I finally gave up on waiting for my computer from Dell this morning when I got yet another message from them saying that my estimated delivery date, once September 8, then September 15, was now being “updated” to September 22.  Since I hd no confidence whatsoever that I would not get an apologetic email NEXT Friday morning informing me that their estimated guess for the estimated delivery of my hypothetical computer which did not yet exist outside of my own imagination was delayed to September 29… October 6… October 13… yaddah yaddah yaddah.  This delay for me, along with the runaround at Dell customer service I got when I called, was the last straw.  I cancelled my order, trucked out to the nearest Best Buy, and bought me the best gaming system they had.  I can now report that I am coming to you live from my 

Asus – Essentio Desktop with Intel® Core™ i7 Processor

Model: CG5290-BP007

Intel® Core™ processor i7-920; 9GB DDR3 memory; DL DVD±RW/CD-RW drive; 1TB hard drive

Watching this post unfold on a 23″ Samsung P2370 HD Widescreen monitor of uber epic awesomesauce.

OMFG wooooooooot!!!!

That’s all for now.  I’ll try to be more coherent when I’ve installed WOW and about 20 drivers I need and updated Windows and got the Curse client up and running and installed ventrillo and told my guild I’m back and….

well, you get the idea.

Oh, and p.s.  SUCK IT, DELL!  Suck it hard, boys.

One of my raidmates recently mentioned something about his UI during a raid and brought up an addon I had never before heard of, VuhDo.  My big ol’ pointy ears perked up immediately, as VuhDo was, apparently, a raid frame addon which is highly functional for healers, along the lines of Grid.  I did some research into this addon and learned that it does indeed function like Grid/Clique, but with additional bells and whistles built in that would elminate the need for SEVERAL other addons I currently used.  Really?  Really!  Of course, I had to give it a try!  Wheeeee!!!!

The first thing I did was to remove Grid and all Grid associated addons from my addon folder.  Those I eliminated immediately were Grid, GridStatusLifebloom, GridManaBars, GridStatusHots GridIndicatorCornerText, and Clique.  After the raid last night I also removed HoTCandy, and will soon be confident enough to remove SmartDebuff.  That’s right.  VuhDo quite comfortably replaces EIGHT addons I was currently using. 

I then downloaded VuhDo from Curse.com.  You can find it here.  Out of the box, VuhDo showed up like this on my UI (Click on image to link to larger version):

It automatically put a link in my FuBar, but it also adds a button to your mini map so it is very easy to find the configuration panel and get started.  Here’s a shot of what the config panel looks like:

Every function on the config panel has a tool tip when you hover over it that gives you a pretty good idea of what it does, unlike the Grid setup which is always confusing for me, even when using guides.  I was able to find my way around and figure out what I wanted to do quite easily.  However, there is a Wiki available for Voodoo that has a user manual (so nice!) and you can find that here.  In addition, there is a very long thread on the Plus Heals forums that the author responds to quite regularly to address user requests and issues.

I was able to do all of the same mouse click assignments that I had setup for Grid very easily.  Here’s the config panel for mouse click assignments:

As you can see there are many, many click combos available making this incredibly functional.  I was able to map all of my heals plus decurses and poison cures to very comfortable combinations using my five button mouse, shift, and a couple of alt combos, with dozens of options still open.  You can also assign clicks for targeting and macros.

Once I had my heals mapped as I wanted them to be, I set about customizing the way that VuhDo looked on my UI.  You can start with the Move tab and relocate things where you want them to appear.  One of my favorite functions about this portion of the setup was a button you could click and hold that would show you what your raidframes would look like if you were actually in a raid, so that I did not have to beg people to join a party or raid group with me just to have some idea of what this would look like when I joined a raid.  You can see that function in this screenshot:

There are functions to change the scale of your raid frames, the group arrangements, the appearance, the font, and so forth.  You can make your name always appear first in your group if you wish, or to make your group always appear first.  You can skin the frames as you wish, using something similar to what’s above or choosing as I did, to have each frame colored according to player class.  Mana bars automatically appear under raidmates who use mana.  You can also set this up to show rage, energy, or runes.  I ended up being able to make the raidframe look and feel very similar to when I was using Grid.  Here’s how my UI looks with VuhDo while soloing in Dalaran:

Here it is with a raid group forming up:

And here it is in the middle of us fighting Yogg Saron (I had forgotten to disable HoTCandy before logging on, which explains why it is shoved up and scrolling over my minimap in this pic):

As you can see above on the VuhDo frames, with this addon you can map HoTs to different locations on frames and give them colored buttons with timers, just as you can with Grid if you add a host of companion addons.  But with VuhDo, this function is built right in.  Lifebloom was already set up to have a red background if one LB was stacked, Yellow background for a 2 stack, and green background for 3.  The red dots you see in each frame are from a function that you can enable that shows you if Swiftmend is on cooldown and is available for a raid member based on what HoTs are currently rolling on them (cool, huh?).

Other cool functions included a buff watcher that you can put GOW and/or Thorns on to monitor whether everyone has the buff and click on to instantly cast it.  You can also set the program to autores raidmates out of combat.  You can customize aggro frames, target frames, colors and frame appearance for debuffs, and many other functions.

I will be working with my setup before I next raid to move the frames a bit farther apart, as I had some trouble with information overlapping a bit last night.  I also need to make some changes to how a poison shows up on the raid frames, as my choices made it so it wasn’t very apparent and I ended up using Smart Debuff for Yogg on Phase 2, although I am sure that I can drop that addon very soon once I get the kinks worked out.

In all, this was a very fluid, responsive, and intuitive experience for me.  I am not deleting Grid and associated addons from my computer altogether just yet, as I’d like to test drive VuhDu more before I make a final decision about it, but overall I was excessively pleased with this addon.  I was able to pick it up and run with it through a progression run on the first day I had it with very little trouble at all and many things that pleased me greatly.  I’d recommend that anyone give it a go.

Oh, and… drumroll please….

We got our guild first Yogg Kill last night!!!  Woot!!!

When 3.1 came out I, along with many, many other druids, found Wild Growth to be… well… buggy.  Sometimes it just didn’t work, telling me my target was dead or out of range, when the target I was clicking on on Grid was very much alive.  I, being no rocket scientist, for many weeks thought that it had something to do with my own Grid/Clique setup and just worked around it,  mostly by manually retargeting and clicking on Wild Growth in my hotbar.  It didn’t occur to me that it was the retargeting that was fixing the problem, and not the clicking in my hotbar.  /facepalm.  At any rate, I eventually ran across this post that explains the bug and has a reply from Ghostcrawler saying that he “can’t imagine it’s going to be too challenging to fix.”  That was April 21.

Not long after reading this post and realizing that the bugginess of this spell could not be chalked up to my own incompetence in configuring Grid/Clique, but rather was a bug straight from the Blizzard hive, I ran across this post from Lissanna at Restokin, pointing out some macros that would help to get around this bug.  Thanks Lissanna!  =)

My next move was to seek out this post on We Know Forums! that gives a good step by step guide as to how to go about setting up Clique to run a custom macro.  I followed the directions, set it, and forgot about it.

I forgot about it, that is, until I changed servers this week.  When I changed servers, random things happened to my addons.  Some of them, like Dominos, stayed set up perfectly.  Some of them, like XPerl, stayed mostly set how I wanted them, but got a little shaken up around the edges.  Some of them, like Clique, had all of the settings  wiped and I had to start from scratch.  In resetting Clique assignments, I forgot all about my WG macro bug circumventing strategy and just assigned Wild Growth like any other spell.  And found quickly that the bug is still flying high, stinking up the place.

I backtracked my steps looking for that post on which Ghostcrawler had foreseen an easy fix, and found that druids are still bumping it every day.  I hope they get to it soon for people who don’t realize it’s a bug (as I long did not) or don’t have the resources to set up the macro that will help them around this.  In the meantime, I’m thinking of sending Blizzard a gigantic crate of pesticide.

What may be meaningless to you is that there is a new version of WordPress, the platform upon which this blog is built.  What may be slightly less meaningless to you, since you’re here reading this blog, is that I upgraded to WP 2.8 this morning.  What may be still less meaningless to you is that it has wreaked havoc on many of my “widgets,” the tools built into my sidebar here for things like my blogroll, the category links, etc.  What may be meaningful to you, indeed, is that I’m working like a busy little bee to fix what this upgrade broke.  It’s like trying to play on patch day over here at Rolling Hots central.  I’m going bald in patches.  Hoping to get the site back to normal asap…

Isn’t it beautiful?  Isn’t it sleek and sexy?  Doesn’t it have FIVE PROGRAMMABLE BUTTONS???  I picked this baby up at lunch today.  I’m still trying to iron out the wrinkles in my new Grid/Clique set up, and one of the things that has made me nuts is losing my “left-click Lifebloom” config that I had for Healbot.  Actually, not just “left-click Lifebloom,”  but left-click any heal at all.  Because Grid acts as a unit frame in a way that Healbot did not, I eliminated all of my X-Perl raid frames from my interface.  I can target someone by clicking on their Grid frame.  But this has meant that I don’t have the ability to left click on a frame and cast a heal.  Not that big of a deal, because you can do shift+left click, alt + left click, ctrl + left click.  Yes, ok, ok.  But anything but shift + click, whether it be left, right, or center, is awkward for me.  I inevitably end up hitting the windows button, which brings up my desktop mid fight while I curse and clench my rear end tighter and tighter waiting for WOW to come back onscreen.  Even when I get it right, I have to move my left hand off the letter keys, losing place of them when I often need them for proper movement in game.  This is not healthy.  So I got this baby, the Razer Deathadder, so that using only the 5 mouse buttons and shift + the 5 mouse buttons I will have instant access to 9 spells on Grid, and can maintain the left click targeting.  I’m so excited to go home and give this thing a proper workout!

It’s patch day!  I hope everyone is as excited as I am to try out all of the goodies in 3.1 tonight.  My plan is to log on as soon as I get home so that the patch downloads, hopefully not sit forever in a queue, visit my trainer to get dual specs, throw up my new resto build and my new boomkin build, then head out to Ulduar with my guild to try our hand at Flame Leviathan.  Yipee!  The one thing about the patch that has given me the most to be nervous about, of course, is the Great Lifebloom Nerf 2009.  /sigh.  To prepare, I’ve been trying out some new healing styles lately when raiding.  Here’s the good news… the results were excellent!

One thing I’ve tried to do is to raise my awareness of Nourish and incorporate it more frequentlly.  I’ve had several runs lately where I put this at the top of my priorities, with pretty strong results, which will be much stronger now that I can talent into a 25% increased chance for this spell to crit.   Unfortunately, my most successful attempts at this were on nights that our raid leader didn’t log the raid for WWS, so I don’t have the stats to show you, but I was pleased with an increased healing percentage both in Nourish and in Living Seed, both of which will surely improve much more when using this spell in 3.1.

I do have some stats to show you, however, based upon my attempts to favor Rejuvenation over Lifebloom on a Naxx run this weekend, wherein we downed 4 Horsemen, Sapphiron, and Kel (we had 3 attempts on Sapph and 2 on Kel I think).  Here are some stats from a raid in mid-March in which I was basically just doing a pretty standard tank healing rotation, with no changes to my regular lifebloom cycle.  On both nights I was assigned to tank heals.

And here are some stats from the run I tried out this weekend on which I was conscientiously favoring Rejuvenate over Lifebloom, and Nourish over Regrowth.  I don’t necessarily recommend this balance of spells.  I was pretty conscientiously trying to replicate the heals of the first night, changing only my favoring of Rejuv and Nourish over LB and Regrowth.

As you can see, on both nights I came in third on heals and, more importantly, my total amount healed is almost identical, 5,100,000 and change.  But the spells I used to get it done are drastically different.  On Night 1, 45% of my healing was accomplished with Lifebloom, while only 11% was Rejuvenation.  On Night 2, 39% of my healing was Rejuvenation, while only 19% was Lifebloom.  Regrowth made up 15% of my heals on Night 1, with Nourish making up only 5%.  Nourish hit 12% on Night 2, with Regrowth only accounting for 1% (part of this low number on Regrowth is a reassignment of this spell to a somewhat awkward key binding with Clique.  I’m still working out the kinks in my new Clique/Grid UI).  I also was trying to de-emphasize my Regrowth use because the talented crit rate on Regrowth will be cut in half in patch 3.1.  Basically, by swapping my preference from 2 spells that have been strong pre 3.1 to spells that will be strengthened in 3.1, I was still able to produce the same amount of healing, before those spells were even buffed.  Nice, huh?

Now, if we look at my total healing with Nourish on Night 2, 755847, and speculate about this number based upon the added 25% crit chance coming for this spell in 3.1, nice things start to happen.  25% additional crit chance for this spell would have raised my critical strikes using this spell to 50%,  producing approximately an extra 86,233 in healing from Nourish alone, assuming that none of that extra healing was overhealing (and my math is right, which I think it is).  It also would have produced approximately 26 more critical strikes, which would have resulted in 26 more Living Seeds, which would have had the potential to heal 30% of each critical strike Nourish, including any amount overhealed by those critical strikes, so long as the target took more damage within 15 seconds of the critical strike.  Now, imagine if I had the Nourish Glyph.  My Nourish healing would have increased by 6% for every HoT currently on my target.

This analysis is so encouraging for me!  It indicates that:

1) even without the buffs that are coming, I was able to heal nearly as competitively while favoring Rejuv over Lifebloom and Nourish over Regrowth.

2) Once the patch comes, particularly with the Nourish Glyph, Nourish is going to be a powerhouse heal for us that will more than compensate for the changes to Lifebloom.  This will hold up even after I lose my 4pc T7 bonus to Nourish, as the T7 adds 5% bonus to Nourish per HoT, whereas the glyph will add 6%.

3) Rejuv can be competitive with Lifebloom currently, and will be even more attractive with the T8 set bonus, which will add an instant tic to this HoT.

Feel free to poke holes in my assessment here if you see any.  I’m something of a fledgling theory crafter, but I think I got this right.  Even if my numbers are somewhat off, though, in terms of the amount of healing that would be added with the increased crit chance for Nourish, it is very clear that this spell and Rejuv held their own against LB and Regrowth in my little experiment, and Nourish would have performed much more strongly post 3.1.  It seems pretty clear to me that, much as I still lament the LB changes, it is a crutch that I can let go of and actually outperform my old healing styles.  So the patch?  Bring it on!

Although I had some issues setting up Grid, some readers here came to my rescue and helped me to resolve my largest issues with the Grid + Clique combination.  Yesterday I fiddled around with my UI for a couple of hours until I thought I was good to go.  I asked some guildies to be guinea pigs and the brave souls volunteered to run some BC Heroics with me. 

LOL!  Everything ran very smoothly in terms of my ability to heal using Grid, so I took my new setup into Naxx last night without a hitch.  I think Grid is here to stay for me! 

A lot of people responded to my Clean Slate post where I was showing off what I thought was a delightfully uncluttered UI telling me how I could further streamline it.  Because there was so much interest, I thought I might put up a before and after screenshot and let you all know what I changed between the Clean Slate post and last night, in case anyone else is working to minimalize the visual noise on their screen while maintaining functionality like I am.

Here’s the Clean Slate screenshot:

And here’s a different screenshot from my raid last night:

What’s changed?

1)  I’ve set the opacity very low on my action bars unless I mouse over them, at which point the bars light up.  Still using Dominos.

2)  I’ve disabled the party and raid frames in Xperl.  I can select raid or party members on the grid frames (using alt + left click), and still get all the information I might need about them without having to have all of that information up on my screen all the time.

3) I added Minimap Button Frame, a program that consolidates all the buttons around your minimap into a collapsable frame.

4) I added some mods to FuBar to try them out.  Some are going to stay, some will definitely go.

5)  I traded Healbot for Grid + Clique.  The setup for Grid was involved, the menus are not terribly helpful, and I almost gave up on it, but in the end I’m very pleased with both the functionality and my ability to lose all the raid frames for Xperl and to have a smaller raid frame for healing than Healbot provided in raid mode. 

6)  I’m thinking of swapping places for my Minimap and the chat frame, as it will now fit in the bottom of the screen and clear up more real estate still.

My impressions of Grid:

First, it was not hard to make the transition from Healbot to Clique+ Grid once I got the thing set up correctly.  I used the same key bindings, so I was essentially doing the same things.  However, the reaction time seemed somewhat quicker.  I can customize Grid for many more very specific situations should I wish to, further improving my reaction time.  My biggest hurdle is getting used to the fact that I now have my UI set up so that alt + left click targets someone.  However, I target players far less than I use Lifebloom, which is what has always been assigned to my left click on Healbot, and the tradeoff will be worth it in the end, I think.

I very much appreciate the accurate HoT timers that show up where I assigned them on Grid.  They are definitely are a big improvement.  I also appreciate the large amount of information accessible through Grid at any given time.  It took me very little time to get used to and to learn to process quickly.

All in all, I think I’ve been converted!  =)  One last great big thanks to those of you who have provided advice and guidance in helping me get to this point.  I’m such a happy cat!  RAWR!

There was this video posted on WOW Insider today showing how to configure Grid.  I’ve thought about trying it for quite a while, and many of the people who looked at my post about my UI recommended it, so I thought I’d give it a go today when I saw the video.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been pretty satisfied with Healbot.  But so many people sing the praises of Grid over HB that I always felt like I should at least give Grid a go.    I’m a bit underwhelmed, and am wondering if I’m just not doing something right…

So here are the things I don’t like. 

1) I installed Grid with Clique and HotCandy, hoping I could get rid of a set of Unit Frames.  Neither on Grid nor on HotCandy can I seem to configure them to show up who received Wild Growth.

2) I like on Healbot how someone’s frame will actually get an icon of the HoTs on that person.  I don’t like how on Grid there are just those little dots around the box and I have to memorize which dot means what.  I also don’t like the way HoT Candy stacks every HoT on a timer, but sort of chaotically.  Healbot has one frame for one player, and every HoT I’ve got on them shows up there.

3)  Clique kept me from setting the most natural button settings for me.  I can’t use Left Click because then I can’t target anyone by clicking on their frame.  I can’t use Right Click because I can’t access the right click menu on my own portrait or anyone else’s with options like follow, leave party, trade, etc.

So, before I throw Grid in the recycle bin, do you all have ways of addressing these issues that I just don’t know about because I’m inexperienced with these addons?  Any advice would be appreciated.

UPDATE: 

Thanks to the comments here, I spent the morning working on this.  Here’s an updated pic of my UI.  Unfortunately, I was working on this at 7:00a.m. so there was no one on that I could bug to get in a raid group with me to see what that looked like.  I’ll try to get a pic while in a raid tonight. 

Here’s what I did:

1) followed Keeva’s guide to setting up HoT Tracking in Grid (omg how awesome thank you thank you thank you =))

2) reassigned some of my clique assignments.  I decided alt+left click could work to target, while alt+right click could work for the menu functions.  I’m not sure whether this will work, and it will take some getting used to, but it did free up my left and right click buttons to have the same assignments I had for Healbot, saving me from having to relearn them and possibly making big mistakes in the process.

3) got rid of HoT Candy.  I don’t need it with Keeva’s set up in place.  She’s right… so much better to have it all in one place.  Now I have HoT timers right in the Grid boxes.  I love the timers and the color coding so I can remember which timer is for which spell.  This is a nice alternative to the HoT Icons that show up on Healbot.

Here’s a zoomed in pic of my grid box with all HoTs going on myself:

We’re raiding tonight, so I’m going to leave all of this in place and give it a whirl.  Thank you so much to those who commented here and on my Clean Slate post.  I’m excited about the way that this looks… I mean just LOOK at how clean my screen is right now!  =)  I’m also much more optimistic about how it will function for me.  I might be a Grid convert after all.

I’ve been tinkering with my UI for ages.  My current UI makes my Virgo heart so happy! 

I love playing with new toys, and addons are no exception.  The downside of this, of course, is that at some point you have to make some choices.  Unfortunately, I don’t have any screenshots that show the cluttered mess my UI was starting to become at one point, but this screenshot of Sacrales’s UI that was featured on World of Matticus will give you an idea.

I had so much clutter on my screen that I was peering through a tiny window to see the actual raid, and I started to hate it.  Then began my campaign to streamline, keeping everything I needed, while jettisoning all the extraneous stuff. 

I got rid of extra visual clutter in a couple of ways.  If there were 2 mods giving me the same information, I got rid of one.  If a mod offered information that I did not need at all times, but still wanted to have access to, I either turned off the display (toggling Omen off is a good example), or I selected options that made the Mod transparent until relevant (Smart Debuffs is an example of this). 

I cut down on the spell bars that I had displayed, although I still have one bar that should go.  If you look at my UI, you’ll see the top 2 spell bars are the same.  This will go when dual specs come and I don’t have to reset my spell bars after respeccing.  The top bar changes when you lose some of your talented spells, so the one below it is to aid my lazy butt in setting the top bar back to the way I like it if I flip to Boomkin and go back Resto.  (/blush). 

Here are the addons I use that affect my UI, in case you are interested in replicating all or part of what I’ve done. 

Cartographer – changes your map,  adding all kinds of information and options.
CBH Viewport – adds the black frame at the bottom of the screen. 
Chinchilla – changed up the look of my mini-map
Fubar – adds the bar along the top.  You can add plugins there to access other addons and information.
Dominos – Allows you to display a large number of spell/ability bars, move them wherever you like on the screen, scale them however you want.  Highly customizable.  One of my favorite addons.
Healbot – I have it set on raid frames and took this screenshot in a 25 man raid to demonstrate how my UI looks in a full raid.  I love how it’s set against the black frame from CBH Viewport, which makes it easier to see the health bars when you need to.  I also love how it’s largely transparent until it’s needed. 
Recount – This isn’t a UI addon, but I’m including it because you can see it on my UI.  No, Really.  I just have it shoved all the way over to the right side so that you can just barely see the edge of it in the screen shot.  I just click and drag to pull it into view when I want to see it for some reason.
Smart Debuff – You can’t see it on this screenshot because no one needs debuffing.  It’s transparent until needed.  When it does show up, it is a small box just over the right side of the Healbot frame.
TipTac – allows you to anchor your tooltips wherever you want them on your screen, change the font, etc.
Xperl – A unit frames addon that I really love.  This is also very customizable in terms of size, placement, information displayed.  I love it.  Looking at the screenshot, I realize that I need to straighten up some of the raid columns.

I think it’s inevitable that I’ll go on tweaking this because it’s something I enjoy doing.  But in all, I’m so pleased with what it looks like.  Everything is so clean, organized, and accessible.  And I have plenty of room to see the actual action, to move around in my environment, to enjoy the amazing art of the game.  I don’t feel like I’m looking through a tiny window  framed by a cacophony of competing information any more.  The best things about the game are shining through, and everything I need is at my fingertips.  /happy dance!