Friday, March 26, 2010

3.3.3(.3.3.3) broke my game!

Since 3.3.3 dropped, I've become more acutely aware of this little fact that's always rested in the back of my brain.

I am completely and utterly reliant on my addons to raid. Or even run dungeons. Or do anything more complicated than fish or camp for the Time-Lost Protodrake (and if he ever does show up, I may be screwed anyway...because killing him will be more complicated than fishing).

A while ago I set up San with a band spankin' new shiny UI. Lots of addons, almost everything default hidden, moved, or replaced. All organized to fit comfortably on a 1600x1050 display of hawtness. (As an aside, I've been meaning to do a UI post, but I keep forgetting to get screencaps of it at good times.)

For this reason, I can no longer raid (or do any of those other things) on San when I'm not sitting at my desktop machine. With very few exceptions my laptop does not have the same multitude of addons installed. Mostly because I don't want to spend the hours it took to set up my UI the first time trying to duplicate it on a different display. Also because WoW taxes my laptop enough without all the addons. (Hence why I use it for little more than fishing or camping...usually while watching TV or otherwise having 90% of my attention occupied.)

Anyway, as tends to happens with patches, 3.3.3.3 broke many of my addons. But usually when this happens, it's not the really important ones. And it's only minor, annoying breaks.

Not 3.3.3.3.3. Oh no. It broke the Mac Daddy of my addons: ag_unitframs. I'm getting so many bugs, it's making effective raiding (and raid leading) almost impossible. First my raid frames won't show up. Then my healthbar won't move. Then my target frame never changes (even though I'm clearly cycling through targets). Then the statuses of other people in the raid stop updating. (Why is our dps so low all of a sudden? Everyone's dead? When did that happen?) All this crazy stuff. I'm going batty because I'm trying to lead a raid and I don't know what's going on.

Can you see my dilemma?

I've already had people in my guild switch from aguf to PitBull (which I have installed, but only use to hide Blizzard's Auras, since aguf won't) or x-perl. Since those have apparently been updated and aguf has not, I may need to switch. But then that leaves me in the tough spot of trying to redo my UI setup immediately before a raid. Fun stuff.

Dear aguf programmers: please, please, please update the addon for 3.3.3.3.3.3!

In a similar vein, I've also decided the default UI is no longer cutting it for Daluaan. Anyone have any good references for Resto and/or Enhancement Shaman UIs?

5 comments:

  1. Shadowed unit frames is very similar to Ag, and it's updated more often. It's got a similar interface to Aguf, not like Pitbull which is "code-y".

    Totemz has an excellent write-up for totemtimers addon http://totemz.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/totem-management-totem-timers-addon/

    Check out the addons section on the sidebar for more shaman-related addon tips.

    There are also some good shaman addon tips in Flow

    http://www.restoshamanflow.com/category/addons/

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  2. I'm probably just being a stubborn hag here, but refuse to modify my UI much.

    In previous major patches, I never even realized my addons stopped working unless a LUA error started screaming at me. Granted, raiding without DBM was challenging, but it was very very possible. The only graphical modification of the original Blizzard UI is the absence of the griffons on the sidebar; I wrote a simple mod to free that space up.

    I really love looking at other people's pretty UI and wish I'd use it, then always fret about bugs and patch incompatibility, and most of all; over-reliance...

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  3. @Bear Pelt

    My reliance on San's modded UI is mostly due to bad design on my part. Basically my abilities are all spread out funky across my action bars and when they're plopped back into the default UI I can't find anything. Since all my other toons still use the default UI, I'm still comfortable looking at it in a general sense.

    I realized Dal's UI was no good anymore when it was so cluttered that I kept hitting Shift+B because I thought all my bags were open. That would, of course, open all my bags and clutter the screen even more...

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  4. I read somewhere that aguf isn't being maintained anymore because the people who were working on it no longer play WoW.

    X-Perl didn't take too long to configure. It has a somewhat different look than aguf but accomplishes the same things. I'm satisfied with the change.

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  5. @Anon

    I'm a coder by profession, so I don't mind "code-y" addons. As long as the documentation is clear, I'm golden.

    But I'll definitely check out Shadowed before I settle on something.

    Also, thanks for the Shaman links. Very good launching points.

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