UI addons
I figgured it was time to drop a listing of what ui addons i like, what I would like to find/develop, and what I don’t like about the standard interface.
I putter around with a ton of various add-ons for different situations. Some are restricted to just one class or focus of a class, some are wide ranging and completely altar game play. Some are indispensable, others I can play fine when they are broken.
Viper notify – a semi-useful hunter only addon – since i have a few hunters in my stable, I like having it, but it only really affects two of my hunters currently. All it really does is annoy you when you are running aspect of viper and your mana level is over a certain threshold.
Squawk and Awe – a very useful spell suggestion add-on for when you are in casting form as a druid. (this one can cause errors if you have it active on a non-druid) it is quite modifiable with weighting and available spells. (I can play fine without it, but do better with it as it reminds me to toss insects and faery fire regularly. I have mine set for proccing eclipse to boost starfire) ie.. moonfire, wrath (till proc), Starfire till end of buff, reapply IS, FF, rinse/repeat. I do this rotation because i love seeing those 10-12k crits hitting back to back. I had a chain of 8 of them on a patchwerk fight.
Auctioneer – my auction management system of choice, anyone who hasn’t heard of this yet.. brush the rock dust off your tunic. – can run without it for a time, but needed if i want to make money.
Gatherer – Critical to me. All of my characters have at least one gathering profession and having gatherer keep track of where the goodies are saves me a ton of time and headaches. Even my skinner/leather worker runs it as it tracks treasure chests too.
X-Pearl – Rather extensible party/raid frame setup, preferred to classic wow raid frames.
Vuhdo – I don’t rely on this one as much now that my character turned over that old leaf and went back to feral for off-spec. – this is a good, well configurable whack-a-mole err.. healing interface for party/raids. depending on the click or modifier used different spells are cast on the frame’s matching target.
ATSW – Advanced trade skills window – decent alternative to the standard TSW, but fails for scribes.
**Lil-Smokey’s correction** Lil-Sparky’s Workshop - further expands tradeskill window with average cost of mats, and links with auctioneer to display current going price of the finished good. great for seeing your best moneymakers.
DBM – deadly boss mods – a given if you even consider raiding, and useful even for 5mans.
Omen – Threat meter – While boomkin are not as squishy as a mage, or for that matter even a hunter. 
it’s best not to pull agro on da boss.
Recount – Damage meter/healing meter – useful as a tool to help tune performance, it annoys me when people use it for bragging rights. “oh wow, you only did 2100 dps that fight? you luzer…….” right.. /kick
iceHUD – I use a heads up display to have my health/resource bars, (along with my pet’s, and my target’s) displayed beside my character instead of up in a corner. I like to keep my eyes on the prize.
Titan Panel – informational bar, i usually keep this one push-pinned to auto hide. I like the info, just not all the time.
decursive – no brainer here,
Elephant – chat logger. elephant never phorgets.
alt-o-haulic – Hi, my name is katt and i’m an altohaulic… – this lets you see tons of information about the characters you aren’t even logged into. their gear, tradeskills, bags, talents, glyphs, ect.. even lets you look at toons on other servers/factions
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Things I would like to find/develop
for fun, a long while back there was an addon called guild quest (i think) that let you give guild members private quests. They would have to have the addon installed to receive the quest, but could be quite fun.. The way I would imagine it being used, is in the case of a guild officer. You give the quest of gathering x number of y item and presenting it to the officer, in exchange for money/made up guild currency/dkp/guild bank item. or the Gquest might be to obtain a particular mount. (Say you have an arena team of 5 boomkin and you want everyone mounted identically.. ) Or you might be tasked to lead an instance run for lowbies. it could be an action oriented way of determining qualifications for advancement in the guild.
a cross server player rating system. – lets you know a bit about people you are pugging with. Say you Run with billybadaxe (former guild master of mine, great guy) and it was your first time grouping with him, if you had this system in place, it might show a rating of 4.5 stars. Comments would include things like, good tank, good dps, protects his healers well. or you might run into ninjacheaterbob (madeup name this one) who is rated a 0.9 stars and has comments of loot ninja, lousy dps, bails on runs if they get difficult. This system would also be great for prospective guild masters to research new recuits. If someone has been commented on as a guild bank theif… big red flag there. Could even have multiple levels of ratings, say, personality, pvp skill, pve skill, overall rating (average of the others).
I do have a programming background, but how to do this eludes me.
Actually, the rating system is something i would like to see become an ingame feature.
Well, I’ve run out of ideas for now. Talk to you guys later. Please, feel free to comment and offer suggestions on add-ons y’all would like to find/develop.
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Katt the second Vs. Redridge
Katt has always gone a different direction from the norm, people tend to stick to the standard starting areas and secondary areas. Unless they have done them over and over.. Katt didn’t like living on a huge tree and left as soon as the bear quest was done, deciding to help the space goats out instead. Their two zones provided enough material to keep her busy into her 20’s. now at 25 having done a small smattering of random quests she went to redridge to work for a while. (good mining to be had there.) Katt’s done a few instances, mostly BFD and stockades. but by and large katt’s questing her way through the levels. (Right now mostly because IRL I have a 2 month old to keep an eye on and can’t commit to long periods of playtime to do lots of instance runs.) Katt will probably move on soon to duskwood but only once mining goes up a bit
I don’t have any interesting stories just now, so just posting an update on the baby boomtank.
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Rant: DPS control issues
I’m not talking about DPS that can’t control their agro, I mean DPS that try to control the speed of the run. I mentioned an annoying mage in a previous post, and was just reading Pugging Pally who had a similar problem.
I’ll keep this short guys, LET THE BLOODY TANK PULL. I told that mage that if he pulled again, I would wait till he died to growl it off him. I pull when my furry butt is ready to, if you get an itchy fireball in your palm that’s your problem.
Chances are, if you have a tank going slowly, they just starting out and haven’t gained confidence in their abilities yet, or do not know the dungeon and the abilities of the various mobs.
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Reflections on older games
For many years before playing wow, I dabbled in old fashioned MUD’s. (Multi User Domain/Dungeon for you youngsters that don’t know) I had two favorites, both of them were as expensive or more than what warcraft costs me now. I liked these games because I was a fast reader and typist, so I could navigate my way around these worlds easily. They were completely text based, so my imagination took over as the world’s greatest graphics engine, the mental images more crisp and clear than some of todays top video cards could produce. Because of these games text based nature, it was a trivial matter to add new items and places to the game with zero downtime for the users.
One of my favorites was called Federation, it was a space based commercial and/or fighting game. (depending on your tastes) I favored commerce and created my ship to reflect that. Big cargo holds, Big engines, Big shields, itty bitty weapon ports. I valued speed and defense over offensive capability. At some point in the game you were given the option to become a planet owner, and create your own world for others to land on, explore, and trade on. The various locations were limited only by your imagination and knowledge of the english language to describe it.
My other favorite was called Gemstone III (later renamed to Gemstone IV) It was a fantasy based RPG with swords and spells, Again, being a MUD it was text based. This game consumed much of my time in college (and money, depending on your desire to play it cost anywhere from 10 to 80 a month. (extra character slots, premium access, platinum access) I played as a premium user which gave me 10 character slots, a larger “locker” and access to build my own house!! With this game, it was common to setup scripts to do some of the playing for you, especially moving from one area to another, but more notoriously automating game play. It was a necessary evil to make scripts, the trip from one major town to the other major town took 5 minutes even on a script. Every time you levelled, you gained training points to customize your characters skills, there were trade skills of sorts, you could forge weapons, and you could fletch arrows when i last played. Armor crafting was in the works but hadn’t happened yet. The features that held the most interest for me were the player run guild hall, and the player owned home. The guild I was in, (twilight hall) had a nice little building on the outer ring of the main city. Had a fully stocked bar, a maze, even a little pool you could toss stuff into for your hall members to grab later. It was a physical home away from home, in our digital home away from reality. The player created home, was entirely yours to decorate as you saw fit. you could purchase all sorts of decorations for it.
The reason I bring these things up from the depths of memory and poke and prod at them. is that I think player created areas would be an incredible feature for wow to develop, I know of other mmo’s that do have that available, but they just aren’t wow.. For example in wizard 101, you can buy your own property and decorate it. I know not what benefits you get from it, I never managed to spend enough time on the game to get to that point. In Guild Wars, you have a private guild area that you customize and upgrade to suit your needs.
We know that the next expansion will have the guild as a whole as an entity that grows, levels and evolves, perhaps we could have a physical location in game that we could build, fortify, defend, (assault? if it’s set pvp allowed?)
I could just picture a couple pvp guilds staging raids on each other for glory and honor attacking/defending full blown castles.. while other guilds have a secluded mountain hideaway designed to not be noticed where they could relax and prepare to take over the world.
I see such player created content as RP tools that could be used as money sinks to draw down some of the excess gold on the servers.
I welcome any comments on my ramblings.
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Katt the second awake again
So, after getting things settled in for the night, I sat down to decide what to do.
Do I go do another random heroic for badges (bleah.. can’t face halls of stone again for a few days)?
Do I work on a lowbie on my main server (I have 5 under 70 to play with)?
Or, do I go work on my baby bear over on BBB’s server?
After a few milliseconds mental debate, I decide I want to be where nobody knows me.. so off to BBB’s server for some R&R. I like his server, it’s moderately quiet and there are only 3 people on my friend list there, BBB (one of his forms), and a guildie from my home server that likes to join me for some R&R from time to time. Lil’ Katt was sitting quietly at lvl 22 when I started last night. I decided to run two randoms selecting tank/dps roles. For some odd reason, I was tank both times.. /shrug
The first round was stockades the group was sitting at the end of the main hallway at the T junction. I roll on down and we go kill basil, get out little sack of loot and go home. I was happy, got a nice little blue feral leather belt. Vigorous belt of the wild
I must learn some day to quit while I’m ahead, the second random pug, wasn’t bad, but had some weirdness in it. Again, I was selected for tank, when I zoned in, it was BFD (not a favorite, but at least it’s not gnomehell.) The group contained a hunter, a pally, a mage, and a priest. Good mix of classes in my mind. They had already gotten past the turtle so I had to catch up. I died almost immediately from one of those %@&* murlocs, it started chewing on my flippers while I was in the water. I finally make it to the others and we proceed through the instance with a few minor inconveniences. Mostly murlocs…. Someone/something pulled half of the room with the murloc boss and I just didn’t have the ability yet to put out enough threat to keep em all on me. It seemed that no matter what I did, the pally ended up covered in things; the healer was pulling agro trying to keep both the pally and me healed. And when the pally died, the critters went after the priest instead of me. I finally discovered what it was.. Paladins have this ability that increases threat from holy spells by like 90% and he was running with that up the entire time. And pulling different mobs than what I was going to. We make it into the room with the braziers, I’m LOS pulling the blueberries and their masters back into the hallway, and he runs out and pulls the boss. We manage to keep it together and scrape a win tho. I asked him to either assume the tanking position totally, or turn off that ability and let me tank it… Things went much better after that.
The other oddity I faced was the hunter was in melee way too much. Turns out his bow was broken… ok, having had that happen from time to time, I can understand that, but what I couldn’t understand was why he didn’t port out, repair and port back… We decided to skip the underwater boss, and went on to kill the hydra. By then the group was following my direction fairly well, they discovered in the brazier room that I knew what was going on. We were making turtle soup left and right and then make it to the big guy and he goes down hard and fast. They did over agro me 3 times in the fight, but I was able to bring him back each time with a growl, FFF, and a maul or swipe. I got a lesser useful casting cloak from that sack of goodies. Tumultuous Cloak of the Sorcerer
After that I decided not to press my luck, and opted instead to finish up some westfall quests I had lying about, and then head over to stormwind and the plan was to go on to redridge after, but It was getting late.. All in all, Katt the second had a good night.
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Crime and punnishment
Well guys, this list goes out to the failpug i ran with the other night..
1. How Do You Catch a Unique Rabbit?
Unique Up On It.
2. How Do You Catch a Tame Rabbit?
Tame Way.
3. How Do Crazy People Go Through The Forest?
They Take The Psycho Path
4. How Do You Get Holy Water?
You Boil The Hell Out Of It
5. What Do Fish Say When They Hit a Concrete Wall?
Dam!
6. What Do Eskimos Get From Sitting On The Ice too Long?
Polaroid’s
7. What Do You Call a Boomerang That Doesn’t work?
A Stick
8. What Do You Call Cheese That Isn’t Yours?
Nacho Cheese
9. What Do You Call Santa’s Helpers?
Subordinate Clauses.
10. What Do You Call Four Bullfighters In Quicksand?
Quattro Sinko.
11. What Do You Get From a Pampered Cow?
Spoiled Milk.
12. What Do You Get When You Cross a Snowman With a Vampire?
Frostbite.
13. What Lies At The Bottom Of The Ocean And Twitches?
A Nervous Wreck.
14. What’s The Difference Between Roast Beef And Pea Soup?
Anyone Can Roast Beef.
15. Where Do You Find a Dog With No Legs?
Right Where You Left Him.
16. Why Do Gorillas Have Big Nostrils?
Because They Have Big Fingers.
17. Why Don’t Blind People Like To Sky Dive?
Because It Scares The Dog.
18. What Kind Of Coffee Was Served On The Titanic?
Sanka.
19. What Is The Difference Between a Harley And a Hoover?!
The Location Of The Dirt Bag.
20. Why Did Pilgrims’ Pants Always Fall Down?
Because They Wore Their Belt Buckle On Their Hat.
21. What’s The Difference Between a Bad Golfer And a Bad Skydiver?
A Bad Golfer Goes, Whack, Dang!
A Bad Skydiver Goes Dang! Whack.
22. How Are a Texas Tornado And a Tennessee Divorce The Same?
Somebody’s Gonna Lose A Trailer*
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Flailpugs are Us
I was trying to decide between simply commenting on BBB’s post, and writing my own. Over this long weekend I have been seeing a lot of the same attitudes as described elsewhere, So, I thought I would share my weekend’s experiences with the group.
As most of us know, I have a 1 month old in the house, which means without warning; I may have to absent myself from the computer for extended periods of time, I will be coming back to this later.
I was bored on Friday night, after we managed to get all the kids in bed. They had a long day of playing with all their new toys and having little blowups when one would take someone else’s “favorite” new toy from them. (3 girls ages 4, 5, 6…) The wife had lain down on the sofa with the infant and both were happily asleep and it was still early (for a gamer on Friday night that is.)
I decided instead of playing the elder katt, I would play katt jr over on BBB’s server. I had created her for the pink shirt event and have been playing her a little here and there ever since. As she’s only low 20’s, there’s not much in the way of talent points assigned, and for leveling I always tend to toss my first few points into resto for the clearcasting talent. (The name eludes me at the moment.) But, at low 20’s all you really need is plenty of armor and health to “tank” right? It’s not like you have any of your role defining talents yet. So I popped into the automatic headache interface, and signed up for a random dungeon for some nice level based loot. I figured I could handle any of the roles so I tagged all three healz, dps, and tank. Well, I woke up inside the instance as the tank, and we were in BFD. I had to oil the hinges on my old instance book to remember how this one worked, got used to all the outland and northrend stuff, and haven’t leveled anything up in a long while doing age appropriate instances.
Ok, so looking at the group we have, hmm, two mages, a warrior, and a priest. (Sounds like the start of a joke to me.) So, we start going along, and my poor memory makes a fool out of me. I get lost underwater on the way to the stupid turtle boss. But I finally get my furry butt on land in the right spot and we take him down easily enough. As we proceed deeper in and start getting small packs of naga, we start encountering some agro problems from the mages blasting away with blizzards. One of them pipes up and says “you need to be spamming swipe and nothing else, I waited 3 seconds before casting, you have enough time.” Right away, I decided not to like that mage.. (One’s lvl 21, the other 24, and at that point I think I was 21 as well.) But I manage to hold things together and not have any massive fails till we get to the leaky bridge out on the water. A runner I didn’t have rage enough to finish gets outta my range and wakes up another pack and I have more on me than I can handle. I’m the last one standing and have backed away so it’s safe to use my emergency trick. I keep shadowmeld on my button bar for just such an occasion. I’m out of combat, the critters reset, and I bring everyone back to life. Minor wipe emergency avoided… moving on. We get into the temple itself and start clearing the side trash; finally we are ready for the boss praying at the altar. I was about to pop enrage to build up some initial rage, knowing the mages as well as I already do. When I see a pyroblast slowly going across the screen. I growl the boss off the mage and we take him down. Then I flat out tell the group, if you pull like that again I will wait till the boss creams you before picking him up next time. The mage then gets defensive, naturally, I the swipe-bot had done the unthinkable and told him the mighty dps what to do… Well, he tells me my tanking sux and starts acting really nasty, I do a votekick and he’s gone. The other mage then says my tanking sux too and leaves.. ok fine by me, maybe I’ll get some people that know how to do single target damage to the target I’m attacking.. right? Well we get a shaman and another druid. Suits me..
In the meantime all the trash has respawned along the way, they can’t get to us so we start to run back to help them make it through. Somehow, I slipped on those wet rocks and found myself in the water under the temple with the loch ness monsters chewing on my butt. Eventually we all get back in and in the right place, when… The infant starts wailing loud enough to wake the dead. I tell the group I have to leave; luckily the other druid is a feral and is ok to finish the run.
Now, I know that wasn’t my best attempt at tanking, I had been hoping for stocks or something really easy that I could plow through without thinking. And at that stage my gear stinks and my spec doesn’t really especially endow me for tanking. But that early in the game it shouldn’t really matter anyway. But I did not expect to come across such rude little people hiding behind some silly little pixels. Not after the great pugs I have had, and even the not so great, but successful ones where it was more a matter of people not knowing what way to go.
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My late great uncle was a film maker out west, and was regarded as a reliable, competent producer. He would back in the day get a request for x number of movies running y length to act as fillers between feature films. Some of his best works actually grew a cult following. Here are a few of his best, should anyone like the old classic B movies. (not all of his movies are monster related tho.)
Mars Needs Women
Zontar: The thing from Venus
Goodbye, Norma Jean
The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald
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Missed it by that much….
For all the agent 52’s out there, We missed the optional boss in heroic strat by… That much.
He was within sight when the timer ran out. 
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Sorry for my absense folks
It’s been busy around here since we got our early christmas present. I hope to get back to playing and making posts soon. There just hasn’t been much time for sleep or playing lately.
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