ETA: Added notes on GoGoMount, Pokedex, and Yay Mounts.
This week I tried out five eight mount randomizer mods in search of the perfect one. With the perfect mount mod, I press one button on all of my characters and the Right Thing(tm) happens. The right thing depends on where the character is and which class it is:
If in zone where flying is allowed, a flying mount is summoned.
If a druid in a flying zone, flight form is shifted to.
If in a zone where flying is not allowed but ground mounts are, a ground mount is summoned.
If swimming and in Vash’jir, the seahorse is summoned.
If swimming and a druid, water form is shifted to.
If swimming at the surface and not in Vash’jir, a flying mount is summoned.
I also wanted a mod with the following features:
Some control over mount randomization: the mod allows me to remove mounts from the random list or to prefer certain mounts.
The mod has been updated for patch 4.2 or recently enough that it’s clearly not an abandoned project.
There are lots and lots of mount mods out there. I picked the first ones I found that seemed popular and likely to meet my needs. Here are my notes on the five eight I tried.
Livestock, Pokedex, and YayMounts pass all my tests. The mod I chose to use was Livestock. It does the right thing with the seahorse and the right thing with druid forms. If you don’t have a druid to worry about, Sally Forth is an excellent and easy-to-configure mod. I like the clever way it uses the existing Blizzard interface to choose mounts, which was much easier to understand and use than all of the others.
I’m interested in tools that improve my WOW raiding performance. By “tool” I mean everything from “information design in unit frames” to “input methods like keyboards and mice” to “camera settings” to “click-to-cast vs mouseover macros”. Everything in the chain from how I am informed of game events to how I act on that information is something I’m willing to examine. I’ll change if it seems to me to improve my performance.
I’ve been thinking about voice chat clients. Teamspeak, Ventrilo, Mumble. Most guilds use Ventrilo these days, now that it has a Macintosh client. I’ve never been particularly happy with either Teamspeak or Vent as a voice client. They’re barely adequate applications, hard to use, hard to configure, ugly, not Macintosh-like at all. They look to me like what you get when you don’t have competition in a product space: sloppy work is enough, so the companies in question don’t bother investing in better.
This week I’ve been trying out Mumble for voice communications instead of Vent, using a server hosted at Pwnwear. I first heard of Mumble when Blood Legion credited it as a significant contribution to their world-first LK10 kill. Mumble hosting is also available at MMO Mumble, Mumble Voice, and other hosts a simple Google search will reveal. I wanted to support Pwnwear as a Death Knight resource.
I’m thinking Mumble is going to provide the competition that Ventrilo needs. I think it’s better in a technical sense (better implementation of voip) and has better user interface.
Mumble has way lower latency. It’s so much lower you’ll notice it instantly. This is the #1 reason I think raiding guilds should consider switching to it. No more 2 second delays while the raid leader calls out “brez Fred!” and I call out “Leafie has him” and then it turns out 2 other druids also burned their brezzes in the time it took them to hear my response.
Mumble’s configuration is great. It steps you through setting your mic levels properly, with a neat visual display of your speaking volume. No more tweaking people’s volumes up to make them audible or down to compensate for overdriven badly-clipping settings on their end. Just talk into the mic normally and move the slider until it looks right.
Downsides:
Access tokens (the Mumble equivalent of group membership) are weirdly tweaky and difficult to explain. I think a little user interface work would go a long way here.
Something in the signal path, possibly the noise reduction, makes everything sound just a little bit metallic. I need to experiment here.
Getting the who’s-speaking overlay working on Macintosh requires more shell scripting fu than most Mac users will be comfortable with. (You need to launch the WOW executable through a wrapper.)
Bottom line: It’s worth switching to now. If you’re setting up voice comms for a new guild and don’t have an existing voice server contract to worry about, pick Mumble.
I decided this morning that I’d overturn my user interface yet again. This time I’m not touching my unit frames, of which I have become quite fond. Instead I changed my action bar mod and the physical piece of hardware I use to trigger actions. Here’s why.
I have been using the Fang Gamepad, which is a perfectly nice gamepad with easy-to-press WASD and a bunch of other hardware keys cleverly laid out for playing FPSes. I’ve been playing WOW with it for a while and it’s great. It’s only recently that I’ve run into the limitations of using WASD to move. By keeping my hand where I can turn, strafe, and press action keys, I effectively limited myself to only the first row of number keys on the pad. I tried to break myself out of this habit, but it was difficult.
This morning I tried out my husband’s Logitech G13 gamepad and decided I liked it better than my Fang gamepad. What it does is move movement control to a joystick that’s under my thumb. Before all my thumb did was press the jump button. Now it controls strafe + forwards/backwards movement, which I can supplement with mouselook. Theoretically, I should be able to run around like a maniac while healing like, er, a maniac. I’ll find out for sure in tonight’s raid!
Okay, fine, I admit I tried it out in a heroic run first and fine-tuned things. Eventually I’ll stop trying to use the non-existent WASD keys and accidentally casting Tranquility.
I switched to Bartender4 from Dominos for configuration reasons. My bars are now laid out on the screen the same way the buttons are laid out on the G3. This is the usual UI trick that reminds me of the shortcut when I need a reminder.
The G13 works out of the box with OS X. And the WOW client also supports it, in that it sends a fairly useless little wow app to the device to show player data on the LCD. You might like it. I’m never looking at the keypad enough to get any benefit from it. I like the G13 overall, though. It feels good under my hand. And I like the color-backlit keys. I wish I could change the color for each key individually! That would be another neat visual reminder of which keys do what.
Also up for trial in tonight’s raid: Deus Vox Encounters for raid warnings. I just went through and changed all the warning sounds to be the same sound. I have no clue why the mod authors thought it would be a good idea to use the low mana and low health sounds as raid warning sounds. No. Wrong. Do not overload important signals like those.
And as a footnote, my long-term review of the Razer Naga mmo mouse is: Gimmick. Meh. Buy a Death Adder instead. That’s a great mouse.
Razer makes all kinds of wild claims about the Naga mouse, their new button-splattered mouse intended for MMO players. I got one yesterday and immediately started using it. Here are my initial reactions.
Here’s my WOW gaming setup: I play on a desktop Macintosh with the standard Apple thin USB keyboard, an Ideazon Fang Gamepad, and a Razer Death Adder mouse. I swapped the Naga for the Death Adder. I play a healing druid and use mouse-over macros extensively.
The Naga is a very nice USB mouse with a USB gamepad built into it. There’s nothing special or magic about this. All my keybinds worked out of the box with it— the numbered buttons in “basic” mode are exactly the keys in the number row of your keyboard. What’s interesting is their location under your thumb. You don’t need to take your hand off your mouse to press keyboard keys.
Good points? It’s a Razer mouse, which means it’s a good gaming mouse with solid quality. If it’s like my other Razer mice, it’ll last a long time. The buttons work out of the box and do exactly what you expect them to do. The mouse tracks well and quickly. It feels good in my hand, though a bit chunky.
The usual side buttons on a mouse are moved to just under your index finger on the Naga. I used to bind those buttons to bring up Opie rings, but the new location is so convenient that I think I’ll change. They’d be great binds for my most-used healing macros for my druid. Or for my paladin’s taunt macro. I like this a lot.
Drawbacks? I think the ergonomics are questionable. Here’s the trouble: when you click a button on a mouse, you disturb its location a little bit. This is true of all buttons, including the big main buttons. However, with those the force is mostly downward. With these thumb buttons, the force is sideways. Both the act of shifting your hand to reach the button you want and the act of pressing that button can nudge your pointer away from your target. You can minimize movement with practice, but the mouse will always be disturbed a little bit. If you’re aiming for tiny targets, like the ones on raid frames, this might be a pain.
The other problem is that the buttons are small. They have to be small to fit on the side of a mouse. People with big thumbs or without good dexterity are going to have trouble hitting all those keys. I need to shift my hand to reach the 10-11-12 keys; those are likely functionally useless for me.
The mouse only comes in a right-handed version, so lefties or ambidextrous mousers like me are stuck using it with the right hand.
My approach at the moment is to transition slowly into using the Naga, one button at a time. Right now I’m making myself use the 1 and 4 keys (Rejuv and Lifebloom macros) instead of the matching keys on my gamepad. I’ve healed a couple of smaller raids using the mouse, but when stressed I reverted right back to using the pad. I need to live with the mouse for a few weeks before I’m used to it, I think. Or I might decide the mouse is a gimmick to be avoided. I really haven’t made up my mind about it yet.
On my Mac running OS X Snow Leopard, the mouse worked without requiring any driver installation, though I did install the Mac drivers anyway, just to be thorough. Points to them for supporting Mac users.
The Naga WOW addons are a customized version of Dominos, so to use them you’d need to replace Dominos, Bartender, or whatever action bar mod you use. I’m already using Dominos as my action bar mod, so I haven’t bothered trying out the Naga mods. You don’t need them to use the mouse; whatever action bar mod you’re using now will work fine. All you need to do is bind the keys.
