An Addon for everything!

I gave everything a bit of a shuffle a couple weeks ago, mostly because I needed more help watching my Focus (Lich King) target’s cast bar (Defile) and who is being targeted (Me, or someone else in the raid). I switched to Shadowed Unit Frames. But changing my unit frames led me into making other changes.

Because I don’t PVP much these days and very rarely heal so VuhDo isn’t nearly as prominent in this layout as it has been in the past. I’ve also switched back to the default Combat Text because I just like the positioning of the text over the targets so much for AoE.

I thought it might be worth consolidating everything into a single post.

The Interface – Out of Combat

Out of combat, in raid

Out of combat, in raid, with add ons marked

The Interface – In Combat

In combat, in raid

In combat, in raid, with add ons marked

Add ons

Bloody Font | Combat Text
This tiny little mod will replace the default font for combat text with any TTF font file you want to use. I’m using Dafxter at the moment because the characters in the set are smaller than your average character font set and even double size critical hit numbers render quite well. Most fonts, including the default one, look jagged and pixelated on my screen.

Decursive | Raid/Unit Frames
Click to Dispel Magic and Cure Disease on any raid or party member. VuhDo can do this just as well, but I like this function to be separated out. My post about Decursive is here.

Dominos | Action Bars
Every spell bar or button, including my inventory and bags, are positioned and modified using Dominos. I like to leave a couple big button spaces free so I can move in fight specific spells eg Pyschic Scream for Lady Deathwhisper. My Shadowfiend pet bar appears in the gap right in the middle. My post about Dominos is here.

Deus Vox Encounters | Raid Boss Mod
A lot of people use Deadly Boss Mods for raid encounter timers and announcements. I switched to Deus Vox and stuck with it because it uses so many audio cues for the warnings. You can customize every single boss encounter and turn on only the warnings and bars that you need to know about. Deus Vox also comes with its own Proximity/Range finder (see above my mini map) and its own boss health bar (right of the mini map).

Elkano’s Buff Bars | Buff and Debuffs
I have a 4 column buff/debuff bar layout (you can see three of the four columns in these screen captures). From left to right:

1. Special buffs (not displayed) – includes things like Heroism, Power Infusion and Storm Power (if you remember Hodir), basically anything that will change how I cast temporarily goes here. These are scaled up significantly and coloured green.
2. Debuffs – in the screen capture you can see Chill of the Throne. I make sure my debuffs are very prominent and show both the icon and the name in text. They are coloured by the type of debuff (poison is green). They also work as timers which is really handy for watching important debuff countdowns like Blood Queen’s Essence of the Blood Queen and Sindragosa’s Instability stacks. I don’t know how I’d play with the default debuff icons! This is one of the most important parts of my interface.
3. Self Buffs – the tiny little line of self buffs is my readycheck checklist. Should contain at any given time Shadowform, Inner Fire, Vampiric Embrace, Flask of the Frost Wrym and Well Fed. I rarely look at this list once I enter combat but any trinket or gear procs show up here.
4. Buffs from others – occasionally I will scan this list to make sure I’m in range of a totem but otherwise I ignore it during combat.

Lathere’s post about Elkano’s Buff Bars is here.

ForteXorcist | DoT Monitor/Spell Timer
Another game changing mod. ForteXorcist tracks every single one of my active DoTs, across all mobs, during combat. Makes multi-dotting much easier and lets me track what mob has Devouring Plague even when I’m targeting something else. Unfortunately it doesn’t track DoTs on your Focus target. Or at least I can’t figure how to get ForteXorcist to track that. My post about ForteXorcist is here.

gChat | Chat Pane
A little add on that neatens up the Chat window considerably. All the buttons are hidden as is the input bar until you type “/” or hit Enter.

Omen | Threat Meter
The standard Threat Meter. Mine only shows up when I’m in combat.

Quartz | Cast Bar
Measures latency and displays it as part of the cast bar. An essential for any caster. My post about Quartz is here.

Recount | Damage Meter
The standard Damage Meter. I try not to look at it during combat.

SexyMap | Mini Map
Makes my mini map look good, hides all the buttons and things like the calendar and time until you hover your cursor over the map.

Shadow Green Light | Shadow Priest Mod
A mod that calculates whether it’s worth recasting Shadow Word: Pain based on how many debuffs are on your target and how many debuffs are available with your raid composition.

Shadowed Unit Frames | Raid/Unit Frames
Replaces the player, target and focus frames in my user interface. You can use Shadowed Unit Frames to draw frames for party members and raid members too, but I use VuhDo to do that. Sometimes it will display a boss frame, but not consistently for all bosses. I’m thinking about turning this feature off.

Tidy Plates | Name Plates
Replaces the default name plates with something a little prettier. You can download a few different skins if you don’t like the default design.

VuhDo | Raid/Unit Frames
The best healing raid frame add on out there. Even though I rarely heal VuhDo compacts all the important information about what’s going on around me in the raid – who is dead, who is being resurrected, who has DCed, who is a ghost, who has aggro etc – into a small space. It also shows who has been raid marked which is really handy when you’re running a boss mod like Deadly Boss Mods or Deus Vox Encounters so you can quickly identify the raid members with Spores in Festergut, Unchained Magic in Sindragosa, Mind Controlled in Lady Deathwhisper just to name a few. Lathere has written two posts about VuhDo: here and here.

Fine-tuning

My user interface is definitely a work in progress. I’ll always be tinkering.

Eventually I plan to bring my player, target and focus frames down underneath my cast bar. The other thing I’ve noticed is that the Deus Vox bars and warnings really get in the way – they tend to overlap my damage output numbers or get in the way of my target’s name plate.

ForteXorcist stops tracking DoTs on a target if I set that target to my be my Focus. I find it much harder to track DoTs when they’re listed in two different places and in two formats. I wish I could figure out a way to keep ForteXorcist tracking my Focus target.

And finally, I think I need to set up some kind of tool tip add on. My tool tips usually appear in the very bottom right corner of my screen and overlap my menu bars there. I’m not sure where I want my tooltips displayed, but I know that I need a special spot for them and an add on that can put them where they’re meant to go.

My VuhDo setup next to Decursive, Recount and my spell buttons

I’ve been asked by a few people what my layout settings are for VuhDo. I thought it would be easier to cover the topic as one single blog post with screen shots rather than by reply to each individual question posed by in game whispers, comments, twitter and email.

This article covers two things:

1. The layout options I have selected. This fits VuhDo all nice and snuggly into space on my screen freed up using Sunn Viewpoint Art.
2. How I have chosen to display my HoTs on my raid targets and my click spell casting options.

Sunn Viewpoint Art – What Is It?

The description from Curse Gaming:

Sunn’s Viewport Art allows you to change the size of the rendered world area (viewport) and adds textured artwork in the non-rendered areas.

Ok, that doesn’t mean much to me either. So here’s my own more basic description:

This mod creates an empty black section under your game screen. The good thing about this is that all your mods can go into the black area so you can see everything happening around your character without any addons covering your view.

While you don’t need this mod to play the game, my customised layout settings have been chosen to display VuhDo directly under my character within the black section of my screen. If you want to duplicate my setup you’ll get most benefit if you combine this VuhDo layout with Sunn Viewpoint.

Vuhdo Layout Options

Opening Screen

So the screen shot below shows VuhDo when you first open it up and the options I have chosen. My favourite part in this screen is choosing your resurrection announcement message. I change mine fairly often, and they are always extremely silly!

General settings, including resurrection announcement

The Panels Tab

Most of the layout customisation is done via the panels tab of VuhDo. This screen shot below is of my General section. I choose to have up to 12 columns available which is more then enough for a Wintergrasp or AV with a bunch of Warlock and Hunter pets thrown into the mix. I also don’t like to see my empty groups when I’m soloing or in a 5 or 10 man instance so I always tick the Hide Empty option.

Panels General settings

Sizing

The sizing I have chosen is specifically inline with my Sunn no-video black area. My individual Bar Height is set to 27 and the Bar Width is set to 55. I find the squares big enough to get a real feel for player health and mana but not too big that I feel like I’m back in kindergarten.

Panel Sizing settings

Bar Look & Feel

There are many textures to choose from for the look and feel of your bar. I like the Aluminium look, but go crazy and choose one that you like the best. I also like the background for each of my squares to match the Class colour of the player. This is very handy as you can see with a glance which players are the melee that need a HoT just before that crash or to work out which crazy Mage has pulled aggro too soon.

Panel Bars settings

Headers

I personally like to show the group headers so I can easily see who is in each group. Vitare generally place the tanks in group 1 and the healers in group 5 so you already have a feel for where people are going to be located when your doing some crazy healing in a pinch. I have the font fairly small and like Skurri at size 10.

Panel Headers settings

Text

I choose to have the text as the Class Colour, which I know sounds like it would be hard to read but it actually presents very well and is very legible. I have chosen to have the text centered, and the persons name in Skurri, Size 9.

Panel Text settings

HoT Icon Layout

You can set up your HoTs to display around the outside of each raid frame, I like the box option which has HoTs in each corner as well as centered at the top and bottom. I’ve included below the layout and order I’ve selected though you may prefer to place these in different locations.

Panel HoTs Icons settings

Click Casting Spells

I have all my spells set to click cast through VuhDo and this is available under the Spells Tab. My mouse set up is as follows:

Left Click: Lifebloom
Right Click: Rejuvenation
Middle Button: Wild Growth

Shift Left Click: Regrowth
Shift Right Click: Nourish
Shift Middle Button: Swiftmend

Alt Left Click: Target/Select Player
Ctrl Left Click: Rebirth

As I only have a 3 button mouse, all other moves that aren’t used frequently are key bound. During Heroic Anub’arak I specifically go into VuhDo and change my Nourish button to Healing Touch to ensure I don’t go on autopilot and spam Nourish instead.

More Information and Good Reads

• If you like the idea of VuhDo but want to know more about it’s great features I strongly recommend our introductory article on VuhDo here.
• Setting up and monitoring custom debuffs such as Penetrating Cold has been covered by Matticus here.
• The VuhDo Wiki is here.
• The maker of VuhDo is very active on the Plus Heal forums and with the healing community which is fantastic. The VuhDo Manual thread can be found here.
• And finally if you would like to download VuhDo and try it for yourself, find the Curse Gaming link here.

Happy Healing!

Both Cass and I have tried several raid frame addons and both of us have been using VuhDo for several months. We love it.

Introducing VuhDo

VuhDo out-of-the-box in Alterac Valley

VuhDo looks great, gives you all the customisation of Grid, and is as easy to use as Healbot.

You don’t need to be a healer to like VuhDo, and if you form any kind of party, battleground or participate in Wintergrasp battles, you might like playing with something more compact and meaningful than the default Blizzard UI.

Here’s just a highlight of what VuhDo does:

1. Displays need-to-know stuff about your party/raid members
   Life, Mana/Energy/Rage/Runic Power, Debuffs, Player Status (eg. Ghost or AFK)
   and especially for the Healers: Incoming Heals, who has Aggro, HoT Timers
2. Click Casting
   You can heal, decurse, target raid members with mouse clicks
   You can automatically resurrect and decurse players out of combat
3. Buffing
   Smart buffing, with 1 click will buff the entire raid – you can set up the parametres

But the stuff that is really impressive, I think, are these little things:

• See immediately who has aggro – you’ll have a Rejuvenation and already be casting Regrowth on that Mage before the mob even reaches him and the tank has realised something’s gone wrong.
• Players who can be resurrected can automatically resurrect simply by clicking on the dead player’s frame out of combat. Even better still, you can see who is already being resurrected (their character name turns green). And, of course, you can customise your I’m-rezzing-you announcement to say exactly what you want.
• Auto-cleanse off afflictions that are still on the player when you leave combat. If you’re chain casting heals the minute the last mob is dead the next heal you go to cast will instead be a cleanse to automatically remove any nasties from your target (that might be making you heal in the first place).

And overall it’s just easier to set up to monitor your HoTs and other buffs like Power Word: Shield on your targets as well as debuffs like Weakened Soul (for Priestys like Cass) than any other raid frame addon.

To access VuhDo’s options type /vuhdo opt

My Final Result

Lath's Interface with VuhDo dead center at the bottom of the screen (click to expand)

In my interface VuhDo takes center stage while my spells, bags and action bars are moved off to the side. Keeping the raid alive is my responsibility so I like having VuhDo right there where I can’t miss it.

I find it’s easy to identify who’s who by colouring my frames using the Class colours option and you can clearly see who’s tanking and taking damage by the red borders and >>Character<< symbols  to show aggro/threat.

I have it set up so that Rejuvenation is a little box on the bottom left (you can see in my screen shot the white boxes).  It does a count down from 9 ticks onwards so I don’t waste mana and refresh too early.

Lifebloom ticks and stacks are also easy to keep track of. 1 stack is red, 2 is yellow and 3 stacks is green. The timer lets me know how long I have until the stacks will bloom and fall off.

Pets can be displayed and customised to take up very little room (the green bar list to the right of my player frames).

Cass’s Final Result

Left: In 25 man Ulduar, playing as Shadow. Right: In Isle of Conquest, healing as Discipline

You can drag and drop VuhDo at any moment to reposition it, and that’s how I like to play. When healing, I’ll drag it closer in to the screen center. I like the 2 column format because it expands out so easily to accommodate 40 man battleground raid groups. 1 column looked too much like a rainbow (way too distracting!).

When I play as Discipline it’s important to track Power Word: Shield and Weakened Soul.

In my configuration Weakened Soul is represented by its debuff icon and is displayed in the top right hand corner of a frame. I have it set up to only display, at most, 2 debuffs, and Weakened Soul is given the highest priority no matter what else is going on.

Power Word: Shield is represented by the white little box in the bottom left corner of a player frame. The Paladin in Group 3 that has run out of range in the right hand battleground example (a sure fire way to die!) has both Power Word: Shield still active and Weakened Soul and “agro”.

Renew is represented by a little red box in the top left corner of a player frame (not shown in either example).

My spells are set to:

• Scroll up/down (easier than clicking): Target player
• Left Click: Flash Heal
• Shift Left Click: Penance
• Alt Left Click: Prayer of Mending
• Ctrl Left Click: Prayer of Healing
• Right Click: Power Word: Shield
• Shift Right Click: Renew
• Ctrl Right Click: Pain Suppression

These days there is no cooldown (which is good, I know) but it can still only be applied to 1 target. Switch to a second target and you have no way of knowing when Devouring Plague needs to be reapplied.

ForteXorcist excels at tracking DoTs across multiple mobs regardless of your current target. So I decided to give it a go.

Introducing ForteXorcist

TMI: ForteXorcist straight "out of the box"

All I wanted to do was track Devouring Plague, right? ForteXorcist is a cooldown reminding, spell tracking, DoT timer beast.

The first thing I did after installation was head down to some Target Dummies in Stormwind and open up the Configuration. 5 minutes later I realised that if my brain was going to make sense of all this information, I needed to scale things right back.

I logged out and switched off all the class modules except the “Priest” class module which got rid of the Warlock purple boxes. I disabled the buff tracking section (all the blue bars: Inner Fire, Shadow Weaving, Illustration, NitT) because I have another Addon that tracks and displays that very neatly.

Then I got stuck into the Spell Timer configuration options.

Monitoring Devouring Plague, and just DP

I beat ForteXorcist into shape. I disabled all kinds of tracking and plugged “Devouring Plauge” into my Customise list and gave it a pink colour and told it to show up.

Placed to the right of Debuff Filter, and above my Quartz Cast Bar, it displays the progress of Devouring Plague regardless of my target. It can also show little markers on the progress bar to indicate the damage ticks, too, which I thought was neat.

ForteXorcist setup to display Devouring Plague only (right)

Ok, so that screencapture is a pretty bad example. The icon with the number 12 on it (on the left) is being displayed by Debuff Filter because my target has Devouring Plague applied to it.

The bar with 2 shiny white blips on the right is ForteXorcist. The big blip is the progress indication, the little blip is when the next damage tick occurs. If I had another target selected this bar would fade to 50% but still be visible but the left icon from Debuff Filter would just disappear.

More Spell Timers Please!

Before making up my mind about ForteXorcist I thought I’d better give it a go at doing all my DoT tracking. This is how I organised things to monitor DoTs on multi mobs. With this setup I could completely remove Debuff Filter and use ForteXorcist to tell me when I should refresh Shadow Word: Pain and when Vampiric Touch is about to expire.

This is how ForteXorcist is intended to be used.

Multi-dotting 2 targets with ForteXorcist

The 2 boxes on the left of my cast bar are ForteXorcist – each box representing 1 mob. I’ve coloured each of my spells separately (to match their icons: blue, yellow and purple) but I couldn’t remove the icons altogether or that incredibly annoying drop shadow border.

I also couldn’t figure out how to simplify the timers the way I could using Debuff Filter/OmniCC. With tenth-of-a-second countdowns I couldn’t help but feel rushed by ForteXorcist. Having 10.2 seconds left on Shadow Word: Pain is not something I need to know. 2 seconds left on Vampiric Touch? I’m interested.

The worst part of playing with ForteXorcist is that there is nothing to connect the actual target mob to its corresponding box of progress bars. I can’t help but wonder if perhaps it would be better to play with the default combat-text, damage-done yellow numbers which appear over the mob’s head. If I’m in a room full of tentacles that I’ve dotted up it’s going to be very easy to lose track of exactly which Corrupter is about to lose Shadow Word: Pain – even though I’m watching it happen with ForteXorcist. Perhaps it’s time I turned off Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text.

ForteXorcist has the ability to display raid symbols (skull, cross etc) on your targets, too. I think this might help bridge the progress bar => mob disconnect.

Something else to note is that I have kept my ForteXorcist progress bars very narrow (about 120 wide, I think) but you can draw them out as wide as you like. I’ve seen many interfaces where Shadow Priests play with ForteXorcist extended to match the width of their Cast Bar. Personally I don’t like seeing 10 progress bars whizzing past so I’ve kept my bars short to reduce the amount of on-screen animation.

Monitoring Cooldowns

When I switched on and played with ForteXorcist’s Cooldown module I recognised it immediately from many different strategy videos I’ve watched over the last 6 months. I’ve seen it used by Hunters. I’ve seen it used by a holy Paladin. And I was impressed.

The only cooldown that I really like to be reminded of mid-combat is Mind Blast. I’m not fussed about Inner Focus (which I have macro’ed anyway) and I have plenty of time to consider using Shadowfiend or Dispersion, so I turned everything off and coloured it up pink to match the Mind Blast spell icon.

The Cooldown module setup to track Mind Blast

The great thing about ForteXorcist’s cooldown reminder is that when the spell comes up off cooldown and reaches the end of the progress bar it animates (enlarges and fades) that pops out visually to remind you it’s time to press that button!

The good/bad thing is that the progress bar isn’t evenly distributed over time. You can see in the screen capture above the progress markers in seconds. The bar spans 6 seconds (0 at the left end, 6 at the right) but the center point of the bar indicates the 1 second mark.

This means that the spell cooldown you’re tracking travels faster and faster down to 0. I found this actually made it more difficult to judge when to hit Mind Blast and found myself trying to anticipate the ForteXorcist cooldown bar and getting “spell not ready yet” complaints from Cassandri instead.

Final Result

I am undecided about ForteXorcist. It’s an incredibly powerful Addon that gives you a lot of control through customisation.

If I was a fan of progress bar DoT tracking I would love it. If I was new to Shadow Priesting (or any class that DoTs) I would love it.

I guess I’ve played for so long now keeping track mentally of what mob has what, and when it’s time to switch over and recast that I feel ForteXorcist makes me doubt my timing and watch the bars instead.

But overall I can’t help but feel overwhelmed by everything that’s being displayed all at once and, as I mentioned above, feeling more disconnected from the actual game play video streaming onto my monitor.

I’m looking forward to giving ForteXorcist a whirl in a raid with Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text turned off and we’ll see how I adjust.

My UI during raid, out of combat

My UI, with mods labeled

Mods Visible on the Screen

Dominos is used to modify & move my spell action bars, XP bar and bags. To lessen the clutter on my screen I have Bars on both the left and the right at 10% opacity, so you only see the buttons when you hover over them.

Vuhdo is a raid frame replacement and click casting addon. As a healer this is the most prominent part of my interface.

Elkano BuffBars replaces the default icons representing the buffs applied to your character. I have mine listed vertically under my portrait.

SexyMap hides all your mini map buttons and makes your mini map look good! Also includes map/location coordinates, if you’d like them.

Decursive makes cleansing a simple matter of clicking the highlighted squares, with Lath I can left-click to remove curses and right-click to abolish poison.

Recount is an in-game damage meter that allows you to keep track of your DPS and healing output during boss fights.

Omen allows you to keep track of your threat in comparison to your tanks and other party/raid members.

eePanels2/Sunn Art Viewport The screenshot above was taken using eePanels2, however after overwhelming comments pointing me to Sunn Art Viewpoint, this is now installed and has been configured. My interface with Sunn Art Viewport looks similar, however, the video display ends just above the Vuhdo/Omen/Recount section leaving a solid black empty background behind all those mods.

What you Dont See, But I Do Use!

Quartz to replace the default cast bar.  As an Oceanic player this is a must! It shows you visually how much latency is affecting your spell cast time so you can compensate.

Mikes Scrolling Battle Text to replace the default combat text options and separate my incoming heals (from myself/other players – left side of my character) and my outgoing heals (right side of my character). I love this mod because it plays a sound and notifies me on screen when Wild Growth is off cool down.

Deadly Boss Mods to keep me aware of important boss encounter stuff – light bombs to enrages.

Additional Mods I use, and Recommend

Combuctor to combine all my bags into one.

Atlasloot lets me know what loot drops are available in each raid & dungeon boss.

RatingsBuster helps me compare item stats in a matter of seconds without leaving the game.

RandomMount because I don’t want any of my handsome mounts feeling missed out! This mod intelligently selects the most suitable mount type for me to fly/ride.

RandomPet because I have a number of pets under my care, this mod randomly brings one out so they all get the love and attention they deserve.

Where to Start

If reading this blog post has inspired you to start tinkering with your own UI then I suggest you have a read through some of the articles Cass wrote when she first started her journey.  Cass has done a series of mod guides which should help you feel comfortable customizing the mods to better blend into your UI design.  You can find these articles here.

Changing your raid frames is always a big step if your new to mods and add ons.  If you are keen to use Vuhdo and need some help setting it up, your in luck because the add on authors are very responsive.  The best place to start after downloading the mod, is the Vuhdo Wiki.

I want to finish this with a final piece of advice for anyone who uses mods while playing WoW.  Download WoW Matrix and create a shortcut to the application on your Desktop.  Every time a patch comes out mods cause widespread chaos in a raid.  Having WoW Matrix lets you update any out of date mods to the latest version with minimal effort required.

Action Shot!

]]> http://www.hotsdots.com/2009/08/the-evolution-of-my-ui-final/feed/ 11 http://www.hotsdots.com/2009/08/the-evolution-of-my-ui/ http://www.hotsdots.com/2009/08/the-evolution-of-my-ui/#comments Wed, 05 Aug 2009 01:48:21 +0000 Lathere http://www.hotsdots.com/?p=795 Over the years I have played WoW my UI has changed. From using the standard interface, to dabbling with mods, I have slowly “evolved” to what I feel is a more sophisticated and user friendly interface for my game play. My biggest challenge has been mod customisation. I need things to be pretty user friendly after install otherwise it is all too much and I give up on the mod all together. I went through my screenshot folder today and have picked out pictures of my many UI attempts some of which are quite embarrassing but I’m going to share anyway!

My 1st Raiding UI

My UI When I Was First Raiding Karazhan

Mods were still a new and exciting thing for me back in my early Karazhan days.  As you can see we are still using the ingame sound, vent was something that seemed silly – why install another program when you could just use the ingame version!  Back in this era, I was using:

• Titan Panel
• Decursive
• Omen – this was fairly new and exciting, most people were still using the very popular KLH Threat Meter
• Deadly Boss Mods

And yes, people are hovering in the air (hence why I originally took this screeny) there used to be a bug which sent people who died during the Chess encounter back into The Menagerie (Curator’s Room) and plonk them in the air.  It certainly made us laugh!

My Healbot Experimentation Phase

My Healbot Experimentation Phase

This was a fairly short period of my raiding life when I tried to use Healbot. While I have heard it is now greatly improved, back in the day when I was tinkering around with it Healbot hated Tree Form. Most of my other mod choices have remained.

This screeny was taken during a naked gnome race to Booty Bay. I’ve always wanted a gnome with pink hair…. one day perhaps!

Discovering Recount

You Mean… Decursive Can Move?

When I look at this picture, the first thing I think is “Thank God I Finally Managed To Move the Decursive Buttons!” Aside from my new found discovery of how to move Decursive squares off my mini map, my mod list has also grown and changed.  I’ve discovered Recount and have also installed Quest Helper which makes questing a breeze. Through this phase I used:

• Fubar
• Atlas
• Decursive
• Recount
• Omen
• Deadly Boss Mods
• Quest Helper

An Over Ambitious Disaster

2009 – The Year Of The UI Overhaul

Ok that screenshot above is a terrible mess…. urghhh. I decided to experiment with Grid, Healbot I had learnt was not for me and I was sure that with the right raid frames I could improve my healing… really take it up to the next level. Unfortunately I had found that Grid was taking me a while to get used to, so I played not only with Grid, but also the standard Raid Frames taking up a chunk of my screen so I could still feel in control.

Other mods of note in this screenshot is my newfound discovery of Elkano’s Buff Bars, which I am still using today. I have also installed Spartan UI, which at the time I thought was beautiful. I look at it now and just think, meh…. not worth the reduced MS and frame rates. Mods in this screenshot include:

• Spartan UI – The big grey bar at the bottom
• Chincilla – A mod that allows you to move your Minimap
• Prat – Chat mod that colours the name of the person talking to their class colour & adds a time stamp
• Fubar
• Omen
• Recount
• Decursive
• Elkano’s Buff Bars
• Grid

Vuhdo I Love You!

Taking Control of My UI

After my major overhaul attempts, I got exhausted with trying to make it all work. I went back to standard UI raid frames and layout for about a month before I was ready to dive back in. I wanted things to be simple this time. I still wanted a better raid frames system but I knew I was never trying either Healbot or Grid again. I was ready to start looking into XPerl when I saw a Plus Heal forum talking about a new mod called Vuhdo. I decided to take the plunge and give it a try and I simply love it.

During my UI attempt, I also tried Dominos based on Cass’s advice and by complete accident stumbled across a mod called Sexy Map… which is great because it hides all the mod buttons until you hover over the map. Mods used during this minimalist phase are:

• Dominos
• Vuhdo
• Recount
• Omen
• Decursive
• Deadly Boss Mods
• SexyMap

eePanels2

Tweaking & Nit Picking

I knew I was near the end of my UI journey.  I had finally found raid frames that I liked and I had a group of staple mods that I was now comfortable with.  I wanted to keep everything towards the bottom of my screen with the raid frames taking front and centre position so I could easily heal and view the events surrounding my character at the same time.

I discovered eePanels2 which allows you to put colored panels on your screen to better break up your layout.  In the screenshot above I have 1 Panel which is a stark black in which the majority of my “workshop” is based. Mods used in this screenshot are exactly the same as those listed above, I’ve just added eePanels2 & Elkano Buff Bars.

My final UI is similar but more simplistic again.  I am still happy with the layout shown in this screeny but I found when doing Flame Leviathan – Orbituary (4 Towers) the black panel covered up too much of my screen and blocked part of my vehicle.  As I generally am the gunner for a demolisher and need to constantly scout the ground for Pyrite, this wasn’t good enough.

Stay tuned for a separate post covering my final UI (once I get it all working again with the new patch!) and each mod used & how I got it to work together!

*Update* Evolution of my UI: Final has been posted.

Why a Buff Bar?

The first time I decided this was a critical requirement in the success (or failure) of my interface was when we were wiping on General Vezaxx and Yogg-Saron. For some strange reason other elements on my standard UI would sometimes cover up my Saronite Vapor (Green Goo) ticks/debuff and it was also covering up my Sanity debuff. This was incredibly stressful mid-fight and there were several occasions when I cautiously left the green pools too early and missed out on precious mana. I was also running to the Sanity Wells in Yogg more often then necessary which meant I wasn’t in position and potentially missed out on cleansing/healing a raider right when it was needed.

Elkanos Buff Bars

Elkano Buff Bars Out of the Box

There are probably a number of mods that alter the display of your buffs & debuffs.  I found Elkanos Buff Bars after reading a post by Matticus on NoStockUI and downloaded it immediately.

The great thing about this mod is that it does it’s job straight out of the box, no changes or customisation required.

Customising Elkano Buff Bars

This is thankfully a fairly straightforward mod to make changes with.  To bring up the main configuration window you simply type /ebb config however you can do most of the modifications by simply right clicking on the header (Anchor) for each group.

Right click on a group heading (anchor) to access the configuration options

Groupings

The standard out of the box set up for this mod is 3 groupings – Buffs & Tracking, Debuffs & Tench.  I have no idea what Tench means but to give you an idea things that show up in this section include fishing lures & old fashion wizard oil for your weapon.

I didn’t want to go too crazy with the groupings, however I did customise this a little bit, and changed the groups to: Buffs, Debuffs & Tracking. This is done by editing the Name option when right clicking on the header.

Look & Feel

The first thing I did was drag my buff bar to the left side of my screen under my character portrait. This suits my UI layout because I do not use the standard party interface which places party portraits down the left side of your screen. Cass has her Buff Bars on the right side of the screen under her mini map, so the positioning is pure personal choice.

I also changed to scale of the groups to 70% which takes up less space, but is still easy to read.

I really didn’t like the bright blue, red and purple colours of the bars.  I changed these by going into the Bar Layout -> Bar section and changing the colour for Buffs to Black and then lowering opacity so it comes of as a pale clear gray.  I also dulled down the Debuff and Tracking groups to a dark red and purple and also lowered the opacity.

The final thing I did was remove the headings for each section, purely a cosmetic change but I thought it was more effective looking in conjunction with my overall UI.

Final Result

Lathere's Elkanos Buff Bars with Customisation

Cassandri's Elkanos Buff Bars with Customisation

The Verdict

I absolutely love this mod.  I can simply see a listing of all buffs my character has, and clearly tell if I’m missing something important.  Most importantly however, is how easy it is to see any debuff my character is experiencing and react accordingly.   I don’t know how I managed without this!

What’s next?

View/read all the articles in this series.

If you already have a good raid frame system set up you can use that to monitor magic, curses, diseases and poisons. However, if you’d like to have a separate, stand-alone Addon for quick click removal of nasty stuff I’d recommend Decursive.

Introducing Decursive

Decursive is going to make your response time for removing the bad stuff from your friends really fast.

Default Decursive (just imagine the last line reads "Curse of Weakness")

The best thing about Decursive is that it self-configures to suit your character class when you log in. To use Decursive all you need to learn is:

• Red = Type A debuff = left click the square to cast your Type A to remove
• Blue = Type B debuff = right click the square to cast your Type B to remove
• Orange = Type C debuff = ctrl+left click the square to cast your Type C to remove
• Purple = Type D debuff = ctrl+right click the square to cast your Type D to remove

The Type A, B, C, D debuffs and corresponding cleansing spells you can use to remove the debuff will change based on what class you’re playing at the time and what cleansing spells you have available. The most common stuff you’ll need to cleanse will almost always be cleansed with a simple left click.

When I’m playing Cassandri, my Priest, I can Dispel Magic Red and Cure Disease Blue. Can’t remove poisons as a Priest? They won’t show up in Decursive if you can’t do anything about them.

Swap over to my Shaman, Xata, and in Obsidian Sanctum my Decursive flashes up Purple squares when raid members are cursed with Drain Life. Ctrl+Right click a couple times and it’s gone.

It’s also worth pointing out that the top left square in Decursive represents yourself.

While it’s true that Decursive is great out of the box, you can change the size, colours, layout and position of your Decursive squares and also define specific debuffs you wish to monitor and who (based on class) should be monitored for those debuffs.

Also, Decursive calls the bad stuff it monitors “Afflictions” so I’ll use that term from here on out.

Final Result

Decursive and other Addons, shown out of combat with no afflicted raid members.

Configuration

Decursive is a mix of shades of green and purple and grey with thin and thicker borders when you first install it. I think the default colouring is to do with range (out of range, in range but not afflicted). I did discover that the borders exist to identify the class of the player.

My thoughts on cleansing are:

• It’s pretty damn important to do most of the time in raids (fights like Yogg-Saron spring to mind)
• It’s the player’s responsibility to be in range of the cleanser
• Everyone, regardless of class, is worthy of cleansing, even if they can remove it themselves

With that in mind I scrapped the borders completely and switched all the in-range-but-not-afflicted, out-of-range settings to grey. I also scaled up my squares to about 120%. I think I also reduced the information displayed in the tooltips to just the name of the affliction.

I did come across a setting that colours the square differently when the player is “cloaked” (a rogue stealthing or a mage using invisibility) and I set this to black. I think this might help me in Battlegrounds where my Dispel Magic/Cure Disease could give away the position of my hidden friends. Not that I BG much, but I thought it was cool.

Eventually I plan to move Decursive right down next to my Grid Addon, but I keep looking towards my minimap (the original position of Decursive on install) so this is an intermediate step.

Monitoring Specific Afflictions with Decursive

99% of the time the default settings in Decursive will do the job.

But this is the situation I found myself in. Ulduar 10 man hard mode Thorim with his lovely wife Sif. Sif thinks she’s a frost mage. And just like a frost mage in a BG she likes to run around annoying players while they try and get on with the killing. All her debuffs are magic, they’re non stop (my Decursive lit up like a Christmas tree) and there are alot of them. But only one of the abilities was consistently getting people killed: Frost Nova.

With Decursive you can configure your Custom Afflictions to monitor Frost Nova (must be dispelled), Frostbolt Volley (ignore) and Blizzard (ignore) separately. Go into the Decursive menu, then to Afflictions, then Add a Custom Affliction and type in the name of the spell. It will now appear on your Afflictions list and branch out to a list of all the player classes:

• Checked = ignore this Affliction on this class
• Unchecked = behave normally and track the Affliction

Setting up Custom Afflictions with Decursive

You can find a mage to duel and test this out if you’re not sure. Worked like a charm for me the following week. Just don’t forget to change your settings back when you BG or Arena next!

You can also configure your Decursive to not light up when another Priest in your raid is afflicted by Magic (on the assumption they should cleanse themselves). I chose not to go down this path because I like to see everyone afflicted by magic in order to make smart Mass Dispel decisions.

What’s next?

View/read all the articles in this series.

If you’ve wanted to try Grid but don’t know where to start you’ve come to the right place. I’m trying it out for the first time too!

A smart reader asked why I would go through the pain of switching to Grid from Healbot. I’ll admit a small part of me wants to be a fantastic Priest healer: DPSing up the meters one day and switching to Discipline and doing just as well – saving the world with the right Shield/Heal at the right moment.

When Dual Specialisation came out I was asked to choose Holy. I threw spells into Healbot for raid healing and I just couldn’t fit all the spells I wanted to use onto 2 mouse buttons + some keys. I was just starting to learn the combinations I had set up when I changed to Discipline as my secondary build and I’m struggling even more to relearn my key combinations. A perfect time to see if there’s something better out there.

What Grid Will Do

Grid creates a square representing each of your party/raid members. Click the square and you will target that player. You can choose (Grid gives you a hell of a lot of options) what information about the player you wish to display in their little box, but usually you’d start with their name and build up from there.

Grid is intended to replace the default UI raid frames – you know, the groups 1-5 that you have dragged onto your screen from the Social>Raid window.

What Grid Can Do

I honestly don’t know the answer. Ask a devoted Grid user and they will tell you Grid can do pretty much everything.

I do know that you can extend the functionality of Grid in many different areas to accomplish want you want. For healing, you can:

• Download modules that allow you to more successfully monitor your HoTs (a lot of Druids go down this path)
• Download Addons that will work with Grid and allow you to cast heals using mouse button combinations (referred to as click casting, check out Clique and Click2Cast).
• Set up mouseover macros in WoW that let you hover your cursor over Grid and smack your regular spell keys to heal your target

The Basic Basic Setup

Grid is, unfortunately, really really ugly when you first install it.

Default Grid display... does it make your head hurt too?

It took me a couple hours wading through the configuration menus but eventually I beat Grid into something attractive, meaningful and helpful. Personally I think most of this stuff should be set by default. If the creators of Grid made Grid look like this out of the box they’d win over a lot more users. By the way, Grid refers to each player as a “unit”.

• Switch to horizontal health bars, not vertical
• Increased the width of each “unit” so they are rectangles, not squares
• Show more letters/characters in the unit’s name (I think I maxed mine at 20)
• Turned off all the Top Left, Top Right, Bottom Left and Bottom Right corner settings
• Removed the border around the Addon
• Removed (or changed to a Flat) background texture
• Removed all the Border (the border around each unit) settings
• Turned off units for pets

From this base, blank canvas I added some meaningful information. But I’ll go into that later.

The Final Result

Grid in Alterac Valley, 40 players but only a few in range.

Grid in Ulduar, 25 players mostly in range (and yes I captured this for another reason - go number 1!)

My Configuration

Building up from the base setup described above I selected some additional information to display on my unit frames from the options in Grid:

• Unit Border:
  display on aggro (the player/s with aggro get a red border)
• Unit Text – second line:
  display the amount of health lost (eg “7.5k”)
  when they have the Weakened Soul debuff (ie “Weakened Soul”)
  when they have died and released (ie “Ghost”)
• Top Left Corner:
  a square appears when the target has Power Word: Shield active

My advice would be to keep the amount of information you’re monitoring with Grid pretty minimal at first. If you wish to monitor several things try and consider which ones might happen at the same time and don’t assign these to the same visual alert (you have borders, text and four corners to play with essentially).

From Healbot to Grid

If you’re like me and are used to playing with Healbot, I suggest that you run both side by side for a few weeks while you make the transition. This is a screen capture I took as Xata while I was still figuring out the nuts and bolts of the Grid options (you can see I haven’t yet turned off pets and something is being monitored in the bottom left corner of some units).

I recommend running both Grid and Healbot until you adjust.

One thing I love about Healbot is being able to see the icons specific to your class on your raid. It’s really easy to monitor how many charges of Water Shield I have up and also how many charges of Earth Shield is up on my target. I can also see who else has been Earth Shielded by another Shaman. On my priest I can see Power Word: Shield, Prayer of Mending, Pain Suppression and Guardian Spirit, regardless of which priest cast it, which can really come in handy.  Unfortunately I have no idea how to achieve this in Grid, or if it’s even possible.

So far I absolutely love monitoring Weakened Soul with Grid. For such a long time I have been right clicking units on Healbot to Power Word: Shield them when things are going wrong (the only “heal” I can perform without leaving Shadowform).

Final Thoughts

Good luck! Grid takes a lot of work and most of the configuration menus don’t make a lot of sense to first time users. If it all gets too hard, give Healbot a go.

Remember, at its essence Grid will simply replace your current default Raid Frames – nobody is forcing you to try mouseover macros, fancy key bindings or click casting. And Grid won’t do any of those things for you on its own.

I’ve briefly tried mouseover macros – and loved it – except I just don’t have enough easily accessible keys not already taken up with damage/dispelling keys on my Priest (where the 1-0 keys are taken) and it seemed counter-productive to set up keys like X and Z which I find hard to hit. I’m definately keen to try this on my shaman, Xata.

I’m also planning to try click casting using Grid (and Clique or something similar) or trying out Vuhdo which is getting rave reviews. But that’s a topic for another post.

ps. The guild member I quoted above eventually qualified for my Mute and Ignore list when he suggested we all change factions and play horde because “Horde are so much better”. I’m fairly confident I won’t be missing anything worth hearing.

What’s next?

View/read all the articles in this series.

What I really want is an option in the WoW Interface that lets me scale up the size of my DoTs on my target to about 200%. Unfortunately this option doesn’t exist. Hiding everything else except my own DoTs would also have been a nice option.

DoTs = Debuffs

A critical lesson. As a Shadow Priest your damage over time spells are considered debuffs on the target. During combat these spells all count as debuffs on your target:

• Shadow Word: Pain (applied by casting Shadow Word: Pain)
• Devouring Plague (applied by casting Devouring Plague)
• Vampiric Touch (applied by casting Vampiric Touch)
• Vampiric Embrace (applied by casting Vampiric Embrace)
  and
• Misery (passively applied when you cast other shadow spells)
• Mind Flay (applied during a channeled Mind Flay)
• Mind Trauma (passively applied when you cast talented Mind Blast)

The only spell that I cast regularly that doesn’t leave a debuff on my target is Mind Blast.

Of the list above, I only need to watch the progress of my Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague, Vampiric Touch and Vampiric Embrace. These are the DoTs that need to be reapplied immediately when they wear off.

Quartz Buff/Debuffs

I tried a couple of different options. Most Addons that monitor your DoTs (a) format them into bars that animate down as they wear off and (b) show all your debuffs, not just the ones you want.

I tried very hard to like the module in Quartz Cast Bar that shows debuffs. But I really disliked the horizontal progress bars, not to mention the self-sorting by duration default setting, and I was quite distracted by Mind Flay which popped up each time I cast it.

Quartz Buff and Debuff monitoring might work for mages, but I didn't like it for 20 second duration DoT monitoring (displayed as progress bars).

Introducing Debuff Filter

Debuff Filter lets you watch just the Debuffs/DoTs that you’re interested in. You are also given the option for each debuff to only show the debuff if you were the player to apply it (thank you! I’m not interested in anyone else’s Shadow Word: Pain).

Final Result

Debuff Filter positioned above Quartz cast bar

My Configuration

Debuff Filter Configuration Options

I added the first four debuffs listed above (SW:P, DP, VT, VE) to my “watch list” in Debuff Filter and for each spell ticked the Self Applied Only option. I removed all the boomkin stuff that was set up when I installed it too.

I placed the debuffs so that they appeared directly above my Quartz cast bar. I can look at my DoTs and then decide what to cast next while I watch my cast bar to decide when to cast. I love it.

I also chose to display timers on my debuffs (not shown in the capture above). This required me to download and install OmniCC. So I did, and it worked with no additional setup. Not sure I actually like the timers yet. I might turn them off.

What’s next?

View/read all the articles in this series.