Since the last time I posted about this, Blizzard has listened to the feedback and revisited the party/raid frames a little bit with more options that we were asking for.

The new options pane

Backing up one step, in the current beta build (12942) the new-style frames appear to be off by default. You turn them on by ticking the “Use raid-style party frames” option in the Interface-Unitframes menu screen, as shown below:

Customising the actual raidframes is in the Raid Frames menu, and now gives you the following options:

I’ll step briefly through the new additions, working down the columns.

A toggle for power bars

I think all healers will probably want them on, and it’s a shame in a way that you can’t choose to show mana but not show rage/energy/runic power, but that’s a minor point.

Do you really need a screenshot for this?

Border

A slightly odd-looking grey border, which can be turned on or off. I imagine most people will want it off, but it’s on by default. It shows around the raidframe box, as well as putting lines around the individual frames and power bars, as you can see below:

Resizeable frames

This was high up most people’s wishlists, and I’m glad to see it make it in.

You can scale width and height independently, and the range of sizes goes from low to high, with very fine control in between (the slider has around 35 steps, so plenty of adjustability there). Here’s the two extremes for your viewing pleasure:

Low (default):

High:

Now there’s some interesting scaling things here. The name text, power bars and debuff indicator (upper-right) don’t change scale, although the health remaining text and debuff icons (lower-left) do. I’m going to assume this is a result of this being beta and not yet finished, but it does look a bit odd.

Numerical health display

You now have options for the numerical health display, although it’s turned off by defauly. It’s got options for absolute health remaining (long-form, i.e. 49516 rather than 49.5k), health lost (same format) or health percentage. A short-form option would be the icing on the cake, but definitely a leap forward.
Here’s the selection dropdown:


And some examples:

• Health Remaining:
• Health Lost:
• Health Percentage:

Class-coloured health bars

By default this is set to off, but you can turn it on if you want to. Another one I’m very pleased to see make it in.

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I happened to spot that yesterday was my 6-month Blogiversary! Go me! It feels a little bit silly to be making a special post to pat myself on the back, but when I started this blog I had no idea if I’d be still going in a month let alone half a year and yet here I am, going strong and looking forward to Cataclysm still as keen as ever. I think that’s worthy of note.

I’ve definitely noticed that I’ve matured quite a bit as a blogger; I’ve worked out some of the kinks in my writing, settled on a ‘personality’, and I feel a lot more confident hitting that “Publish” button now, although I still get a little buzz every time I post something new. I’ve also reached out to the community, joining Blog Azeroth and spreading comments across a wide range of blogs, which is also something that I wouldn’t have done 6 months ago. Blogging has been a nice boost for me personally over these last few months.

It’s also really nice to see so many people visiting from links posted on guild forums. That’s great evidence that I’m actually managing to directly help people, which is just awesome.

What’s helped a lot is the support and encouragement I’ve recieved from around the internet.
At the risk of forgetting other significant people, I’d like to mention Zelmaru for including me in multiple Parliamentary Papers and generally being a source of encouragement; Beruthiel for highlighting me in her Community Spotlight and giving me my biggest influx of readers and subscribers to date; the fine folks over at Blog Azeroth for at least quadrupling the size of my Google Reader list as well as for the wealth of guides and tips they’ve amassed there; the Twisted Nether Blogcast for mentioning me multiple times too and for including me in the Wiki; Karatheya for getting me started; and everyone who’s commented on my posts, subscribed to my feed or linked to the blog. Thanks all!

And to end on a gratuitous statistic: according to Feedburner I’m sitting at around 55 subscribers, which is frankly astonishing to me. I really didn’t expect that many people would be interested in what I had to say.
Thank you for taking an interest, and I hope you stick around.

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Everblue recently posted a retrospective on Wrath of the Lich King from one tank’s perspective. I liked the format, and I’m feeling nostalgic, so here’s my version.

Favourite instance

I have to agree with popular opinion here, and go for Ulduar. The grand scale of the instance, as well as the tremendous variety of the bosses kept it exciting and interesting right the way through. I also loved the way the hard modes were implemented, generally adding mechanics rather than just bumping bosses’ HP and damage output.

This was also the phase of the game where I also felt at my most flexible as a Disc Priest, being able to keep up with tank heals or switch to raid healing depending on the requirements of the fight. And since most of my hardmode experience of Ulduar was on 10-man, I really used that flexibility.

Most difficult encounter

With the exception of heroic Lich King which we’ve not attempted on either format yet, the hardest boss for me personally and for my guild has to have been heroic Anub’arak.

You had to position the adds relative to the boss extremely precisely or you didn’t have the DPS to keep up with the fight, not to mention the many, many “kersplat” moments we had when an add got behind their tank, and for healers the reaction time needed in Phase 3 was not much fun either, especially combined with the lack of anything much to do in the rest of the fight.

Least fun encounter

If not for the fact that there’s so much else going on to keep the fight interesting, I’d pick the Lich King. Spending 10+ hours a week in 10-minute bursts of bubble-spam is definitely not on my list of fun experiences.

However I’d probably pick Faction Champions, just for the sheer helplessness of it from a healer’s perspective. Random people being nuked before you can react, aggro lighting up everywhere, the inability to properly strategise (we’re not much for PvP in my guild, so we didn’t have people accustomed to calling targets or responding to key deaths); it all combined to make for a very frustrating experience.

Most fun encounter

Firefighter, without question. Mimiron is one of the best bosses I’ve ever come across in WoW in just about every way. From the enticingly cartoonish Big Red Button to the well-written dialog the designers outdid themselves, and the mechanics were tuned very neatly to stretch you without introducing too much RNG; just about every mechanic could be mitigated or controlled through the raid’s actions.

A distant second would be either of the Mind Control encounters: Instructor Razuvious or the Who Needs Bloodlust? achievement. It’s nice to be central to an encounter, and to use a trick that usually doesn’t get much of an outing.

Most rewarding boss to heal

Another tie here.

Heroic Anub’arak-10 felt really, really good when we finally got it down. It demanded a lot from two healers, with tanks being absolutely pounded at the same time as the raid needed complete focus because Penetrating cold could take people out pretty quickly. Those two healers needed to work together to get everything covered.

As my other choice, I’m going to nominate early Mimiron once again. You can’t beat a fight where the focus shifts from spot healing to raid-wide healing (and on to total chaos), and needs coordination and defensive cooldowns to make it work.
Especially one which takes a lot of learning time to defeat, the rejoicing on Vent was amazing.

Proudest moment

Yet another Ulduar memory: getting my hands on the Rusted Proto-Drake. This was pretty much the golden period in Wrath for me, working through the achievements with a really tight-knit group of people. Even though it took a long time to get Firefighter down, spirits always stayed high and we kept plugging away until we got it, and then kept going back for a few weeks afterwards to make sure everyone who’d work for it got their drake too.

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So in the end I’ve moved to a new host (the recent niggles were the final straw, and I was up for renewal soon in any case). I had a few false starts, but I think I’ve got the wrinkles ironed out now. Cpanel makes backing up and transferring pretty easy, which was a relief.

I don’t expect anything to be broken, but if by some chance you do spot anything especially unusual or non-functional, do let me know by leaving a comment here or by emailing me (malevica at typehforheals dot com).

Apologies if you’ve noticed anything odd this evening, but it should be pretty much smooth sailing for a while now.

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I’ve been having some pretty annoying site niggles lately so I’ll be doing a lot of poking around tonight, which may or may not end up with the site being offline for a few hours. Please bear with me, and I’ll apologise now for any weirdness!

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