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.

Introducing Quartz

Getting maximum DPS out of your casting sequence is about queuing up your next spell as soon as possible. Quartz monitors your latency (the information transfer gap between your computer and the server) and displays this on your cast bar as a red zone. I tend to treat it like this: when your current spell has hit the red zone, start casting your next spell.

I love Quartz and it does everything I want my cast bar to do. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t need some customisation.

Final Result

Quartz Cast Bar while casting Mind Flay

Please note that I’m casting a channeled spell (Mind Flay) in the example. For channeled spells the bar progress animates “down” from right to left so the red zone is at the end of the spell on the left. Most direct damage spells (like Mind Blast, Fireball etc) would be the reverse traveling left to right.

Configuration

It’s very rare that I take my gaze completely off my cast bar during combat. I’ve positioned my cast bar directly under my feet in the center of my screen and stretched it out wide. In Quartz settings this is all done in the “Player” menu (ie the Player Cast Bar).

Quartz will also replace the Mirror, Target and Focus Cast Bars if you enable them. I like to leave everything except my own bar turned off and let the default interface handle the rest.

Most of my changes to Quartz are cosmetic. I’ve dropped off the shaded border, removed the background gradient shading (choosing the Flat option) and even removed the name of the spell from the bar. I’ve kept the spell icon up (this registers in my brain faster than the spell name) and the cast time.

I’ll probably recolor the bar at some stage too.

Some Shadow Priests have suggested customising the background texture of the Quartz bar to show approximately where the 3 Mind Flay ticks occur along the bar. I’ve decided not to do this because my latency is high and fluctuates enough that I think the 3 markers would be misleading.

What’s next?

View/read all the articles in this series.

Before I realised I was looking for an Action Bar replacement Addon, I downloaded and trialed SpartanUI. SpartanUI is an all-in-one User Interface Addon. But I just didn’t like it. It places your player frame and your target’s information side by side like Street Fighter. Using SpartanUI made me realise that I’ve used the World of Warcraft default UI for a long time and I don’t want a complete change.

Introducing Dominos

I’m not entirely sure how I chose Dominos. I was reading information about Bartender and Dominos and downloaded both at one point. However, it was Dominos that I chose to install and tweak first. One site said that Dominos was easy to work with out-of-the-box and they were right! The author of Dominos has stated that he is trying to stick as close to the Blizzard functionality as possible and I think this is a smart position to take. Nobody wants an interface that breaks the first time you jump in a vehicle.

I strongly recommend you try Dominos if you like the look of all my “buttons”.

The Final Result

Here is what my interface changed to with just the addition of Dominos. Note: Ignore Healbot and Grid, installed but not configured yet, just left of the center of the screen.

Xata's Interface with Dominos replacing the default action bars and menus

My Configuration

I found the configuration of the action bars was very straightforward and mostly a case of dragging stuff where you want it. No guesswork involved, the menu options behave just how you expect them to.

I’ve moved the XP/Rep progress bar to the very center bottom of the screen, scaled it right down and dropped the opacity. My main action bar of spells sits directly on top of that. For Xata my totems and mounts are spread out horizontally above my spell bar. For Cassandri, my pet bar is positioned one step further up. Professions/utilities and buffs are vertically arranged to the right. Overall, my set up is very similar to Left/Right default action bar placements.

The placement of action bars on the screen is entirely up to you. And you can set up a lot of bars, many more than the default interface will give you.

Update
A day or two later and I look at Xata’s string of totems with new eyes. I’m going to set up 4 separate action bars in Dominos – one each for fire, water, earth and air – and arrange each bar as a column with the most often used totem at the top. That means I can click four icons right next to eachother at the start of the fight.

Tips and Advice

My advice in this step is to stick fairly close to the arrangement you currently use. Too much change will disorient you, so if you want to make major changes, do them one at a time over the next month or so.

If you need to place spells on your interface that you know are irrelevant during combat (eg mounts/professions) you can configure these action bars to show at a low opacity until you hover over them. I’ve chosen to do this with three of my bars on Cassandri (mounts, buff spells and professions).

Once you know where everything is by heart consider scaling down the overall size of your icons/action bars. You can do this in the World of Warcraft>Video options. I have reduced the scale of my interface to about 75% of the default setting in the capture above.

What’s next?

View/read all the articles in this series.

Perhaps if I explain the research I went through I can save you some time on your journey to a better interface.

Some Websites

NoStockUI

NoStockUI features complete interface packages like this one from Taeo. You can download it too.

While a lovely site with great UI examples, I couldn’t quite figure out what Addons were doing what in each screen capture.

NoStockUI will occasionally package up a whole interface for download (basically you unzip and replace your WTF & Addon folders with theirs). I wouldn’t recommend doing this unless you actually like cooking in someone else’s kitchen.

ShadowPriest.com

ShadowPriest.com runs an Interface Competition (the winning entry could also be downloaded in full). All the entries seemed too extreme for me – too far from the default interface which I’ve used for years. And I guess most of these Shadow Priests never heal because they had the smallest, tiniest, square raid frames you’ve ever seen. As small as the mini-map!

ShadowPriest.com also has a great list of suggested/recommended Addons that I came back to over and over again.

Curse

The place to download all these goodies. Except maybe Auctioneer.

Some Guides

In addition to the sites above I read some great guides. Definitely worth a read if you’re interested in healing and raid frames.

Mouseover Macros by Sydera

The idea here is that you’ll use your (right) mouse hand to hover your cursor over your raid frames (using something like Grid) and use your left hand to click a key nearby to cast a healing spell on them. No cursor clicking required to select your target to cast.
http://www.worldofmatticus.com/2009/03/23/a-guide-to-mouseover-macros/

Grid vs Healbot by Keeva

Keeva is a Restoration Druid and long term Grid user. She sets out to compare both Addons and how they can be customised. The only problem is that she tries to turn Healbot into Grid. Now if she showed me how to display a health bar percentage underneath the player’s name using Grid (basic Healbot functionality) I’d be more impressed. A good article nonetheless.
http://treebarkjacket.blogspot.com/2009/02/project-compare-raid-frame-heavyweights.html

Keeva’s Mimimalist UI

Keeva's UI dissected and labeled

More interesting than the Grid/Healbot debate, Keeva dissects her minimalist interface here:
http://treebarkjacket.blogspot.com/2009/02/my-current-ui.html

Terminology

Some lessons that I learnt along the way:

Raid Frames

When you drag raid groups out onto your screen from the Social>Raid window – these are Raid Frames. Raid Frame Addons like Grid, Clique, Healbot (and Pitbull?) will replace these with something better and probably save you quite a lot screen space too.

I should also point out that Decursive, which creates a clickable box representing each member of the raid for the purpose of decursing/cleansing/dispelling, is also a Raid Frame Addon.

Action Bars

Any thing you can drop a spell onto is an Action Bar. Action Bar Addons will replace/configure your bars and let you move them pretty much anywhere it suits you and drop them down until they are almost invisible if you like. Action Bar Addons may also modify you XP bar and main menu (you know, the thing you click on to open a ticket or laugh at your latency). I tried out Dominos but Bartender is very popular too.

Ace and Non-Ace

Ace is a type of programming language or library that can be used to build World of Warcraft Addons. That’s about all I know! I don’t have a preference for one over the other.

Debuff

Debuffs can be bad when they are cast on you and should be cleansed (and this is what I think of when I see the word) but they can also be good when you are casting them on something else. For a Shadow Priest, your DoTs are debuffs on your target.  Shadow Word: Pain, Misery, Vampiric Embrace and even Mind Flay are all debuffs. Mind Blast is not a debuff – it hits and it’s done.

What’s next?

View/read all the articles in this series.

For the last couple of years I have been playing World of Warcraft on a laptop computer with wireless internet connection. Turning off Recount improved the performance of my laptop during raids so I learned to make do with the default interface. Playing using the default interface isn’t a bad thing. It means that on patch day you don’t feel completely disoriented and you don’t suffer through days or weeks of “what addon is throwing these errors?!”.

But now I have a brand new computer that can handle addons and I want to stop drooling over the beautifully uncluttered interfaces I have seen in user videos and create my own.

My history with interface addons

MetaHuD moves your health/mana bar information to the center of your screen

Back when I first started raiding I was playing a rogue and spent my time looking from the middle of my screen and flicking back to the very top left of my screen to monitor combo points.

At the time I experimented with MetaHud. HuD stands for Heads Up Display and it helped me keep my eyes focused in the center of the screen.

I played for quite some time with MetaHud simply added to my default raiding interface. It didn’t remove any of the existing elements, just displayed a duplicate of my health bar, my energy bar, my combo points as well as my target’s health bar neatly around my character.

I loved it. I felt like I was more aware and more in control of what was going on.

The holy grail

But I’m a designer at heart. Even while I grew dependent on MetaHud a part of me was frustrated that it was duplicating information. I didn’t like turning off the default portraits because I couldn’t do simple things like leaving a party or self-targeting with MetaHud.

So this time around I’m going to build an interface that feeds me the information I want to know and simplifies my interface at the same time. I want maximum space to see the action please!

Design goals

The only way I know how to approach something like this is to try and get specific about what I want my interface/s to do, what information I want to be prominent and then try and make it happen using what’s available.

First off I know that I will be building slightly different interfaces because I have different requirements when I am DPSing on Cassandri than when I am healing on Xata.

Cassandri’s Interface (Shadow Priest)

I’d really like to be reminded when some abilities come off cooldown (notably Mind Blast) and make my own DoTs/debuffs on the target very large and visible. Seeing my own health and mana is important and I’d like to be able to see how many of my raid members are alive and how much mana they have too (for Hymn of Hope situations) although this is much less important. The center of the screen must be the focus because I need to see what’s happening under my feet in order to react quickly.

Very Important

• Visual emphasis or highlight when Mind Blast (or other abilities) come off cooldown
• My DoTs on the target
• My own health and mana bars
• Focus on center of screen/what’s happening under my feet

Important

• Being able to click and target myself or fellow raid members (mostly to apply Fortitude after a battle res etc)
• Who in the raid is dead/alive and how much mana they have
• Text instead of icons for buffs (I’m always hovering over the icons in order to read what buffs are what)
• Seeing healing done via Vampiric Embrace (mostly this is so I know when VE is up and working)

Not Important

• Chat (my guild uses Vent almost exclusively during raids)
• Mini map

Additional Considerations

• Sometimes I will need to switch talent specialisations and heal for a few fights. Whatever healing system that I put in place for Xata must be available to Cassandri without logging in and out.

Xata’s Interface (Restoration Shaman)

For Xata I need something that clearly shows what totems I have down. Blizzard intends to modify how totems work somewhat in the next Patch, so I won’t spend too much time working on this part of the interface until I see more.

Most importantly I need a really efficient raid frame/healing system. Up til now I’ve been a big fan of Healbot and I still think this is a great healing addon for Shadow Priests (who only need to heal occasionally and have most of their keys taken up with damage spells). I’m willing to try other addons for Xata – getting the healing right is the most important thing.

To sum up Xata’s requirements:

• What totems are down, and how long they will last
• Water Shield (on me) and Earth Shield (on my target) charges
• Efficient healing raid frames system

What’s next?

View/read all the articles in this series.