Addons & You

SaladFork of Omen of Clarity fame posted a list of five questions about Add-ons in the Blogstorming section of BlogAzeroth. Since I'm good at lists, I thought I'd pick up the challenge and go with it.

He asked,

• How many addons do you have?
• What addons can you not live without?
  
• If you met someone new to the game using the default UI, what addons would you recommend they start with?
• What are important qualities you look for when you look for new addons?
  
• How do you usually find new addons? Are they recommended to you? Do you search for them? Are they required by your guild?
  
• What sort of layout does your UI have?

For the number of addons I have, its a pretty strange answer. I was a beta tester for the MazzleUI from WowInterface. Since beginning the beta (almost a year and a half ago now) I have for the most part let the latest build of the compilation dictate what's in my UI. I have added a few things, and replaced some. Those things are GroupCalendar, Omen, Violation, Ogri'lazy and sometimes Auctioneer. I will state clearly, that MazzleUI is not as updated as it once was, and it's so nearly deprecated it's not funny. But I'm not code smart enough to fix it. The absolute things I can't live without are having the 5-man units at the bottom of the screen which makes healing easier and the autoplacement of spells into bars. Those two just rock hard.

The addons I can't live without are, a threat meter (Omen), better Unit Frames (DUF/sRaid Frames), and some bar mod (Bongos).

For a total newbie to UI modification, I'd start them with Mazzle if I could talk them into it. If not, they must absolutely have a threat meter. Useful only in groups (unless playing a hunter or lock), nothing says "Hey, I know what I'm doing" more than a threat meter.

For new add-ons, I always look for the Ace alternative. Since so many of my mods are Ace mods, I like to keep it in the family.

I usually find new add-ons through word of mouth. And for me, "word of mouth" includes reading others blogs and listening to the few podcasts I actually remember to download.

Layout for me, is pretty much built into Mazzle. But I think it's a clean compilation which puts important information in the right places. It keeps the center of the field of view open so you can see the most important thing -- what's going on in game without hiding it behind addon windows.

So, that's my post. I hope this is my welcome back to regular blogging!!

So. Here's a shot of my UI...With the bonus of the bottom of Karazhan included...

By Any Other Name

I was desperate for a blog topic today so I wandered over to BlogAzeroth and took a look at shared blog topic ideas. There was a post there suggesting we blog about our characters' names to include alts. So. Here goes.

My first MMORPG was City of Heroes. I had resisted the call of MMOs previously because I know how addictive my personality can get. And I knew many friends who got hooked on the Evercrack never to be heard from again. I figured I could avoid a fantasy game as when I was a wee table-topper D&D (and clones) were not my first choice. Instead I loved the Champions game. You know, the one about super-heroes.

So, when I found there actually was an MMO that was all about the supers, I was hooked! I pored carefully over the five classes I could play and their powers. There were tankers, scrappers, blasters, controllers and defenders. Little did I know it but, defenders were about the closest thing to a true healer there was. I chose Radiation Emission as my primary power and Radiation Control as my secondary. Got my outfit put together. (By the by, character creation in COH was amazing. You could hundreds of changes to body parts, armors, colors, hair, face, and so forth). Now I just needed a name. I chose, Brehmstrahlung.

Well, so what, I hear you cry. What does Radiation Boy wearing his underwear on the outside have to do with WoW? Well, a lot actually. As my first MMO, COH introduced me to many things including Ventrilo. Type "Brehmstrahlung" into a Vent client as your login name if you want a laugh. And listening to folks I barely knew mangle it was also interesting. Early on, I told people, "Just call me 'Brem' if that's easier."

When I picked up WoW with several of my COH cronies, I just chose the same moniker. And started varying spelling, adding consonants, inserting suffixes, etc. So. Here's the whole list.

1. Bremm (70 Human Priest)
2. Brehm (70 Dwarf Warrior)
3. Bremette (70 Gnome Warlock)
4. Bremagorn (70 Dwarf Hunter)
5. Bremmie (70 Gnome Rogue)
6. Bremtanica (28 Draenei Mage)
7. Bremma (26 Draenei Shaman)
8. Brem (19 Dwarf Priest)
9. Bremstar (16 Night Elf Druid *probably on the chopping block*)
10. Bremomir (60 Tauren Hunter)

And they all live on the Alleria server. Feel free to stop by and say hello. If you can find me that is :-)

Why Do I Play this Class? - Redux

One of my comments yesterday (Hi Noosh!) said I hardly play the warrior and warlock anymore. And he’s right. So, here are the final three 70s that I have. And in this group are my two favorites.

Priest

The Story

Remember what I wanted to make first instead of a warrior? Right. Priest. After the warrior and the warlock were at their max level, I decided I needed to do something when I wasn’t attempting to raid or playing at max level. I have a leveling partner (druid) so it shouldn’t be a big deal.

The story continues as of January 16, 2007. At the time my intention was to level my warrior to 70 first and fulfill a main tanking role. However, with the folks I was generally playing with at the time, my priest would be the better choice. I stuck firmly by my choice and eventually convinced my guild that I would not abandon progress on my priest to help them out “just for a little bit” with a tank for an instance.

What I like

I sometimes feel the most useful on my priest. Tanks and healers are a symbiotic relationship. Neither can function without the other. I don’t want to imply that I’m more important than the warrior, but I sometimes feel that way. I really appreciate the complexities of playing a priest that didn’t really exist for me with either the warlock or the warrior. This became a game of how well I could estimate what was needed now, what was needed in 5 seconds, what was needed within the next minute, and so on.

Recently I’ve done a little PVP and I’m really enjoying what, at least in my battle group, is a void. I don’t see many people healing (on Alliance side) much, and I feel I can be an asset in this area. And I like being asked to switch to a priest from an alt because someone “needs a really good healer for Heroic Instance X.”

It’s also very cool to have been my first to 70, and thus my most played at 70. That means he’s got the best gear of any of my toons. And that makes him even more fun to play than someone in crappy “I just dinged 70” gear.

Hunter

The Story

My first horde character was a hunter. And hunters can solo. And I wanted something to do when I was just fooling around. Unfortunately, my hunter languished around 37 for a very long time. It was only once the expansion came out and I decided I needed a jewel crafter that I had the moment where I figured out how to get one without all the pain of massive leveling.

I had this neglected miner/engineer hunter at level 37. I could get his skill up to 300 with little or no stress. And at that point, I knew I wanted to make it to 375, and that meant leveling. So I did.

My hunter rapidly turned into one of my favorite characters to play.

What I like

I like still being able to get onto the hunter and solo. I like that I have many answers for everything in a PVE sense. I love being able to effectively chain trap and crowd control anything. Having a pet makes farming very simple. And being the first character with an epic flying mount further simplifies that. And I totally was passionately am in love with feign death. Get out of jail, here I come!

If my guild would allow me to swap mains, I would. But as I said above, the priest is just too darned good a healer to consider letting the hunter be primary.

To some degree, my hunter is the most fun I have. I don’t watch timers well enough to be a kick butt warlock. If DPS is my game, I need to use the hunter to pump it out. Raiding on my priest is fun, but I don’t often state that after a raid. Whenever I get to raid with my hunter, I tell everyone who will listen (and some who won’t) how much fun I’ve just had.

Rogue

The Story

Back several months before Burning Crusade, a group of five of us got together to make midgets to play once weekly. The rules were: the five had to make a viable five-man and they all need to be midgets (i.e. short – dwarves or gnomes). We were only allowed to play these little dudes when we were all on, which quickly fell apart. So my little rogue stayed at about level 16 for almost a year. With patch 2.3, I took advantage of the increased leveling speed. And now he’s 70. And. In. Greens. And. Blues.

What I like

Did I mention get out of jail free? Vanish FTW. I’m also enjoying the new (to me) play style being right up in their faces (er..butts?) to get the job done. And there are so many situational tricks to be employed to let your group last just a bit longer. I’ve not begun to plumb the depths of the rogue, but I’m really liking it.

Why Do I Play this Class?

Over at BlogAzeroth, there’s a thread that asks about why we play our chosen class. Several members of the community have already responded on their own blogs about why they play what they do. As I sat down to tackle my take on my chosen class, I quickly got caught on the horns of a dilemma.

I don’t play “a class.” I’m an admitted alt-oholic. (I hear that admission of problem is the first step to recovery.) I guess the real answer here, is most folks have a main, I have five. So if most folks have a reason, I should also have five. Here goes. Since I don’t want to play favorites, I’ll enumerate them in the order that they hit level 60 (which was the level cap when many of them were being played.)

So, what follows is part one of this post. I just have too much to say.

Warrior

The Story

Honestly, warrior was not my first choice. Several of us had played many levels on a PVP server, playing the Horde. The bad news was twofold. First we were on a server where horde to alliance ratio was something like 1 to 3. Secondly we started from 1 to 4 months after release. So, it seemed like the vast majority of the vast majority was always over-level for us. We finally got tired of never completing our quests and spending the better part of our play time running back to our corpses. We made the move to a carebear server and swapped sides.

On the Horde server, we basically all ran whatever class felt good. So we wound up with something like 87 hunters, 2 shamans and a warlock. When we made the swap, I insisted that at least a few of us build classes that could be the core of a five-man. I selected priest. Within a week of re-rolling, the guy who chose warrior decided he didn’t want to do that and instead went for priest as well. He took my trade skills to boot. Still wanting to be able to form a five-man, I re-rolled (again) and began a warrior.

What I like

I liked tanking. I liked the idea of my peers relying on me, to some degree moreso than on the healer, to keep them not dead. I liked being the guy who got dibs on the plate drops. I liked never having to look for a tank when I wanted to do Scholomance.

Warlock

The Story

When my group of friends wasn’t really available, I still wanted to play. A good friend told me once that watching a protection warrior fight is like watching two old people make love. (Well, maybe he wasn’t quite so delicate, you get the idea) And this was never truer than my little dwarf tank. I sure could fight 3 or 5 mobs at a time and not die. But boy did it take forever. I wanted someone who could solo. And I wanted a mechano-chicken. And I wanted an engineer. And it sounds like gnomes would fit that bill (with the built in racial mount and extra engineering skill) if they were a warlock. It was only at level 40 that I realized, I’d get a free warlock mount and thus never probably have my mechano-chicken.

What I like

DOTs make the world go round. And a good warlock is hard to kill solo. Mobs lose agro and you can always sacrifice a voidwalker. Properly healthstoned and soulstoned, a warlock gets multiple attempts to not die. I was handy in five man dungeons and raids, always having a repairbot with me. And if I accidentally draw aggro in an instance, I have the stamina to live at least a little while.