Several things...

I haven't posted any art lately, so have a shot of my sketchbook.

There've been several successive guild dramas lately, and it eventually culminated in a mistaken transferal of GM-ship and said person then proceeded to ninja most of the guild bank about one hour later. Two of our best dps have left for another guild, our original GM may not be back for two weeks while they sort out his account, and the merge with that other guild has pretty much failed. The whole story is long and I'm not really at liberty to talk about it here. In short, I probably won't be raiding aside from the lucky PUG.

I can't say I'm too happy about this; but of course, no one would be. I told myself I'd post as little guild drama on this blog as possible, but because of the outcome of this recent spat, I find myself unable to raid and therefore possibly unable to maintain content.

My characters' futures are still currently unsure. I've long considered the current content "boring", so it may be worthwhile to take a break while things sort themselves out, and with patch 3.1 coming soon it may be the right time to do that. But if the guild doesn't reform itself, I may delve into arena or something else. But in the meantime I'm not sure.


In other news, I spiffed up Tora's UI a bit. It was largely inspired by one of Ishtara's old, unuploaded uis, but one which I've always really really liked. I finally managed to pin down that castbar-in-powerbar look too! And it really looks awesome. But sadly I may not be able to raid on it for a while. Who knows?

I have too many buttons!

I see so many UIs (not even Hunter specific ones) that are cluttered with buttons, and I cringe inside. I'll admit it's no small feat to fit all your essential skills into two or even one and a half bars, but folks, it is possible.

That screenshot you see up there is one I had when I first dinged 70 and started raiding Kara for the first time. Fellow Hunters, you can probably make out what skills are on those bars. Looking back on it, I feel rather silly for having them there at all. Eagle Eye? Holy crap who uses that anymore?! See the icon next to Dismiss Pet? That used to be Ye Olde pet training window.

Later, when I was starting to look at minimalist UIs and reducing my buttons, one of the mods that helped make the transition easier was AutoBar. It works a charm right out of the box, with buttons for your Aspects, tracking, potions, professions and other things. Eventually as I got the hang of having less buttons on screen, I got rid of it altogether.

Of course, the one-button-tracking change from a few patches ago has helped with this. I'm not sure if anyone else remembers, but you used to be able to only change tracking from the buttons, instead of a drop down menu from the minimap.

Here's a few tips to help get your actionbars in shape.

• Remove Auto Attack and Auto Shoot from your numbered bars. With Auto Shot being unlinked, you don't have to worry about clipping anymore!
• Bind your most used abilities to where it is accessible with one hand. Things like Steady Shot, Serpent Sting, Explosive/Arcane Shot and Aimed/Multi Shot should all be within reach easily to facilitate an effecient rotation. It'll be easy on your hands too!
• Get rid of things you don't use. Aspect of the Wild? Check.
  
• Create bars that will only appear when you hover over them. Things you only use occasionally, but often enough to warrant a hotkey should come under this category. Profession panels, your Hearthstone, mounts and consumables are good examples.
  

UI ramblings

I've been itching to make a new UI on Toshi recently, and last night due to sheer boredom, I finally decided to do it.

It's still got most of the elements in the same place, but I did change my raid frames to Grid (just for looks) and switched the layouts on the unit frames. It was inspired largely by Mutiney and Skullflower's UIs which I found from posts in WoW's UI & Macros forum.

I'm largely pleased with it, overall. There are a few things that bother me, like the cast bars, and some of the actionbar placements, but I have no idea what to do with them for now.

I also redid Tora's tanking UI, but it looks too much like her old UI which I got sick of, so I might not keep it after all.

Tora's UI

Back when I first brought Tora into Northrend, she had a very drab, plain UI. Stuck at level 69, I didn't have much resolve to level her at alll.

Then one day, I saw a screenshot of a beautiful UI and it inspired me to make what you see here. I spent a lot of time on the eepanels, especially the Recount and Omen ones. To this day the OmenBorderTop still gives me problems and I have to change it every time I log in... but it's so worth it.

Oh, one of the mods I forgot to mention in the previous post...

OmniCC, for tracking cooldowns. I used to use CooldownCount, but found that OmniCC put the cooldown on debuffs in Pitbull as well, which is highly useful for timing Rake/Mangle/Rip reapplications.

Anyway, Tora finally (FINALLY!) got Staff of Trickery from Violet Hold tonight. The Naxx10 guild alt run we did was also pretty productive, I got me some shoulders, a kitty 2h mace, and a very nice chest. My avoidance is up about 2 or 3%, and health increased by 1k, which I am very pleased about.

Incidentally, I ran as kitty dps in the Violet Hold run that got me that staff. Pulled about 1.8-1.9k dps, came 2nd place just shy of the Death Knight, which I'm very happy about. All that reading about kitty dps rotations has really paid off, I think. Didn't do too well on Cyanigosa herself due to an actionbar malfunction though, but I'm really not too fussed.

Overall, Tora's feral dps and tanking sets are coming along awesomely. Hope next week's Naxx10 run is just as good. WTB set bonus! (legs, hands and helm would be nice) :3

Speaking of UIs...

Pike's recent post about her UI just reminded me that I was about to do one of those eventually. I'm one of those who will spend hours tinkering with things like eePanels to get just the right look, so I take pride in showing off screenshots of them, usually.

And yes, I love the look of minimalistic UIs. I try to keep things as simple as possible, but at the same time trying to have utility and just the right amount of information avaliable on screen.

I've been running that UI (and various iterations of it...) for several months now. It started out largely inspired by Rayne's Burnt Black Cherry Lite in BC, and over the months I've changed little things about it but managed to have it retain the same general feel.

Here's a little "progress montage".

Anyway, here's a quick and comprehensive addon list.

Pitbull, the one UnitFrame mod to rule them all. When I first started adding addons, of course XPerl was the first one I went to for unitframes. But after looking at a few shiny minimalistic ones on various sites, I was drawn to Pitbull. It may not be as easy to configure as XPerl out-of-the-box, but it has a ton of features and configurations. You could literally spend hours figuring out what does what. And when it comes down to looks, it does so very efficiently.

MikScrollingBattleText, or MSBT. I was initially using SCT, until patch 3.0 hit and suddenly my screen was flooded with a floating wall of green healing text, thanks to the new Bloodthirsty pet talent. Our GM at the time was also talking about MSBT, so I decided to give it a go, and haven't looked back since. It is much more customisable than SCT, especially the size of the text columns, which was my problem with SCT. All in all, a very useful mod.

eePanels, the mod that lets me put that delicious 1px white border on my unitframes. I've been told to update to KGPanels, and I did try it once, but it had too many settings and I wasn't in the mood at the time. :P I may go back and give it a go, but for the moment eePanels is the one for me. If you're interested in trying out making some art with eePanels, there's a brilliant tutorial on omgphatloots.

SL Data Text, text mod that shows various stats. I've been seeing UI screenshots that had durability, gold, fps, etc. in text along the bottom and was wondering for ages what it was before I finally stumbled across a post that listed it. It's really handy in that you can put whatever data you want, wherever you want it. I can't have a UI without this mod.

As for the others, well, they're pretty standard really.
Dominos for actionbars
Recount, Omen and DBM
FuBar
Atlasloot
Chinchilla for minimap
Bison for buffs/debuffs
Prat for chatlog
Quartz casting bar
Aloft for nameplate modification
ButtonFacade
oRA2 for maintank targets
You'll be able to find all these mods over at WoWInterface.

I'll post one of my druid tomorrow, since she uses a completely different UI.