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.


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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.