Eric Replied

That’s not Shinsoku
I’m well aware of that.  It’s a discipline priest.  A troll discipline priest (Athene would stone me if he saw it - Weakness of the HEX).  This last week was an exercise is trying “someone else’s shoes on” to see what it would be like to be in the hot seat of a [spot] healer.  I’ve always felt that one way to get to a higher level of playing is to understand the other classes almost as well (if not as well) as your own class.  Getting an in-depth understanding of how a class functions gives me valuable insight into the pitfalls, weaknesses, and timing.

All the forum posts and FAQ/Guides won’t ever give me the information needed to battle back against competing classes.

So What Did I Learn about Disc. Priests?
I’m no master on the class, but playing a healing class is definitely a different experience.  All the little things that annoyed my healers annoyed me all the same:  Line of Sighting, Crowd Control-chaining, and Mana Burning among some things.  Something I can take back to my warrior is to always be aware of my healer’s positioning.  In fact, a better lesson to be learned is that I should help my healers position themselves advantageously.

How can I manifest this?  Well, I describe this process to be a lot like wearing a rubber band around you and your healer.  If you go too far, you snap back to your healer.  You never want to make your healer run through the crowd to get to you because there’s a high possibility he’ll get CC’d or burned (or a combination of both).

Arena in Review
Main Team - Slash Hungry (5v5) put up some great fights this week despite playing a limited week.  We started with Oblivions, but opened with a few hefty losses putting us as far down as 1850 at one point, but we pulled it together and battled back to get to 1927 (+27 rating for the week) to end the night at 6-4.  While this was a rather lackluster performance, we did have two notable matches that opened up the doors to hope for our team.

We beat Team Noobsauce twice (Twice!) taking 24 and then 23 points.  When I checked their ranking for last week, they were #3 on our bracket.  This is akin to Appalachian State upsetting University of Michigan earlier in the Fall of 2007.  It was great synergy, and I’m hoping for some strong wins in the upcoming week to finally push the 2000 barrier (It’s like the Great Wall of China).

We Only Know Three Words (3v3) worked its way to 1886 from 1853 this week, but this was shy of our highest rating of 1915.  It was tough battling many teams this week, but we held in and made a modest gain to make this the sixth consecutive positive week this season.  Here’s to another 2000 breakthrough.

Alt Teams - Bear Blasting is a new 5v5 team featuring my Troll Priest.  It’s a rather odd setup that changes day to day, and we have yet to ever feature a Warrior or a Paladin in any of our slots.  Our typical DPS includes a Hunter, Warlock, Rogue, and Mage.  Our healers go between Druid, Priest, and Shaman, and more often than not a combination of at least one of them.

In all practicality, the team is incredibly effective for its unorthodox method of play.  The style can be best marked as “Drain DPS” from the Viper Stings and Mana Burns.  Needless to say, the strong DPS count a long with the mana drains can quickly break many teams.  Unfortunately, our gear level and synergy is lacking, but as we pushed 41 games this week, we started to gain rhythm to finish the week at 1600 something rating with 1640 being our highest for the week.

I Hate Rerollers!
Several teams this week seemed to be coming from rerolled teams because even my alt team would be fighting players that were decked in S3 Shoulders and S3 weaponry.  We felt the lash of a rerolled team our 5v5 because we lost 23 points to a team that had the S3 shoulders and Weaponry.  Given this freak week, we still pulled through and we’re looking to claim our own shoulders and continue to move up the ranks.

Who knows - maybe the Grass only gets Greener on the other side of 2K.

-ERP-

Don’t Just Dive Right In
Most people attempt Arena as soon as they can just to get “points.” This most often applies to alts of people who just want to get geared up.  While it’s nice to get 200 arena points with a rating of 1350, the player won’t get a good experience from doing so poorly. It’s very disheartening to go 1-99 (that’s as bad as Glass Joe from the original Punch Out). Simply put, it’s hard to learn when you get two-shot.

Get Prepared
Preparing to enter Arena isn’t difficult.  The only guidelines you need to prepare include:
+ Collect enough resillience to protect yourself (300+ is standard)
+ Get Weaponry that’s relevant (Put that Axe away, snag a Sword or a Mace)
+ Spec yourself appropriately (I know you love Prot, but it’s not applicable)
+ Find people that you can tolerate - Yes, I realize this isn’t easy.
+ Get lots and lots of team-practice.
+ Communicate!  Ventrilo or something similiar is important.

Where Do I Practice?
Personally, as a Warrior (and this applies to most classes), training in Alterac Valley - while fruitful in honor - is detrimental to practicing PvP. There is too much chaos and too many variables to practice tactics and techinques against other players. On the flip side, dueling might be helpful if you find yourself in a 1v1 situation, but this is typically an unrealistic way to hone your skills for Arena. That leaves EOTS, AB, and WSG. These are all excellent training grounds. I must comment though that it helps to bring your Arena partners with you into the matches so you can start working on synergy (the ability to work together seamlessly).

Last Words Before I Reach Zero HP?
Gear only matters at the entry point.  Once you’re rocking a little more than 300 resillience (All PvP Gear - S1 or better), you’ll be in good enough condition to maintain 1600+ rating in any bracket.  That said, all the gear in the world won’t save you if you don’t communicate with your team.  Many a time our team failed to close someone out because of a lack of communication.  When you’re ready to seal the deal, let your team know, and have your procedure in place.  The only thing left is to go and do it.

-ERP-

Keeping with my current agenda of building upon a solid foundation upon which to build your interface, today’s lesson is extremely simple and borderline common sense: consistency. I don’t have anything new or groundbreaking for the UI community, but the topic is still important. What am I talking about? Textures.

Keep it Simple
As with choosing font, you should choose textures for their legibility. I know you don’t read textures, however a lot of text is placed over the textures and I cannot stress enough the importance of a good texture. There are numerous textures to choose from: some good, some bad, and some terribly overused. A quick/short list of terrible (or default) textures:

Banto
Blizzard (default)
Cilo
Glaze
LiteStep
Perl

By no means is that a complete list but it should give you a general idea of what to avoid when choosing textures.

Keep it Classy
Just like Ron Burgandy, you’ll want to have a sense of refinement. Sure it’s easy to just install that addon and forget about it, but wouldn’t you like your interface to somehow be just a little bit different than the rest? Something to help distinguish it from the masses? Of all the people that download any addon, a good portion of those never bother go beyond the default settings and can’t be bothered to change the appearance or textures of those addons. On the flip side, some people go crazy and pick seemingly arbitrary settings for their addons.

The Shame!
Here’s a perfect example of what NOT to do: badUI1*. I thought about hiding the name but that’s okay. On this screenshot you can see no less than five(5) separate textures throughout the interface. I know at least four(4) of those are the default (I’m unsure about SW_Stats). If for no other reason to change your interface, do it so you’re not wearing a brand new silk coat with cotton and cashmere patches (analogy courtesy of Eric). Another example of what not to do (sorry, Amelio): badUI2*. In Amelio’s defense, it is an old screenshot andhe has since improved his UI.

If you looked at these screenshots and you didn’t see anything wrong, stop reading now and go here.

*These screenshots aren’t terrible UIs, but those that best illustrate my point. 

SharedMedia the Savior!
Okay, so you know what you don’t want but you don’t know how to fix it. Well, in my first post I mentioned SharedMedia as a substitute to manually changing fonts. And as I previously mentioned, it is capable of doing the same with textures and sounds. This addon will allow you to have consistency throughout your interface. This simple change will make it look as though you’ve designing interfaces for years even if you’ve just started.

Here’s an interface I was toying with a for a few days in October:

It’s by no means great and far from perfect. But the one thing it has no shortage of is consistency. This is a typical outcome simply due to SharedMedia. A single texture used throughout all addons, as well as only two fonts.

If interested, there are additional fonts and backgrounds available for SharedMedia on http://files.wowace.com. Hal also designed an amazing compilation of textures that can be found here.

Look, I’m Jerry Springer!
Default wouldn’t be bad if it all mods followed some rules of standardization. Unfortunately, there are no such rules. Where’s the value in bothering to clean the UI? Well, you won’t be mocked in other people’s blogs when your UI is seen by me, I suppose.

-JM

When Blizzard set requirements on the weapons, off-hands, shields(1850 Rating) and shoulders (2000 Rating), the arena system changed in a subtle way.  Gone are the days where teams would be formed just to scrounge up a weekly 400~500 arena points to get a complete set of gear.  The competition has gotten a little harder and a little leaner.  I’m not seeing team jumping quite as often any more.

People who played second string in their wonderful level-up-70 blues aren’t getting S3 weapons right out of the gate.  Teams don’t seem hashed together anymore.  Many players have heard of and studied the “ideal” setup and have formed appropriate teams.

“The Wall”
There are “walls” in place at 1850 and 2000.  As teams get increasingly close to 1850, the number of competition gets higher and higher, and then after 1850, the number of teams seem to drop off.  Over the last few weeks, we’d play teams that would either be well below us (gaining 11 points a win) or well above us (losing 11 points for a loss).

Why might this happen?  I think teams that reach 1850 break to get their weapon and just call it quits because there’s some psychological “gain” for being an 1850+ team.  Teams below 1850 all continue until they get sick of playing or until they get to the magical 1850.

This week’s Setup:
41+ Arms Warrior | Holy/Ret Paladin | Resto. Shaman(s)
Shadow Priest | Felguard Warlock

So Where Does that Put Slash Hungry?
We hopped over the wall.    Last week we struggled to get to 1850, but this week, it was a clean(er) run to 1900.  With Crazzymike starting, we opened with an optimistic 3-0 start, only to fall 3 straight to 3-3.  We switched over to Oblivions and took a loss right out of the gate, but we turned around our luck to go 7-1 with Oblivions.  As the above image implies, we closed out the night with 10-4 and 1900 rating taking us to a season standing of 50-20.  The record in itself gives me hope that we still have a lot of growth to go.

What did we fight last night?
There didn’t seem to be a particular pattern of the teams.  There were no-Paladin teams (hah, Pain Supression is no BoP by any means).  There were teams that sported high amounts of mana-drain (Hunter, Warlock, Priest).  There were teams that sported no warrior, and some that sported both a warrior and a rogue.  Lastly, there were many teams that started bringing Druids into the fray.

Teams with Druids
I must point out that the teams with Druids in them were strong contenders.  Druids, in some ways, can play a great part in a 5v5 team.  They work well as distractions and chain-CC’rs (Especially if they’re rotating on everyone in the opposing team).  The current problem that many druids have is that they are done for if they are ever caught in Human (Tauren? Night Elf?)-mode.  Having a team with stuns, fears, and casted damage doesn’t always bode so well for the Druid.

Teams with Heavy Drain
With Uglie running Felguard, we found a sweet spot in piercing the drain teams.  We didn’t rely on Silences and Dispels.  We put all our eggs into the DPS basket (something, I think we do rather well).  With a Felguard out, clothies (particularly Priests and Warlocks) struggle to focus on Draining.  Between Earth Shocks, Pummels, intercepts, and rapid-melee attacks, we dominated teams that required long-drawn out fights by sheer force.

To be a little more clear:  It’s hard to play drain when there’s no time to drain.

Closing Thoughts
We’re moving into uncharted territory for the upcoming week.  Last season, it took us about four months to reach 1900, while this season took us one month and a week.  We’ve picked up great talent this season; combined that with what we already have, and we’re looking to push to 2000 in the upcoming week.

-ERP-

It’s the Small Things
As the above picture suggests, I’m easily amused by any assortment of things. So, imagine my excitement when I found out that I could tweak my interface without downloading a thing. I know, I know. It sounds boring or complicated and probably both. I’ll admit that it can be tedious when doing it the first time, but the end result is worth it (unless you throw your monitor out the window in frustration).

Making the Most of Your Monitor
There’s much to be said about the importance of scale. After all, nothing will create more screen real estate for you and it’s extremely easy to change. To change the scale:

1. Goto Video Options (Hit ESC to see Options menu).
2. Check “Use UI Scale.”
3. Use the slider.
4. Hit Okay.
5. Enjoy.

Let’s say you want to set the scale to an exact amount that’s not .64 or 1 (good luck doing this with the slider). You can use the Config.wtf found in your WTF folder (use Notepad or Wordpad if you’ve never opened a .wtf file before) in the WoW directory. Look for SET uiScale and enter any number between .64 and 1 you desire (keep the quotations around the number). Save the changes.

Zoom Zoom
Mazda commercials aside, zoom will determine whether or not you see your environment adequately. It’s an MMO not an FPS, after all so being able to see around you isn’t “cheating” and it will probably save you from being called several unsavory names simply because you couldn’t see the mob you backed into. So, how do you maximize the effectiveness of how far you can zoom out? It’s a relatively short and painless process:

1. Go to your Video Options (Hit ESC to see Options menu).
2. Find Terrain Distance.
3. Use the slider to change the visble distance.
4. Hit Okay.
5. Goto Interface Options.
6. Under Camera Find “Max Camera Distance.”
7. Use slider to change to High.
8. Hit Okay.

Ya, ya - but how much will this help? You might even be asking why Terrain Distance? Rather than telling you why terrain distance, seeing is believing:

The difference is night and day. And if you’re interested: Terrain Near Full Image and Terrain Far Full Image.

The exact same location taken with three different camera distances. Camera low is obviously the left end of the slider in Interface Options and High is obviously on the right end, but how do you get high x4? Simply type “/console cameraDistanceMaxFactor 4” into chat like any other slash command. You can enter any number, but I don’t really see a point in going beyond 4. Oh, and for those curious, full versions of the camera zoom images: Low, High, High x4

Are you Serious?
The overall aim of this post is simply to create greater visibility of your surrounding environment. I know this is rather mundane for the more advanced users out there and I apologize. I’m going to stick with fundamentals for now and then start examining some more complex topics in future posts.

-JM