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WoW UI — Part 1: General Thoughts

A fairly recent screen shot of my user interface in action (click for full size).

This post is obviously now quite out of date, but I'm leaving it up for shits and giggles.

In the first installment of my User Interface posts, I'm going to talk about about the general theory behind how I have designed my UI, talk about a few specific modifications,  and provide a list of the addons I think are most essential.

There are WoW players out there who are User Interface purists; who insist that they play fine with the default UI, and will even insinuate that those who modify their UI are inferior players that require addons as a crutch. In my experience, these are usually people who have never used addons, often because they believe they don't have the technical competence to set them up, or are simply lazy. That being said, I don't think you have to modify every aspect of your UI, the extent and types of modifications that will let you play your best will vary depending on your class, spec and personal preference as to how you like to see information displayed.

I like addons; I like figuring out how they're configured and seeing what I can do with them. I also enjoy trying to find a balance between optimal function and aesthetics. It wasn't long after I started playing WoW that I began using addons, and since then I've changed virtually every aspect of my interface many times over. As of the time of writing, the screenshot above is quite recent, but there are things I've changed since, and other things I'm likely to change.

The most important consideration is the space your interface does not take up. It is vital that a substantial amount of the screen be free from clutter. The best players are those that can do their job, while remaining constantly aware of everything that is going on in the fight, and being able to actually see whats happening is the most crucial part of this.

The basic goal in creating an interface is to reduce the eye movement required to get essential information, without having it impede your view of the battle. All the most essential information is displayed near the center of my screen, and only shown as needed through the use of a variety of different addons. Memorizing action bars allows me to move my action buttons to a far corner of the screen and make them fairly small, if not invisible. I like having some visible during combat since its a good secondary reference for cooldowns, among other things.

As a healer, it is essential to replace the unit frames for the raid. There are a lot of options out there that are very good, but the default frames WoW provides are simply not sufficient. I have never seen a competent healer who used the default raid frames in a raid, and I would hazard to guess that Blizzard fully expects you to replace them before setting foot in a raid.

The second modification I believe is essential for healers is click casting macros. These can be done manually, but addons like Clique, Healbot, and VuhDo provide a slick and easy interface for creating and managing click casting macros. By using clicks instead of having to target and then hit a key, you are literally halving the amount of actions required to do the same healing.

The last aspect I'd like to mention is boss mods. Probably the most debated type of mod next to GearScore, there are a surprising number of people out there that insist that using DBM / DXE / BigWigs is somehow cheating. The simple answer to this is that if boss mods are "cheats", then Blizzard would disable them. I can't seem to find it now, but I swear there was a blue post that specifically said that they design encounters with these addons in mind. Just look at the short lived AVR, a mod that took boss mods to a new level, and is to be disabled because of the advantage is provided. Everyone who intends to do any raiding should have some form of boss mods installed, as they require little to no setup, and provide essential information. And if you think you don't need them because "it's all called out on Vent", then you're just having someone use a boss mod for you; if everyone just had the mod installed, then just maybe every aspect of the fight wouldn't have to be called out on vent.

List of raiding related addons in my UI (in no particular order):

• Grid - unit frames (with a bunch of the addons for Grid)
• Clique - click casting
• Cooldown Timers 3
• Dominos - action bars
• Quartz - casting timer
• Tidy Plates - Unit frames over units' head (now using with Threat Plates, which is downright awesome as a tank or DPS)
• Power Auras Classic - Use this to track Valanyr and other Procs, heroism, and when PoM, Penance and CoH are off CD. The two icons middle-left are for the latter.
• Omen
• Chatter - chat box mod
• Chinchilla - minimap mod
• DXE - boss mod
• RBS (Raid Buff Status) - appears top left, it tells me if any buffs are missing off anyone in the raid. I came to rely on it for checking my own buffs while raid leading as well as general raid buffs.
• CowTip - tooltips
• MSBT (Mik Scrolling Battle Text) - scrolling combat text

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