Glad it’s not just me…

I just read this article on WoW Insider.  In it, Matthew talks about the challenges of playing well into the night – where sleep deprived Priests fake disconnects, and instances that should be quick, clean walkthroughs become extended corpse runs.  While Matthew’s experience was surely frustrating, it came at just the right time for me.

As you can probably guess from reading my posts over the last few months, I haven’t been playing much.  Correct that – I haven’t been playing as much as I used to.  Most of my time online has been some solo work on Amanna, and playing around with some new alts (level 19 Warlock and level 17 Shaman).  Basically a lot of personal drama combined with the disintegration of my guild has contributed to little time online, and basically no time in instances or raids.

So, when I had a couple hours over the weekend to kill I logged in to see what kind of trouble I could get into.  Almost immediately, I got a /pst from one of the few remaining 70’s in our guild wondering if I was interested in a Steamvaults run.  Heck yea!  Not only had I not done any instancing for longer than I will admit, SV was perfect in that I still need to build CE rep for my Earthwarden.

I know, I know, you don’t have your Earthwarden yet???  Hey, sometimes that thing called “life” has to be attended to for a while…

Anyway, I got the invite and the group was a PUG.  If I remember right it was me, a Pally, a Warlock, a Hunter and a Rogue.  Everyone was from different guilds.

Well, you probably can guess the punchline – it was a horrible run.  Multiple wipes even before the first boss.  I was really thinking it was me; that I was too rusty or something.  And that probably did contribute a bit to the bad run, but you know what?  Sometimes, as pointed out in the WoWI article, you just have a bad run.  I’ve done Steamvaults plenty of times before and had flawless runs in less gear than I’ve got now.  Plus, it doesn’t help when you’re in a PUG where no one wants to mark, the rogue is sapping the right target but in the wrong mob group, and the Shaman keeps whining “I can’t heal you if you’re not in my line of sight.”  Well then MOVE, dammit! 

So, yea I’m probably a bit rusty.  But you gotta accept that you’re going to have a bad run here and there.  I guess my time was this past weekend.

One thing I did notice is that my my new custom UI was more of a hindrance than a help.  I actually miss the lower resolution a bit.  Text on the screen is really small and my eyes aren’t what they used to be.  Plus, maybe I was just too used to my old action bar setup, but I’m having a hard time adjusting to this new layout.  With the amount of addons in the package, my framerate really took a hit also.  Now, that’s not to say that the ADUI package didn’t open my eyes to some great addons that I wasn’t aware of, but I’ve found that I probably don’t need around half of the stuff that’s in the package.

So, one decision I made out of the run is to move away from the custom package and rebuild my UI from the ground up, getting back to something more like what I used to have, but integrating the addons I found out about by using the package.  In the tradition of BRK’s recent Omen overview (which was great – thanks Damh), I’m planning on documenting the rebuild and posting it here in case there are others out there looking to build or just revamp their UI and could use some help.  You all probably know more than I do, but hey – it sounds like a fun project.

Cerberus responds – Warcrafter sandbox mode fixed for IE

I checked the forums this morning and had the following reply from Cerberus:

“Amanna: thanks for stopping by :p. I loaded your profile and checked the buffs you mentioned (also saving your character for the first time will clear any buffs currently checked) and the mentioned new was working for me: either http://www.warcrafter.net/sandbox/10602?b=0i1M1R or http://eldrethalas-us.warcrafter.net/amanna?b=0i1M1R . It’s the querystring part that adds the buffs I hope this makes sense :p
edit: oh I see, it’s just not working in Internet Explorer haha, thanks I’ll get it fixed. edit2: I think its fixed.”

I played around this morning a bit, and I’m still having some trouble with the Save Character button, but the URL string on the Buffs page works.  Here’s what you do:

• Go into Sandbox Mode
• Click the Buffs link
• Check off the buffs you want to represent (this is where Bear and Cat form is)
• X out to close the window
• Click Build Stats
• Click the Buffs link again
• Copy the URL link at the top.  It has all the querystring info it needs to re-create this character

You can now use that link as a representation of your character.

I posted in the forum again to see if I’m using the Save Character button incorrectly, but I can’t get it to save a character, with buffs, and supply a link that works.

Enjoy!