaves Garrosh in charge? An orc so angry he has no understanding of politics and will just treat the Horde as an army, not to mention he slaughters the Tauren Chieftain for being anti-horde and allows his son to lead them, which makes sense, because no son would ever want to kill the man who betrayed his father.

Tauren Paladins. Fuck you. If you can't see the issue here, you are as dumb as the person who thought this was a good idea. Next we should make Night Elf Mages.

Night Elf Mages. Really? I can't hate this idea enough. First we take the Earth Lovers and give them a follower of the Light, which goes against everything the Tauren stand for and now we give the Earth Loving Magic Hating hippies a Magic Class and don't throw that whole, "Nelfs have priests" crap in my face. Priests follow Elune, that don't use "magic". Besides, Nelfs shunned magic and made people who liked or used it go to the Horde.

Things I like.

The whole planet getting fucked up. Hell yeah, let's destroy some shit. Blow up Black Rock Spire! Flood the Barrens! Make Azshara a lvl 10 zone... wait what? Oh well, flood the Blasted Lands. That will make the portal to the Dark portal a little interesting, no?

To be honest the only things I'm excited about is the world changing cataclysmic event. That sounds fun. The other ideas need to be burned alive.

And if Hellscream is in charge, I will never play my Tauren again.

Oh yeah! Picture of the New World!

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Fuck you, Garrosh.

I have to get this off my chest.

How can one be a Resto Druid for the Horde in the future?

Thrall leaves and gives his seat of power to that Douche-bag garrosh? And then the fat faced pile of walking poo kills the Tauren Leader? Fuck that. I'd rather my leader be a stuckup and cockey sob. At least he didn't kill the leader of my people.

WTB New Faction of renegades.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Age Rage

Alright, I tried to play nicely with people and what did it get me? More irritation.

Why is it that whenever someone says something idiotic or immature, people automatically brand them as 12.

soandso says: I like touching your moms penis.
sumoneelse says: What are you, 12?

That's an example.

Here's my problem. Soandso is most likely late 20s early 30s or somewhere there abouts. He's obviously bored and wanted to start a troll war or thought he was being funny blahblahblah. Irrelevant.

Here's what IS relevant. You know those amazing players that are always mature, thoughtful, helpful, and generally amazing players? Yeah those are kids. They aren't online during the day because they were at work all day. They were in school.

When they say things like, school must be out, what they should say is, oh, there must not have been enough traffic cause Douchy McDouchums made it home from work in record time.

The most immature, hotheaded, and rude players that I have played with have all been late 20s through late 30s. They ALWAYS thought they were right regardless of how wrong they were. They cussed excessively, made references to porn, PLAYED porn on vent during raids, got hard-ons when girls talked in vent and then TALKED about their hard-ons over vent, never tipped, showed up late to raids, expected a spot, demanded loot, NEVER read boss strats, and more often than not weren't very good at the game in general. BUT, they were adults.

The most intelligent, kindhearted, fun, and thoughtful people that I have played with were usually under 18. Always early to raids with ALL the reagents and then some for those of us who were running late, always willing to pass on loot in favor of seeing content, always polite and respectful of others, never called people out for being terribad, learned their class better than they learned science, knew the strats and knew their role BEFORE we walked in the door, never spoke on vent because they didn't want to get made fun of by the older raiders, always willing to step down for another player, always ready to tip for everything, oh, and did I mention they were fun to play with?

The point is this:

Everyone gives kids a bad name, but remember that kids are better at games than adults. You know that druid that outhealed you, Mr. I'mTheBestHealerEver? He was 13. That hunter who managed to pull 8k dps on patch? That's his brother. 11. That twisted looking undead mage who keeps destroying you in arena? She's 8. That one person in trade who tries to calm everyone down and get trade normal again? Under 18. All the others that keep fanning the flames? 26, 32, 19, 23, 41.

People automatically start assuming that immature people are kids and the truth of the matter is they aren't. Those are full grown men claiming that girls can't raid. Those are CEOs of multinational corporations that are making those Chuck Norris jokes. That's an Air Traffic Controller who keeps putting Murloc in movie titles.

That guy who blew up in vent the other night because he was late to the raid and his spot wasn't ready for him still, 28 minutes later? He was 37. The guy that stepped out of the raid so he could have a spot? He was probably 15.

I have more respect for some of these kids than I do for these adults. So you know what? Call me a kid. Ask me if I'm 13. You know what I'm gonna say? Nothing. Because I'm not some lame ass adult who starts fights on the internet. I have more important things to do.


Now if you'll excuse me, I have to write about this in my diary...er, I mean my blog.


Totally different.

Its a Lizard Baby.

And she's all mine.

ge8kvjjq2wnpit1e53hf.png
And all I had to do was hit 70 and goto Dalaran and buy her... seeing as how I can't get one to drop cause KEEVA >.< keeps taking them all. Big ol' Meanie Tree.

The UI. Again.

My new UI. All 5mb of it. Shown here in a fail BG with Target on top, ToT in the middle and Player Frame on the bottom. Target Cast bar is above the target frame. Player cast bar is below player and above raid frames.

ytimxr19iwi36gelg3t.png
Unit Frames - StufUF
Raid Frames - StufRaid
Mini Map - iMinimap
Action Bars - Bartender4
Buff Frame - rBuff
Combat Text - Mik'sScrollingBattleText
Chat Frame - Chatter
Data Text - LynStats
Viewport - Sunn & Sunnart

Monday, August 10, 2009

New Forms. New hatred.

My Nelf is white.

White bear. White cat.

I love the cat, I hate the bear.

There is no medium.

Alliance got screwed.

My cow is black.

Black cow. Black cat.

My cow looks like a badass.

I can have different color bear and cat forms.

I give it 5 months before they allow Nelfs to factor in skin tone as well. I really wanted to be a white kitty and a black bear.

Has anyone else noticed that the alliance forms look girlie and the horde forms look manly? I mean, I see a tauren cat and I think "That guy looks cool" or "Hey, he looks just like the old cat."

When I see the Nelf cat I think, "She's pretty."

Imagine my disappointment when that cute little purple kitten shifts into a dorky looking Nelf male. I HATE nelf men. The way they run, the way their hair looks. I always imagine the people playing them look just like them and that's not a good thing.

On a side note, Draenei men walk like they are walking on their tiptoes. It makes them look like they pooed their epic little pants.



SIDE TOPIC:

Just finished the quest in Zang where you turn into one of the bird guys from The Dark Crystal. They have a dance animation, a wave animation, and a kiss animation. The dance = amazing. I love Skettlebutts.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Screencap Quality and You

So you want to save some screenshots, but they look like a bunny ended up in the business end of a wood chipper. In the immortal words of Parker Lewis, Not a problem.

Simply use the following /cmnds and you'll have an aesthetically pleasing configuration of images that humans will go NUTS for.

/console
screenshotFormat tga
/console screenshotQuality 10

If perchance you aren't into the whole, looking hot thing, you can use these:

/console screenshotFormat jpg
/console screenshotQuality 3

Format denotes the type of file your image will be saved as. tga is bigger and prettier but jpg is smaller and more compressed. The quality ranges from 1-10 with 10 bieng Jessica Alba and 1 being Seth Rogen.

Once you have selected your image quality and type, then you are on your way from misery to happiness today. If you selected jpg, you are ready to view rudimentary images in all their unsplended glory, but ready for instant upload to be shared with the whole world via blurry and inconclusive picturesqueness. (Yes, that's a word. No, you can't look it up.)

However, if you selected the oversized, bloated and lumbering sexiness that is tga, then you'll need some sort of convertor/viewer to actually SEE what ever it is you thought you saw. I suggest
irfanview and recommend saving them as PNG. Sure, you have to do a few extra steps, but isn't it preferable to those jaded edges that make it look like you have some form of stage 7 diabetus exploding from your tree bark, scarring away the small woodland creatures that came to visit you during your glorified screen capture session? Yes, I think it is.

For the love of Elune, don't use Photoshop to convert your images. What are you, masochists?



Saturday, August 8, 2009

Overheal HoT Proc Fix

We managed to get in a hotfix today that allows periodic healing ticks that were going to overheal entirely to go ahead and fire. Previously they did not fire. This means that effects that were able to proc from HoT ticks that did some healing can now also proc from HoT ticks that overheal completely. The most notable such effect is that Val'anyr's absorb shield should now work as advertised. All these ticks should now appear in the combat log as well, allowing you to get a fuller sense of your raw healing output from all sources.

Just thought I'd toss that out there.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Life After 3.2

Ok, so the big question is always what works, what doesn't work, where's all the new shit, how do I do this?

...

Well I suppose that's really 4 questions and yes, I had to go back and count those questions. It has been a long day.

So, what works:

Blizzard has copied ItemPriceTooltip which, I'll say it, is pretty poorly coded. However, if you aren't using a mod for that already, there you go. It works but it is incompatible with something or another.

Blizz also copied RatingBuster and EquipCompare. EquipCompare is now moot and you'll want to turn that or the equivalent off, less you get more errors and wasted memory usage. RatingBuster on the other hand is still very nice and I prefer it to the default Blizz one, sadly, now it fluctuates with memory and cpu usage with no particular rhyme or reason. You're pretty much stuck with the default one now.

What doesn't work:

Anything that was based on unit aggro colors and/or healing was pretty much bunked. Luckily Grid was updated for those of us that still use it. oUF on the other hand has issues. Not oUF itself, but a majority of the profiles that were created are now filled with one error or another. Of course this means that my oUF grid replacement is also kaput.

So, I went with StufUF. Turns out that while it is bigger than the other UFs, once you have it configured and set up it takes up less cpu/memory usage than almost ANY UF. It has its own Grid replacement as well and I have yet to encounter any issues.

Where's the New Hotness?

The orphans are in Dalaran and are easy enough to obtain. Flight form is in your trainers teachings and costs less than 3g. Breanni in Dal has your new dino, which you can also collect the rest by killing boss dinos and rare spawn dinos around the world. Mount trainer in Hippy Town has your ugly ass new tiger, while Brill has your new dead horse. Enjoy farming rep a la Wintersaber style to get your very own Ravasaur mount. For you Twinks out there, you'll want to gather up 10g and pay off the guy by the BG Masters so you don't unwittingly become the best geared lowbie in your next battleground. Gear Manager is better than ever as well.

How do I do this?

IoC? You'll want to read up on that, but basically, take the docks and the factory to win. Its a little lopsided atm. Fly? Get a 310% mount and do it like the big boys do it, only with druid "I-can-loot-shit-without-getting-aggro-aaaaand-go-sexy-fast" style. Heal? Stop using LB so much. Throw your hands up in defeat as Blizz does everything in their power to PROVE that Nourish is a great spell. Never mind that they slowly take away or destroy every other spell until we use that and only that. Then they'll nerf it because we don't use our other spells anymore. /sigh. The life of a druid.

Oh and don't forget to pick up your Cold Weather Flying Book so all your alt druids, I'm looking at YOU Keeva... and admittedly, myself, can fly the chilly skies with everyone else, only sooner.


Blahblahblah. More about me!

I LOVE my new kitty. I'll admit, I wasn't very happy with the forms at first, but seeing them in game is something all together different. Anyone else just want to grab their kitteh and huggle it? They look so soft and they make me think of my late kitty. Alliance only of course. Horde kitty is a scary and frightening badass that looks like he'd suddenly BAM! CAT CLAWS TO THE FACE!

I don't really like the bear form very much, not much of an improvement in that aspect, but I'm Notabear so, meh. WTB Apple Tree Form.

I'll snap some screenies of my new UI, which I now love. It only cost me 2 levels with distractions. OCD kicks in at times. Leveling in the Outlands with Bird Form is so Game Genie It isn't even funny. I'll be in Northrend before next weekend. I hope. Maybe then I can focus on what this blog will really be about. Healing. Cause we don't have enough resto druid blogs imo. Hopefully I can fill the niche of angry tree. Here's a pic!

Gogo Purple Kitteh

Also, gogoo Broken Blizz Ui.

Yup, Blizzard erroneously wrote the code for their ItemPriceTooltip Ripoff and now there's this redunckulous error floating around in my buggrabber. Thanks for that. My own IPTT was working just fine.

Also, thanks for ripping off DruidManaBar. You even managed to make it look identical to the original author's. Very pro ninja.

Also with the change to mob difficulty levels, there have been some errors with ouf. Not anything important, just a slight graphical issue that only slightly annoys me. There is also an error with Postal. And TomTom. And Grid.

Not at the front of this content push, but then, I don't really care. The pro side to this patch is I hit 60 on Monday. Now I has cheap mount and lvl 60 birdo form.

Saturday, August 1, 2009

New Druid, New UI. WIP.

I know I know. I said that I'd get to talking about my replacement for Grid, but leveling is a pure pain. WTB 500 Badge Scroll of Instant 60.

Well, truth be told, I have found that leveling has given me the chance to redo my UI almost entirely. I've been looking into a lot of different mods and addons in an effort to reduce the memory/cpu usage and increase my latency and fps. What I have noticed is that a lot of my favorite addons are HUGE. So I thought I'd offer some tips on how to spot a good, great, or bad addon.

Tip Numero Uno: Lua Configs. Using an addon that utilizes the LUA without adding /commands or a waterfall config option generally reduces the amount of memory being used. For example: Pitbull is a very heavy UF mod. The memory usage is through the roof and can hog your cpu resources and reduce your effectiveness with healing or more dramatically with your dps. oUF on the other hand is a very small addon. Pulling a number out of my ass, results in around a 70-80% smaller addon. The trade offs?

1)All customization is done through the lua. There are no /cmds, no waterfall configs, nothing. You have to open the lua and adjust the code yourself. Daunting? Absolutely. Worth it? More than you know.

2)User Friendliness. Dear God. You have no idea what it feels like to be completely stupid. If you know nothing about lua configuring, prepare to feel like you failed Kindergarten Math. It takes a lot of research, trial and error, and scrutiny to learn how to edit and configure other people's codes if you have no experience in it. But the results are truly amazing. Plus you get to get smarterer.

Tip Numero Uno, Pt. II: Usefulness. Yeah yeah. I get it, Sexymap is highly configurable, looks pretty, does what you want it to do, blahblahblah, and uses at or more than 1mb of memory. dMinimap2 is functional, simplistic, movable, has different designs and uses around 8kb of memory. Do the DO the same thing? Yes. Do I really need a spinning circle to grace the edges of my minimap? No, not really. Will using a more minimalistic minimap help me heal better? Unless I'm running the best machine on the market? Yes.

Wait, what? How can using a smaller addon make me a better healer?

Ah, and there begins the lesson, young padawan.

Let's say you have a very nice 32ms or lower-WAIT! How did you get your ms so low?

Oh, I chose my realm based on geography, ping, and timezone. I picked a realm that was within my interests, progression, and timezone, not to mention one with low latency, rather than the one that sounded the nicest.

Anywho, as I was saying, low ms, but you have low fps as well. Low fps means you have a slightly lower reaction time than someone who has high fps. The reasoning is simple, you react to what you see. If what you see is delayed, so is your reaction. This means you have to heal around your own poor fps by planning ahead. You'll still miss a lot of CDs, sometimes you may rehot someone you already hotted, etc. The resolution to this is to start going through your addons and replacing them with smaller, more lightweight addons that don't eat up your cpu.

I, myself, have a single core processor. I know, those were outdated back before Ozzy got his own TV show. My g/f has a dual core. she also has the good gfx card that shits on her and makes her have to restart her pc. Interesting tradeoff to say the least.

Anyway, as a single core user, I NEED every bit of cpu I can get. I was running around 26mb of memory usage healing in Naxx and Ulduar. In Naxx I was the best healer. In Ulduar I got roflstomped by another druid who did everything the same as I did. I now use 3mb and have all the functionality I had when I was using 26mb.

While leveling, I have a few addons turned on that I would otherwise not have. Things like Carbonite (10mb), Lightheaded (26mb), Tourguide (6mb), Tomtom (1mb). I use these, because I'm the one who does the guide. My g/f levels with me using 3mb at the most. Being a gentleman, or at least the one who lost the bet, I carry the weight of the world on my cpu.

I've been messing around with my UI as of late and have a strange attraction to viewports. here is what I level with:

WIP pt1

You'll notice I don't like anything covering my gameplay area. Using Sunn viewport, I've reduced the area on my screen that is rendered. I put my addons on the area that is not rendered and I use SunnViewportArt to make it more than just black bars. I'll probably change the art a million time before next week, but that isn't the point.

Currently, I'm still using bartender. I'm looking into other bar mods and I'm thinking Barkeep will be my replacement for it, but I haven't decided on anything for certain yet. Professions are faded out on the top left where carbonite is sitting, hogging my memory. The Top right is where my buffs are faded out and also where rBuff is located. The top center is housing Tomtom and tourguide. The Unit Frames are oUF Maneut, though I need to move the cast bar a little, it cuts off some of the numbers, but nothing to worrisome, just aesthetics. The bottom left is Chatter, which will likely be replaced by pChat and and redo of my Master Fonts. The bottom center is where Bartender sits. There are a few other bars around those visible that I keep faded for aesthetics. The bottom right is where the map sits and also where my minibar and bags are faded out. I'm currently using tiptac for my tooltips but I may switch to the smaller tiptop addon. That mysterious big black space beside the minimap is where oUF Maneut Raid goes, which is the grid replacement. Still use Clique with that.

Grid is sex, but it is too heavy. I wanted something that could give me the functionality of Grid without the lumbering colossus that is the addon's size.

I'll keep updates on the changes I make and the performance that is derived from said changes. On a sidenote, my g/f hates veiwports and is trying to make me get rid of them. I just hate seeing shit underneath my frames, they distract me. I may use kgpanels in the future, but we'll see what I come up with. More to come and a bonus screenie:

A Tail of Two Druids.