What I Enjoy

There are many things to do in the game that I enjoy and raiding is one of them. Lately I think of what I can do for others and how I can help other people I am friends with on the server and in my guild. Of course running heroics and raids is one way. On my main I don't need gear, but I still enjoy collecting shards for account-bound honor turn-ins, the greens for disenchanting and just the general fun factor. As a retribution paladin, mobs die quickly and unless its a terrible tank in Heroic Trial of the Crusader or an aweful group in Occulus, I enjoy running heroics. Now that I have six well geared level 80 characters, each one presents its own charm with certain limitations. Lately my shaman, druid and priest are quite fun, as the variety of healing spells makes each heroic (or raid) a unique experience. The shaman is suited for close quarters healing with the chain heal spell, but with high efficiency and string mana regen, can readily heal a main tank with a riptide heal-over-time and earth-shield. The priest, as holy is fun to have prayer of mending bounce around, while prayer of healing, circle of healing and cycling renews are powerful but can be mana intensive. With hymm of hope and the shadowfiend, timing is essential. As druid, I think the highest skill-cap is set with a wide array of heal-over-time, as well as regrowth and nourish. So my other dps classes, such as my rogue and mage are often neglected, since my main can out-dps them in his current gear set. Lately, I am looking into getting back in the auction house.

Mouseketeers

Back to my original mouse, the mouse I adore, the mouse I feel comfortable with after hours of long gaming session. My search for a mouse thT truly fits my gaming style has evolved. For a very long time I would alternate between three different styles, a thumb-based trackball, a normal trackball and a normal trackball. Then I went through the line of Logitech Gx series, the G3, G5, then G7 and lately the G9 (which I now use at work). But after discovering how I use the side buttons (for infrequent but time-critical BoPs, Salvs and Freedoms), I switched to the Microsoft Sidewinder. Well, after re-doing my whole UI to accomodate the Razer Naga version of Dominos and spending an entire weekend getting used to the mouse, I have returned to my original mouse and my original UI. My friend (who also bought the Naga) is taking a different approach, he is leveling a level 1 toon from scratch to force himself to acclimate to the mouse.

My Addons and WoW History

My use of addons and my first post, so I will provide some history and context. I have been playing World of Warcraft for the past four years. I started after being introduced by a friend at work to EverQuest II. Having a strong background in graphic design and games such as Diablo II, I was always dissappointed in the lack of visual clarity in EverQuest II (EQ2). I would constantly upgrade my PC to be able to play EQ2 at higher resolutions and better graphics quality. I had some degree of success, more so with ATI graphics cards than NVidia. The culmination of my EQ2 hardware quest brought me to acquire a top-of-line, Alienware Laptop with all the bells and whistles. What I found was dissappointing, even with literally the best CPU, the best graphics card and the best hard drives configured specifically for gaming performance, I was not happy with EQ2.
Don't get me wrong, there were many long nights spent exploring all of the various zones and completing various 'Heritage Quests'. I was enamored by the scale of the game, the lore, and the general immersive feel. I loved exploring the cities and especially enjoyed the ability to have a home and pets. I enjoyed the Bard and Dirge class for they were so unique in the style of play and abilities. Not your typical 'Fire a Magic Missile in the Darkness', or hack-and-slash class.
One day my friend coaxed me to acquire a copy of World of Warcraft and we both rolled alliance on the Lightbringer server, where a friend of his was playing. We were both starting out with level 1 toons. I chose a Hunter class, as I wanted to be as self sufficient as possible and he chose a Druid as he wanted to heal and also perform other roles. I leveled my hunter to 31 and during that course of time, my friend went back to hardcore raiding in EQ2.
I was lost between the two worlds and frustrated. My friend had maxminum level toons and was raiding high level dungeons nightly with 40 other people and I was unable to join him. While back on WoW I had not met anyone and it was getting boring to level my character alone. Luckily Sony introduced a character exchange program wherebuy you can buy in game characters, items and gold. I acquired a few maximum level characters and had some fun playing with my friends from work on various quests. But I still could not get into any of the raids and ultimately lost interest in EQ2 altogether.
Around this time a family member of mine stopped playing WoW and I took over his account and started playing a level 60 Hunter on a Horde server. For the first time I began to realize the depth and immersive qualities that WoW had to offer as well and I decided to roll my own Hunter class starting at level 1.
From the beginning, when playing EverQuest II, I had come to know and love UI Mod compilations. The individual mods were nice, but keeping them all up to date and working was a full time job, so I preferred to enlist the help of the 'maintainers' of these UI compilations. When I started playing World of Warcraft, while I was leveling my character in the Order of Thought guild, I began to maintain a compilation of UI mods for the guild. I even made a video on how to set up the compilation. But after a while I found that others were better at that than I was and I would rather spend that time playing the game, rather than configuring addons. My favorite WoW compilation was always the Mazzle UI suite. It reminded me of the EQ2 ProfitUI compilation. However at some point Mazzle stopped playing and the compilation stopped working.
By this time in my WoW career I had leveled one of every class to level 60 and The Burning Crusade expansion was released. I elected to play a Blood Elf Paladin, as this was the first time that Horde was offered a chance to play this class. Since the start of WoW, the Horde had the Shaman and its Totems, while the Alliance side had its Paladin, wearing Plate and its Bubble. Upon reaching level 70 and being among the first on my server to do so, I was readily drafted to a high level raiding guild. Eventually I found that Arkive had picked up where Mazzle left off and I began using the ArkiveUI compilation.
Some of the mods that Arkive does not include are listed here (* requires settings to be saved):
-> Altaholic: Lists every aspect of every alt, even across other realms and provides a search function.
-> AutoLog: Automatically log raids, to be able to post to WoWMetersOnline.
-> Bagnon: Better than Combuctor (a bag mod).
-> AutoAcceptInvite: Automatically accept raid invites.
-> DailySummonHelper: Helps parties summon daily bosses (HH, BRD etc).
-> Dugi's Guides: Leveling guides.
-> Elephant: Chat recorder.
-> FreeHat: Checkboxes for Hat and Cloak display in the character frame.
-> GMOTD Pop Up: Pops a window when the Guild Message of the Day changes.
-> GuildMains: Helps track who is who, when guildies are on their alts.
-> LushGearSwap: Automatically changes gear sets when a talent spec changes.
-> Misspelled: An in-game spell checker.
-> Mountiful: Automatic mount and dismount.
-> Noggenfogger: Disables undesired effects of the Noggenfogger beverage.
*-> NotesUNeed: In game Notes.
-> Overachiever: Tracks all possible in-game achievements.
-> Pallypower: Manages Paladin Greater Blessings in parties/raids.
-> Pawn: Trackes EAP points and assists in comparing gear.
-> PoMTracker: Tracks Prayer of Mending.
*-> PowerAuras: Tracks buffs and provides visual displays (note: in-game export/import).
-> RaidComp: Assists in building ideal raids with all required buffs for hard modes.
-> RaidInfoExtended: Better heads-up to instances expirations.
-> SavedInstances: More of the same.
-> SexyCooldown: Better cooldown display.
-> ShockAndAwe: An Enhancement Shaman rotation assistant.
-> SmartRes: Rapidly recover from wipes.
-> StealYourCarbon: Automatic reagent restocking.
-> WhatHappened: Death reports.
-> XToLevel: Tracks experience gains.
Since I am transitioning from a standard gaming mouse (Microsoft SideWinder) with two side buttons, to the Razer Naga with twelve side buttons, there are some basic UI changes. Most notably, Dominos is rebranded, so I will be taking the basic ArkiveUI Dominos settings and renaming the setting files to work with the Naga's custom Dominos UI mod, so that my basic UI configuration for my bar mod will not need to be recreated from scratch. In so doing, I am going to reset my UI back to ArkiveUI vanilla to test that all works well, so this entry serves both as a public sharing of my gaming experiences as well as a means for me to track what I am doing.