WE:

Need 3-4 ranged DPS.
Provide all flasks, pots, consumables, repairs, vent, a kickass group and great leadership.
Raid ICC10 on Saturdays from 8:00pm to 1:00am and on Mondays 8:00pm to 12:00am.

YOU:

Need an awesome mature guild of like-minded adults who want to see end-game content and pursue hard modes and heroic encounters.
Provide a punctual raiding toon (enchanted/gemmed properly) rigged with Ventrilo and can pull 5k dps on a single target, by yourself.
Raid some ICC10 experience and want to see the Lich King dead.

Please mail lolotov@truthinessguild.net in the real world or Salovia in the game. Also feel free to whisper Salovia.

This morning we had an account compromised and in turn most things from the gold vault were taken and presumably sold or mailed out. They left some pygmy suckerfish, some army knives, some flares, and about a tab’s worth of misc. food stuffs (except feasts). Our first hacked account in 2 years (ever)!

We were on to it pretty quickly, but it took only minutes before the vault damage was done. Mizz and I have tickets in to the GMs to start the restoration process, but there’s no word on how long it will take (and really we’re not guaranteed to have it all restored). So we’re on top of it.

Our guildy is in need of some TLC so to speak. Being hacked just sucks in all sorts of ways. There’s no word yet on if her gear on her toons or her bank items will be restored. I’m sure her day is going to be pretty chaotic trying to get her WoW-life back into order, so we’ll need to be there to make sure we can help her with whatever she needs.

For now all access to the vault has been removed in an over-zealous attempt and minimizing further damage. I want to keep the logs clean until we get things back in order. I’ll update with more details as they come.

Alright, so these types of things are usually for me, but I hope you find them interesting. I do these overhauls every few months, but I think that I’m finally starting to settle on a layout that I like and can use. Let’s start with the before, click for bigger:

Not a whole that is interesting, honestly. I try to have the ‘game world’ as clutter free as possible; you can see DXE, buffs, my bar, target bar, stance bar and pally power. I use SunnArt to squish the game viewport down so that I get that lower area. I do this because that is all basically noise and I want as little noise covering the gaming area as possible. So now I’ve got to figure out what I can do to improve it.

I realized that I have a ton of icons on the screen that I don’t use. I have a lot of colorful information staring back at me. I have too many lines. It’s all functional and informative, but I really don’t need all of that information at once. I can definitely slim this down. The icons? They’re all bound - I click nothing except Grid for heals and other offensive-defense (blessing of protection, etc.). My clicking is for targeting runaways or accidental pulls, not doing the actual taunts or anything else.

Utopia? Helpful, but total excess. Gone. Replaced with simple brain power.

Recount? Helpful, but do I need colored bars? No. Do I need total damage, dps AND percents? Nope. As a tank, I actually use Recount a lot - it’s helpful for deaths, seeing heals done and dps performance (’yes battle rez the top heals/dps if they go down’ type thing). I definitely don’t need bars to tell me class colors which I don’t even know what they are anyway. What the hell color is ‘hunter’? ‘rogue’? Please, they’re the same damn thing to me (colorblind).

Omen? I regret that Omen is still useful. It’s helpful to know who’s up top so I can throw salv on them, call for FD, ask for MDs/tricks, and who to keep an eye on in case someone is about to pull. It’s the same deal as Recount though - I definitely don’t need colored bars and a bajillion digits staring me in the face.

Pally Power? Gah, I can’t get rid of this one yet either. I’d like it to fade up when I mouse on it, but it doesn’t offer that. I like it up so that if anyone gets battle rez’d, I can throw 10-minute buffs on them very quickly. I don’t even have to think about what class they are or anything.

Chat? I know, I know, fade it out, it’ll blend with the background, you’ll regain some screen real estate. The problem is that with my eyes and horrible color vision, anything that puts text on game textures is torture to try to read to me. the chat background has to stay. And yes, I want to see my chat windows during raiding.

Buffs? Buffs are not actually necessary. Once a fight starts, there’s not much that I need to know from buffs. Penance on me? Guardian Spirit? Renew? Flash of Light hot? Don’t really care honestly. It’s all noise and I don’t know buff icons well enough to be able to quickly glance at them and see what I need. I used to have buffs down by my name bar, but I found that they were just overloading my brain when I was mid-fight. I need them, but not all the time, so they are relegated to where they were born.

Minimap? It’s basically a circle that holds some addon buttons that I randomly use, and the calendar. You’re gone.

Grid? Stays. Period.

DXE? Dues voX Encounters is a new addon for me. I’ve railed against DBM and the like because people come to rely on them and they can muck things up. I liked just learning the encounter as well. DXE is like DBM, but a bit different. Much more refined. I feel like it’s informative without being hand-holdy. Get it, you’ll like it. Stays.

Unit frames? As a tank, I need myself and my target, and my target’s target. Stays.

Good grief Charley Brown! That’s a bunch of crap (but not nearly as much as others…), how can I make sense of it all? Thankfully, Mizzy is a kick ass designer, so she helped me tackle the issue… using this:

Paper Wireframing! We drew out the proportions of the monitor, and I free-styled all of the important elements. They’re obviously not to scale, but that’s not too important at this stage. It’s mainly for moving everything around quickly and getting a bird’s eye view of what the UI will do and how it will function. At first it seemed odd - why not just do it digitally, you can move stuff around just as easy. Well, you can and you can’t. It’s easier to move around, but it’s not easier to quickly get a feel for the layout. With the paper frames, I don’t commit to anything, I can try anything very quickly. It also makes me think more about the size and orientation of all the elements on my screen.

After an afternoon of toil, I landed on the layout I wanted and started kicking my addons into shape. This is with what I ended up:

MUCH cleaner. I’m not in a raid, so there’s more there than you can see: DXE is still in the top left corner, just hidden. Pally Power is present, but not while solo. Omen is also hiding out of combat. I’ve removed something like 24 icons and made all my tanking abilities very large and faded. I can easily see their cooldowns. Chat window moved, but is largely unchanged. Unit frames are untouched. Minimap moved down and slimmed. Overall, I’ve really stripped out a lot of info that was largely not useful. I’ve even made the game world bigger and tightened up the black area down below.

I’m very pleased with how it turned out. I raided Vezax and Yogg with this setup and it’s working out really, really well. I’d LOVE to see some breakdowns like this of other UIs. Anyone care to throw up their UI and explain it?

Then Kel’Thuzad. This guy is a pain. We had to swap our awesome DK, Ashaba with his druid, Feldegast, in order to clear up the melee area and get some backup heals for ice-blocks. Melee frost blasts were chaining four or so people into ice blocks and there’s just no way our healers could have covered it. We wiped a few times and put in two *really* solid hours. 19 minutes before we were scheduled to call it, we gave it one last try and ended up pulling off a win. Clicky for bigger screen cap.

I hate Windows, but I love TinyXP. These are some screens of a fresh install, taken right after booting up the first time. Formatting my OS drive took 18 minutes (none of that quick format business for me, thank you) and the actual OS install took less than 6 (yes, six). This is with TinyXP Rev09 (Option 8):

Note, 15 processes. 50mb of ram being used.

Screw you OEM crap! Screw you internationalization junk! IE, Windows Media Player - you’re outta there! I’ve been using TinyXP for a while and re-installing Windows has become a cinch. I get the base functionality and can put all my own things over the shell. It’s lovely. Also, thank you Blizzard for making WoW so portable - since all my crap is installed and residing on another drive, reinstalling the OS doesn’t mean reinstalling WoW. Yippee! Once my audio driver is installed, I’ll be back in the game.