i hear the voices when I'm dreaming

Okay, I ... have not played in a couple of years. (Literally. There is a post from two years ago saying that I started a baby panda because the changes to my mains were too overwhelming.)

I have more or less decided that I am going to level my 85s the normal way and use boost-to-90 for a different char (probably my 62 feral druid). But I am stuck on, of all things, the UI.

I am most used to playing Lich King / Cata era with a bunch of addons -- one to give me a shitton of bars on the screen, one that was a bag organizer, one for profession management, and a bunch for other stuff. And I haven't kept up with stuff so I didn't expect to want to play again.

1) Does one really need addons any more, or is the native UI decent?

2) If addons are good, what ones are best? I am assuming it has changed a lot.

3) HALP HOW DO I TALENT. Well, not how, but I have no clue what to choose. (Enh/Resto Shaman, Fury Warrior, Feral Druid.)

4) Where is the best place to level an 85? How do I get started? Once I get started, how do I continue? How do I find the Count? Once I do, how do I find you again? Once I find you again, how do I escape? ...sorry, had a bit of Princess Bride slip in there.

5) Pleh?

(Links for things to read are fine, I just don't know where to start and am super overwhelmed and augh)

(because I know y'all care so very much /grin/)

Teal deer version: gamings are not really happening much, and partly that's due to (probably depression-related) lack of interest, but mainly due to not having a setup that works.

Here's the thing: with zero mobility, I don't have a lot of options for where to put my hands. Which means that if the mouse is in reach of (either) hand, that hand can't reach the keyboard. Additionally, the keyboard I had been using, a Kinesis Freestyle (I think?) split, stopped responding when my computer had its latest set of shenanigans, which means that I'm stuck with a standard keyboard.

I'd had the KF set up with one half of the keyboard where my left hand could reach, and the other half up out of direct reach so that the mouse was usable with my right. This was not perfect -- a lot of games tend to expect, y'know, full keyboard access -- but it worked. WASD movement, 1-6 for skills, other left side of keyboard keys used for other functions (which I tried to standardize over all my games so b would always be inventory, c opened the character info pane, r toggled walk/run, t targeted nearest foe, etc.), and mouse control over the rest of the stuff.

(It also worked for regular use, not just gaming. If I wanted to type, I could use a stick to reach the right half of keyboard keys without moving anything, or for serious e.g. nano typing I could move the mouse aside and have both hands touch typing.)

But with a straight keyboard, I've lost a lot of that. The only way to make a mouse usable for me involves having the keyboard at a weird angle so that my left hand sort of reaches (but everything is skewed badly, so my touch typing instincts are thrown off, and if I accidentally hit capslock instead of shift that's why), or else I just move myself over relative to everything so that I use the mouse exclusively with my left hand, typing via either dictation (which sucks) or an on-screen keyboard (which also sucks).

These options, in case you can't tell, all suck.

Right now I am typing via left hand and stick, with the mouse out of reach so that the keyboard is straight. This is giving me a halfway decent WPM for typing. (38, which is slower than I used to be but at least workable) The on-screen keyboard gives me about three WPM. five if I'm lucky. And is so totally not workable for gaming, for obvious reasons.

I need to get a replacement for the KF; I'm just hesitating because Expense. (I am also tempted to get a gaming keyboard, which would take some getting used to but would give me possibly better options ... but hello Expense. Also Needless.) And I kind of want a gaming mouse, but I have no clue if I would be actually able to use it. (In a literal sense. My current mouse is a vertical one, and I hold it weirdly, but I was able to try it via my sister before getting it so I knew I could use it.)

And really Expense is a silly reason to hesitate, because it's not all that much and it gives better flexibility and actual access to what I want to do, but I think part of the thing is that I've gotten restricted too much to play video games even with the right equipment, and that makes me all sad and anxious.

...but anyway, that's that. Sigh.

Game-specific updates, mainly for my own benefit:

( Read more... )

This is mainly for myself, in case things go weird and I lose the stored macros; but other people are welcome to use them, or suggest improvements, or ... whatever.

( General )

( Shaman macros )

( other classes )

...I don't have a lot of useful warrior macros, so suggestions would not go amiss. Even for things that aren't usable until I level more.

* I can't explain what controls my interest level in a given class. By all rights I should be in love with druids -- they combine rogue stealthiness (though not picpocketing, alas), melee bash-heads-in-ness, and self-heal, not to mention instaflight. (Leaping off cliffs and birding halfway down will nev... well, it might get old eventually, but not for a really long time. And why is it that druids can bird instantly, but worgen can't drop to all fours instantly? anyway.) And yet I am more obsessed with leveling my warrior -- which has the bashing head in thing going for it, but doesn't stealth and doesn't heal outside of bandages and potions -- to the point where my warrior, which a week or two ago was somewhere in the 30's, is now almost 63, whereas in the same period my druid went from 65 to ... 66.

* (leveling is kind of crazy, between heirlooms and guild rewards and guild perks. zoooooom.)

* Wintersaber trainer repgrind is really kind of laughably easy now. Used to be that the only way to get rep with them (and thus the only way to get their mount) was to run quests that took forfrickingever and were a pita even if you were outleveled for the area. (Originally it was on the order of 840 quest turn-ins; when I was half-assedly trying on my shaman, the quests gave about five times as much rep, meaning "only" 168 quest turn-ins, of a very obnoxious quest that was still a pita to do. Now? One set-up quest, and then twenty fairly easy daily quests, and bam.

* Then again, Timbermaw has gotten kind of like that too. I did repgrinding on my (shaman) tailor, not because I *needed* the recipes (especially since shamans don't tend to wear cloth items) but to be completionist. This involved a lot of running around killing ewoks furbolgs a lot. My warrior was just following the normal quest line and is up to revered already.

* (and the wintersaber thing is especially ridiculous if you're a goblin engineer -- although five out of the six times I've used the transporter, I've ended up on fire, which rather sucks for a class with no self-heal -- but still, I don't have to be hearthed in everlook or travel there, just transport and do the quest and whoosh back to wherever I'm actually leveling at.)

* It turns out that being used to a shaman can lead to embarrassing situations like dungeonating with a fury warrior that had a shield equipped. (I'm used to weapon-and-shield because that's the best equipment for my shaman; plus which, I sort of forgot that I could dual-wield already, and was sort of stuck in a rut thinking I had to wait until I got the talent that let me dual-wield two-handers.) Amusingly, I discovered this not because someone said "Hey, you know you might get better damage output if you dual-wield rather than have a sword", but rather because someone was mocking me for being the most ridiculous thing he'd ever seen. I refrained from saying "yeah, and this from a hunter who doesn't use misdirect and complains when he gets aggro."

* I will actually be the first to admit that I don't have a clue how to do warrioring. Especially in groups. Solo, I've got a setup that works well enough -- battle stance; charge to start out, victory rush if it's up; pummel if I need to interrupt; slam, overpower, execute, when they proc; rend always up, sunder armor if I'm not feeling lazy, battle shout always up, thunderclap and demoralizing shout and sometimes piercing howl if I'm dealing with more than one at a time; otherwise a semirandom mix of strike, bloodthirst, heroic strike, and hamstring as necessary -- which isn't probably the most efficient but it's comfortable enough. But things that work for solo play don't work for group play. The one group I was in I switched to berserker stance, because charge doesn't work when I'm not the tank and anyway I don't have to worry so much about getting pummeled myself, but I'm ass at managing threat, and /because/ I'm not the tank and therefore not getting pounded on I rarely have enough rage built up for, er, anything. And okay technically as a warrior I could tank, but a) not specced for it (need prot, not fury, as far as I know) and b) not at all used to defensive stance. And also see above re solo play not being group play; when I am solo, I have to basically be dps as well as tank, so my mindset is there, not wholly in tank mode.

* Motes of fire are obnoxiously scarce.

...more for my own record-keeping than anything else, but.

( may include discussions of Gunk )

(Plus, with my head all cottoned up, I can't really focus on anything of consequence. Which translates into a string of WoW achievements that are really more embarrassing, in a I-have-no-life way, than anything else: maxed fishing, Limnologist, three fish away from Oceanographer, northrend gourmet and other cooking achievements, and I am precisely two recipes away from Outland Gourmet and from the Chef title, but annoyingly they are the two recipes that can only be gotten as random awards from the freaking daily cooking quest in freaking outlands. And I also made progress on the Children's Week achievement -- which, I might add, I am still bitter about the PvP elements, of which I have half.)

(...and I really wish Azeroth capital cities had direct portals to shatt and dal -- probably with a level restriction, but that wouldn't affect a max-level char -- because there are Things I want to do in outlands and northrend and I tend not to because it's so freaking annoying to get there.)

So I have (WoW) raid night on Thursdays, which means several hours of focused computer attention with a headphone on.

Despite the fact that she has access to me almost any other time, this d oes not sit well with Miss Kitty. It does not sit well at /all/.

I kind of had a sneaking suspicion of this last week, when she jumped on my desk and put one foot on my keyboard and almost ran me off the platform. (We were doing the lich king for shits and giggles, though mercifully we weren't actually actively playing at the time.) But hey, it was her first week, she was used to me dropping everything when she did the "I want attention" mrrrrp at me.

So this week, after a couple hours, she decides she wants Me Time.

Telling me this consists of increasing mrrrps and meows. Which I steadfastly ignore.

So she jumps from the floor onto my armrest, scrabbles up my arm and boob until she is stabilized, walks over my keyboard, and tries to eat the shiny moving bits on the monitor, which happen to be boomkins that are jumping up and down waiting for me to get back from kitty aggro.

....I was kinda giggling too hard to be as stern as I possibly should have been. /grin/

(naturally once I was done playing and went over to her she ignored me. Pointedly.)

So I am happily watching CotG (whee they are all so young and adorable) and knitting, and I realize my mIRC window is flashing -- people from my WoW guild were asking me if I was signed in.

Which I wasn't.

Getting hacked is /fun/.

...changed password, ran scans on my computer, and then opened a ticket. My main (lvl 85 shaman) was missing the chest, legs, rings, trinkets, relic, and weapon/shield of heal set, as well as the entire dps set stored in teh bank, and a lot of my inventory.

Oh, and all the gold.

(Well, no, not all of it. They left me 94 silver 6 copper.)

The 82 rogue is missing some gear and all the Cata-level herbs and volatile elements and stuff. 80 mage seems okay? It looks like they were mainly after Cataclysm-level stuff.

Fuck this shit anyway.

(And I decided to give in and get an authenticator -- I had been resisting because it was RL money, but it's an additional layer of security, right? -- except the battle.net store isn't accepting my credit card information. And yes I am keeping an eye on my cc for Suspicious Activity in case I have a keylogger or something, though I doubt that's the case, and this is just me typing something in wrong, but it is icing of suck on a cake of suck.

...at this point I am just kind of saying 'fuck everything' until tomorrow. Am hanging out in WoW in case they get back to me and have questions, but it's not like I can do anything useful with half my equipment missing.

So ... even though the new WoW expansion hasn't come out yet, er, a big dragon apparently /has/. (Kickass cinematic. I need to rewarch with sound on)

( spoilers, for them as care )

*flails*

*flails more*

I have NO WORDS, you guys, omg