So I turned towards the PvP side of the game, arena to be more specific. I teamed up with Xeyna and we’re playing 2s as resto shaman/hunter at 1400 – 1500 rating. For a couple of weeks I had a great time exploring a part of the game I haven’t seen before. Anyway, I allready made an introduction post about it so I’m not going to explain again that I’m I was a total noob at it. It comes down to this: we’re stuck at 1500. As soon as we get close to it, Blizzard send us to Dalaran sewers, throws in some rogue/priests teams and pew pew pew, we’re back at 1350. They swipe the floor with our faces. It got me frustrated and I think Xeyna isn’t happy about it aswell.

So what’s the solution? Xeyna levels priest, I level rogue. Reach level 80, farm badges/honor like your life depends on it and own 2v2. Simple isn’t it? Yeah ofcourse, only problem is that I’m kinda sick of leveling. So that’s what I’ve been upto lately. Another secret project, trying to see what I can achieve with a new class. Not sure if it will works out. I always promised to never ever play a rogue…I fail. But I’ll promise I won’t do PvE with it…really, I will not raid with a rogue. Unless ofcourse I need some weapons for pvp. But beside that, no pve. Or maybe for emblems, but that’s really it!

Besides WoW I’m planning to move to my fresh build house together with my favorite boss. A lot of work has been done allready but we still need to finish a lot of stuff. So WoW time is limited and I’m not sure what the effect will be in the future.

That’s it for me so far, I don’t have the time to write some more. Don’t blame me…

Ah yes, finally I started to write this post. I had this one in mind since the start of my blog but now I finally feel I’m ready for it. One of the things I enjoy myself the most with is creating a user friendly UI that makes my life a bit easier. I can spend a whole day reading on curse.com or wowinterface.com to check what other people are using, what addons could be useful, how are addons configured and is it possible to add your own taste to it. Well yes it is!

We all know that addons will never play the game for you. I agree, but they can make it a whole lot easier sometimes. To me, there are 2 distinct categories if you look at all addons available: Addons everyone should have and addons that change the appearance of UI or the amount of info you get to see.  I will browse through my addons folder and let you know what I use and why I use them.

Before I start on a new UI project I always have the same goal in mind: It needs to be functional, as minimalistic as possible but still with the right information on time and only when I’m required to see that info. My computer is fairly new so memory isn’t an issue but for my gameplay I always aim to keep everything as low as possible. Also, in this UI, I try to combine both PvE and PvP functionality.

Omen: Classic addon, I don’t think anyone playing WoW seriously can leave this one out. I think this is the first addon I installed when my mage was doing deadmines. For people who don’t know it yet, Omen gives you a visual overview of the aggro table. As long as the tank is on top of the table, you’re safe. If your screen starts flashing red, you know you are taking aggro and should do something about it. There are little things you can do to match it with your UI. I changed the color of the bars to some dark grey so it fits my UI and the text is in the class colors. Plain and simple, I don’t need any extra info on it.

Besides Omen, I don’t think you need any other addon if your pleased with the default blizzard UI. In fact, you have it all: Actionbars, Unitframes, buffs and debuffs, minimap,…nothing else is required to play the game. But for me, that’s not enough. I’m not pleased with the standard look. I feel you miss the potential of improving your game. So here are the addons that make my game a bit more fun and easier to play.

Bartender: Step one in my UI. I need 1 to 2 bars max to put all of my skills on. Everything else will be on hidden bars that only come up when I mouse over them. Also, a lot of my keybinds that I use for a long time are on those hidden bars. When I play on my shaman, I just need some extra space to put some rarely used totems. Mounts, drinks, trinkets, some spam macro’s are all hidden. Also, bartender allows me to put my totem bar wherever I want them.

Buttonfacade: In combination with bartender, I use buttonfacade. The addon speaks for itself. it puts a skin over the buttons. In my UI, I use the Dek2 skin. I also use buttonfacade to customize the look for my buffs. No functionality, just some graphic modification.

OmniCC: This tiny little thing adds a cooldown timer on top of the skillicon on your actionbar. So instead of the classic “shadowclock” you get an actual indication in seconds or minutes. Based on the remaining cooldown, you can give other colour codes to it.

Chinchilla: a minimap addon. The standard blizzard minimap can not be changed or moved anywhere and the size is messing up the rest of my UI. That’s why I use this one. I’ve use simpleminimap and sexymap before, but so far this is the only addon that suits my needs. Also, it let’s you move not only the map, but other frames that you don’t always see. For example the capture bar when you are trying to take a base in Eye of the Storm or the boss frames when you are doing the gunship battle in Icecrown. I just want to be able to move them to the outside of my screen where they don’t bother me.

So the above addons gave me an initial startpoint to position my UI. I will first move these into place, add some graphics to it and make sure I have enough space to put all of my remaining addons.

Align: simple addon that draws a grid over your screen so you are able to align everything. Just type /align and you will see the result. Retype /align and it’s gone.

Kgpanels: This is an addon I wanted to use long before I actually implemented into my UI because I didn’t really understand how it worked. After checking some youtube guides on how to make your own panels and configure them, I started to create some stuff in Photoshop. You sometimes see very large graphic skins at the bottom of screenshots that cover the whole width of the UI. I didn’t want that because I feel you decrease your view area. I just wanted to add some center graphic and add some background to my actionbars, omen, recount and chatpane. This is the result:

So in the center you see somekind of…(what is that actually?)…graphic. On top of the graphic, I’ve put the minimap and added a black border to it so it feels like it integrates with the graphic. On both left and right of the minimap I addes 2 of the same background panels that work as a placeholder for my actionbar. In the same style, I added a background for my totembar.

I’m not going to explain the whole process of how to configure kgpanels and make these kind of graphics in photoshop. The only thing I do want to tell is that it’s all based on .tga files, you just import them, play with the size and position and voila…you got panels. On the buttom left side of my screen I’ve did the same for omen, recount and chatter.

That brings us to the next 2 addons: Chatter and Recount.

Chatter: this is the chat addon I use. I used Prat before and I don’t really notice the difference between them. i just wanted to keep the chat as small as possible, minimal info, no timestamp or so… Also, when people post links in chat, you can easily copy them to your clipboard. My edit box is on top of the chat panel and most of the time, I’m only watching my whisper and guildchat window.

Recount: This is a damagemeter. Very useful if you want to track the performance of people. Or even more important, you want to track how people died. If you are still learning a class, you can actually learn a lot from this addon, just head for a dummy, do your rotation and check your damage breakdown after each session. It will show you miss, hit, crits, wich spells do the most damage, etc…As a raidleader, it’s the first spot I look for when we wipe. I can track if all dps did damaged the spikes on Marrowgar. In a 3 hour raid, this can take a lot of memory.

SLDT: Speaking about memory, I want to be able to track down my most memory consuming addons. When I see that one of the addons is having a large effect on my performance, I might go and disable it. But SLDT does a lot more than that. It shows your gold, mail, armorstatus, fps, latency, memory usage, what you are tracking, coordinates, clock, zone text, bagspace, guildinfo and friends online. Every part of it can disabled or moved to another place. Again, I’ve placed the same type of background panel behind to match the rest:

The clock, coordinates, tracking and mail text are integrated in my minimap graphic (see above). Are you still with me? Good, we’re halfway…

Grid: Another addon I couldn’t see myself playing without it. As a healer, it is my most crucial tool. Addons that do the same are healbot, Vuhdoo, simpleraid, etc… Grid represents the raid unit frames. I’ve configured grid to my own taste and added the raiddebuffs plugin and a manabar. The debuffs are very helpfull when you want to keep an eye on people while raidleading. Just by looking at it, you can tell if they are doing something wrong or when the tank can expect a lot of incomming damage. When I see my fellow healers low on mana, it’s time to drop my mana tide totem. As a shaman, I added a custom buff to keep track of my earthshield. When I play priest, I want to track weakened soul, renew, and PW: Shield.

Clique: In combination with Grid, I use clique to make sure my heals reach the right person at the right time. Clique allows you to keybind specific mouseclicks to helpfull spells like heals or cleansing spells. If you use the appropriate keybind while mouseovering the correct person, he will recieve a heal for example. To me that’s a lot more useful than first selecting a person and than throwing in the heal. These 2 addons have made me a better healer.

Pitbull: Pitbull is a replacement for the standard player and target frame. Like I said before, I hate the standard blizzard frames and they take way to much space. I want to be able to only see what I need to see and at the same time I want to integrate my frames into the rest of my UI to keep it nice and simple.

As you can see, the player frame is just a representation of my health and power. There is no text on it because I don’t want to know my hitpoints in actual numbers. If I hit 0, I will die, I can track that by looking at a bar, no need for text. But when you look at my target frame, I did added the HP and mana text. Also, in the version I have now, the power bar is also in the class colour. I found it a bit nicer that way and easier to track the class I’m facing. On the right of my target is targetoftarget with just a procential representation of their health. When I focus someone, it will appear on the left of my player frame with the same setup.

Quartz: I almost forgot this one but it’s pretty important. Quartz provide castbars for the player, target and focus. You could also add buff or debuffs you have put on your target but I disabled that option. I added a latency bar to the cast bar to time my next cast better. Also, at the right of my bar, I added the cast time. In arena, the focus castbar is right underneath my character in the center. If my focus starts a cast, I want to know it fast so I can interrupt.

Zmob Advance 6: Although Pitbull has an option aswell to show a 3D portrait, I’m not fond of using it. You don’t have the save liberty to move it arround and resize it just like you want it. Therefor I use Zmob. it takes a while to get used to all the different setup options but there are some nice tooltips that can help you with that. Although this addon is more for the looks and graphics, I still find it usefull to track my target and to get an indication of their race. Especially in large aoe packs, I want to make sure I have selected the right target.

Targetcharms: Right next to the target portrait, you see all raidicons. I use that one to mark people while I raidlead. It only shows up when I selected something. There is no need to show it when I’m just doing solostuff without targets. You can change the way it’s positioned in the config. Best raid icon addon I found so far.

Satrina’s Buff Frames: On the right top of my screen, I positioned my buffs. The debuffs are close to my player frame. SBF let’s you create different frames that you can move all over your screen. Each frame can be configered seperatly. My buffs are shown as icons without timers, my debuffs are shown as bars with timers. I also have frames configured to track the buffs from my arena opponents. Lot’s and lot’s of options to play with but out of the box, it’s allready a great addon to use. Also, I used the same buttonfacade skin for the icons as I did on my actionbar.

Did I told you we were allready halfway?

Tiptac: I can’t remember the previous tooltip addons I used before but this seemed to be the only one I actually enjoyed. Their are no limitations in how you can configure your tooltips. I got rid of the blizzard border, changed the background and only added the info I wanted to see when I mouseover npc’s or players. This tooltip addon let’s you position the tooltip anchor wherever you want on your screen.

Aloft: This addon is mostly used during my arena fights although I find it easy to use in raids aswell. When I’m doing arena, I want to have a constant indication of where my opponent is, his class, and his HP. When they cast, another bar shows up underneath their HP bar. So I can actually see if a person is casting while watching at the player itself and I don’t need to bring my eyes down to the targetframe.

In raids, when I get aggro form a target, their nametag starts to glow aswell. Raidicons are also displayed with Aloft. On a fight like Dreamwalker with a lot of incomming mobs from different sides, this is a musthave if you want to keep a good eye on your surroundings. To few people use nametags. The Blizzard ones might be to large for you, well give this one a try or check Tidy Plates.

So far, all of these addons are positioned on the outside of my screen. Now, we’ve come to the center part of my UI. I don’t have a screenshot where all of my center addons are displayed at the same time because that would be impossible. I just want you to know that the most important info should be close to your character, especially in arena and battlegrounds. It’s no use of having a stun indication on the top left corner of your screen because your eyes will be slow to notice it.

Icehud: I concider this an addon that is unmissable for all of my characters. Not everyone wiches to have a Hud arround their character but it really helps me in getting a quick view on my personal condition and on my target. If I would disable Icehud and only rely on my pitbull frames, I would die a lot faster. It’s hard to explain so perhaps you should give a shot. I uninstalled this addon 3 times before I actually knew how to use it and adjust it to my own taste. But now, I couldn’t miss it anymore.

My Icehud is kept very basic, just a vertical indication of my health, mana, target health, target power, castbar and active totems. At the top, their is a small range indicator. You can choose a couple of textures that come with the addon but I created my own. I wanted to keep it tidy and clean, so I decreased the width of the bars so they don’t take a lot of space.

If you dig deeper into Icehud, you’ll see there are a lot of more text options you can enable and even make custom cooldown bars. I think I have enough info allready so I don’t use this function.

Mik’s Scrolling Combat text: Arround my Icehud, I configured MSBT. It allows you to make different “scrolling zones” and add the wanted info to each zone. In my setup, left of my healthbar you’ll see all incomming stuff, either damage or healing. On the right side, close to my mana bar, you’ll see the outgoing healing and the stuff I purged. Underneath my character, their is a text indication of wich spells are off cooldown and ready to use again. For example, riptide is pretty important for me and in arena I wanted to refresh my grounding as soon as possible. On top of my Icehud, I represent all outgoing damage, combat entered or left and honor points.

Each different zone can be configured differently, you could change the font, change the way the text is animated and it what direction it goes. MSBT allows you to make triggers aswell that can be shown in each zone with sound warnings if desired.

PowerAuras: Ah yes, powerauras! You can’t have enough, can’t you? Well to be honest, I used to have a lot more before. I found some other addons that took away the need to configure an aura for it. Also, after a while you kinda get familiar with your UI and abilities. Before you know it, you have all kind of icons on your screen that aren’t really needed anymore. I have 4 aura’s for PvE and 2 extra for PvP. Water Shield, Earthliving weapon enchant, Riptide and my Oh-shit-big-heal-needed-button. For arena, I added a Hex and Wind Shear aura with their cooldown timers. I made them nice and small, no need for them to block the whole center part of my screen.

Spellalerter: This is a recent addon I’ve added to my UI, mainly for pvp usages. It shows what enemies are casting arround me, to me or to my arena partner. It shows up in text just above my character and with some colour you can indicate the type of spell. I’ve also added a sound warning to 2 major CC spells: Polymorph and Cyclone. God I hate those 2. Ah yes, and mana burn ofcourse, how can I forget that. As soon as the enemy start casting this, I hear a typical sound warning for each of those spells. If I keep hearing that mana burn sound, I know I’m doing something wrong.

Loosecontrol: In addition to spellalerter, you can get cc from instant spellcasts, like silences and stuns. This addon provides an icon that I placed on top of my head to see what has hit me and how long the cooldown will be. I combine this with powerauras aswell to have an extra visual confirmation. Sometimes you can get stunned and silenced at the same time but loosecontrol will only show you to most recent CC. You can not only see icons for yourself, also party members, target and focus.

Arena Unit Frames: This addon has everything you need in arena: sound warnings, text warnings that you can send to party or raid chat, trinket indication, enemy unit frames, click actions, etc. I only use this addon to configure some warnings about CC. For example: “Cyclone on partner” or “Priest trinket used” or “Warrior low” or “Druid drinking”. It’s not a visual thing you need to look for but it’s an actual voice that tells you what happened. If you need to react fast in some situations, these kind of warnings are a lifesaver.

Gladius: For actual arena frames, I use Gladius. There a lot nicer to configure than AUF. I especially like the CC views on the bars, or an indication for pain suppresion, shield wall or paladin bubble. This is my main source to target and focus enemies while in arena. By adding click actions to the frames, I can use mouseover hex or wind shear actions.

Natur enemy castbar: This is my most recent addon. It shows you a whole series of bars with cooldowns, spells being cast, buffs and debuffs for your target. Really great if you want to track when a druids innervate is about to get off cooldown. But the coolest function this addon has is the sound warnings when you get a killing blow. Everytime you get another killing blow, you get different warnings. I love it when hear “Killing Spree”.

Xloot: This is my loot addon. I also have installed Xloot Group and Xloot Monitor. It changes the standard loot windows and makes them a lot smaller. When I’m master looter, I can use the xloot menu to announce loot rolls, give them to a random person and announce who got the drop. I didn’t found a way yet to skin this one. It would be nice if I could change the appearance a bit. But so far, there is no other addon that can replace Xloot.

Ora: Ora is a raidmanagement addon. In our guild we use it mainly to perform ready checks, automatic invites, give a visual overview of the main tanks and target assists. Raidleaders can also check the durability status of their raid members and see if people brought enough reagents to buff.

Deadly Boss Mods: No explanation needed I think. I allready post a custom version of it in one of my previous UI posts. I’m still using it although I’ve resized the bars a bit and put them on the left side of my screen.

Loadit: this addon allows you to disable, enable or load addons while not logging out. Although some addons require you to log off first, most of them can be switched on in the loadit gui and you just need to /rl ui.

Nicedamage: A font I use to display my damage done. Besides that, I use “Skurri” as my main font.

Pfew, I think I covered them all. Do I have to many addons? I wouldn’t want to miss one. I’ll add 2 more screenshots where you can see most of the addons at work. The first one is in wintergrasp, the second one we just killed festergut. If you want to see my UI at work in motion, I suggest you check our Putricide video. So far, I don’t really have a lot of PvP footage to show you. Perhaps that’s some project that I’ll pick up later on.

I hope you enjoyed reading this post. If you have any questions about these addons, I could always try to provide some assistance as far as my knowledge goes. Remember, an UI will not play the game for you and the addon choices you make are highly dependant on personal taste, but a good UI will definitely help you to understand the game faster and perform better.

I have to admit, there aren’t many reasons why I shouldn’t keep this blog updated but after last night I didn’t had any excuses anymore. Oldtimers killed Putricide! Ow yes, and I’m proud of it. For months he has been toying with us and we always seem to be able to kill his 2 midgets, taking down the professor himself wasn’t on our achievement list yet.

I don’t think I can count the numerous wipes on this fight. But I’m pretty sure that the times we reached the final phase are below 5. There is a 10% raidwide buff to all damage and healing and it sure helps a lot. On fights we master, we might decrease the fight time with 30 secs – 1 min. Outsiders might not be very impressed by our kill several months behind other guilds but 80% of all puggers on Sylvanas don’t have this achievement. And that is what makes me feel proud about our work. Sure you can farm the first 4-6 bosses in both 10 and 25 these days but it get’s old news in my newspaper.

It pleases me that a guild like Oldtimers offers their members a chance to go beyond the line of pugging. I’ll be honest, the last month, there wasn’t much that seperate us from any random pug. The ventrilo chat have always been an asset to our runs but pure progress wise…we were slacking, big time.

But not last night. It took us one attempt to reach phase 3. And I was suprised it went that well. We wiped because of a poor transition with a brown ooze still up, myself miles away from our main tank because the ooze was on me, and the trigger happy space chicken Felios took Putricide first hit… I switched on my fraps, because I wanted this on tape. A first kill was getting close. Estme was our slime cleaning tank and she did a great job. The green oozes went down so fast that we barely had any explosions. Just to be sure, I always stayed away from the explosion to throw in my chain heal straight away. Came to think about it, we 2 healed it. Me and Jalyla, a resto druid alt owned by Jacopo…adds some extra flavour to it, doesn’t it?

We had a perfect transition to phase 3. All oozes were gone, the boss at 36% and just one more slime pool for Estme to pick up. Yells on vent: “Stop DPS on boss! Stop DPS!”. Bam, the gas came in, no more slime on the ground. I heared everyone taking an extra breath although no one was speaking on vent… I explained the taunt mechanic on our previous wipe so I hoped both tanks knew what to do. After all it was the first time we ever got this far. Pilum started and took some heavy punches, I ran away from the first pool and threw in Hero. I was still unsure if we would made it. Estme taunted perfectly and after that, all was executed flawlessly. I almost died by standing to long in a pool and I wanted to throw in a big heal on myself. I almost lost Xeyna because of it…But he went down. Everyone got the achievement, cheers on vent and in guild chat…I’ll say it again, man I’m proud.

So what’s the next step? Well I think Blood Prince Council and Sindragosa are within our capabilities. We reached part 3 of Sindragosa before the 10% buff and we didn’t really know how to handle the ice tombs. Blood Prince should in theory be a lot easier. But I find it a lot harder to get a general overview on the raid’s condition in that room. Especially as healer you are unable to see everyone in range…adds some extra stress to the fight…I don’t know. I’m not going to worry about that now. I’ll let you all enjoy our kill video and I hope I can provide another one soon.

Fugaru goes Arena, another epic adventure in my World of Warcraft book. It’s like going on a holiday, away from all the boss slaying. “Oh boy, what is he trying to do now”, I hear you think… Well boys, I have no idea! Last season, I started to collect some pvp gear wich was mostly aimed for an elemental pvp specc. I saw some pvp movies from an elemental shaman running arround in Eye of the Storm and he was constantly using thunderstorm to shoot people of the cliff when they got close to the flag. I was like “Muhahah, I want to do that aswell”. So I started to run a lot of battlegrounds and I actually enjoyed the fact to kite people arround as an elemental shaman and actually being able to kill something.

I remember the days where my mage needed to run Altarac Valley for days in order to get my lvl 70 epic pvp set. Back than, those where the only epics I had access to. No raiding, no heroics, I was still a noob and didn’t even know there was a whole new world besides AV. Every time we killed Drek, it felt like a personal achievement. All I ever did was running with the large mass and shooting some frostbolts now and than hoping to not get cut off from the rest of the troops. Because if I had to run back by myself, there was no way I ever crossed the center of the map alone.

But a lot has happened since than and I can now say that I’m a better player with my shaman than I was with my mage. Zydraliam, a resto druid that use to be an Oldtimer brought up the idea to team up for a 2v2. We always kept discussing it how nice it would be to actually win some matches but we never really got started. Untill the day where he invited me to his arena team “Good old boys”. Sigh…I was hoping for a more “evil” name but he spend the money to buy the team so I didn’t made any comment. But don’t ask me about our banner/tabard, I feel shamed…

Our pvp activities from last season aren’t really worth mentioning. We got frustrated after 2 weeks and we couldn’t really figure out how to cc different classes. When we actually won a match, it was probably because our opponents went afk or they didn’t even had clothes on. Tzuké joined me for a couple of matches and that was a lot more fun. We actually won based on tactics and skill, not on pure luck.

So now that Zydraliam left for another server, I got the command over a 2v2 team and I noticed that Xeyna started to do a lot of battlegrounds during the day. I asked him if he was aiming for a pvp carreer and he said he was hoping for some arena fun like his friends do on horde side. I offered him my help as a resto shaman. It took me a while to get my gear back on par with the rest. I still had some Furious items in the bank…mostly from the elemental set but good enough to start. To bad I couldn’t resist to waist a lot of triumph badges on raw gems, I could have used them now to buy a full pvp set. Well I was still good for over 1000 resilience after some gems and enchants and I figured that must be enough to stay alive long enough.

Xeyna is a really good pve hunter, really smart and he thinks about the things I forget about when I lead the raid. He knows his class and with it, every single talent his class has to offer. But he never got the expierience as an arena player. Neither did I and it was still unsure if our hunter/shaman combination would be a succes.

Last night it was our first serious pvp night and this was the result:

I was pleased. We could have won about 5 matches more but we made some newbies mistakes. We never really encountered a team that gave us real hard problems except for a shadow priest/aflfiction warlock combo. All of a sudden I got nuked down within 2 seconds…

But we were able to survive 2 rogues wich I was happy about. You never know what’s comming when you don’t see any frames apear in Gladius. Those were funny fights. We couldn’t really understand why a hunter/hunter combo would work in 2v2 and I guess after they encountered us, they probably started to wonder what’s wrong about their setup. The retri/retri combo also gave us some problems, 2 bubbles is just…mmm lame?

The longest fights are against combo’s with a resto druid in it. Whatever I try to do, their heals just keep comming. Purge is nice but it doesn’t seem to have any effect, and Hex is only usefull when they try to cyclone one of us. I need to do a bit more research to encounter druids. I just don’t like them as my opponent in pvp.

So we’ll see how far this pvp adventure will take us. Perhaps we’re actually able to become a good pvp squad…

But a lot of work has allready been done and so far I’m happy with the result. I ported everything to the new domain and decide to make a Joomla portal to host our guild website. It was easier to just copy paste our old website and add a menu structure than getting the website files from the old ftp site. It has been a PITA to get our forum database back. Match2Web.dk (our old hosting) seems not able to put it back in place. I wouldn’t suggest the hosting. The support is fairly fast in their response and follow up but they don’t seem to realize I can’t speak Danish.

So the latest forum build of phpbb3 sits and waits patiently for our old data to be restored. Untill than, I won’t be able to show my work to the outside world but you can allready catch a glimp from the template at the top of this post.

I was starting to work on a new EQdkp site aswell and put it all in the same database but I’m getting some errors when adding new raids. I’ll leave that for now, our old one is still doing his job. I rather see the forum online as soon as possible.

In the meanwhile, what happened in game? Well we had our first week in Icecrown Citadel with only 1 ID. I must say that I’m fairly pleased with the outcome so far. We were able to bring up Dreamwalker on Sunday and that was thanks to 2 raidnights of practice. To bad we didn’t had an extra tank or healer available so we left Rotface to rot and headed for Sindragosa. Another fun fight that requires coordination from all 10 players. Yesterday we got her untill 35% but we not every member got the idea of the fight. It’s also hard to learn it with 1 tank.

The Blood Prince Council could be another option to do with 1 tank only but no member has had time enough to practice tanking the shadow boss. We used a warlock before, this week a hunter and an elemental shaman. They weren’t really holding aggro so my healing was drawing more attention than their dps. We’ll probably do the same thing next week after the reset. Trying to clear at least 6-7 bosses and than we need some more practice on Putricide, Blood Prince and Sindragosa.

We have had some hosting issues lately and so the matter came up that we probably should look for another hosting company. It’s an excellent occasion to also update the forum version and create a fresh look and feel aswell. I hope we can get it up next week, if we can ofcourse recover our forum database…

I was planning to do a post about my UI changes but it’s still work in progress. I’m not totally sure that the current version will be the one I will use for a couple of months. This is on my to do list:

• Change Prat to Chatter, just to test it out and see if I can minimize this more into my UI
• Reconfigure Aloft. I seem to have deleted my profile somehow and I got way to much clutter on my nametags
• Upgrate to Pitbull 4. I will probably stick to the same layout, maybe some small tweaks
• Change ZmobDB Advance from Full view to Portrait. I want to integrate this more with Pitbull.
• Make some kgpanels for my player and target frame.
• Only use 1 Actionbar at the bottum of my screen. This will be a big challenge, I don’t like to see a lot of actionbars, but I still need the click some icons during the fights.
• Omen when in combat, Recount when out of combat. I have these two on top of eachother but I want to put them in the same corner
• Minimize my target icons
• Restyle/place my poweraura’s for trinkets, etc…

My warlock is getting closer to 80 (72.5 atm) and I’m starting to work on his UI aswell. As a dps, you have all kind of nice procs that require you to use a special ability. I want to combine power aura’s and make custom sounds for it. I allready made my first wave file for the Molten Core proc…funky robot sound.

In Icecrown, we’re working on Dreamwalker, a challenging fight and a nice change of scenery after grinding the smae bosses for weeks. Should be doable, especially with the extra raidwide buff Blizzard gave us.

That’s it for now, sorry I can’t post more at the moment.

Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

The above nursery rhyme sometimes serves as a metaphor for life’s difficult choices and I want to use it to refer to the choices you need to take as a guild officer. Lately, It has been rough in game. Not like we progressed our way on to the Lich King all of a sudden, no, in fact we’re still stuck on that Rotface dude (Altough we killed him several times before after hours of wiping). What I ment by rough is that managing the guild has become hard to achieve. I ran arround for a couple of days deciding if my time as an officer had come and if I should say goodbye. The main reason for that is that I feel like I’m not bringing the same solutions any more wich pleases most of our members. At the moment, we need to choose a path wich can have a large effect on our social ingame environment.

I was getting sick of logging into the game and awnsering people’s questions about what’s on the planner, who will raid, who will not raid, when will they raid, when will they continue, etc. On my left side I see a guild that is getting bored of the first 4 bosses in Icecrown and they want to see more. The left side doesn’t care anymore about the badges and the loot, they just want to achieve something and push themselves further to get a new boss down. On my right side I see a guild that still wants to farm those 4 bosses because it brings in their weekly badges, if they are lucky they can loot some new items. The right side isn’t ready for stepping up and evaluating their personal performance. They want to be carried.

I feel like I’m right in between those 2 sides. I’ve saw those bosses aswell, I still enjoy doing them but the element of suprise is gone. It’s farming to me but not to others, they still need this expierience. I see people who aren’t ready to progress but still insist they diserve to be a part of that progress group. It’s like Fugaru is walking with the progress side and as a person I’m sticking close to the people that still need the help. I feel it’s my task as an officer to be there for them. And I know I shouldn’t bother but if I leave them behind, I feel like I’m ignoring our guilds values.

“Not taking decisions is a bad decision” – from the great warrior Sigge

Right,…how do we handle this? I believe most of our guildmembers understand that something needs to be done and most of them understand the dilemma. I’m not going to talk about the details on how we’re handling stuff in the future but I did made up my mind: We’ll take a decision, we’ll communicate it and we’ll listen to people’s comments. Our decision will be permanent and we realize that it’s not the best decision for every single individual. We’re aiming for the best decision that helps the guild.

I came across a very well written article of Ciderhelm, one of the founders of tankspot.com. The article is more an open letter to Blizzard and how he feels that WoW is in need of reinventing itself. He points towards some differences between the hardcore guilds and the more casual player. One comment he made is especially true for our situation:

For me, my biggest frustration and source of burnout in the 99% has been when I have been doing a complex job in an encounter without mistake for hours and days and having to deal with the few who seem to always find new and interesting ways to die.

The issue present for serious gamers in the 99% is that they rarely are given challenges or means of discovering new and interesting ways to play their class or play the game. They only need to be as good as the worst players in their raid, and have little motivation to be better except for personal pride

When I look at our memberbase I see a lot of people that are decent players. With a helping hand, they can do the job. But most of the time they get used to it and forget to stand on their own feet. If you let people figure things out themselves or assign them to a really critical role in the encounter, they might suprise you. And I strongly believe we should do this more often. It will not work for everyone, but it will for the majority of our players.

Our new strategy will be like this: we want to progress and every member can be a part of it as long as they are willing to increase their performance. We’re not pushing people anymore, we’re going to pull people. Right now, we’re pushing people into new content but there is no one in front to open the next door to progress. If the push group can go stand in front of the guild and starts pulling people across the doorstep, I believe we’ll advance as a guild and as an individual.

Let’s see how it turns out, not sure how big the impact will be but I’m sure there will be one. It would be sad if it didn’t had an effect at all, than I really need to reconcider my position as an officer and as a guild member.

So, we had 2 days in Icecrown before the weekend and on thursday we had some very close attempts on Putricide. We really worked ourself into the fight and after a while we even switched to resto shaman/druid healing combo to have an extra dps and it was still managable to keep everyone up. We hitted the enrage at 30% and decided that we did our best for that night.

A lot of people were still unsaved and waiting for a fresh run in Icecrown, hoping to get some more badges and loot. Enough people are willing to help but most of the time we lack healers and/or tanks to get the train going. I silently offered to go as tank with Masiv, my old dwarf friend. He was always the first to lead in Naxxramas and Ulduar but Icecrown was unexplored teritory for him. Apart from that, it has been several months since I switched to Fugaru for full time healing. An occasional run in ToGC was the last we saw from Masiv.

I was a bit shocked of his gearlevel. The notorious addon called “GearScore” gave my pala tank a 4.9k. Ouch, that’s so painfull. There is not a chance I would ever get into a pug if I needed to whisper that to the raidleader. I had lot’s of triumph emblems for him but I used almost 50 frost emblems to buy Primordial Saronite to upgrade Fugaru’s boots. And there weren’t a lot of options to upgrade from Triumph. I was glad I had the T9 2 set bonus and bought the hands aswell, it should gave me an extra socket.

My cloak was still something I picked up in Naxxramas 25 and it seems like the only upgrade is in Trial of the Crusader or saving for Frost emblems. Ah well, let’s just see how it goes. After all, I got 3 good healers to rely on. My co-tank was Estme, a protection warrior. She had more expierience in there and was also far better geared since she plays that one as her main. I decided to let her do the hard work and I would go “OT” for most of the pulls.

Trash seem to take a bit longer than usual, perhaps it was because Lovelace was sniffling arround the room for traps. Apart from that, no problems with keeping aggro, altough I needed my righteous defense once in a while to grab a mob from Twinfire. And we all know that hunters are masters at overaggroing.

We faced Lord Marrowgar and for the first time since a couple of weeks, I started to sweat again before a fight. Excitement, but also a bit of fear. Fear because I know he hits like a truck if you need to take him by yourself for a couple of seconds. I decided to jump on Estme’s back and never leave her alone untill all bones went down. And everything went well, I never really heared my “oh shit” sound and I only used my Divine Protection on our last taunt after the whirlwind. Boss down, mmm, good job healers. After the cheer, I took a look at the loot: mail healing bracers…doh! Fugaru would have killed for those, never saw them drop before…Ah well, the holy  pala’s didn’t want them so I decided to pick them up for offspecc. Should give Holy a try again soon…

On to Lady Deathwhisper, a fight that required a lot of coordination and awareness in the beginning. I was curious on how hard it would be for a tank since a healer doesn’t need to push that hard before the final phase. But all seemed to go well, about 5 trash waves and the mana shield went down. Estme and me were excellent on the tank switch, 4 stacks, bang switch, boss went down…I left a small tear, Masiv was still standing. Good job little boy.

I was rewarded with my first ilvl 251, a tanking chest. Estme allready had it and I saw that it had 3 nice looking sockets that I could fill with stamina gems. That wouldn’t hurt at all…

The boat was up next, I’ve put a healer in the canon, the birdman Felios has made his nest in the other one so that was settled. We lost a hunter on the first mage. No idea what killed him and Felios forgot to take his rocketwings and couldn’t battleress him. The fight went on and on our second mage phase, Estme, the boarding tank died…Ouch, this is going to be painfull. I was looking for a gap to take down my side first and to jump over if needed. But Felios was able to reach her and we got her up again just in time for the next mage. Holymojo and Helgard decided that the deck of the our ship needed cleaning so they went down like a piece of cloth aswell…Tzuké, it’s up to you my friend, proof now that you are a worthy healer. I think he went to the refrigurator and got himself a coke and he was still able to keep everyone up…

It was close but the boat went down. Pfew, glad we don’t need to do that again because a lot of people didn’t realize what they died from. Tzuké picked up another mail healing item, but the headpiece was allready in Fugaru’s possesion so I was happy for him. Altough it’s mail, still a nice upgrade. It will break his T9 4-set bonus but maybe you could use it sometimes.

Saurfang next, that was the first boss I didn’t down before with Masiv. I was concerned about my hit rating. On all bosses I saw a lot of white floating combat text on the right side of my screen, meaning that I was missing a lot. Perhaps I should look into it and get me some more expertise and hit. We sticked to 3 healers, just to be sure. Our dps was on par with other runs so time wouldn’t have been an issue. Again, me and Estme tanked like we never did something else. The taunts went flawlessly and I don’t think the boss had the chance to heal from his ruin of blood. I always tried to hammer one add down when I was able to, so the ranged could focus on 1 add first and the 2nd was allready halfway. Worked out fine, only 1 mark to keep alive and we got the achievement. 4 bosses, all down on first attempt. Guys, we’re doing great.

It was close to end raid time but everyone agreed to continue and have a try on Festergut. We wiped on a Valkyr and on Stinky and I was a bit afraid that Festergut wasn’t an option tonight. We left Precious, didn’t want to wipe again and headed to the left. I briefly explained the mechanics and everyone knew his part of the fight. I started to tank since I wanted to use the debuff to have some extra dps on the boss after the tank switch. I also figured that if we taunt at 8 stacks, Estme will get hit very hard and she was the better tank and hopefully it was easier to keep her up than the dwarf. The spores seem to run nicely, we never needed to get someone else into the range group and everyone survived the first big blight.

No shaman for heroism this time and we were getting close to enrage. I taunted when Estme got her 8th stack…and than I realized I taunted to soon…”9″ appeared on my screen. Oh oh, if I got 1 more stack, we’re in trouble. I called for Estme to taunt once more and she immediatly got a 9th stack aswell, I hitted my shield and it removed my stacks (Thank god that worked). I looked for my bubble icon and clicked it away. And picked up Fester again right before he was about to apply a 10th on Estme. Nice timing, we saved the day but now I was unable to use my shield cooldown again. Down I went and I thanked Ardent Defender to get me back up. Our holy pala’s needed to keep me up now. On the second big blight, both holy pala’s died, I guess they missed the spores… Holymojo wasn’t able to save the ranged and also Yeranio and Helgard died…Oh man, 1% left, kill it!

Down he went, first attempt again…good job Oldtimers. It was close but we got him. We agreed that tomorrow we head for Rotface and maybe we could see Putricide aswell. Never hoped to get this far but I was happy I could contribute to the raid and give everyone their badges for the week.

Hey there, how are my fans doing? Actually, I’d better write “fan”…

Achievements! Those tiny boxes you see flashing at the bottom of your screen every time you completed something special. Well, special…you don’t really need to do a lot of stuff to earn your first achievements. Level untill 10, explore your starting zone, get a vanity pet, etc. It’s all fairly simple.

I never really focused on those achievements. I do believe it’s a nice addition to the game because a lot of people are now exploring a part of WoW that otherwise would have been forgotten and left to rot. But Blizzard does a nice job to keep all of their content alive wich they created during the years. Every day, at least 1 raid is formed to visit some old raid instance like Mount Hiyal or Molten Core. I wasn’t really a dedicated player during the release of those places and now you get a chance to see them. I was in a “Battle for Mount Hiyal” run this week. It was pretty nice to see how the encounters were develloped during those days. I can imagine how 40 players had struggled weeks to get to the final boss.

Some people spend a lot of time to farm those achievements. It’s like they are addicted to that popup box. I sometimes ask myself how bored those persons must be if you see a achievement announcement every hour. It actually requires a lot of planning and research, especially if you start to go for achievements that require some more work or multiple players to help you.

I was browsing my screenshot map last night and realized that I had earned quiet some achievements myself the past weeks. I’m still leveling my warlock and I do that by joining random dungeons. It gives me some decent gear that helps me level, you get to see dungeons you’ve never been before and every run is 25% of your expierience bar. After every dungeon, I got an achievement. But than came Black Rock Depths. Damn, the time I have spend in there, exploring every corner, opened every door, downed every mob,…just to have some idea of where we were in that huge instance. The only time I did get an achievement in there was when Pieonhere boosted me and Holymojo’s druid. A dangerous place to walk thrue.

There is a lot more to come after the break…

My warlock is close to level 65, I just got my Incinerate spell and I really start to like the abilities of the warlock. Every pull I do about 40% of the overall damage. That’s probably because I stacked about 80 spellpower onto my pants. More about my new upcomming 80 later on.

It was actually Fugaru who earned the most achievement points lately. I got exalted with the Ashen Verdict, the faction you’ll find in Icecrown Citadel. I think I’m actually the first person in Oldtimers to get it so I guess the numerous rep runs payed off.

It allowed me to get the healing ring (ilvl 277) and an extra haste gem. Pretty nice upgrade if you ask me. And by the way, we’re doing pretty good in there: Oldtimers killed Saurfang in 25, not as easy as it looked I must say. And it’s save to say that Festergut and Rotface are part of my weekly farmtour. Last night we even got a weekly raid quest in there wich gave me extra frost emblems, the 3rd Tier 10 item is getting closer altough I still doubt if I shouldn’t get the totem first. I hope we can get some progress now on Putricide and Blood Prince Council and I think the removal of the limited attempts can help us with that. After all, we are still wiping champions when it comes to progress.

And ofcourse a new world event has started this week, Love is in the air, the Valentine event. I decided to do the starting questline wich leads to the boss encounter in Shadowfang keep. I did it because sooner or later Tzuké will ask if I can join him for the achievement. He’s a real hunter and I believe he only needs to finish this event to get “What a long strange trip it has been”. Gratz to him if he makes it, that’s some dedication I will never have, well atleast not for that part of the game. By the way Tzuké, the boss encounter isn’t that simple as the Hallow’s End boss in Scarlet Monastary…

Like the achievement sais, it was tough, but it had probably something to do because Snake was in the group aswell. Well Snake, you’ve always believed that a shaman will once tank again, you better start training with your rogue aswell!

So I recieved some love tokens for all of this and actually the daily quests were simple aswell and didn’t consume a lot of time. It gave me some extra cash on Fugaru and Xiuz earned a whole level with it. So I decided to continue. I was glad I didn’t spot any cooking achievements… Last time I ever completed a special event achievement was Winter Veil with Distefano, now more than 1 year ago.

I started to buy some stuff that were needed to complete other achievements. The hardest to complete was finding all different class/race combinations and put some rose pedals on them. I’m serious, there are only 5 Troll Rogues on Sylvanas, I don’t think Blizzard allows any more of them on our server. So I was more than happy to finally meet Crafteroo. If I ever meet him in a pvp combat, he can slay me for free.

I only had one thing to finish now, the love fool achievement. It’s a box you need to buy and you need to /pity him in all kind of different places. I was disappointed to see that you actually had to buy 5 of these if you were doing the achievement on your own. It just stands there for 10 seconds and explodes, it will not return to your bags. So that’s 50 love tokens, pretty expensive. I needed to farm some more love bracelets for it and headed for Sholozar Basin. There is a spot at the big maiden who summons all the flowers. You’ll find some easy to kill lvl 75 mobs who respawn the second you killed one. It was only a matter of time before I had enough to form my last bracelet and buy that final love fool.

There was a Blood Elf DK aswell, we were just standing 10 yards from eachother and I think he had the same mission as I did, farming shards. I needed about 30 mins to farm my stuff and he never really looked at me, neither did I. I just slayed some of his army gouls when they headed for me but that was it. My final shard popped and I mounted, flew away, targetted the DK, flew back down and popped Heroism and my 2 doggies on him. I couldn’t count to 5…dead DK. Oooh that’s so unfair Fugaru! I know. And you know what’s best? I did it the previous day aswell, with the same DK. He must not have kept a kill on sight list than…to bad for him but I presume I’m on it now.

I headed for the Culling of Stratholme and /pity my last fool…

Gratz Fugaru! A new title aswell…Fugaru the Love Fool

Mm, perhaps I keep it for a couple of days but after that I get back to “of the Ashen Verdict”. I hope my next achievement is “The Plagueworks” when I kill Putricide tonight. I might be a Love Fool, but don’t get fooled by my looks, I’m lethal, go ask that DK, he’s probably still farming in Sholazar Basin.