You might have seen from the blog posts or from our twitter feeds that Enveloping Shadows recently switched from to Mumble from Ventrilo. Here’s a little story about why we switched and why I’ve fallen completely in love with Mumble.

Primary Target Can Suck It

A few months ago, the small company that used to manage our Ventrilo server got bought out by Primary Target. They changed our server information, and then a slew of technical difficulties began.

The lag was unbearable for weeks. Vent would disconnect randomly at the most inconvenient times, kicking everyone out of the raid. We ended up raiding at least once on a public vent because ours crapped out in the middle of Heroic Putricide 25, while we were learning it. To add insult to injury, Primary Target apparently “lost” the prepayment our officers made for the original server. And their customer service was plain awful – the officers got in touch with them to try to figure out what was going on, and got no information whatsoever. Their customer service sucked and gave us no hope that anything would get better, anytime soon.

After a few weeks, our poor officers sighed and decided we’d have to move. Since we were switching anyways, we opted to give Mumble a try.

Mumble For The Win

I don’t know all the technical differences between Mumble and Ventrilo, nor do I really care about going into them in this blog post. You can go read plenty of other sites for that. As a tank, a very talkative person, and a weekend raid leader, here’s my impression of Mumble post-switch.

1) Sound Quality

It just plain sounds better. Vent sounds awful and scratchy in comparison. And voice modulation! I know you can do this with Vent, but Mumble does it so much better! Hearing the whole raid swoon as Mumble automatically modulated down the voice of a certain holy pally who enjoys screeching at the raid when something goes wrong… it was truly amazing.

2) People Can Talk Over Each Other

We have a talkative vent. People talk right over poor Rhidach constantly – he doesn’t just have to yell, he has to really moan and groan and threaten to quiet us all down, and even then people will start right back up with the banter when he’s done going through a strat. We will gleefully poke at each other, mock each other, and discuss everything from class changes to whose child is cuter straight through into a progression pull until a difficult game mechanic (or an irritated tank) shuts everyone up. We will also enter into a strategy discussion – a ton of us will – with equal gusto, and we like to hang out in vent for hours after raids. When we learned Heroic Putricide and Heroic Sindragosa, the hardest adjustment might have been to keep vent “clear” for plague call outs, healer calls and tank swaps.

We talk over each other. A lot. Vent sounds like crap when two people try to talk at once. Mumble doesn’t sound perfect, but you don’t get that crazy feedback noise, and you can hear everything said by each person.

3) No Latency. No Delay.

I have a lot of silly pet peeves. Raid calls are one. I get very, very irritated when someone takes it upon themselves to call something out and they call it out late. I watch raid warnings and listen to vent simultaneously, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a raid warning pop and heard a call just a half second or second later… and thought, with irritation, “That wasn’t exact. Why call it out?”

Little did I know, this was a Vent delay issue, not a raid awareness issue. Because as soon as we switched to Mumble, that mysterious and hard to quantify delay just… disappeared. I now hear calls simultaneous with raid warnings.

Oh my god, it’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful. As a raid leader, I was sold from the first Heroic LK pull. You don’t understand until you hear someone call a Defile target RIGHT AS the raid warning pops. It’s really cool.

Check out my post a few days ago on Heroic Halion, where I talk about how the healers yelled at people who had Combustion. I’d be willing to bet that Mumble over Vent made a difference as far as response time goes. I am an aural person. I respond better to sounds than visual cues, which is why I always play with game sounds on. Switching to Mumble was a game-changing experience for me.

The End Result

I don’t know if Rhi feels as strongly as I do. I know the whole raid was extremely skeptical, especially the day we lost about half an hour before raid while everyone found the client and installed it. And yet within an hour or so, everyone was completely sold on the new service.

Even though we’ve had some technical difficulties with Mumble, too, the people we’ve got the server from have been great about communicating with us when something goes wrong and when it’s likely to be fixed. Customer service is really worth a lot. No one’s said a thing about returning to Vent. I’m sure Mumble isn’t for everyone, but it sure has worked well for us.

Links: Here’s a nice little Youtube video with a display of Mumble’s latency vs Vent’s latency. The Mumble website, and a link to Multiplay, the company we bought our Mumble server from (they’re great!)

When I was putting together this post, I noticed something funny. The first time I majorly changed up my UI and posted about it was April 2009. The second time was October 2009. The third, April 2010. It’s now mid-September 2010 and I realize there seems to be about a six month life span to each iteration of my user interface. Coming April 2011: Pimped my UI, part 5!

Anyway, I’m really proud of what I’ve come up with this time. I originally set out to make the most minimalistic UI yet, and I think I’ve succeeded. And there’s still a lot of tweaks I can make, especially to the in-combat “version”. Shrinking DXE’s bars, scaling down TipTac’s tooltips (they do not need to be wider than grid, imo), and shrinking Omen to show maybe half an many rows.

A huge part of what makes the UI so uncluttered is the sharp reduction of how many buttons are on-screen. I went from my full rotation and various ancillary abilities being completely on screen–44 buttons worth of precious real estate. Now I have 13, 8 for cooldowns, and 5 for buffs. Everything else is keybound and invisible. (Well, except for auras and the micromenu, which are visible on mouse over.)

The only problem this presents is that hiding my full rotation and all these buttons requires a lot of faith in my own muscle memory. The other major problem: not being able to see when abilities are on cooldown. Right now I’m not finding it hard to watch when an attack is used based on my cooldown bar reacting to GCDs being expended, but sometimes I’ll lose track and have to restart at the beginning of the rotation. It’s a pain, but something I think practice can allow me to work around.

If worse comes to worse I’ll make the primary rotation bar visible on mouse over so I can quickly eyeball cooldowns if needed. I expect to be be fine though.

I also set up click for my various Hand abilities. Shift+right click is Hand of Sacrifice. Alt+right click is Hand of Protection. Ctrl+right click is Hand of Salvation.

Probably one of the less drastic changes, but one of the most effective, was what I did to my unit frames. The way it is now, I have my player frame on the bottom, with health being the driver of how full or empty the bar is. I removed the separate mana bar, and instead just have my % of mana remaining on the left. The little spark under the mana number indicates if Divine Plea is active (that’s Power Auras).

Above the player frame is the target. Buffs and debuffs show just above the target (which are a bit too small right now, at least for ones I’m applying), and on the top right is the target of target. Just the name though, because that’s ultimately all I really need. I don’t show any indicator of target mana, which I really need to fix, if only to check healer mana levels before pulls.

And lastly, on the right is the focus frame. Pretty simplistic, just name and health. I need to put focus target in there somewhere.

One other big change I wanted to mention was I completely dumped the whole “have a bar with various sub-addons at the top of your screen” model. Instead I have nice, clean, minimalistic SLDataText under my unit frames. It’s not not have this line of crap bordering the top of my window.

Just to review, here are the addons I used:

• Satrina’s Buff Bars for buffs/debuffs
• basicMiniMap for map
• Pitbull for unit frames
• Grid for raid frames
• Chatter for the chat window
• TipTac for tooltips
• Deus Vox Encounters for bossmods

I still have a few things I want to change or streamline (as I mentioned above), Once I do that, I’ll finagle a way to offer this UI as a packaged download. Once I figure out which folders I would need to include.

Feel free to ask any questions about it in the comments! I’m sure I left tons of small details out.

I was crushed yesterday (150% damage!) when I saw the first of forty people to tweet a link to the announcement by Blizz that they were intentionally breaking the AVR mod in the next patch. That sucks.

I was an early and fervent convert to the Church of AVR, and perhaps one of their more vocal evangelists. I forced every raider in my guild to pick it up and quickly spread the contagion to the entirety of the guild, hooking all of them in AVR’s warm, understanding embrace.

That said, I completely understand why they’re breaking the addon. I always felt a bit dirty about using it on fights like Rotface, because it was ultimately a step too far. You didn’t have to think or strategize about stacking on one leg and then shifting to another, you’d just step out of the circle.

Hell, just about every fight in Icecrown Citadel has some major element of “don’t stand in this,” and when there’s an addon that rapidly converts all of those moments into an easy-to-process red circle under your feet, it removes a lot of the challenge of the encounter.

That’s nothing to speak of the fact that the “challenge” of an encounter can be so easily boiled down by a red circle. Perhaps, Blizzard, it’s time for some more innovative encounter designs beyond “stand here… and now… here.”

In the end the only thing I’m truly going to miss about AVR was the ability to mark things on the floor to direct my raiders. I could care less about the encounter-cheesing red circles, it was the god-like powers the mod afforded me to share information directly to the interfaces of others in the run that was amazing. We were able to rapidly learn Sindragosa thanks to being able to have persistent marks on the floor for folks to stand on during air phases.

We could have done the same thing with smoke flares and post-it notes on everyones’ monitors, but AVR streamlined that significantly. It’s going to be a pain to do the fight without my precious marks. But not impossible, of course.

Blizzard already designs encounters with an assumption that people are using Deadly Bossmods, or DXE, or any similar addon. They probably were daunted at the concept of having to design encounters in the future with the assumption that everyone was going to have such spatial concepts instantly presented to them, and found it an easier course of action just to break the mod than have to live in a brave new world where the old saw of standing in stuff wasn’t as potent as it used to be.

At the very least, in the future they should consider giving raid leaders some more control over the screens of their raiders with something similar to the toolset of AVR (be it marking spots on the ground, or drawing arrows and lines). Raid icons, flares, and pings can only go so far.

I feel like, now that AVR is soon to be snatched away from me, I’ve peeked through a crack in the doors to Eden and seen what could be. Blizzard is now slamming them shut, forever keeping those possibilities out of reach. It’s a shame.

When I set out to write this post I didn’t realize how behind the times I was with this addon. While AVR (short for Augmented Virtual Reality), in the version I have downloaded and setup, works with BigWigs for Icecrown boss encounters, apparently there’s been a shuffle with the mod making it so BigWigs is not longer needed. So, I’m thankfully spared detailing the dance you need to do to make this addon work with BigWigs while not clash with your bossmods of choice.

Instead, just grab the base AVR pack, and then AVR Encounters.

Now, I’m sure the functionality has remained the same, so let’s talk a bit about the Encounters side of this glorious piece of work. While you can use to the mod to put custom textures down on the ground for everyone in your raid to see (provided they have the mod), the really amazing part of this addon is how it streamlines (perhaps “dumbs-down” is a better word) certain boss mechanics.

For example, on Festergut, the mod will put a massive red circle under the spores.

This will show everyone the range of the spore so they can be sure to stand in its fungus-y embrace. For myself, as the tank and raid leader, it especially facilitates my job by making it take a split second to see if there are two spores in melee so I can order one to run out.

In the Rotface fight, AVR is a lifesaver. When a Big Ooze explodes and fires its slime rockets into the air, AVR will put red circles on the ground under where everyone was standing so you can guess where a rocket might hit the ground, making dodging them a cakewalk.

Once I get everyone in the raid to get set up with this addon, this will finally kill the much-maligned “Leg Shuffle” strategy. Rather than “everyone move to the other leg,” I can just say “don’t stand in the red circle, ya idjits.”

On Putricide, AVR is unfortunately a little buggy, but still a world of help. It will put a red circle under where a Malleable Goo is going to land.

Unfortunately, AVR only tracks one of three goos. But, at least it will mitigate some of the damage and help melee know in P3 if they’re about to get murdered by a goo falling on their heads. Alternatively, there’s an option for Putricide where you can have AVR put a red circle under everyone when Malleable Goo is cast, so people just need to not stand in a red circle to avoid getting it. That would work well, but I can see it being a headache for melee.

Lastly, we only saw a little bit of Sindragosa on Wednesday night (sidenote: first time we got to her, woo) but AVR demonstrated its effectiveness in all its glory for this fight. It puts a circle under every Frost Beacon so they can space themselves out and hopefully people won’t go into their circle and get frozen as well. We only got two tries in, but I can see this mod making the learning curve a lot more forgiving on this fight.

According to the AVRE page, they cover Marrowgar, Lady D, Blood Queen, and Lich King as well now. I can’t wait to try out these fights with the new version.

If you are using this mod I’d like to hear your impressions of it.