Authors (the retail version):  Kollektiv, Harleschorsch, Alfieri0815 and Fariel

Deus Vox Encounters (also known as DXE) is another representative of so-caled “boss mod” addons (such as DBM) whose main purpose is to guide the player through a boss encounter, show the spell timers and warnings for boss’ spells and other events that are important. That allows the player to focus more on their role in the raid since they more or less know when everything is going to happen. DXE is based on the modularity, complex settings of many of addon’s aspects and functionality and efficiency.

I would also like to point out, even though it’s been already mentioned above, that I am not the creator of the original addon. For that I am grateful to the authors mentioned above and many others who have developed the DXE many years ago. The version of DXE I am basing my work on (635) comes from the end of 2011 which dates about a year after the Cataclysm expansion release.

A bit of history

When Twinstar had a Tier 11 PvE season in progress for more than a year and all raiding instances had been defeated on all difficulties I remembered to improve our raiding experience, which was at its peak I would say, and try using instead of Deadly Boss Mods (the famous DBM) an alternative of which I have known in the depths of my soul from the previous expansion where some of my guildmates from Endless Agony were using it to automatically mark the players affected by Bitting Cold on Anub’Arak encounter. I was quite surprised that the addon had existed for Cataclysm as well (it’s not always the case) and so I got myself the last version released for Cataclysm and tested it in one of our raid. Understandably I was quite scared at first of the wide variaty of sounds I was not used to. I have come to like the DXE though because it allowed to adjust each timer and warning individually whereas the DBM usually only allowed turning things on and off.

My motivation

Even after trying out the DXE I was still using the DBM for raiding but my patience was running out with Cho’gall’s timer for Fury of Cho’gall which was a couple of seconds longer than it should in DBM. My frustration came to the point where I opened up the DBM’s source code for Cho’gall and looked for the place where it could be changed. But then I also looked at the source code for DXE and I very much liked the way DXE modules were written. It all looked much more organized and more systematic. Finding the Cho’gall’s timers, which were by the way also wrong in the same way DBM had it wrong, wasn’t difficult at all. Back then I did it only for this one boss but it was the first time I tested to see whether my “DXE fix” would work in practice and look it sure did.

I made a choice back then that if I’m to fix mistakes in an addon and spend my time I would prefer to choose the one I like more from the technical point of view and from the user point of view as well. Here the DXE clearly won over the DBM. And so I began going through the source code of the entire DXE and tried to understand how the whole ‘thing’ works (a process which continues to this day). My first version of the DXE addon that was on its way to be compatible with ways of Twinstar came into the light on 5th of January 2016 and contained only small changes such as implementation of commands /dxe range and /dxe distance that worked the same and had their counterpart in the DBM. Even though DXE did pop up the radar it only did so on its own and player had no way of showing a custom distance radar by himself. Soon I found out that the fixes I made had a real impact and made the raiding much better experience than before.

Since then I started fixing anything and everything I could find about the addon that wasn’t working as intended. Over the years I spent on DXE I went through phases of a repairman of that which doesn’t work to a developer of that which the addon could use. The entire time I tried to diligently abide by the design pattern I have observed in the addon and with certain pride continue the work others started before me.

It didn’t take long and my raiding mates started to notice that “an addon” (back then they didn’t know it’s not the DBM) shows more than their’s. My timers were more precise and could announnce anything ahead of time exactly right. I’m not going to lie that my original intentions were entirely selfish and I was driven by my frustration and fuled by the fun I had doing the work and learning a lot in the process. In the early January 2016 I made the next important decision and that was to share the fruits of my work. I did so using the Twinstar’s official formus that had a lot of visitors back in the day. I probably managed to convince about 10 people to try the addon out (judging by the number of downloads). If they kept on using the DXE I have no idea since only 3 people, whom I haven’t made using the addon personally, reached back to me at that time. I understand that some people might not prefer the DXE and not by my fault and that’s fine. But I would very much prefer if the people at least told me their reasons. I hate the idea that a person would stop using the addon because of a mistake that could have been easily fixed and he/she would not tell me about it.

Unfortunatelly the Twinstar forum’s popularity have been declining and my thread that is promoting my version of DXE gets burried fairly quickly and I don’t feel like bumping it everytime. So I left it to people recommending it to each other by themselves. I never wanted to make myself a promoter saying “Throw away DBM, DXE is better”. But there is so much work that went into the DXE now and it has so many features that it’s difficult to deny the fact that in many aspects it is better.

I have only informed guesses about how many people use DXE currently. To make it simple it’s difficult to make a proper marketting and so I do what I can.

Conclusion

I think DXE has a lot of features it can offer to players that are not available anywhere else. For the last couple of years i tried to take every bit of feedback I got to push DXE further to make raiding experience better for everyone. I therefore ask everybody who’s read the whole text to download my version, try it out and if you like it please recommend it further and if you don’t like it let me know why. I may be able to do something about it.

Thank you for reading and good luck 😉

Greghouse @ Apollo 1 (Twinstar)