Guide to Healing, Leading, and Progressing in WoW Raids
Matticus It’s so sweet and touching. I will forever stash it in my letter box for future reference. I mean, I know I’ve had problems for a while and I do have my short comings. But maybe her plea to me will help me become a better Priest then what I am.
Well, maybe not.
My UI is an absolute mess. But somehow, I’m able to make sense of all that information and I’m able to act on it (usually). As a Priest, I spend most of my time with my eyes glued on the raid. With new encounters in Hyjal and BT, situational awareness becomes much more important.
Here’s a sample screenshot of the current state of my UI. It’s a complete and utter mess. There’s a lot of crap on my screen and a lot of it is redundant.
With that in mind, I decided to do a quick 2 parter before and after series about my UI. I figured I’d share my thoughts and my approach in overhauling my interface so that it’s more zentastic. Yup, that’s right. I intend to apply a minimalist zen approach to my UI. I play on a large screen. It’s quite tiring to traverse my eyes from the left side to the right. I want to start compacting information in one area so that I don’t have to scan the entire monitor for it.
Note: The addons I have below are those that can be visually seen.
First, I’m going to write about the non-addon related stuff: Namely, the text chat.
I’ve split up my chat windows from 1 window into 3 separate windows.
Left window: Handles general, trade, LFG, and Say chat.
Middle window: Raid chat, Guild chat, Healer Chat, and Priest Chat
Right window: This is meant for a separate channel that I share with my friends on the server. They’re all in different guilds but we keep in touch in our channel.
Aloft: This replaces the default nameplates that Blizzard has packaged with the game. You can see it in action over some of my guildmates on the right. Their health bar is colored to reflect their class. It also shows their mana bar below (or rage or energy). It’s very handy for me if I need to find a player and physically get to them.
Omen: Omen has replace KTM as my personal threat meter of choice. At the moment, I’m seriously considering removing it from my screen or disabling it. I’m almost never going to pull aggro. Knowing the threat levels of other players isn’t going to help me much in any way. I will keep the addon activated in order to transmit, however.
Bongos2: I use Bongos in order to manage my bars. As you can see, I’ve reduced my bar size to something fairly smaller than normal. I do most of my spell casting via my keyboard anyway. The alpha (transparency) has been set to 50%. XP bar is disabled, along with my bags, latency, and keyrings. I use Shift B in order to open all of them.
Elkano’s Buffbars: You can see my buffs in action on the right side of the screen. It shows buffs, debuffs, and durations. I’m trying to figure out how to disable that "Blessing of Demonstration" or whatever it is on the bottom.
Recount: I’ve mentioned Recount before but I mainly use it to analyze my own performance and troubleshoot player deaths. Note that the one linked is to Recount (Preservation). It’s meant for use in 2.4 but I believe it should still work for 2.3.
Pitbull: This is what I use for raid management. There’s a lot of options and a lot of flexibility and I need to spend some serious time going through it and messing with it. Those raid windows are large and I need to figure out how to shrink them among other things.
NECB: Natur EnemyCastBar is what I use to help track spell casts of other entities around me. I just need to find a better place to put it. Maybe to the right of the middle.
DoTimer: It can tell me at a glance how long before my HoTs and DoTs expire and when my cooldowns can be used again (Stoneskin, trinkets).
As you can see, I have target windows all over the place. There’s my player window, my target’s window, my target’s target window, my focus window, etc.
I don’t use focus macros that often, if at all. Therefore I’m considering removing that. I might move my own player window to the far left side. I plan on downloading a HuD eventually. I’m going to do away with Pitbull’s Main Tanks and tank targets window. I’ll probably axe pet targets and party pet targets as well.
You will also notice the raid in various states of transparency. That’s my range finder. If the player is transparent, they are not in range. If they frame isn’t transparent, then I can hit them with a heal.
Check back next week when I post the results of my modifications.
Our beloved WoW is full of many different types of players. The people behind them are people of all ages and all maturity levels. I’ve met my share of intelligent 16 year olds who have shown signs of wisdom and humility. I’ve also met 23 year olds who wonder why they’re shunned by other players. In my past guild, we would always debate amongst the officers if we should impose age restrictions. Eventually we did but it was solely because of the content and nature of our guild discussions at times and not because of maturity levels.
What exactly is a mature guildmate then? There are 20 characteristics that I can think of:
Most importantly, mature guildmates will not object when they are asked to do something. They are aware of their own capabilities and limitations and they are downright dependable.
I want to direct your attention to a post made by Galo, at Ardent Defender. The post is an example of the casual guild experience when they raid. In the last paragraph, he poses a question:
Am I hardcore?
It all depends on the measuring stick that is being used. But in this case, Galo, no you’re not. Here’s a pattern that I’ve discovered when I’ve raided with "casual players".
Behavior like that is just unacceptable to me. It proves to me that a player is lazy and unmotivated. No real raider wants to raid with players like that. They give "casual" gamers a bad name since that’s what they’re frequently classified under.
Here is my other question. Why are players who do the exact opposite of what I’ve listed above considered hardcore?
Namely things like:
That’s not hardcore. That’s showing that you’re willing to work for your gear. Galo has no problem getting gear since he does heroics regularly with relative ease.
Join that Guild, Galo. They sound like the kind of players you will get along with and progress with. Sure you might not be able to make all their times, but the runs you can get in on them with deliver a huge thrill for you. It sounds like you actually want to go somewhere. I’ve had to make the tough choice of parting ways with some friends a long time ago to play in my guild now. But we’re on the same server and we still chat and I still play with them every now and again. Just because you change guilds doesn’t mean you change friends.
I guess one would say I’m a zentastic player.
But throw away those old stereotypes of raiding. Don’t be a casual raider. Don’t be a hardcore raider. Just be a raider.
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I’m on my retribution paladin and I’m doing 3v3’s with a few friends. My team is 1300 rated. We just finished this EPIC battle against 2 rogues and a warrior. We were a Ret Paladin, Prot Paladin, and a Resto Druid. We beat the crap out of that team. Maces were flying, seals were being cast, bops were all over the place.
And all we got? 6 rating.