[Local Time]

When I started out as a newspaper reporter, fresh out of college, my editor told me I'd need to write 8-10 stories a week. That was a daunting task; researching, interviewing, taking photos (it was a small paper :P), and editing 10 pieces a week was more work than I'd ever done. But really, it wasn't so bad. The paper ran five days a week (one of those rare small dailies), and each day my section had a different theme. Big feature Monday, economy Tuesday, Schools Wednesday, etc. So I'd write the story for my section. Then I'd write a column that gathered up all the small-town bits that weren't really big enough for their own story. Then I'd write a feature for the front page. And maybe I'd cover an event. My point is, by breaking down the overall task into smaller bits and focusing on those, the deadlines themselves weren't so daunting.

Enter [Local Time]

I'm trying to keep this blog active and this is one way I can do it. Each week (or so) I'll post a sort of roundup of the things I'm working on and that my guild is working on. I keep writing and I keep an idea of what kind of goals I was working toward and how close I am to finishing them.

This week I've pulled my trusty lock out of BC storage. She was my PvP character in the closing months before Wrath came out and so she sports a full set of epic PvP gear (this is back when the term "welfare epics" was coined). Now she worked her butt off to get these epics, don't get me wrong, but it's not nearly the work load we see in Arenas today. Mostly she was a battleground toon and I liked it that way.

Anyway, she was level 73 on Monday and she's level 77 today. Big jump! A full rested exp bar and all the heirloom items I can get my hands on sure does help :). Unfortunately, I dropped Affliction and picked up Destruction. I say unfortunately because I have a great love for Affliction. Or at least I used to. I leveled Affliction all the way to 70 and then kept it up through the months of battlegrounds PvP. But I didn't play her much at all during Wrath (about two levels over the course of the xpac, total), so I know this is news to no one but me, but I miss all the instant dots that differentiated that spec. It's become less about the instant casts and more about lining up Drain Soul and Drain Life. And that's not really the spec I want to play. Destruction feels much more like what I'm used to, where I cast one or two spells with a cast time and finish off the rest with instants that really do damage. I suppose dots don't tick as hard as they used to. Ah well.

Who would get rid of these if they had the choice?!

She's still wearing her Vengeful Gladiator's Felweave Cowl, though. For those of you who either didn't play during BC or have forgotten the awesome, that's the purple demon wings. Every so often they flare out, flap, and then disappear. It's a really random but exceptionally cool animation that I am reluctant to give up. I've seen upgrades, but right now it's still not worth it to give up the cool factor. Probably once I hit 80 I'll let it go.

On the guild front, we're making serious progress! 7/12 is, I think, our official progression. This week we downed Maloriak and the Twilight Ascendant Council and I'm really proud. We came into both fights knowing the encounters (we spent last week beating our heads against both), but without a whole lot of upgraded gear throughout the raid. Either we were totally on our A game or the stars aligned (or both :P), but we were able to make the interrupts stick on the potion guy and we got all four Twilight Ascendants to right around 25% before the third phase.

We took a look at Cho'gall and tried to figure him out a bit, but we didn't really get that far with only 30 minutes left in the raid. Hopefully we'll get him down next week.

We've been plagued by DCs and bad lag on Tuesdays the last two weeks. I wonder if that's a sign from Blizz?

Goals

This coming week I want to get my lock to 82. I figure it's doable and probably easier solo than duoing (and I think I want to blog about making quests harder to do in a group :\). Hopefully I won't run out of rested and I'll still have time left over for flask farming.

Sell those Darkmoon cards! I have a stash of several leftovers from making the pieces of my Tsunami deck. The Darkmoon Faire is coming in a week, which means prices will only go up. I'd like to make some cash on these while I have the chance since the prices on them will continue to go down each month as more and more people get their decks.

Kill Atramedes and Cho'gall! That may be a little far-fetched, but right now I'm still riding high on getting two new kills this week. At least one of them should be doable, I'm just not sure which :P. I suppose it'll depend on which bosses we kill first and what our raid leader decides to do on our progression night.

Until next week, good luck!

My dirty little secret

Hi everyone. My name's Raevyn and I'm an addon addict.

This is the exact opposite of my husband, who has Omen, DBM, and not much else. I laugh about my penchant for latching onto new addons along with everyone else, but it's not something I'm looking to fix. Around once every month a new addon will catch my eye or an old one will show me something new, and I'll frantically go about changing my UI to make it better. Unlike other addictions, my addon addiction is keyed toward making my life (in this case my gaming experience) better. For the most part, my addons reflect that.

Back in the early days of EverQuest, I tried to work with addons. They were cumbersome, gangly things that didn't really do much besides alter the appearance of your UI. I tried with four of five different styles but I could never get them to function well in the game. I think part of it is that Sony made modifying your UI a herculean effort, so few people used mods and fewer still made them. Blizzard has done just the opposite, making UI modification a cottage industry that's open to anyone with a little time and a clear idea of what they want to do.

Players can change the look of their bars, their maps, their buttons, their raid frames, their chat, their buffs, add timers, overlays, extra buttons, frames that indicate distances, aggro, healing done, damage done, and more! At the end of the day, with some time spent searching sites like Curse or WoW Interface your UI can look however you want it to. The problem, of course, is where do you stop?

My answer: I don't.

The shot above is pretty crowded. My Vuhdo bars are in the middle and my buffs take up a hefty chunk of space along the side while my bars crowd the bottom. I have countdown bars seemingly all over the place and healing done and received scrolls over the other spots. This is actually better than it used to be. I searched for a screenshot of an early UI compilation. I remember it well. My Grid bars were nearly an inch wide per raider and extended over half my screen. With everything else bumping up against that, I had a very small box in the middle that was my view of my character. I could see the fire so I could get out of it, but very little else.

The difference between then and now is pretty big.

Recently I went through and updated my UI to make it less cluttered and easier to see everything. I moved my player and target frames to the center of the screen under my character and took a lot of my superfluous buttons (the two blocks of bars on the left) and made them show up only when I moused over them, and not in combat at all. Then the bits that I need in combat, like healthstones and potions, I put on the other side of the screen. They only show up while I'm in combat. Overall, it's a lot easier to play with.

I use a lot of addons. I enjoy using them because each of them serves a purpose for me.

Vuhdo The big debate between Vuhdo and Healbot and Grid will rage indefinitely. I just don't really tend to get into it. I like what Vuhdo can do with hot placement. It's easy to configure and customize. Although I don't use it, I could easily configure it to use click healing. It's got a lot of features I don't use, but I'm ok with that. I'm comfortable with it. I used Grid for a long time, but eventually having to update two or three addons to get what I had in one, along with the easier to maneuver interface, led me away from Grid. My only real experience with Healbot was in BC and I didn't use it for long. I hear it's a very good addon. When people ask what they should use, I recommend Vuhdo, but I amend it with a caveat to use what they like. Every healer is different.

Shadowed UF I use this addon on every one of my characters. The amount of information you can display (or not display) on player, target, target of target, target of target of target, and boss frames is amazing. All I need is bars with numbers. This addon gives me bars with numbers, and I can say which bars have which numbers. For example, the percentage on the mana/energy/rage bar on my target is actually their percentage of health, rather than their percentage of power. I find that easier to look at than having another number up with the boss health numbers.

Prat A basic chat frame addon. I like class names in chat. I like to know the level of the person I'm talking to. I like having time stamps on whispers. Prat does all these things simply and effectively.

Bartender4 Gotta mod the buttons up! I use this to help unclutter my macros and to make the cool clusters of buttons that only show up in combat or on mouseover. Great for getting things out of the way and easy to configure my preferences for keybinds.

Quartz Everyone's go-to cast bar. I use it to show my own and my target's cast bars and the spells they're casting. Useful, functional, unintrusive.  I love it.

Tidy Plates/Threat Plates I totally grabbed this from Big Bear Butt's tanking guide when I was learning how to tank and now I totally love it for healing and my DPS characters as well. If you're a tank, the nameplates are green when mobs are aggroed on you. If you're not, the nameplates are green when mobs aren't aggroed on you. Perfect for fights like Omnitron Defense System where it's kind of important to know if an ooze is attached to me and if so, which one. I thought having nameplates in my face would be annoying, but I've embraced them. I can see mob health, aggro, and a cast bar for things I don't have targeted at a glance.

Satrina Buff Frames I've heard this is going the way of the dodo and I'm extremely sad. SBF is a huge asset, letting me move my buff frames from up top to a smaller list along the left side. Recently I've configured it to paste a big column showing the buffs (hostile) or debuffs (friendly) of my target. This makes it easier to figure out when it's more effective to use our now-expensive dispels and when the boss is about to start hitting extra hard.

ForteXorcist I used to use SO many of this addons cool features, but nowadays I really only use the cooldown bar. I've since moved the bar back down to the right hand side under my Skada frame, so the screenshot above isn't entirely accurate. It lets me watch how close my cooldowns are to being ready again. I suppose I could add a set of Power Auras to do the same thing, but I still like my bar. It stays for now.

Chinchilla Map This makes my map square on two sides and round on two sides. It also tells me who is pinging the map and what my map coordinates are. It can do other things that I'm not interested in. But that may change. I have been known to go back and make use of old features when I get a wild hair to do so :P.

Mik Scrolling Battle Text This is the addon I'd most like to either replace or get rid of. I like seeing my healing numbers, knowing what's coming in, but I'm not entirely sure it's not just background noise getting lost in the ocean of the raid environment. I haven't seen anything better yet, though, so right now it teeters on the edge of oblivion.

Power Auras Classic This is my current favorite addon. It does a little bit of everything if you take the time to configure it. It can also make your screen look like a complete mess.

Don't try this at home! Actually, do, it's funny to see all your various timers and auras up all at once and try to pick them apart. I have auras that tell me when my Wildgrowth and Swiftmend are off cooldown, when the haste buff from Nature's Grace is active and for how long, how long my Omen of Clarity has to run (thanks to Keeva at TBJ), how long my tree form has left, and then that cluster in the middle are mostly get-out-of-crap warnings for the Twilight Ascendant Council fight (thanks to Beru at Falling Leaves and Wings). There's also a couple that show me the number of Lacerate stacks I have up as a bear. Power Auras is imminently versatile and definitely a mod I use for many, many things.


Skada Probably my newest addon, Skada replaces the functionality of both Omen and Recount, acting as an aggro table during combat and a damage/healing done table out of it. I can track individual fights and Skada comes with absorbs built into the healing numbers, which gives me a better picture of disc priest output.

DBM/Spell Timers Duh, who doesn't use this (or its cousin BigWigs) for raiding? Get out of the bad, here comes the big boss strike, everybody turn away from the boss RIGHT NOW -- it tells you all that and more. I also download DBM Spell Timers (from the DBM site) so that I can see when druid innervates and brezes are up along with the cooldown on heroism. More useful to have in a 25-man raid, but still nifty. If something HAD to go and I'd already ditched MSBT, I'd probably get rid of the spell timers next.

I guess my point in listing all these addons is that they have a purpose (mostly). I'm fully addicted to making modifications to my UI in order to improve my game. I try new things, put them into practice, and if they work, I keep them. If they fall flat (as so many have), then I ditch them. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Hi, my name is Raevyn and I'm an addon addict. And I feel fine :).

A little help from my friends

I mentioned last time about raiding and the niggly part of me that feels like I'm not doing enough to be prepared because of my responsibilities as a parent that come first. But I neglected to mention something very important: I'm getting to raid. And this is entirely because of the kindness of the eight or so other people I raid with.

See, at the tender age of 6 months Vivi finally decided she could go to sleep at a regular time, right about 9pm, each night. That's great, except before she was born, our raids started at 8pm. I was prepared to alternate raid nights with my husband, Grundle, to put the baby to sleep at the right time, respec as a bear as necessary (hence my numerous posts about tanking :P), and pretty much abase myself before these people to keep my raid spot as much as I could. But I didn't have to because they are awesome.

Instead, my raid completely changed the raid schedule to fit mine. We now raid three nights a week from 9:30 to 11:30, sometimes pushing midnight on Fridays. And all of us are pretty happy with it.

I know that everyone would probably like to push the raid schedule back toward 8, but right now Vivi is still stuck firmly at a 9pm bedtime (and since she wakes up at 5:30 to 6am each morning, I'd rather not push that wake up time any earlier if I can help it). We get our farm content down, though, and have at least a full raid day, if not more, for working on new stuff. It's a really nice balance and I am completely content with it.

I am also continually amazed that my guild is willing to do this for Grundle and I, to keep us raiding with them. It's really sweet and shows me just how much we mean to the rest of the raid.

Since we joined the guild at the end of BC our friendships and attachments have continually grown and that is awesome. I love being a part of this guild and when the guild we'd all joined decided to stop raiding and we put together our own raid team for Cata, it felt like a very natural progression. Of course we'd all stay together. Just like we had throughout Wrath.

So despite my complaints, which are entirely about my own failings and mental blocks, I'm having a really great time raiding in Cataclysm because of my friends. Thanks. I owe you big time :).

Me and my raiding buddies with our rustbound drakes, back when getting rustbound drakes was cool!

Back in action!

A funny thing happened on the way to the blog post... Life, mostly. I got bogged down with baby stuff and then Cataclysm dropped and then the holidays hit me and now we're focused on raiding and, well, I kept putting things off. I'm good at that.

Anyway, I'm back now :).

Mostly I'm back because I find myself having things to say again. I'm getting to actually play with the new mechanics and talents and that feels a lot better (and more useful) than just speculating about them. And we've got a new patch coming up that's going to change things yet again! Whee.

Mana

I'm not as bad off as I thought I'd be. Or rather I'm not as bad off as I was when we started raiding. It took the hubby (pally tank) and I about three days to hit 85. My mother (saint that she is) came up the week the xpac hit and babysat for us so we could pretty much play non-stop. Unfortunately, the baby still requires a lot of attention from me, so it wasn't as constant as it could have been. In the meantime, we sort of fell behind the gear curve. By the time the guild started raiding that next Monday (about a month ahead of what I thought we would be!), I still hadn't even gotten into my first heroic dungeon.

It felt horrible. Just absolutely horrible. I was OOM after Innervate, Mana Tide, and a pot and there was literally nothing else I could do to gain mana besides sit there. I felt crushed and useless. But gear fixes many things.

Since then I've enchanted, gemmed, and reforged for a lot of spirit, run a number of heroic dungeons, and picked up a lot of epic gear from raids. And I feel pretty good about it, overall. Last night we downed Halfus Wyrmbreaker and I ended the fight at almost full mana (in large part because of ToL). I'm getting out of my mana dry spell and I'll probably ease up on the spirit scale. Throughput will start being more important now that I've got the hang of how the fights work and I think on the later bosses in the zones it won't be as big a deal to be nearly OOM at the end of a fight.

Tree of Life

I miss it. Mostly it's the aesthetics of it (I have the glyph for the old form), but I really identified with being a "tree" and having to spend most of my time as a boring old nelf is a little depressing. I realize that Blizz had sort of designed themselves into a corner. Tree form didn't do anything but make us on-par healers with the other three healing classes and a lot of those bonuses could just as easily be rolled into our Restoration talents, and most of them have been. I just wish the form itself could have been repurposed in a better way than as a cooldown. I want to be a tree again. It's hard to find myself in raids now :P.

On the other hand, I have had a lot of fun learning how to use the ToL cooldown. I can juggle two lifebloom stacks fairly well most of the time and it really does save a LOT of mana. On our first Halfus Wyrmbreaker kill (back before Christmas when our gear was just so-so) I managed it for the first time for most of the duration of the fight. It saved so much mana through Omen of Clarity procs that I had more than half mana by the end of the fight, which was a real feat at the time. Now I just have to figure out how to work it into various fights rather than just popping it randomly.

Overall I miss the old form. I would give anything (including the new cooldown) to get it back. Not that I don't like the new cooldown mechanic, but I feel like the essence of my healer identity has sort of fallen away.

Patch 4.0.6

So lots of changes are coming to trees in this next patch, a lot of them nerfs. The nerf to Mana Tide will hit us (but since I didn't have any on-use spirit trinkets, it won't be so bad) and the change to Omen of Clarity will, too. The change where multiple stacks of Lifebloom can no longer be maintained sorta sucks. I enjoyed the challenge of that mechanic, because it's not one you can just step into. We're getting a mana cost reduction to Rejuv and some changes to make Regrowth more attractive, so that's a nice step in the direction of making us HoT-centric healers again. I don't think I've cast Healing Touch so much since vanilla :P.

I have to admit that I haven't been taking advantage of Nature's Grace. The increased cast speed is awesome, but I just haven't been casting Regrowth that much. Making it so that the spell also refreshes Lifebloom stacks means I'll have more of a reason to use it on Omen of Clarity procs. Speaking of Omen of Clarity, I've seen the numbers and while I agree that we will be getting fewer procs (and thusly less theoretical mana regen), I also have a lot of procs go unused. And since my most constant HoT has been Lifebloom anyway, I think I'll still be getting my fair share of OOC hits. Reducing the mana cost of Rejuv and giving us a cast speed buff on Nourish when there's three of them up, making Regrowth also refresh Lifebloom, and the change to Omen will, I think, give trees a lot more casting options. I like having somewhat complex mechanics. I think Swiftmend is an amazingly fun spell, and coupling that with our only instant-cast that takes advantage of Omen of Clarity means that I really think about it before I cast it. Now I'll also be weaving Rejuvs in to get faster casts of Nourish and throwing Regrowths out for very fast tank heals that will also take advantage of my mastery (which is also getting a buff).

I think the biggest disappointment for me is the loss of the multi-stack maintenance mechanic on Lifebloom. It's a complicated (again, a plus for me) thing to keep track of and do right. I feel like I've really accomplished something when I do so. But not everybody does like and not everybody can or wants to do that, which is why Blizz is not making it an option anymore. Otherwise they'd have to design encounters and mana regen around tree druids being able to do so, and that's sorta unfair. Still, I like the concept and I wish they could implement it in some other way.

Not your mama's expansion

I have been feeling really down in the dumps this whole xpac so far. And I can totally see why but there's also very little I can do. 

I have a baby. I love her dearly. She's walking and starting to babble a lot. She can pick things up and hand them to me and she smiles almost constantly and she's a tremendous torment to our dog, which is hilarious. But she also requires my constant attention. I knew this was coming and I accept it as part of parenting. When she goes to school, I'll have a little more time to myself. But right now it's all her, all the time. 

So when I do finally get to sit down and play WoW in the evenings, I'm behind. Most days I don't get a chance to do a daily heroic. She naps two to three times a day for an hour or so each, but I can't reliably finish a heroic in that time frame, so I refrain. I farm herbs or archeology or quest. I'm not where I was, gear-wise, at this point in Wrath. I'm desperately trying to get either Darkmoon Card: Tsunami or Tyrande's Favorite Doll. One requires lots of archeology, one requires lots of herbing. Both require a lot of luck. But for the card, I can influence luck with cash.

I think my point is that I want to play more and I can't. I want to farm for the things I want and need, but I can't. I want to improve my gear outside of raids, but I can't to the extent that I want to. I am frustrated by this both because I'm being denied something that I want and because I'm wanting something that, if I were to indulge, would potentially harm my child. Leaving a 10-month-old relatively unsupervised in the house is going to cause damage to the things in it and maybe to the little girl, depending on what she gets into. And I don't want that.

My best coping mechanism so far is to back off. I don't play WoW every time she takes a nap because it just reinforces my unhappiness. I go to raids and I don't compare gear with other healers (fortunately I'm the only tree or this would be much worse :P). I do my best and we're succeeding. Or at least not failing because of a lack of gear on my part.

I don't think I was ever HARD CORE, but I was certainly a lot less casual than I am now. And I definitely feel that. I have to learn to deal with that and it's a struggle. I have more boundaries than I did before. But it's my hope that I'm still as good a player as I used to be. Because I really believe skill can make up for a lack of gear and I intend to prove it.