May Waypoints

Q: Why should you never buy Mother's Day flowers from a monk?
A: Because only you can prevent florist friars.

(With apologies to all our moms. Happy Mother's Day!)

The UI had a bunch of small but useful UI tweaks earlier this month, and you can see most of them in the April Feature Pack post. With so many excellent ideas for features on the boards, we've been continuously busy writing and testing since then. If you check frequently for DarqUI updates, you've probably noticed. Here are a few more premium updates, fixes and improvements from April that you might find interesting, along with a quick look at some of what's coming up in May.

PvP 2K/4K

One of my all-time favorite dragons, Zarrakon has been immortalized in the new Player-versus-Player server that was inaugurated just a few days ago. There are a couple of PvP-centric UI pieces that had not been picked up yet in the 2K/4K project.

In Image #1 above you can see the PvP Event Scoreboard that's been part of the UI for several years. I'll have to admit I don't have much of a history as a PvP-er, and never participated before in the events that use the window. Was it a Battlegrounds thing? Either way, it made sense with the opening of the PvP server to build 2K and 4K sizes, just in case the developers decide to resurrect it.

Image #2 shows the PvP Immunity Timer, which will get used on a day-to-day basis on Zarrakon.

And this is a good place for a reminder that the DarqUI Tracking window has a cool PC Tracker that watches and alerts you when other players move into and out of range. Very tricksy! We have a Tip of the Day video that highlights the Tracking window and the PC Tracker, which will be coming around in the next couple of weeks.

The Map

Darq Side member Benj made the observation recently that zone names have been getting longer -- some of them almost absurdly so in this expansion. But he noticed the zone and continent dropdowns on the Map window were way too small, making it difficult to know for sure which map you're looking at. (Try fitting "Buried Takish'Hiz: Empire of Antiquity [Contested] (Knowledge)" into anything!)

With the new update, widgets on the main Map window will now get wider as the window is resized horizontally, making it possible to see more of those encyclopedic zone names.

Even with this adjustment there will still be a few crazy-long zone names that are too wide for the dropdowns. Benj also liked the idea of a tooltip on the titlebar that always shows you the full zone name regardless of how long it is.

And by the way, if the name Benj sounds familiar it's because he is responsible for the vast majority of new expansion maps added to the database over at maps.eq2interface.com. He and jnils work together to get custom cartography graphics and code onto the server to benefit everyone who uses EQ2MAP. We are grateful for Benj's efforts, and proud to have him among our ranks here at the Darq Side.

NPC Spell Monitor

Not long ago, Darq Side member Sharakari was looking for a bit more information from the NPC Spell Monitor. If you've never kicked the tires on that window before, take a look at the tutorial. It does some pretty groovy stuff. (Fair warning: set aside about half an hour!)

In addition to reporting spellcasting intervals, Sharakari wanted to know if the window could report the target's health at each cast of the monitored spell. This is a useful bit of data, especially when learning an encounter where spell X is cast when the enemy's health reaches Y. And there are plenty of those around Norrath.

We added target health to the casting interval display, but the tooltip also now records the enemy's health at the first cast of the spell (see Image #3 above.) The initial cast of a spell is an event that was not previously collected in the monitor, so now you can get an even more complete picture of an encounter's script. Thanks to Sharakari for the ideas and for quite a bit of testing while the feature was being developed.

Overseer XP

If you're a fan of the Overseer system, you know that more than 30 new quests were added in April for Season 5. The Overseer window has been updated to show XP amounts for all of them.

Gear Buff Macros Update

This cool improvement happened to the premium Gear Buff Macros window this month. If your Patreon account is set up to get an email whenever there is a new Darq Side post, you received two embarrassingly blank announcements a week or so ago. The Internet gremlins like to mess with me every now and then, but the video post is working correctly now. If you use Gear Buff Macros, I invite you to take a few minutes to find out about the new changes.

Housing

The developers made some tweaks to the default "Omnihouse" Player Housing window on the 25th, and of course those changes are reflected in DarqUI.

Statter for ACT Integration

Way back in February we hinted at a suggestion from Naviaz to leverage the DarqUI Stat Monitor to create some kind of combat stat analysis, possibly with the utility, or possibly integrating with ACT, to help players make sense of the boatload of stats and overcaps and how they can be analyzed to optimize combat performance.

Not long after posting that broad feature description and request for ideas, Darq Sider Reapp messaged me with a link to his Statter plugin for ACT. On its own this plugin is a high-quality, easy to use, very cool way to expose combat stat changes -- essentially what Naviaz had suggested.

Reapp has graciously agreed to see if we can communicate with his plugin through the DarqUI Stat Monitor to customize the setup and the output just for us. So far (keep in mind this is just a beta solution for now) it looks like this:

If you currently use ACT, I recommend you give Reapp's Statter plugin a try. It's very lightweight on your system and easy to get running. (And I'll bet you can bend his ear in Discord if you have any questions!) Reapp is yet another EverQuest II community contributor that we are proud to have as a Darq Side member. Stay tuned as we bring you more details about this exciting collaboration.

Thank You

I want to welcome quite a few new Darq Side members who joined us between March and April, and personally thank you for giving DarqUI a spot in your favorite MMO. I believe our long-time members will agree the premium UI has really come into its own since 2021.

As you continue exploring and personalizing the UI in day-to-day gameplay, I'm confident that you'll be impressed with the rich list of exclusive innovations and improvements generated almost entirely by great ideas from our members. When we say you are part of the project, that's not marketing mumbo-jumbo -- it's true!