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

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.

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.

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.