I do know that I will not make any more half-assed attempts at blogging about WoW if I do return. If you’d like to keep in touch or keep an eye on what I’m up to, feel free to follow me on Twitter. Thanks for stopping by, and may you kill many internet dragons and receive epic, phat lewtz!

It’s been almost two months now since I was part of a guild regularly doing 25-man content, so I’ve been able to get away with using a bastardized catch-all Resto spec, leaving my other spec slot free for whatever tomfoolery I wished. (Lately, this has been bear tanking.) So, I’m returning to my old ways, of optimizing top-to-bottom for a given role, with regards to my talents. I’ll be using two somewhat distinct, and highly focused builds to fill either the role of raid healing or tank healing as need arises.

Tank Healing

The first, my tank-healing build, is 14/0/57. Using the Glyph of Nourish, Glyph of Innervate, and Glyph of Swiftmend, it is tailored to HoT up my chosen tank(s) and then bombard him with big-number, high-crit Nourishes. The only real allowance I’ve made for the changes in 3.2 is adding Empowered Touch to the mix, for the extra 20% of spellpower added to my Nourishes (along with the original 40% of spellpower to Healing Touch.)

I’ve sometimes comtemplated rocking out my 4-piece Tier 7.5 set in this build to nearly duplicate the effect of the Nourish Glyph: “Your Nourish heals an additional 5% for each of your heal over time effects present on the target.” (Lifebloom counts as one HoT whether it’s a single stack, double or triple.)

Raid Healing

For the purposes of raid healing, I’m using 11/0/60 with glyphed Healing Touch, Swiftmend, and Wild Growth. I can hit up to 6 targets with my AoE heal, cast sub-1.0 second Healing Touches for anywhere up to ~11K crits, and Swiftmend all those Rejuvs I’m tossing out to the raid. This build will really shine if I ever get that elusive fourth piece of tier 8, which will add an extra instant Rejuv tick to the target as soon as it’s cast, healing for upwards of 2K and then another ~12K over 15 seconds. Since 3.1 I’ve dropped Revitalize in favor of Living Seed, as my glyphed HT gets tossed around a lot and has a great crit rate.

I’m still adjusting to the new Innervate mechanics, but I so seldom need to Innervate myself anyway that it hasn’t tripped me up yet.

All that having been said, looking forward to getting back into 25-man content again!

Cross-posted via email from Shane’s Posterous

Starting today with patch 3.1.2, when the realms come back online, Innervate and its glyph have been changed as follows:

Innervate: This ability has been redesigned to grant 450% of the casting Druid’s base mana pool to the target over 20 seconds.
Glyph of Innervate: Has been adjusted to grant the Druid 90% of his or her base mana pool over 20 seconds.

That makes this spell at least as handy as was before 3.1 if not moreso, and is a very nice buff. According to the information here, a level 80 druid casting Innervate on another can expect to restore 15,732 mana to his target. If he or she is also glyphed, he will additionally restore 90% of his or her base mana pool to himself (3496).

Methinks we just became a lot more popular in the raid. The concept of Innervating your Paladin, your Hunter, your Mage, etc. is no longer inherently ridiculous. With the glyph being fairly powerful, we will once again be able to consider sharing the wealth.

Recent NSUI posts:

• Patch Day PSA: WowMatrix Will No Longer Work
• Patch 3.1: Something Wicked This Way Comes
• VuhDo Child: Interview With The Author
• Killer Combination: AuctionLite + Skillet + LilSparkysWorkshop

Recent lewtz:

• Illustration of the Dragon Soul from OS
• Band of Channeled Magic from Valor badges
• Idol of Awakening from Gothik to complete my Epic achievement
• My T7.5 helm off of KT to complete my 5/5 T7.5 set, which if you ask me looks totally badass.

Recent Lewtz IRL:

• Saw an amazing sale on Newegg for 4GB total of DDR2-1066 from a brand I know and love, which is the fastest RAM my motherboard supports. I had been using 4GB of DDR2-800, and before now, the cheapest I’d seen 1066 RAM at was still $150+.
• My HSF (heatsink & fan) on my CPU died a couple weeks ago. Died hard. My CPU hit 70C+ before I knew what was up, and even after sitting all night to cool off, it would heat up a good 5 degrees in just a few minutes the next morning. So, with some extra money I had from Uncle Sam, I got an E8400, a dual-core at 3.0GHz. Previously had a Q6600 at the stock 2.4GHz.
• Just days before that I had voluntarily spent some more of said “free” money on a shiny new 896MB GTX 260 video card and I couldn’t be happier with it. Upgraded from SLI’ed, and then later a single, 8800GT 512MB.
• I’ve been running 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate, build 7000, very happily since the official Beta release. It’s been the most stable and high-performance experience I’ve ever had with Windows, excepting a bare-ass Windows XP x64 install. I’m very stoked for its release and might even actually pay for a copy.

3.1 Goodies

I managed to sell a lot of goods on the AH Monday night, enough to pay for my dual spec and then some. I went with:

Restoration: 11/0/60 with Nourish, Innervate and Swiftmend glyphs

Restoration: 11/0/60

I mostly tank heal with more sporadic raid healing, during our 25-man raids. This seems like a good first shot at a post-3.1 build for me and my healing style. Looking for some other 3.1-ready builds from one of my favorite druid bloggers? Check out Syd‘s post at World of Matticus.

Balance: 55/0/16 with Insect Swarm, Starfall, and Wrath glyphs

Balance: 55/0/16

Balance is my “for funsies” spec. I put this one together with a few things in mind: farming, 5-mans and the occasional bout of PvP. I know that isn’t optimal for any of those things, but it’s a good Jack-of-all-trades build, IMO. Some of my inspiration here came from Graylo’s 3.1 builds post over at Gray Matter. He’s been a great source for me as a part-time boomkin.

Addons and Wrap-Up

My addons survived the 3.1 transition well because I update them religiously and tested them weekly-ish on PTR. My realm, and more importantly, my ISP, were not so lucky. For those of you with networking know-how, I was experiencing dropped packets at a rate between 1 in 2 and 1 in 4 for all of last night, to no less than 3 hosts in drastically different locations. Sad panda. I hope I have a better experience with the internet at large tonight.

Look for more updates as my guild, Celestial Being, starts progressing in Ulduar. I can’t wait!

Well, so here’s what I’ve been working on lately, and it’s been a hard secret to keep. NoStockUI is a blog that is all about that esoteric layer of whoozits and whatzits that come between you, the player, and your on-screen persona. It’s the brainchild of Matt Low of World of Matticus fame, and is off to a great start with posts by yours truly, Matticus, Brajana of Mend Pet, Lilith, and Andrea of Altoholics ‘R’ Us.

The following posts are all waiting hot and ready for your viewing pleasure. Go have a look!

• 4 Popular Heads Up Displays
• Why Aesthetics are Important
• 6 Nifty Addons You Might Not Know About
• 37 FuBar Plugins You Can’t Live Without
• Where to Find Your New UI
• Killer Combinations: AuctionLite + Skillet + LilSparksWorks
• In Depth Analysis with Recount

Three of my fellow authors have introductory posts up on their own blogs as well. Have a look-see!

• Say Hi to No Stock UI!
• The Secret is Out!
• Check out No Stock UI!

I’m very, very excited. Customizing my interface is a huge passtime of mine, and something I have a lot of interest in. It’s also going to be a great place to work on my writing skills, and a good excuse to try out that one addon I can’t find the time for.

Raid Screenshot

Click the image above for the full-resolution 1680×1050 screenshot.

As you can see above, I have a lot going on in my interface, but I’ve tried really hard at keeping it clean, concise, and lightweight, in terms of addon efficiency. Chat messages and names on Recount have been blurred to protect the innocent.

Here is a (quick-and-dirty) diagram showing the majority of what’s on my screen during a raid:

Interface Mockup/Key

I play on a 22″ widescreen at 1680×1050, using a Logitech G5 mouse and a Logitech G15 keyboard.

I covered a handful of the addons I use here and some more here. I’m gearing up to do a total overhaul sometime soon, but in the meantime this is what I’ve been using to raid for last month or so.

LibDataBroker AddOns

In the top left, I have:

• BugSack
• Broker_Memory – a memory usage display, click to start garbage collection and free up some RAM, hover for a list of highest memory usage in your addons
• fps display from Broker_SysMon
• ping display from Broker_SysMon
• Calendar display
• Attrition
• Bagsy
• Outfitter
• gold displayed from Broker_Money

In the center, I have:

• picoFriends
• picoGuild
• AutoText – for posting macros like Vent info, boss tactics, healing assignments, etc.
• Broker_Currency – can be toggled to show any counter from the Currency tab of your character frame, and shows them all in a tooltip on mouseover

In the top right, from left to right, top to bottom, I have:

• Broker_Transit – a portals/teleport/hearth menu
• launchers for Cooking and First aid, from Broker_Professions
• Broker_Switcher – a fullscreen/windowed mode toggle
• gfxToggle2 – for switching between presets for video quality
• configuration button for my LDB display addon of choice, DockingStation
• spell reagents counter
• launchers for my other professions, Alchemy in this case
• BankStack – a super fast way to keep your bags and bank nice and neat
• Broker_Trainer
• TradeBook – lets me view the professions of all my other toons while only using a tiny bit of memory

Unitframes

My party frames are provided by oUF_Perfect, powered by Haste’s oUF and written by P3lim. They show names, health and mana, targets, are colored by class and turn red when a player has aggro.

(I just realized proofreading this post that I do not have a usable screenshot of my actual player/target unitframes, so I’ll have to add those later.)

Next up we have my Grid frames. Mine have mana bars on the bottom, two text lines in the center, and several corner indicators for HoTs and missing buffs. The second line displays a color-coded timer for Lifebloom. The white square in this shot is for Thorns. As you can see, we’ve only got it on our tanks, as it should be. The first row are only the tanks. I took some of what I’m doing with Grid from Resto4Life and two posts from Tree Bark Jacket. Once I put some more time into creating my own Grid setup, I’ll do another blog post, but I’m starting to eye another addon, VuhDo, with some interest.

Other

My buff bars are provided by SimpleBuffBars which I prefer slightly over the more common ElkBuffBars.

On the left you can see my RaidBuffStatus window. This lets me see at a glance who/how many people are missing crucial buffs like Well Fed, flasks, and so on. A control-click will (very matter-of-fact-ly) whisper those players who can give the buff about who is missing it. An alt-click on a buff I can provide myself will cast it on one person who needs it, or if at least 4-5 are missing it, it may cast the group version. In my case, Gift of the Wild instead. The bottom buttons can report to yourself or to a channel/whisper the overall status of who’s missing what.

My lower left chatframes are separated by one last row of LDB addons:

• BuffEnough – self-check for all available buffs
• RBS window toggle
• DropTheCheapestThing
• DBM
• Broker_RaidSave – let’s me see on mouseover exactly what instances I’m saved to and for how long, across all toons
• Omen
• Broker_Recount
• oRA2

The top chatframe has most of the more personal chat channels, party, whisper, raid, and guild, while the bottom one is all the regional channels, says, yells, emotes and so on. You can see the style applied by PhanxChat as well. It’s a very clean, concise look that I really like.

My minimap is customized by pMinimap, also by P3lim, configured to show new mail and server time. Again, very clean and sleek. Below that you can see the rest of my minimap buttons arranged by TidyMinimap, including a redundant BugSack icon that I have since rid myself of, and another DBM button. Rawr!

My actionbars are controlled by Bartender4, here with ButtonFacade and the Caith skin. I do dabble in PvP, but I largely click-cast my heals, so my action bars are fairly empty. You can also see a fine example of my macro naming policy!

On the right I have my micro-menu bar, bags bar, and two (technically three) more chatframes. Rightmost is the vanilla combat log, while the left are colored backdrops for EavesDrop.

All in all, it’s served me well, but this UI layout and collection of addons are getting a little long in the tooth, and to be honest, a little chunky too. Here’s to hoping I can come up with something svelte over the next week or so.

• Buffet – I replaced AutoBar mostly just with this, along with QBar. Automatically updates a pair of macros for getting up your health and mana, shows food out of combat and pots or bandages in combat.
• FriendsWithBenefits – Sync my friend and ignore lists between my various toons.
• HatTrick - Super simple: gives me checkboxes on my character sheet to toggle my helm/cloak on and off.
• Kennel – automatically summon your minipet, selected randomly from a configurable list.
• Panda – really deserves a post all on its own. Really an incredible tool for anyone looking to make money with their professions, but especially helpful to Inscriptionists and Jewelcrafters, whom it was originally written for.
• StealYourCarbon – I replaced FreeRefills with this, but they both do the same thing; each automatically restocks configurable items (i.e. spell reagents, routinely-used mats, etc.) from any vendor who happens to sell them. Also works with your bank, but that behavior has been quirky for me the last time I tried it.
• tekJunkSeller – automatically sells your greys to vendors, and knows about the one or two grey quest items and keeps them.
• tekKompare – probably the one most people have heard of or used. This allows you to automatically view a comparison tooltip on items in your bags or chat links versus your equipped items.
• teksLoot – attractive, compact and movable, highly useful group loot rolling frames that change color by item quality as well as counting up and displaying who rolled Need/Greed/Pass.
• TourGuide – also deserving of its own post. Step-by-step interactive leveling guides, currently covering up through the mid 70s or so for both Horde/Alliance.
• VendorBait – highlights the quest reward with the highest known vendor value.

As you can see, there are many very useful addons here, and they all tend to be very focused in purpose as well as very gentle on your memory usage and CPU cycles. That’s the mark of a great coder. There are a few more that I use that are only available from GitHub, which is a little advanced for most users, so I won’t go into detail yet.

For more info, you can view Tekkub’s personal website, his GitHub profile, or his WowInterface listing.

• Unitframes: Haste’s oUF and oUF_P3lim, and oUF_Perfect for party frames but tweaked to not display raidframes
  What can I say, I’m a sucker for attractive, lightweight, and expandable unitframes. P3lim does some great work!
• Actionbars: Bartender4
  Hands-down the best actionbar addon IMO, though prior to 3.0.x I used Dominos.
• Chat: I prefer PhanxChat over Prat, etc.
• Map/Minimap: Mapster and pMinimap
• Auction House: Auctioneer Advanced
  Let’s face it, folks. You’ve heard this spiel before. If you like making money on the AH with whatever you can gather or make, I highly recommend AucAdv.
• Equipment Management: Outfitter
  For a hybrid class who keeps multiple gear sets and needs to switch on the fly, Outfitter is a major boon. It even makes it easy to pop items in and out of your bank.
• Leveling Help: A combination of LightHeaded, Tekkub’s TourGuide, and Carbonite.
  Now I know many of you swear by QuestHelper, but as a programmer, I am horrified every time I look in the general direction of QH. It causes crashes, huge framerate drops, DCs, etc. I just prefer the look, usability, features and general stability of Carbonite. The only one of these I keep enabled on my 80 is LH, though.
• Visual Customization: ButtonFacade with the Caith skin, Tekticles for my fonts, TipTop for tooltips
• Raidframes: Grid for the frames and Clique for click-casting goodness
• Meters: Omen3 for threat, Recount for damage, healing, etc. although I may replace with Skada as it matures
• Other: QBar for an Autobar-style set of buttons for my Usable quest items.

Well, this definitely turned out to be longer than I planned or expected, but I hope you enjoyed reading and maybe saw a few new addons to try!

I had taken a long hiatus from playing, blogging about playing, or Lua coding through the month of December, and now I’m back in the saddle. Hitting 77 was when it really all started coming together. Guildies were finally paying attention to me, not to mention being able to fly greatly sped up both my leveling and my herbing for spare gold.

I hit 70 for the first time ever a mere 2 days before the launch of Wrath. It was both exhilirating and exhausting, and a tad disappointing. I might see level 70 raid content here and there on a whim, but never shall I know how very unprepared I am. Also, I haven’t PvPed since my 20s or so, besides the world PvP that comes with playing on a PvP server. (That’s a lot of P’s.)

So, knowing that, dear reader, you might be able to sympathize how childlike and new I must seem to my guildies and friends. I had several first experiences over the last week, including:

• First Heroic: Culling of Stratholme. Arthas, you talk too frakking much! No lewtz for me, besides a quest reward.
• First time in AB
• First time healbotting in WSG: our Warrior tank Kosantu got his Iron Man achievement thanks at least in part to me.
• First time in Strand of the Ancients: I still don’t know what’s going on there.
• First time making gold hand-over-fist by finishing older quests
• First rep grind: tie between Kirin Tor and Knights of the Ebon Blade (nope, neither above Friendly yet!)

All in all, between all of that and sudden inspiration for a new direction with one of my own personal addons, my interest in WoW has been greatly increased. So, expect to hear more out of me soon, and feel free to watch my Path of a Hero blog for less momentous interim entries.