Two weeks of Dragon Soul runs since returning to WoW after a two month Skyrim/whatever break and I manage to snag 5/5 pieces of Tier 13. Nice. This almost makes up for 6 years of bad rolls. Also, if you were in that one run with me where I broke the one item per run rule and won two of the armor tokens, I'm sorry :(, trigger happy.

I like the raid finder; It's simple to use and gets people who wouldn't normally have the opportunity to raid (or like myself, don't have the time to participate in a regular schedule and don't want to sit in LFG all night), into the new content with minimal hassle and server drama.

Success! It looks like we are actually going be able to go this year! I was number 700 in queue, a marked improvement over last year's position at 5k. The maximum number of tickets allowed per transaction was reduced from 5 to 4 this year, which probably helped a little bit as well as the Internet Gods being extraordinarily kind to me this morning. Also, I am sure that having literally only Google Chrome open with absolutely no one else and no other application sucking bandwidth out of the networked helped as well. We were all on Vent and WoW when tickets went on sale last year.

I really wish that the ticket price wouldn't keep creeping up, but whatever. Looking forward to meeting up with folks and what not in late October :D.

I'm getting the WoW itch (and the blog itch) again. I haven't been playing all that much for the past month or so, in lieu of other game releases, real life business and the like. In fact, we just got around to finally running Zul'Aman tonight (one of my absolute favorite raid instances back in the day, glad it's back in the game).

Is it just me or does the 60 to 90 day mark seem to be the make or break point for most new MMORPGs? That span of time seems to be the period in which most of the converts either get bored of or burned out on the new game and start trickling back to old WoW habits. Though, if you truly do play that MMO consistently for about a month or so, that's actually not a bad value in terms of time:money. A month of solid play isn't bad for $60, considering how most games nowadays are at about 10 hours of gameplay if you are lucky, some significantly less (or more if you count multiplayer I guess).

The market is pretty saturated with fantasy MMOs to say the least. Do we really need more of them? I would absolutely love a good future themed game (with relatively fast paced action). Word is that Blizzard's next-gem MMO, "Titan" will be sci-fi themed. If there is a game that I will consider replacing my WoW habit with, it would probably be that. And honestly, Blizzard is probably the only company that's going to outdo Blizzard. That's my 2 coppers on other MMOs for the time being.

Also, on an unrelated WoW note: I am kind of a backseat tank ಠ_ಠ; Not in group of course because that's fucking rude. Most of my in-head and whisper conversations to certain people have been inane concerns about the current PuG tank, how they fail at threat generation, fail at marking, etc. Though in my defense, we really do have horrible luck with PuG tanks. Properly marking mobs and assigning targets is a lost art apparently. I should learn to tank again, it would make our queue times shorter.

A couple of people have requested my UI setup, so here you all go; Many apologies for the uuuh delay lol. A full description of KeUI is included in this post. This interface has been exclusively designed for and used on a 1920x1080 windowed setup. It should however, still work properly with any windowed 16:9 ratio screen resolution.

As a word of warning, I don’t play anything else other than Keiya most of the time so my interface is very retribution paladin centric (though I am looking into more class generic addons to replace things like Holytrinity and clcret). If anyone else uses a Logitech G13 and is interested in how I bind everything in accordance with my G13 profile, the keybindings configuration files are included within the WTF folder.

Installation Instructions
I sanitized all of the addon profiles as best as I could. After a fresh install, the correct profiles for each mod should load without having to fuss around with Reflux. If you want to use your Config.wtf file, just make sure to set the following values:

SET gxResolution "1920x1080""
SET gxWindow "1"
SET uiScale "0.76999998092651"

Aside from that, setup is standard fair. I have included general instructions below; If you need more assistance, Tankspot has one of the better guides that I have seen in regards to uploading, downloading and configuring custom UI setups.

1. Please please please make sure to backup your original Interface, WTF and Fonts folders. Both are located within your World of Warcraft root directory. Either rename both of these folders to something like, WTF_OLD or create a new folder and move them into it.
2. Download the .zip file attached to this article and extract it into your World of Warcraft directory. The .zip file should contain three folders: Interface, WTF and Fonts.
3. The following folders within the WTF folder will need to be renamed: YOUR_ACCOUNT_NAME, YOUR_SERVER_NAME and YOUR_CHARACTER_NAME to your login name, server name and character name respectively.
4. Login to WoW. At the character selection screen click on the “Addon” button located on the lower left. Click the checkbox at the top labeled, “Load out of date addons.” All of the major addons included within my UI compilation should be fairly recent, but I can’t guarantee how often this .zip file will be updated.
5. Load your character and enjoy.

List of addons
The list of visible addons are included below.

• Bartender 4
• Chocolate Bar
• ClassTimer
• CLCRet
• HolyTrinity
• MikScrollingBattleText
• Omen
• OmniCC
• oRA3
• Pitbull4
• Prat 3.0
• Recount
• SexyMap
• SimpleTankFrames
• TidyPlates
• XPBarNone

If anyone has a request or configuration question, I would be happy to address them in this thread or via email when I have time.

I have my Logitech G13 broken down into three different states: M1 (default), M2 (red) and M3 (blue). By default the gamepad will always be in the M1 state. However, I have the Logteich software setup to allow me to momentarily shift into M2 and M3 while I have the two buttons below the thumbsticks pressed down. That way, I don't have to manually press the M2 or M3 buttons at the top of the keypad to access any of the red or blue buttons. The colors by the way, correspond to the LCD backlight coloring for each state as well as my N52 setup. This is generally how I tried to organize each of the three states:

M1 (Default): Frequjently used items, combat abilities and regular shift modifiers (Shift, Control and Alt)

M2 (Red): Blizzard interface elements such as the guild screen, map, professions as well as party targets (F1 through F5).

M3 (Blue): Raid icons, auras, screenshotting, camera views and other stuff.

The new gamepad software, version 6, will allow you to assign a button that will toggle you into any of the M states by right clicking on a button and going to Edit > Fuction. If you are using the old software, version 3.0.6, you will need to add a script  (included below). FYI: I have G23 assigned to M2 and G24 assigned to M3. If you prefer another configuration, that shouldn't be too hard to change.

function OnEvent(event, arg, family)
if ( family == "lhc" ) then
        if ( event == "G_PRESSED" ) then
            if ( arg == 23 ) then
                SetMKeyState(2, family);
            end
        if ( arg == 24 ) then
                SetMKeyState(3, family);
            end
        elseif ( event == "G_RELEASED" ) then
            if ( arg == 23 ) then
                SetMKeyState(1, family);
            end
            if ( arg == 24 ) then
                SetMKeyState(1, family);
            end
        end
    end
end

Keys G9, G10 and G11 are where I naturally rest my ring, middle and index fingers. I tried to keep important abilities centralized around this area. It's worth noting that, to avoid any possible EULA violations, I don't use the G13 to script anything that couldn't already be macro'd in game. I have quite a few items bound to awkward key combinations in game (Shift + Control + F1 to toggle Recount for example). Not so easy to press on a normal keyboard, trivial to bind on a gamepad. Also, I have jump, autorun and 4 or 5 other things bound to my mouse.

If anyone is interested, my configuration file is included in the zip file posted below. Beware, it's highly customized to my awkward in-game keybindings...