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.

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.