Five years eh? Has it really been that long? Well yesterday technically, but I didn't get a chance to post. Oh by the way: I haven't gone dormant, just extremely busy.

Ignore the frequent theme changes. I'm playing again and am too lazy at the moment to use the dev site.

I better post this entry before I get busy again. Delayed is better than never! I compulsively bought Aion off of Steam a few weeks after it was released to scratch a PC game itch that had been festering all summer. It was my downtime project for a bit, the idea being to reach mid-game so that I could do a review after experiencing some of the meatier content in the Abyss. Sadly though, I only made it to the mid-teens before I set it down permanently (real life business happened).

It's hard to discuss MMO's fairly without soaking a significant amount of time into them. You see, they are like people: some are pretty and sweet things on the first date, but transform into an overbearing bitch a few months into the relationship. Some on teh other hand are diamonds in the rough; They just need some time. Okay okay, that was a really bad metaphor (it's late). TL;DR: Take this post with a grain of salt, I is noob.

New computer building time. So, this is what I will likely order within the next week or so. I could probably save cash by just cannibalizing one of the media harddrive and PSU (it's nice and fairly new) out of my current system, but I want it to remain functional for future use. Actually, there's one thing that I will likely cannibalize out of my old machine: the sound card. Onboard sound is pretty good nowadays, but I like my X-Fi. Well okay, I like the knobs and shit on the front panel...

I know that the i5-750 is the current supposed sweet spot in terms of performance vs price. But, for not really that much more, the i7-860 offers a good boost in performance with hyperthreading, a faster turbo boost, etc.

Still a bit torn on whether or not I really want to go SSD for my primary HDD. The speed would be nice for the OS and WoW, but I still don't think that it justifies the extra cost. so instead, I'll probably just go with a 300GB Western Digital VeliciRaptor for the primary drive and a 1TB Cavalier for my data.

My UI goals this time around were more-or-less the same as any of my UI incarnations. First and foremost, I wanted to keep the center of my screen clear of all clutter, windows and bars. Other than the scrolling combat text on either side of the central box, there shouldn't be a single thing obscuring my vision of the game. Per usual, any unused elements should automatically vanish or be hide-able when not in use. I strongly dislike layouts with the giant black bar of death across the entire lower third of the screen. It is not only a huge waste of space, but looks really weird when nothing is happening on screen.

4 sets of 12 buttons (48) is what I deemed minimally necessary to remain functional. I love my buttons and can't really reduce it any further (previous UI versions had 6 sets). 3 of the bars are keybound to my n52te, the 4th being mostly used for random macros and stuff like that. There are two sets of 6 AutoBar buttons on either side of the Dominos bars. I didn't like the little circular buttons in my previous setup so I moved them to the sides, making use of the wider screen.

• Left set: Blessings, Auras, BoP, Raid Wall Macro, DI, LoH.
• Right Set: Health Potions, Mana Potions, Healthstones, Crafting, Food Buffs, Water/Mage Food.

The Raid Interface
I've just conceded to the fact that my UI is probably never going to ever be clean and pretty looking mid-encounter no matter how hard I try. So this layout is as minimalistic as I could get it without sacrificing my precious windows and what have you. Actually, all I really did was shuffle a few mods around. It's a necessary evil I guess, given that I am the raid leader and frequently a tank (I swear that some classes and roles have like, a total of 3 buttons on their screen and little else). Other than the focus frame and any pop-up range warning window from DBM, I think that this is probably the maximum level of crap that I would ever need to have on my screen at any given time.

I went back to the old school thick raid frames versus the skinny perfectraid style bars. Instead of being placed on the left edge of the screen, I have them shoved into the spot to the right of Dominos where Recount and Omen used to be. I am quite happy with this change; the 5 raid groups dock nicely into that spot, leaving the middle almost completely clear. I also moved the party and party target frames to this location.

Omen was moved front and center while recount was shoved in the corner. I wanted to do two things with this interface: one, make use of the gap between the player and target unitframes and two, drag Omen out of the corner into a more prominent position. So this takes care of both. And as far as recount goes, it's happy over in the upper left corner. There's really no reason, other than meterwhoring, why I need to or should have to stare at it during an active encounter. I've caught myself being a naughty retadin and Recount rubbernecking when I should have been looking for giant flaming balls of poo at my feet or something. 

What Else Changed?
I went with Dominos (successor to Bongos) instead of Bartender 4 to move all of the interface elements around. It's a lot easier to keybind and configure, though feature wise I'm not sure if I see much of a difference. But then again, my bar interface needs aren't really all that exotic. Fubar was replaced with ChocolateBar since it is no longer being updated. I also extended it to cover the entire length of the screen instead of being limited to the small box in my previous UI incarnation. eePanels2 was replaced with kgPanels for the same reason.

Oh: I finally jumped on the Deadly Boss Mods train. There was a point when BigWigs was nicer because of the now defunct WoW Ace Updater compatibility as well as several other things that I don't remember. I think Big Wigs is still updated more often, but I find the DBM indicators and bars more useful. It's also seems to be more up to date and complete for newer encounters. It has built in shield monitors for the twins as well as timers for Ony and several other things that were missing from Big Wigs.  

To Do
I am not completely happy with how the combat text is layed out. All of the special warnings for all mods dump right into the center, turning it into a clusterfuck whenever something important happens. Visibility isn't necessarily a bad thing I guess. Being in the center makes them easier to see so that I can react faster, but I could do without the redundancy.

I am also not satisfied with the buff/debuff appearance. I like having the square icons with the timers below them in the upper right hand corner (Elkano style mods bug me), but they are too large and need to extend further leftwards towards the center of the screen. I also need to filter the buffs; Anything that appears on ClassTimer doesn't need to be up top. Blizzard is changing the default buff interface in 3.3 though so, I'll see how that goes before searching for yet another addon.

I have a couple of things that I want to post about within reasonable time when I'm not so real life busy. So, this is my late October and Early November tentative post schedule: Keiya's New Raiding UI Version 3.2, Dabbling withAion and Borderlands for the PS3. I might do a CD review in mid to late November because Them Crooked Vultures is releasing an album on the 17th of November and well, I'm a pretty big fan of Dave Grohl.

I impulse bought Aion a couple of weeks ago. I was actually going to do a thorough review and state of the MMO industry post once I had a chance to properly delve into it more, but I have kind of already lost all interest in it. It's a fun game, but I just kind of got...busy/distracted and set it down. If I'm really bored and game deprived at some point in the future, I'll go poke at it when I'm not on WoW or doing other things. Borderlands is an interesting game that was just released for the consoles. Think Fallout 3 + Team Fortress 2 + Left 4 Dead. Having fun with it so far.

So I redid my user interface yet again, mostly to switch over from Fubar to ChocolateBar, from Pitbull 3 to Pitbull 4 and from Bartender 4 to Dominos. I also wanted to consolidate the functionality of a few of my addons. My previous setup had a quite a bit of redundancy. Aside from some window shuffling, it really doesn't look that different I guess. I'm liking it so far though. I don't know why I do things like this to myself. Redoing your UI is a giant pain in the ass. I spent all of yesterday evening half-assed running battlegrounds and poking shit mobs to make sure that every little element was exactly where it should be.

I was in 25-man Trial of the Crusader last week (well and tonight I guess) when my computer started dropping below 10 frames per second during most of the counters. The resolution increase on my new monitor in addition to the fact that this machine is getting ass old probably doesn't help. I'm thinking that it's probably time to start building a new computer. I made the mistake of goingel cheapo on a CPU with a low upgrade path. I think this time I'm going to budget more towards building a nicer machine.