Latest UI

So, here we have it... Von UI revision... oh f**k, I have no idea how many times I've changed it!

New changes since last time aren't really that drastic. Some tighter packing together of action bars to regain screen real-estate, and a separating out of a dedicated "group" chat window from everything else. The group window clusters all guild, party, raid, whisper, emotes, etc, together. Everything else, like loot, experience gains, trade channel, etc, remains on the general tab on the RHS of the screen there. Of more interest, I can have the combat tab and the party/raid chatter both up at the same time.

Ventrillo Enabled

A-Von moved across to Aman'Thul last week, because, let's face facts... WoWCrack without friends is just an overcomplicated variant on the First-Person Shooter. The move has been a good call. With the server operating in prime Aussie playing time, there are actually people around. BGs and Instances pop without much of a wait, and WG is just plain full-on:



I'm hoping to experience some premade PvP action. Nothing to report on that score yet, but I'm not really trying just yet either. On that score, I've spotted the occasional premade forming with the request for peeps to join Vent.

Now.. I run Ubuntu natively, so the answer to this dilemma for me involves installing wine and Vent to run within Wine. There is a bit of a trick to getting it working, which involves unticking the "Use Direct Sound" checkboxes:



I gave it a bit of a burl last night with Guildies, and it seems to be doing the trick. Now to get over the introversion when the next premade forms...

Feeding Vandar the hordies... one toon at a time.

So, it's been an AV Holiday weekend, which means Honor galore, and very small queue times. Which has been excellent for upgrading A-Von's kit. Over the course of the weekend, I've developed a love of defending Vandar (A disturbing number of losses where I'm sure they picked up the Blitz achievement).

So.. here's the basic approach. Stand way back in Vandar's room, death-grip then chains of ice the first to step into the room, rinse and repeat. Now, it doesn't really matter if they decide to rush, but they gotta get over the headspace first of "Oh god, I just got pwned by Van and friends".

There's only one charge in this death grip, but which one o'you sons-a-biatches wants it?

H-Von taking a new path

So, My Horde Vonmalefic has seen me decide to take a radical departure from my "familiar" keyboard layout. Unfortunately, now that the Arena Season has just ticked over, A-Von can get lots of PvP upgrades. It's time to align both layouts (or remain VERY confused). Here's how H-Von currently looks:



Salient points changed:

• The combat ability bars are now smaller, and laid out visually close to the centre of the screen, so I can keep a better eye on cooldowns with the peripheral vision.
  
  
• Protective abilities, such as CC breakers and damage absorbers are all now clustered together.
  
  
• All things that inflict CC are now clustered together, and tied to mouse buttons (with a shift key modifier).
  

Macro Madness

I've embraced the dark side, and rolled a Tauren Death Knight on Barthilas. His name is... Vonmalefic. *shrug*

I'm taking a bit of a different approach this time. I'm not going with the macro madness that I did with A-Von. Still, here are some notes on what I did, just in case I ever want to go back to the macro madness approach.

First off, here is an example showcasing the general form:

#show
#showtooltip
#/cast [nomod:shift] Death Strike; [mod:shift] Obliterate

Generally, I try to put the more likely to be used ability as the "nomod" one, and pair up abilities that are somehow similar. Here's the current list (heavily weighted around the blood talent tree):

• Death Strike/Obliterate (both cost one unholy and 1 frost rune)
  
  
• Heart Strike/Blood Strike (Both cost 1 blood rune. Being single-target, Blood Strike would seem to be a good PvP choice, but even with glyph buffs, Heart Strike comes out on top in DPS output, regardless. Thanks for the heads-up Reubs!)
  
  
• Death and Decay/Blood Boil (differing rune costs, but both AoE, with D&D putting out more damage, and needing to be "placed", which makes it unattractive when also using a shift modifier)
  
  
• Empower Rune Weapon/Blood Tap (ERW is more useful, but they both serve to get me a little more bang for buck WRT rune cooldowns).
  
  
• Raise Dead/Army of the Dead (both call ghoul(s), but RD has a smaller cooldown, making it more frequently reusable)
  

So what am I doing instead? Taking advantage of Bartender 4's paging mechanism. In my naive reasoning, macros probably require more client-side CPU cycles to crunch. Ok, I admit it... it's more just trying to go deeper with BT4.