New Toys

One of the many things I love about World of Warcraft is the ability to customize the user interface with all of the user made addons there are available for the game. I've said it before, I am an addon junky. Surprisingly I have never been completely burned by this addiction. I update my addon's every week, so far, when a patch has hit I have some minor hic-ups for the first few hours and by the end of the day all of my "essentials" are up and running again. My "essentials" include Bongos2 and Pitbull and for my Druid, Clique. Those three are probably the only three addons other than guild required things like a threat meter and Boss Mods that I actually NEED to play Warcraft.

This week with 2.4 hitting the biggest snag I ran into was for a little bit before I left for work on Tuesday night, Pitbull, was enabled but not working. That was it... well my damage meter isn't working either but I expected that with the overhaul blizzard has done to the default combat log.

Anyway, this post is about my new toy, really it is. My new toy is the Belkin N52te. I come from using a Saitek Pro Gamer Command Unit (Yes really ugly bulky name). I am in love with this speedpad. The Saitek has a few more buttons but, the east of programming the Belkin, the way that it fits my hand, and simply the more responsive the buttons are make the Belkin a much better choice. If you're looking into a speedpad, either this one or perhaps Belkin's older model the N52 (I have never used this one but my husband has and he says it's nice) is the way to go.

I also have some updates on Luna's progress I don't have time to write them out right now but good things have happened I promise!

I might be an addon junky

I'll be the first person to admit it. I'm an addon addict. If you were to look at my UI there's little to maybe nothing left of Blizzard's default UI. I've replaced everything, action bars, buff tracker, quest tracking, the mini map the unit frames... everything.

With my mage and warlock I have everything keybound and I use a Saitek Pro-Gamer Command Unit (the saitek version of belkins's speedpad) Now, this set up has served me well for all dps rolls, and when Luna was feral spec'd in the beginning it was very useful to me then however, I hate trying to heal that way. I'm not a big fan of making macros for every little thing I do and, to adapt my saitek style to how I'd ideally like to be healing, I'd have to make a crap-ton, yes a crap ton, of mouse-over macros.

I'm a lazy druid. I don't want to make a ton of macros so I needed a solution. Enter Clique.

I use Clique in combination with my favorite unitframe addon, Pitbull. There's no going back. In my opinion Clique, a decent Unitframe replacement and a mouse with a LOT of buttons is so the way to go. I have yet to play with making Clique macros, that could change my opinion of the addon, but I doubt it. I think I'm in love.

I still have things keybound. Right now, Luna is kind of an odd Balance/resto blend close to a dreamstate build but not dreamstate (I may be changing this around if I find the spec isn't working for me but so far I like it and I'm only doing the leveling 5 mans right now) so, on easier instances and during my solo (or rather light grouping I almost always have an elemental shaman with me) endeavors I use my speed pad for my balance spells. I also have some straight up modifier keys bound directly to my saitek in particular shift and alt are bound to keys 9 and 10 on my device. I'm not sure if I could do this with a belkin, although I havent tried it because the belkin has a few less buttons. I bound shift and alt to the saitek in my druid profile because... I'm a noob and kept hitting the windows key and basically alt tabbing out of the game while I was trying to heal. You don't want to be the noob that tells the rogue he died because as you were going to heal him you tabbed out of the game.