Thank you for playing “Should we or should we not listen to the advice of the galactically stupid!” – A Few Good Men
I love tweaking my UI. Nothing brings me greater joy than working on my Dashboard of Doom, and unleashing it’s death-dealing fury in a raid.
But enough of that. This is not an article on how to build a UI. In fact it’s an article about when not to build a UI.
I’ve known for a long time that building a UI takes work. I install my addons, customize them, move things around, and then I test. It doesn’t matter how great my UI looks, if it doesn’t provide the functionality I need then it’s garbage.
Enter raid night. I decide to break one of the tenants of UI building – Never makes changes to your UI right before you raid. Even small changes can have adverse affects.
On this night I installed ForteXorcist because I wanted to be able to track serpent stings applied to multiple targets (this addOn handles that job nicely by the way).
Configuring the addOn was easy and about a half hour before the raid I paid a visit to our space goat pals in the Exodar and borrowed their training dummies. Sting on the heroic dummy, and sting on another dummy, both tracked beautifully by my new mod. Test concluded, raid invite accepted, hearthed, mounted and on my way to ICC.
Tonight’s boss? Rotface. That all important multi-add encounter where tracking stings is of the utmost importance.
About 1/2 way through the third attempt my abilities get grayed out and I hear this dwarven voice yelling – “I’m out of ammo!” Out of ammo? I open my inventory and in my bags are well over 5,000 Iceblade Arrows. How can I be out of ammo?
Then it dawns on me (this is all still during the encounter) I never use the good stuff on training dummies. My testing ammo of choice is usually the whopping 22 dps Wicked Arrow. I can get it in Dalaran and it’s cheap.
I pull open the character sheet and drop the Iceblade Arrows into the ammo slot, and proceed to wipe. I recovered nicely and did top the meters on our kill, but that’s really no consolation.
We get fail points for tweaking the UI prior to a raid, and for not replacing the cheap ammo with epic ammo. We get bonus fail points for needing three attempts to realize why my dps was crap. To be fair, I was in the top five all three attempts, but again no real consolation.
Ah well, to quote Al Delvecchio – /sigh Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah…
Wow, there must be some cosmic force on the Drenden server that binds only the best of hunters… I Was doing the same thing with NeedToKnow to track Internal Cooldowns (I was using Heatsink). After the 2nd boss in our ICC25 I noticed I was using the cheap arrows too. I didnt run out, but I was wondering why my dps was not as high as I thought it would be with the extra 5% bonus.