Like this:

…   if you show me yours <lol>

Just Kidding!

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Wowzers, has over 2 weeks gone by?  What a rotten bloggette I am; well in the TL;DR bullet fashion

1. Doc released me to start strengthening my recently reconstructed PCL on my good leg.  I took it upon myself to graduate from walker to crutches.  Two weeks to the day I tore the calf muscle in my bad leg.  Lost a week; it could have been worse; it could have needed ….  drum roll …. more surgery
2. Nephew decided he wanted to start playing WoW again; since his dominant hand is broken and he can’t play xBox.
3. Nephew decided he wanted to join CO, our primarily adult guild;  drama ensued.
4. 3 days after joining CO, nephews account got hacked; MUCH drama ensued; need to tell the tale some day soon.
5. If you are max mining skill; make darn sure you have an authenticator; see point previous.
6. Saw the double specialist Neuro/Ear Doc; can get tube in my ear and FLY away little girl; also going for cat scans and balance tests; surgery is likely in my future; as well as a hearing aid.  Yes, hubby is right; my hearing has deteriorated; ‘very common result of head injuries in high speed motor vehicle collisions and fistula leaks; and if we don’t repair the fistula you will lose the hearing completely’.  Joy.
7. Bestest Mom-In-Law popped out her hip, and may be coming up for surgery and rehab.  Yippee!  (not the hip part, the visiting part)
8. I’m hoping to squeeze in a trip to Texas to visit family and bestest nephew after tube.in.my.ear before Mom-in-laws.hip.surgery and before middle.school.starts.  Must tackle my own mother.

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So, wanna see mine?

That is a screen cap during a 25 man raid; with the section of the screen that I really keep my eye on.  I recently switched to x-Perl from the standard raid frames; and really like it.  Working up the nerve to loose the boss buffs debuffs completely; but i r cluckers.

And, this is the composition.

1. Player Targets – part of ora Main Tank Windows; on Chablis I only use these if Main Tanks are not set
2. Omen – Really don’t use it much anymore with built in threat and threat indicators in xPerl; so long as I’m not pulling aggro I don’t much care what position I’m in on threat; unless of course it’s Patchwerk or something similar.  x-Perl does a great job of aggro warning and monitoring; so Omen just turned into noise.
3. DeadlyBossMod’s Timers – essential IMO (in my opinion)
4. Grid – OK; so I installed this so I could get use to it before I started raiding with Vineyard; who prefers it more centralized and prominent; Chablis has learned to like being able to glance over and get the pulse of the raid
5. Bartender4 – bar mods FTW – how did I ever survive without one?  Pick your flavor of the bar and do such neat things as conditionally display or not; position; size; arrange; bind keys and fade buttons
6. Power Aura’s – lets me see at a glance when I’ve gained or lost something very important to the success of a battle and to my improved damage dealing.  Lots have been written about Power Aura’s in the last several months since WotLK released.
7. Debuff Filter; or dfilter – I’ve been reading about using debuff’s on the boss to time when to put up my dots for the greatest DPS effect; watching the debuff’s on a boss fight is just insane crazy for me; so I’m trying this to see if I can improve my DPS
8. Coolline – love it; does just what you need in a simple low footprint manner
9. ora2 Tank Windows – fellow guild member hunter is responsible for me finding this jewel; I don’t know how I lived without.  It lets me do and see something at a glance.  Quickly, Timely.  Improved DPS uptime, improved target accuracy.  No more mousing around the UI trying to find my intended target.  Who needs a Misdirect, who needs a shield.  I noticed ora2 running on virtually all of the Ensidia UI’s.
10. MiniMap – I used Chinchilla for a long time and loved it; until it got buggy prone in the last patch
11. Activity Dependent Area – during battle; fight key binds – between battles; recount – general; quests
12. zHunter – my very first addon; ahhhhh.

When I’m testing an addon; I look for both functionality to improve my game, as well as flexibility to configure the way I want.  I try to minimize the noise on my screen at any time, and have learned to love and utilize conditional operatives to hide different things under different circumstances.  Generally, I have slighly different UI’s for: (a) just running around, (b) fighting solo or in small parties; (c) raid time battle and (d) raid time between battles.

I still think my UI is too *busy* during a boss fight; other than the slew of target/self/pet/focus buffs & debuffs I can’t really figure out what to do without.  What I have done is to move the absolute essentials to the foreground or focus zone so to speak.  And, I really like having my *stuff* at the bottom of my UI; makes movement intensive fights oh so much easier.

Getting into time with a boss fight; the normal tone areas are my focus zone:

During a boss fight; I find that Coolline is somewhat like a metronome and stanza to a musician; keeping time with the team, dancing on the beat and Power Aura’s provide the masterpiece dynamics while debuff filter is the accent marks.

And, just like learning a new piece of music; changing your WoW User Interface requires a ton of practice.  Practice on the target dummies, solo, small parties; PVP and then expect your DPS to go down for a time when you take your new ensemble into a 25 man raid.  Oh, and review your work.  Take tons of screen captures and go back after or between battles and take the time to look closely at a moment of frozen time.  Also, I’m going to try FRAPs’ing; as I think that would be a good way to review.

Practice makes Perfect Harmony.

Oh, and I can tell at a glance that some other hunter has overwritten my Improved Aspect of the Hawk and is costing me plus every other hunter in the raid 150 AP.

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