The WoWAceUpdater is being discontinued while wowace.com is making the transition into becoming curseforge.com. http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.php?topic=14316.0 What this means for us: For all of us who stand by out Ace-based addons, we'll be using the new curse client to update addons starting in August. Read that forum thread carefully and take it all in. Basically, instead of updating to beta versions of addons every night, we'll be update the "realease only" versions of addons on a less frequent scale. Of course, we'll be able to select "download betas" (I certainly will) to get the latest and greatest versions of our addons.

The ONLY thing we'll need to really worry about now is making sure that our favorite mods all make the move to the project space at www.curseforge.com. Let's hope that there's still active development on all the addons we've come to love and they make the switch!

Update 11/20/2008: www.wowmatrix.com <-- Learn it, love it.

It looks like Blizzard finally got a paladin player on their dev team. Yes, after nearly four years, we finally get the talents and abilities we've been dying for.

I dub today: Happy Day. A day we will all remember as the day that end game raiding for holy pallies changed drastically. We're no longer flash of light bots. Yep, we now are being actively encouraged (through a LOT of talents) to get in there and judge our fucking brains out. Blizzard wants us to judge EVERYTHING we've got. Even non-offensive judgements like light and wisdom will now be able to put up the 3% raid crit bonus.

Instead of the usual holy/prot build that most of us holy pallys use, come Wrath we'll mostly be Holy/Ret. And this is a good thing. Here is what looks like will be a typical OMGAOE holy build:

http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=sxAztGzhVuzxRtZVf0xh

This gets us into Beacon of Light, which looks to be the Circle of Healing of Wrath. It's a gimmick and will probably have the hell nerfed out of it, but for now, rejoice my faithful. This also puts us into some serious haste territory through Judgement of the Pure that encourages us to JUDGE JUDGE JUDGE. Since Conviction in the ret tree now gives us 5% spell crit and we can also pick up Heart of the Crusader (3% raid crit for ANY judgement), the ret tree really looks like fun :)

Another spec that will be popular, and the one I'm particularly excited about is this:

http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=sxAzthzhVuzxRhZif0xh00h

That's the paladin HoT spec. No, really. We get a muthafucking HOT when we crit. And since we pick up about 16% holy crit JUST FROM TALENTS we're going to be HoT'ing a LOT. I love this spec because we pick up Pursuit of Justice (run speed) and a little Imp Might.

With some synchronization between pallies, it's possible to drop points in some auras and other buffs to really maximize your talent point spending. I'm excited as hell, to say the least.

For the first time, I will be raiding completely on my linux machine tonight. The game, all addons, and all the extra programs used to run my G15 keyboard are up and going. It was a big pain in the ass to get the keyboard working.

The only thing that hasn't made the transition yet is Ventrilo. Trying to run vent via Wine has not produced much optimism, so I'll be stringing a wire across my office to run Vent on a nearby windows machine.

Other than that, I should be 100% tonight, barring any crashes or other catastrophic failures. I'm at about 60fps standing around in Shatt, so I'm hoping Black Temple will be just as good.

http://elitistjerks.com/f32/t27791-wowcardioraid_offline_graphic_wow_log...

Well, my little linux project is coming to fruition. Basically, I've set out to build a linux machine that can handle WoW and all the stuff that surrounds it. Attached is a little video of the machine in action, complete with Ventrilo and WoW running side-by-side (emulated through Wine). Next up will be the WWS parsing program and then an open source alternative to the WoWAceUpdater called WoWUIUpdater (http://www.wowinsider.com/2007/05/10/addon-spotlight-wow-ui-updater/). Open the video with a video player that supports ogg theora (http://www.theora.org/).

Updated with a new video of the current desktop in action.  All audio works.  WoW gets amazing frame rates and I can multi-task like a beast.  The video i just an expose of a lot of stuff going on and no slowdown.

So, this has been a project of mine since I found out that you can run WoW in Linux at really great performance. It kills me whenever I hear from someone that their computers are crashing or that they're getting 1 frame-per-second (guilty) in raid. I kinda always wished that we had a quick and easy "drop ship" solution that people could just order and - BAM - WoW runs great.

The lowest cost I've been able to get this down to is about $600 (including shipping costs). The main parts from Newegg are here: http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=1...

There are about $45 in mail-in-rebates as well. The case and power supply are here: http://www.amazon.com/MFBK400-Micro-V400PSU-2-5-25-ULT33114/dp/B000FIS91...

By running Ubuntu Linux (http://www.ubuntu.com/products/WhatIsUbuntu/desktopedition), we save about $200. Of course, Linux requires a little bit of elbow-grease to get running, but all the parts are compatible.

I've ordered the first iteration of this system for myself and will be testing how it all goes this week. If people are interested, let me know.