UI tastiness.

So I haven’t mentioned this but for the duration of Yas’s healing career, I’ve gone through a few computers or so. The first was a poor laptop that was ill-equipped for handling anything graphically intense and resulted in hours of staring at a poor resolution, low fps game on dialup no less. I’m surprised I didn’t turn into a murderous psychopath but I had some support and eventually got a technically superior if somewhat used desktop. This computer served me well except for the fact that its innards were slowly deteriorating and a few months ago showed signs of its impending need for retirement. So I had this computer for a long stretch of time until finally I was afraid that it would die and I was able to get a job where I could save enough to get a brand new computer.

Now where am I going with this? Well my old computer had a really cruddy resolution. Half the time I couldn’t use anything higher than 800×600 for fear of random crashes and freezes. This, naturally, led to a really constrained UI which you can see a few posts back. And being a healer, my screen real estate was virtually nil half the time. Once I started tanking on my druid, I realized just how much of WoW I’d been missing. What do I pull? What does this boss do again? And now I went from not noticing the instances to not really being able to see anything past my large posterior.

But now, with a 19 inch widescreen monitor, I can see again! I can actually design a UI I like and not try to squeeze in everything. It’s glorious.

And now I present my current UI (a work still in progress):

Listed above (and hastily drawn in mspaint):

1) X-Perl Unit Frames – I wanted to get away from Pitbull and ended up going back to these. I’m not quite happy with it , so if anyone has any suggestion for a unit frames alternative that is not Pitbull, I’m happy to try it out.

2) Chatter – A chat mod.

3) Simple Minimap

4) Autobar – Convenience! Laziness!

5) Dominos – Like Bartender, highly customizable action bars.

6) Fortress with several LDB mods such as Statblock_coords, PicoGuild and others.

7) Elkano’s Buff Bars – There are more minimal mods out there, but I like the look and predictability of this one.

8 ) TourGuide – So I cheat and take convenient and efficient quest routes, kill me XD

9)  Omen Threat Meters – Even healers need to watch it!

10) Smart Buff – I hardly use the buff portion but the Debuff part (that I seem to have lost) is great for keeping track of who needs decursing or dispelling in a timely and easy way.

11) Recount – Healing e-peen. Or not.

Not labeled:

- EE Panels – for that nice little black background to keep your messy addons looking spiffy.

It’s a scaled down version of what I’ve had before which was way overloaded and half the time I didn’t know what I had.  But I do think I have a fair amount more space than I did before. I still need to see if I can stand to scale things down more or just try again from scratch XD But! It’s fun having a computer that can handle WoW for once.

Oh how time flies.

So this weekend was full of nostalgia and new things. I went to do an AQ 40 run with my priest and while we weren’t able to nab a full clear, I was very happy to have seen it at all in the first place.

Pic or it didn’t happen

Later in the weekend we also did a full clear of ZA with chests and all that done. It pleases me when I don’t die several times over. It’s a running joke in my guild that it’s not a raid until Yasura dies…at least once. I’m just a klutz in-game is all. *shifty eyes* Fortunately I usually have stellar tanks and have trained myself in the art of “listening to the big kaboom Omen sound so I can fade like the trained monkey I am”. And then fading anyhow when the cooldown is up. Did I mention I really like Fade?

Anywho, Kadomi’s post recently about nooblet-Kadomi made me nostalgic and I went to dig around my screenshots folder. Alas, I lost most of my early WoW screenshots but I do have at least a few from the tail end of 2006.

My UI, then and now: (Some things will never change >.<)

Yea it made my eyes bleed too

Yea, oww.

And here is Yasura today. Her trademark Troll mohawk is on vacation but I’m sure it’ll make a re-appearance soon.

Note: She is neither rolling in the money or managing yours.

And as a bonus, nothing strokes my ego more than being needed by everyone unexpectedly: