Author: Stargrace

Profit UI, at 1650×1080

Finding a UI that matches your play style is one of the most important things for any gamer I would think. While the default UI may be ‘good enough’, a lot of people are looking for just a little bit more.

So what sort of UI do you use? eq2interface.com is just one site of many (and probably the best out there) for displaying different UI’s that people can download. One of the more popular ones is profit. It’s easy to install and pretty bug-free which is always an added bonus. Why profit? Well, there’s a few reasons

• Hit enter to loot
• One click cures (noxious, trama, elemental etc)
• A clear display of character stats (everything from coin, to experience gained, to general stats such as strength and resists)
• Everything on the UI can be moved / re-sized to your liking
• Add / remove as many hotbars as you want and display them however you want
• Smooth and clean feeling

Since I upgraded my monitor, I had to change the resolution to the two MMO’s I play. This gave me a huge amount of extra space in the UI, I love it. I added four chat window’s to profit along the bottom, one for guild / say / group / yell and general messages like motd’s and down time (which I pay attention to the most) and then to the right of that, my dps window to watch what’s hitting me and for how much, then my hotbars, to the right of them another window for channels like 60-60 and Qeynos_Crafting, to the right of that, NPC says and tells so I can read the lore behind quests without being worried about losing everything in spam. Yes, I love my UI’s.

Faydai hit 59 sage, one more to go and she’ll be out of the dreaded T6. Then it’s time to get Yamini (the alchemist) from 50-60. I’ve been looking forward to it. I’ve always wanted a sage, especially as I was leveling my characters up and looked for spell upgrades. It’s a lot cheaper to harvest the rares / make the spells myself, then pay 20g per combine which is what typical crafters charge. I still also need to get Silverstep from 60-70 and even Dasie has been sitting at 65 and 91% into it for months now. I figure I’ll get them all to 60 first, and then worry about the grind to 70.

Stargrace, the slacker

So, a little bit of a rant this morning. Have to get it off of my chest. At 8:55am, smack dab in the middle of poets palace, the servers start spamming that they are coming down in 5 minutes, for a 4 hour update. There was no warning previous to this, nothing on the update notes, nothing in the forums, so you know it’s some random bug they’ve got to be fixing. Updates are typically on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, rarely on Thursdays. There was some speculation that it was unrest going in, but that’s been stated to be in game as of the GU (game update) 32, which is some time away.

The message also said it was just the US servers coming down. Of course, I’m in poets, on the third floor, with my 18 hour lockout already started. I looked at Shadowgeist and said “ok.. we better get moving”… used my sol ro miracles, and we sprinted off to the fourth floor. Completed all four named, in 4 minutes, out of breath and with me dead since I ganked agro too soon, nothing worth while dropped and I was pissed off that servers were coming down at all with no warning.

10 more minutes go by. Then 15. Speculation on other servers about what’s going on. Apparently a few servers had come down for their 4 hour updates. LDL however, was still up. It’s now 40 minutes past the down time set by spam, and the server is still up.

Sighs.

It wouldn’t bother me quite so much if I felt that SoE gave even the briefest thought to any of their player base. I used to think they did, but the past few months have just gotten progressively worse.

Yesterday I could not re-activate my account. I had station access, and wished to drop it. They ask you for some secret password though and to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never ever chosen one. So to drop station access, I cancelled my account completely ( I’ve done this in the past as well ) and then when it was closed, was prompted to re-activate. Well. I get a 403 “Forbidden” error when I try to access the “my account” section at all. So I follow the help commands. Live Chat is also not working. I get an error / timed out message. I try email support. Also not working. So I finally bite the bullet and decide to call them long distance and find out what’s going on. I have raids that night and would rather not miss them.

20 minutes on hold from Ottawa Ontario to San Diego and someone finally (a real person) is speaking to me. They tell me it must be my credit card. . . . uh . . . Pardon me? I can’t access the site at all because of my credit card? I can’t even get to the ‘type in your password’ portion. So I attempt it one more time, and low and behold, the site is working agian (I checked the forums, this was an issue for a few people, since the 15th roughly).

Sighs again.

I have little patience, I know. But come on folks I’m a paying customer here. I know a few people are feeling the exact same way. Like we’re being ignored completely while things are going on. I don’t mean to bash away at SoE, I do still play the game after all, but my patience is wearing thin on some issues that I think are important.

Now that the rant is done, on a completely different note. Stargrace hit 87 and almost 88 ap’s yesterday. We did a labs raid with three healers, that was.. interesting. To say the least. We did wipe a few times, but came out fairly unscathed. We also only had three groups and one group didn’t have a healer at all the entire time. No wonder people are one grouping the trash in this zone.

Some times, you’re just glad you follow sol ro

Actually got some quests done yesterday that I’d wanted to do for a while. One of them in Lesser Faydark had me kill a level 67^^^ who came with a 67^^ and that means, they were blue to me. Now, I’m a cloth caster, without masters of my pets or nukes. Wearing a few fabled pieces but a lot of treasured. So of course I had my doubts. I mez’d the ^^ and decided to take down the ^^^ first because I figured he’d update my quest (I was wrong about that as it turned out, I needed to defeat both and loot a shovel they dropped). I was very thankful I follow sol ro. Not only do I wear a cloak that gives me +65 damage to all of my spells, but I also get a miracle called incinerate. It does (with my current intelligence) 17,000 damage or so. Of course as you can see from the picture above, it can also crit. That’s on a mob with no debuffs. Toss it on a raid mob and it’s hittting anywhere from 28,000-32,000. If I had any heat based spells sol ro has a better miracle I’d have chosen (I have it on my fury, who can crit for about 45,000 or so) but for now, that’s not bad at all.

I keep my God happy by feeding a few pieces of spare gear to them every day, and those blessings and miracles don’t only come in handy on raids, but for my every day adventuring where I need a sudden boost of dps in order to win a particularly tricky encounter that I shouldn’t be soloing (but I am).

I finally completed my poets palace access. I’ve never needed it, I farm the zone with friends and haven’t ventured in solo yet on my illusionist. I wanted it mostly because the house reward is a carpet that ports you to the citadel (convenience is great!) and to up my very small quest count of course. I also did the access to ToS (Tower of the Sky, it’s an epic instance in shimmering citadel, and completing that zone gives you a scale, that lets you inside of the Djinn master’s prism, another raid zone with one hell of a script to run through). no house item for that one though.

Also a huge thank you and shout out to Mrrx, he’s been working on the Ashen Order faction and posting about it, I decided (since I collect titles, it’s a quirk of mine) that I’d go after “The Jade Tiger” title, and am now sporting it. Slightly annoying to get simply because I was at -20,000 faction with the order to begin with. After raising the faction to +20,000 in the sprawl, I headed over to pillars of flame – where there are large encounters of level 55 heroics that I can aoe madly away at and die in a matter of seconds. It was great. I also made about two plat from all of the stuff they drop after killing 10 groups of these. Each group netted 1,000+ faction each, plus a few quests I did to boost it a little higher. This was the first time I’d actually quested at all in DoF with the illusionist, I pretty much skipped the content in my mad grind to 70. It was nice to start working on it again. I’ll have to work on courts faction one of these days too I think, and there is silent city access I’d like to obtain, and a few other quests (of course I did my carpet quest already, who wouldn’t want a free mount!).

Dasie frantically beating away at the Droag for MoA

Learning the raid strats for EH (emerald halls) has been challenging to say the least. Three hours on a single named encounter. Learned a lot though. When you zone into EH you have the chance to have a few random named up at the time, other times you’ll zone in and they won’t be there. So it was fun to see something new at least. Went to Deathtoll after that, but I was feeling slightly under the weather after 5 hours of raids, so I called it early. Deathtoll is a stroll in the park now anyhow and doesn’t require a full raid force any more.

TK is apparently going to be making a quick MoA run (the final quest is a x4 raid) for a few members who need it, so I figured I should get Dasie (my level 70 templar) caught up to that point. I’d already completed the major parts except for the solo trial. I was level 65 at the time, and any one who has ever played a templar knows they are not the most dps efficient of characters. The solo trial was impossible for me to beat at that time. It was a whole different story at level 70 though. I stocked up on some thornskin potions just for some extra dps, slapped yaulp on, and a 2handed weapon, and mashed away until everything finally died. I remember doing the quest with my warden, as well as my (at the time) coercer. So this’ll be the third time I’ve gotten my MoA for a character of mine. It’s a pretty significant piece of gear and I remember how pleased I was the first time I got it.

I was thinking back to the last time I was really impressed with an encounter and a guild kill, the last time I was so very excited and happy about raiding and the game in general, and I pin pointed it to the first time TK took down Chel’Drak, I screamed in the teamspeak channel when we did, lol. I also won a pair of the druid boots that night. I’m not sure what the game seems to be lacking lately, maybe (probably) it’s just me. Raid schedule’s changed a little bit, fri-sat-sun-mon and wed are the new days, instead of tue-wed. Makes for a long run, fun none the less.

Today – hopefully I’ll get Faydai a few more sage levels, at least two. I’d love to quest some more with Stargrace as well, we’ll see how it goes. I’ll probably dip into warcraft today as well.