This is What Panic Looks Like

no-frames

Hands up! Who can tell me what fundamentally important aspect of a UI is missing from this screenshot?

Hint: Compare it with the images from this post.

The Story

We initialized a pull on Freya and on the first wave of Detonators, my client crashed.

“I’m offline!”, I grunted.

Closed the WoW client and restarted it again. Managed to load back in and what did I see? No raid frames. Some of the officers utilize the oRA2 keyword invite option. I whispered the appropriate word and was told I couldn’t be invited due to combat. Duh, I forgot. My raid frames still hadn’t shown up. I panicked and did the only logical thing that made sense.

I activated friendly name plates.

Normally I have name plates disabled. I even unbound my hostile name plates so I could use that key for something else. Thank goodness I didn’t unbind name plates. It wasn’t exactly the ideal set up but the encounter became even more like whack a mole.

Except this is advanced whack a mole.

Where the moles will only appear within 15 yards.

And they’re moving all around.

So just a quick lesson. If your client is unable to load raid frames for whatever reason, name plates is the plan B followed by a quick prayer.

32 thoughts on “This is What Panic Looks Like”

  1. Had that happen to me a couple of times as well, I just dragged the standard Blizzard raid frames into my screen. I think that’s easier.

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  2. Haha, I have had this happen a few times.

    The first time I even remember, it was on KT, and I got DC’d. I come back in to see my raid frames gone.

    I start to freak out, trying to figure out what to do, not paying attention to my surroundings… BOOM. I just blew up 2 people with Mana Detonation… crap.

    I decide to just target the scarab tank and spam heal him, all worked out, no worries.

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  3. Heh! Exactly the same thing happened to me yesterday as a raid healer on Emalon 25. Since we were 7 healers and 3 on raid I was able to drag the default raid frames out from the raid panel. Very messy anyway. 🙂

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  4. I have been having issues as well with crashing. Ussualy when playing the client will crash without any error of some kind, it freezes and then exits. There are some reports that multi monitor setups and some multithreading improvements in 3.1 might be the cause.

    I tried last time disabling my second monitor that seemed to help, but didnt play long enough to be certain that this is the cause.

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  5. sometimes it happen to me in another way..
    The raid frame is there after D/C and come back,
    but Clique is not responsive..

    so what I did was /rl to reload the ui again
    this very tricky and dangerous.. but it works 😛

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  6. I had that on an attempt on Auriaya the other day. I lost healbot completely and even clique had failed on me. All I had was the very tine boxes I use on grid for quick character selection. Manually clicking each person and then tabbing across was incredibly stressful, but luckily it worked out reasonably OK!

    Sophie (Espreya-Terenas-EU)s last blog post..Progress

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  7. This has happened to me multiple times. In fact it happened on Iron Council last night. I pulled up the name plates, and also pulled out the Blizzard frames. The bad part is I always disable Blizzard frames in Clique.

    So I had to use the frames to select the player then use keybindings to cast heals. Which meant the other healers were getting to everyone faster and pretty much all my heals after the D/C were overheals.

    There was a time when I always healed like that. I guess I’ve become dependent on mods. Oh well. I don’t think I could be near as effective with the standard UI.

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  8. It’s been a long time since I’ve dragged the Blizzard raid frames out, but as I remember it, turning on friendly name plates is 1 button, which makes it quicker and gets you healing rather than your toon standing around while you drag raid frames out where you can see them.

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  9. I had that happen last week on Mimiron 25 man. I did the exact same thing and enabled friendly nameplates and quickly put the main tank on focus.

    (Un)fortunately we wiped on the attempt, but I’m sure it was partly due to my lack of legit healing 🙁 The raid frames came back on the next attempt, a success!

    FWIW, the crash came from having QuestHelper still enabled.

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  10. Our first Auriaya kill I had that happen to me. I had the same initial reaction and turned the name plates on (almost couldn’t remember what the keybind was it had been so long since I used it). With everyone standing clumped up in front of her it was hard to click on any particular person so I resorted to chain healing off the main tank so I would at least hit someone.

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  11. I’m surprised you haven’t bumped into that before. None of the unit frame addons work when you load up in combat, and Clique doesn’t work either. It’s maddening. Smart call with friendly nameplates. I’ll have to remember that.

    Keeping a little library of mouseover macro heals handy for these occasions is well worthwhile.

    Llyras last blog post..Grid2 – Not ready for primetime

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  12. I had a LOT of this problems recently, when I begin crashing every single 25-man boss fight (and that’s even worse not to have your unitframes up if you’re a mouseover healer, like me). Last time it happened to me, I was healing Kel’Thuzad 25 man. I was on raid-healing duty, but then, I crashed. Logged back on, and there was my Grid gone. I sighed, opened Khaos, turned the Pitbull raid frames on, quick reload… Nice, there were my raid frames! …all over my screen. Ok, we wiped, but that day, I began searching for an addon whose raidframes didn’t disappear whenever I disconnected, and that would allow me the info I usually need to know (debuffs to cleanse, who has riptide/earthliving on, and such).

    I found it. stUF. Everytime I crashed since I began using it midraid, when I managed to log back on, there were my raid frames, nice and clear… ok, Clique was not working, but if the raid wasn’t going bad, I’d allow myself a 3-4s /reload… else, I’d just hit shift+6, and go nuts with all my cast-on-mouseover macros. ^^

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  13. Ow I know the feeling! It’s horrible. I just put those player frames on and FFA heal and spam CoH. Or if healing is doable and I’m not needed right away you can do /reloadui. Takes a few seconds but your raidframes will be back then.

    SuicidalPriests last blog post..Change we need!

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  14. I had this same thing happen in OS (1 drake). Thank fully I was standing in the correct spot for the two flame walls that went by while my screen was frozen before I fully DC’d. Came back in and of course no raid frame… so.. yup, up came the friendly name plates. Thankfully I was only assigned to healing the tank for the adds, so I targeted him and cast PoM and CoH a lot. It was near the end of the fight by the time I did get back on, so not much healing was needed (at least as far as I could tell).

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  15. It may be secondary to the pain point of your article, Matt, but I think you can tell based on the numerous “me too” posts that disconnects during boss fights is a SERIOUS issue…. and it has apparently only really started with the 3.1 patch that introduced Ulduar content.

    If you go and scour through the official support forums, you will see many threads where people talk about disconnecting. And here is what I can tell. For the majority of posters, these are the ONLY conditions by which they disconnect:

    Ulduar 25 (*NOT* 10-man)
    Boss fight
    Activity-heavy. Scenarios where a lot of things are happening, be it Freya, Hodir, or Thorim.

    When I run into this problem, I also lose my Grid. Which is a complete suxxors.

    There is as of last week, no official response about this from Blizzard. They would initially post those “well what is your traceroute?” or ask to disable adds, etc. etc. etc.

    … but I am telling you, this seems to be persistent and across the board on all servers.

    You’d almost think it was a conspiracy.

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  16. Kinda funny as I just posted about this yesterday on NoStockUI.

    During Naxx we were doing the Arachnid Quarter and going for that timed achievement. I do not remember if I actually DCed or not (probably did), but I lost half of my Grid Raid frames. Suddenly I only had 10 frames instead of 25 plus pets. I thought that it had somehow swapped it to 10 man, but it was showing as 25 and I still could not get it to change. I did not want to screw up peoples achievement so I followed along healing as best I could while clearing trash.

    After trying a few things to fix it I simply turned off Grid and turned on the raid frames for AGuF, I use this for my self bar, target, and a few others. So as we cleared trash I moved these into the same area as my grid and used them until we finished trash and killed Maexxena. When we were done I did a reload ui and my Grid frames were back to normal. After the raid I tweaked them a little and now have them set up so that if grid ever does it again I have them there to turn on and go.

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  17. That was one reason that when I raided, I kept to the stock UI Blizzard raid frames. No Grid, no Healbot, nothing. I found this kind of thing happened WAY too often, and it never once hurt my efficiency because it was what I was used to playing with since I started.

    Addons are great, but this kind of glitch is why I tend to keep mine minimal at best.

    Beejs last blog post..A Blast from Beej’s Past: A Six Year Old Essay Resurfaces

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  18. Yeah, this happened to me in hard mode iron council. I had to pull the default UI out and use my keybound spell instead of clique, which was a just a tad awkward. The good news was that it was a first down and no one died!

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  19. Yeah, all of you that are experiencing crashes, I’m suffering from the same thing. Random disconnects on fights, sometimes in Dalaran (wait, that might not be a sympton). I’m also running a dual screen setup. This never happened before 3.1.

    Matticuss last blog post..This is What Panic Looks Like

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  20. This has happened to me a few times. I use Grid + Clique. If I reloaded my UI then grid would come back, but I still wouldn’t be able to click-cast. So I’ve taken to enabling Clique on my pitbull raid frames JUST IN CASE. It’s not ideal (I mean, two sets of raid frames is a bit redundant…), but I can still see the entire raid and heal them if and when I get DC’d in the middle of a fight.

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  21. Religiously, my client crashes once per raid day. I think it has to do with my onboard NIC card — it just randomly DC’s me. It’s a quick drop and a quick relog, but my UI never comes back complete. Grid gets especially confused — I end up with 6 groups instead of 5, all shuffled around in order and not working. Even my Xperl raid frames get out of whack. Now my current SOP is to relog, then immediately /console reloadui. From there it’s smooth sailing. Fortunately I am usually on raid healing assignment, so assuming the other healers can cover while I’m gone we can survive.

    Frustrating to say the least. >.<

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  22. Pff, don’t stoop to using blizzard frames, just spam control-tab like a pro. (I actually have target next friendly bound to mousewheel up)

    oh and to the poster above me: /rl works, no need to type all that out.

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  23. @Tarqon: One of my guildies had his mouse crap out on him. He couldn’t target for crap. Had to rely on F1-F5 for party targeting. That’s intense.

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  24. Name plates (one keypress), focus target (macro’ed to a hotkey) and literally targeting a player are the only tools available in a sudden World PvP encounter to assist others (in terms of healing them) not in your party or raid. Most times it happens so suddenly that it is not possible to get grouped with them until the dust has settled. It can be so intense where even typing /invite could result in their (or your) death. Other times the other party is grouped and it’s not possible for you to invite them… and they are pretty occupied in the heat of battle for them to invite you (those are the times you do /say invite and nothing happens till it’s over).

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  25. Our Razorscale kill last week was done with me frantically clicking on spells from my spellbook then clicking on my raid members after one of my addons threw up a massive error and locked up my UI… My mouse worked, but I couldn’t interact with my raid frames or action bars in any way. And it got even better when I tried to type into chat, because then it locked up my keyboard. Trying to move and heal all with just my mouse, using my spellbook, had me in a state of panic.
    My UI got a very intense workover after that raid.

    As for general disconnects in Ulduar… I have a problem with these. It’s partly due to my latency (I’m in Australia) and partly due to a not-so-great PC…. But still… I get told to stand in a corner before every Thorim pull to prevent DCs, and I can’t jump during any boss encounters. Or in Dalaran. Jumping seems to DC me.
    /sigh

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  26. @Talv, /reloadui won’t work in combat. Raid frame addons do not load in if you enter a zone during combat. This is the same for Grid as well as VuhDo, which Matticus here uses. You need to be out of combat FIRST before you can /reloadui to get the frames back. It’s a common issue.

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