aaaaaaahhhhhh

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I’ve seen everything from sleek, ultra minimilistic UI’s with no buttons showing at all to people still using (and getting along fine with) the default Blizzard UI.

I used to be a default UI user with my needed addons scattered around the screen, but I liked the smooth sleek look of grid so much that I decided to try and make my whole UI look that good.

This is what I came up with.

I use Grid for my party/raid frames, Pitbull for myself/target/tot, Bartender and ButtonFacade to make my buttons pretty, and Satrina Buff Frames to mess around with my buffs and debuffs.

My favourite addon, however, would have to be PowerAuras. It displays an image on your screen according to conditions you set. For example, when Surge of Light procs on my priest, I see this:

I also have auras set up for when I’m missing buffs like Inner Fire, Power Word: Fortitude, and Divine Spirit. I’ve found it very useful on my paladin to tell me when my seals run out, so I don’t sit there for a few seconds wondering why I can’t judge

Do you guys have any addons you can’t live without?

Then I decided, in all my wisdom, that I should pug a few raids on Alliance side for badges before I finished my faction change. I’d get badges, a chance at loot, and all my raid IDs would reset when I joined the Horde.

So I hopped into LFG and kept an eye on trade chat. My first PuG opportunity was a 25 Onyxia being organised in trade chat. Got an invite, got a summon, and then we were heading into the dragon’s lair!

I should have realised that my group was destined for failure when the raid leader insisted on talking exclusively in raid warnings, but I decided to stay and give it a shot. Just because the raid leader’s an idiot doesn’t automatically mean we’ll wipe, right?

Wrong.

Five people died to cleave during the pull. We managed to struggle on to phase two where the main tank died to whelps and number of melee died to one of the big adds. The raid leader, a retribution paladin, spammed /rw calling for a druid to rez him, ignoring the fact that the tank was also dead.

After that wipe people started to leave and the raid was called.

Oh well. One bad pug, you can’t win them all right? I hopped back into LFG and found myself a group for another Onyxia raid, 10 man this time.

There were some people already at or near Ony’s lair, so I idled in Dalaran awaiting a summon. I watched as one by one my fellow group members were summoned away. Then I stood in Dalaran, no summon in sight, and watched as they entered the instance and began clearing trash.

[R][Kells]: Uh, guys? Can I get a summon please?

No answer. Time passes, it looks like they’re clearing more adds.

[R][Kells]: Hello? I didn’t get a summon…

Still no answer. They wipe on something (an add I’m assuming) and start the corpse run back. No one’s talking in raid chat. I ask for a summon again and no one responds.

Sigh. I left the raid and hopped back into LFG yet again.

This time I got invited to a Trial of the Crusader 10 man. We waited around for a while searching for a tank and healers. Eventually the raid leader announced we’d be two-healing it as he filled the final raid spot with a resto shaman from LFG.  That was fine by me, so we summoned him in. It was then that the raid leader got a good look at what he’d just invited.

[RL]: Um, I’m not too sure about this shaman. His gearscore is terrible and he doesn’t have the achievement.

My dislike of gearscore snobs led me to persuade the raid leader to give the shaman a chance. Everyone didn’t have the achieve at some point. It doesn’t mean that the shaman is a bad player, right?

Oh how wrong I was. The shaman idled around while I ended up chain casting greater heals on the tank during Gormok. He cast Earth Shield on the DPS warrior as the worms appeared, got the fire debuff, and died.

I had to use everything I had to get us through Icehowl alive, and by the time he died I was out of mana and feeling very stressed.

Thankfully the raid leader replaced the shaman and the rest of the run went smoothly.

Have you ever had any nightmare pug days?

No, not in the ‘running around in circles with nothing to do’ way – the ‘loading bar fills up and I’m instantly booted back to the login screen’ way.

This isn’t exactly a rare occurrence, it’s happened before to me on several of my characters. Sometimes disabling my addons is enough to get the city to load so I can limp to the portals. There’s no point in hurrying – they take five minutes to show up.

A few times I ended up having to get a GM to move my character to a different city before I could log in, as even with addons disabled and cache cleared I’d get booted to the login screen.

From my own experiences and what I’ve heard from other players it seems that for those not blessed with super-fast internet and beastly computers Dalaran is a real pain in the butt. You’d think that Blizzard might have learned a lesson from Shattrath, a place that was the target of very similar complaints during the Burning Crusade. Fact is, cramming the entire population of max-level characters from both factions into one tiny city doesn’t seem like the best idea to me.

I can’t wait for Cataclysm when we all get herded back to our faction’s capital cities. Plus we’ll always be near the auction house, and we can show off our leet purples to the admiring lowbies hanging around.

Who wants to be stuck in a city with the stinky Horde Alliance anyway?

My third 80 is Alliance, a Draenei priest to be exact. She’s guildless and hardly ever touched, which is a shame because I enjoy playing priests rather a lot. So I was thinking, why not do a faction transfer and join the rest of my 80s on the dark Horde side?

It was at this point in my musings that I came upon a dilemma.

What race would I pick?

I know which race I want to pick. I’ve been a fan of Blood Elves ever since they came out despite the amount of hate they got. They just look more polished and pretty than any of the other Horde races. They have the prettiest hair, painted toenails, and I quite enjoy their jokes and flirts. Trolls would be my second choice for non-ugly Horde race, but their hair is horrible and they don’t wear shoes.

The main problem for me is the stereotype of idiocy Blood Elves seem to have. I know that I myself have met plenty of bad Blood Elf players – mages and death knights with terrible names and even worse dps,  warlocks who can’t type or move out of fire, hunters who never seemed to have trained feign. I know that these types of players play all sorts of races, but when they’re a Blood Elf the idiocy seems to really leap out at people.

“The Death Knight died to the aoe again? Oh no wonder, he’s a Blood Elf.”

Does anyone else experience this type of stereotyping of Blood Elves? Should I ignore the haters and give in to my desire to have a pretty priest?

Okay, so it’s not hideous. It doesn’t look that bad at all. The main problem I have with it is… They’re giving us another kilt. Now I know that plenty of classes wear dresses. All the clothies wear robes, druids wear ‘vestments’ (when you catch them out of form), even shamans have been known to throw on a mail kilt on occasion. So what’s the difference between clothies/druids/shaman and paladins? Paladins tank with their gear showing. And I for one will feel ridiculous going into battle as the main tank in my shiny new dress.

T11 Revealed!

It’s almost enough to make me work on my holy set…

This dawned on me as I was slamming my fist on my desk in frustration after being disconnected at the end of an Onyxia 25 fight. The Paladin tanking helm had dropped, and I was excited to be able to roll on it. The master looter went through every other piece of loot first, but finally he got to the Judgement Heaume. At that precise moment my connection dropped out.

Frustrating, right?

That’s not the only time I’ve lost my temper over the game either. I silently fume when guildies sign up for a raid and then show up late or not at all. I argue with idiots in trade chat and /ra. I grit my teeth in frustration when my fps inexplicably drops down to 5 as I’m trying to pick up the adds on Anub. I swear loudly at my computer when I get disconnected and the game won’t boot me to the loading screen so I can log back in again.

The nerdrage  never lasts long, but it always pops up in times of trouble. I’m pretty sure I don’t get so angry so often about anything else in my life, so why do I get mad at World of Warcraft? And if it makes me so mad why do I still play?