raidNot much of a "redo" since it looks more or less the same as version 3.0 except for the smaller button grid and the unit frame change. I went with Pitbull because of its layout flexibility. X-Perl was becoming and eyesore with the plethora of windows that needed to be displayed.

I tried to compress all interface elements to the edges as much as possible, because I dislike having junk stay in the center of my screen. I also wanted any unused elements to fold or fade away when not in use so that I didn't have a giant black bar of death obscuring precious screen real estate.

Class buffs, auras and oh shit spells are grouped and auto-barred on the top left round buttons so that I could keep all of the paladin blessings off of my bars (giant waste of space). Consumables, food buffs, mage food, tradeskills, quest items and stuff like that are autobarred on the opposite side.

idleThe chat log will fade away after 30 seconds of no activity. The combat log, general chat and trade chat are tabbed. Recount and Omen are docked to the far right. recount visibility is hotkeyed on my G15 and Omen will automatically appear upon enter ring combat.

I like having my bajillion buttons and my combat information displayed, but I also appreciate clean interfaces and to some extent simplicity. So this layout is a compromise...I guess. (Addons listed below)

I need to find a stronger detterent for comment spam. It's starting to return...

There is a working Wowhead loot link filter for Drupal if anyone is curious about how to use the [item] bbcode tags. The old module died quite some time ago and there hasn't been a good working alternative until recently. I also finally got around to re-doing the guild homepage and migrating it from the ghetto fugly vBadvanced portal over to Drupal. Yay!

Guild business as usual. We finally have a fairly stable 25-man Ulduar run going on the weekends now. We were low on folks for the past few weeks since returning from our short pre-3.1 raid hiatus. We are though a bit short on tanks, I guess I should finally gem, enchant and upgrade the trash pieces in my tanking set for the sake of being viable for off-tanking. I have a metric fuckload of badges to burn.

So I've been really super lazy about my professions for the past oh, several months? I am 5 points shy of the skill cap on both blacksmithing and enchanting...which was somewhat alright until the epic patterns started dropping in heroic Ulduar (by our loot rules only max level crafters are eligible to roll). I have all of the mats that I need for both professions rotting on my banker. Shame on me.

Tangent: If you haven't seen the new Star Trek movie, go and see it. It is really quite good, independent of me being a huge Star Trek fan. JJ Abrams retained the spirit of the old series without the Trekkie fap. /wants to see it again.

Note to self: I really need to enchant and gem my off-spec healing set. Actually, I really really need to find myself a better healing weapon since I am still using the one from Maiden inKarazhan; Haven't gotten a chance to roll on a healing weapon in a long ass time (being prot/ret, I wouldn't of course roll over a legitimate healer). I guess I can craft this, since I already have alll of the mats.

Hodgepodge: Peggle for WoW, complete with a Peggle loot rolling system, guild scores, talent trees, duel modes, etc. New favorite raid downtime activity! I've been really bad about doing the Argent Tournament dailies lately as I've skipped most of them this entire week for one reason or another.

I'm looking for another raid fram add-on that's cleaner than X-Perl; trying to reduce raid and targetting clutter, especially with vehicles and ToT. I might give oUF a spin tonight.

I settled with (0/17/54) for my primary PvE Retribution spec and went PvE protection as my secondary spec (0/53/18), since we have been light on off-tanks lately, despite originally planning to go Holy. I still need to chat, gem and glyph my off-spec set. The in-game talent preview option is nice; Miss-clicking while assigning talent points sucks pretty hard.

Ulduar 10 was fun last night: My guild (and me to some extent) has been on a pre-3.1 raid hiatus for several weeks, so it fun shooting the breeze with everyone again. The Flame Leviathan event was a lot of fun, it reminded me of those old school arcade shooting games.

It's a vehicle encounter, but unlike Malygos, the vehicles scale according to item level. We assigned two choppers, two siege tanks, and two demolishers, each of the siege tanks and demolishers carrying one passenger and one shotted him that way. We wiped on Ignis' trash for a while afterwards. It's been a while since we've encountered trash that required any amount of thought:

Molten Colossus: Tank them spread out so that the raid doesn't get hit with double earthquakes. We had the tanks drag them to opposite sides of the hallway so that they were just within healing range, with the raid in the center. You can also just send a tank and a healer over to some far corner. Either way is fine.

Magma Ragers: The fire tornadoes will target people and chase them for around 15 seconds. They are slow and easily dodgable (but will knock you back quite far if you get hit). Tank them in the corners at the bottom of the ramp, have ranged stand at max range. FYI: The tornadoes form on the Magma Ragers, it's really really easy to see.

Not so much luck on Ignis, we might try a different boss after Leviathan next time. Oooh: The instance maps now show the location of both you and your raid members; No more wondering where the hell certain people are. I have been wanting that feature for a really really long time.

I guess I'm semi-back to posting entries since the patch is out. I don't really go on hiatus per se, but the object of my fixation (WoW, this site, other games, anime/manga, obsessively playing the guitar, etc) rotates around on a weekly to monthly basis :P.

Random site stuff first: I don't know why the WoW blog link bar disappeared off of the front page or why the comments don't seem to update right away when not logged into administrator mode. I'll look into that if I have time.

I tried to update my mods this morning and noticed that WoWMatrix wasn't working very well. Apparently curse and WoWInterface are currently blocking WoWMatrix. So, hopefully either someone at WoWMatrix finds a workaround or the folks at Curse un-ass their horrid updater within the next few days. Hmm, the Curse Client has been vastly improved since I had last used it; So for the time being, I'll use that to update my addons.

Anyway, it's patch day! I have been so busy/distracted that I have completely forgotten about looking into my new retribution main spec and holy off-spec. Anticipating server instability and delays, I probably have plenty of time to do so...Oh also, I'll do an updated UI post whenever I have my 3.1 interface stabilized.

Boredom Edit:  Maybe the servers will go up soon and we will all get to play? Oh and apparently Outfitter has been un-discontinued, which is nice since Blizzard dropped the integrated equipment manager from 3.1.