Deus Vox Encounters!

Servers are down for maintenance, so here I am actually updating again. However, after today, updates may go back to being somewhat infrequent because I have a new, full time job starting tomorrow. I WILL try to update as often as possible.

What is Deus Vox Encounters?

Deus Vox (being shortened to DXE for this post because typing "Deus Vox" repeatedly is annoying) is an alternative to Deadly Boss Mods or Big Wigs. It provides warnings and information about an encounter in all of the Northrend raid instances.

What makes DXE different from Deadly Boss Mods or Big Wigs?

While I can't speak as to what makes it different from Big Wigs (I've never used it), I can compare it to DBM. With DBM, you have bars and warnings (in the forever annoying, "RUN AWAY LITTLE GIRL!" sound effect). You can move the bars around, you can change their coloration and texture, and placement of some of the text warnings. I used DBM for many years and it does its job very well. DXE does all that (and a bit more), but differently.

First thing to note is that DXE has a boss health bar that you can move wherever you want. I find this especially nice as a healer because generally I'm not targeting the boss, or even if I am - I'm not staring at his health bar. I'm staring at Grid. On fights like Blood Princes, it has 3 health bars; one for each prince. On that fight, the boss health bar makes it really nice to see which one is active right away. With the boss health bar is a timer for how long the fight has been active. While it's not always important, it's kind of nice to see how far you got, in what time, when there's a wipe. 

So the warning bars. On DBM and DXE, they're customisable in color, texture, font, and location. With DXE you can add a little border, which, ok, isn't a lot - but I like the little touches to some addons and a little border makes it look a little more refined. What DBM doesn't have in this sense is the colorised "On you" warning. For example, if you stand in the Coldflame on Lord Marrowgar, your screen flashes blue. If you have a spore on Festergut, your screen flashes another color (I forget offhand, and with servers being down, I can't exactly check). For some of us, that flash of color is all we need to realize that, "OH SHIT I NEED TO MOVE" because I was staring at my grid trying to make sure the offtank wasn't being gibbed from the Saber Lash. Most of the time, when your screen flashes you get a sound effect as well - one that isn't "RUN AWAY LITTLE GIRL!"

The last thing about DXE that I've grown to really love as dps are the arrows. If you're on an encounter that requires you to move to a specific place (Blood Princes, following the Empowered Flame Sphere), or attack a specific target (Bone Spikes on Lord Marrowgar) - one to three arrows will pop up on your screen, directing you to where you should be focusing your attention. This is especially nice for knowing when a hunter is spiked on Lord Marrowgar, but not in range for the melee to realize they, ya know... need to move to break them out. Now, the arrows don't show up for every little thing you'd like them to show up for since placement of people in raids varies (think of where you might run for the linked people on Blood Queen Lana'thel, or how you have the ranged set up for Festergut) - but when it DOES have arrows? It's fantastic.

Also, Final Fantasy victory music when you kill a boss. :D

What are its drawbacks?

It can be a bit of a pain to customise. It works just fine out of the box (as it were), but you CAN customise it greatly. First you have to go into the configuration (/dxe config) and have it load the zone encounters you want to work on. So, go in and load Icecrown Citadel. From THERE you have to configure each boss (which, is listed alphabetically instead of in their order of appearance). If you want to change the sounds? You have to do it all one by one (which makes sense), but you have to basically test each sound since it adds in quite a few sound effects that I know I didn't have before. Customising it can be a major pain, BUT worth it if you have the time to sit down and do it.

Secondly, it can be a little buggy (like any addon). I was in Trial of the Crusader on an alt over the weekend, and for some reason, the boss encounters weren't loading - so I got no warnings at all. You also can't load an encounter mid fight and have it just.. pick up. It only started happening recently, and really only randomly. You can manually load an encounter before it starts just to be sure that you're getting the warnings necessary, so unless you're really terrible and depend on your warnings to tell you EXACTLY what to do and when - a failure to load shouldn't be too bad to deal with.

There's no warnings for instances. At all. The author has said he has no intentions of actually doing so, though he encourages others to do so if they want. This is actually the reason I ditched it the first time because I was going insane in places like ToC and wasn't paying attention to when I needed to spell steal the mage's haste buff, or when I needed to dispel the renew during Palatress. It drove me bonkers. It took me two tries before I finally sat down and said, "Self, you stick with this one now dammit. Stop being all waffley (wafflez!) about it, and just stick with it. You know all the instances well enough that you don't NEED warnings for them."

Should I get it?

Are you tired of hearing, "RUN AWAY LITTLE GIRL!" and not necessarily knowing where you should be running to or from? Yeah. Are you perfectly content with DBM or BigWigs? Maybe not. Are you like the freak of nature in my 25s that runs no addons at all and still tops meters? Maybe, but there's other things that would probably be more important than just DXE (*coughcoughPALLYPOWERcoughcough* I'm looking at you Jables). Do you want to have a little more control, graphically, over your boss warnings? Yeah.

I'll admit that I can't compare it to Big Wigs since I never used it, but now that I've adjusted to DXE, I realize that it's really going to be based entirely off preference. I started using DXE because I was curious about it and saw a few screenshots with it in it. It looked nice and pretty, and I like nice and pretty things. It takes getting used to, but I do suggest giving it a shot if you're not entirely thrilled with DBM.

Addon next up for review? Stuf Unit Frames!

As a note - I know there's no screenshots right now - servers are down and I don't have any screenshots at the moment that have DXE in it. I'll get some posted sometime today so you have an idea of what it looks like in my UI. Otherwise, the link provided at the top to Curse.com to download it SHOULD have some screenshots to tide you over.