A while ago a friend asked that I do a post which describes the UI that I use. I had been putting this off because, until very recently, I hadn’t put much thought into the layout that I was using. It worked well enough for leveling. Regular five-mans are still mostly easy mode so it didn’t really matter that I had some clunky targeting and keybindings for taunting.
I’m rapidly approaching heroics where I’m certainly hoping that the engaging difficulty will require a slightly more efficient setup. I’ve spent a few hours over the last few days experimenting and have come to a system that I think will work well enough. I figured that now was a great time to take my friend up on her request and try to share my thoughts on how my UI is set up.
First, here’s a link to the giant screenshot: Giant Screenshot. The winning team of me and wordpress is too stupid (lazy?) to insert a nice tiny thumbnail. This screenshot is from a regular run of The Violet Hold this evening that gave me a chance to try out the new unit frames in a five-man. I’ve obscured the names of my pug-mates. Though, in this case, they were pretty awesome! Adding decent healers to my friend list is certainly paying off more and more over time.
Anyway! We’ll handle each visual element in turn. Starting at the upper left and making our way clockwise.
I’m using X-Perl for the player, target, and focus frames. I tried to trim down a lot of the noise that X-Perl defaults to. I turn off buffs and debuffs on all the frames except for the target. I do sometimes like to eyeball the visual clutter there to get an idea of what’s going on. Here you can see our pally healer judging light and my jugement of wisdom, for example. I don’t use X-Perl for raid or party frames, though, which presents a bit of a problem. With X-Perl’s raid and party frame addons disabled it doesn’t suppress the default blizzard unit frames. Another addon, HideBlizzard, does a fantastic job of doing exactly what its name implies. It has tick boxes for hiding most of the default blizzard UI.
SexyMap is sexy! This is a recent and treasured discovery. I appreciate the simple square design and that it hides the buttons unless I mouse over it. Fantastic, all thumbs up.
Here we have Deadly Boss Mods warning us about something or other during the fight. I use this in conjunction with little notes about each boss to keep me from making stupid mistakes during bosses with fiddly mechanics. I have to admit that I haven’t really configured this very cleverly. Some of its raid warnings seem to be a bit much, especially when they’re confusingly still on the screen, if admittedly fading away, long after the effect has stopped.
Oh, PallyPower, what would I do without you? Screw up buffing my groups, that’s what. It lets us assign buffs to classes and players, turns bad colors when the buffs expire, and lets us click to refresh them. It also coordinates with other PallyPower users and raid leaders to make sure multiple pallys get their buffs straight. Having this means that we don’t have to worry about our buffs in grid, as we’ll soon see.
Qbar: subtle but worth it. It’s sitting to the upper right of PallyPower in the screen shot. It’s a button bar that is automatically populated with usable quest items. No more screwing around in bags trying to find whatever dingdong you’re supposed to throw at 18 turtles, or whatever. I learned of this from a post over on Blessing of Kings on Qbar.
OK, this is where things get interesting! One of the things I hated about the X-Perl party frames was the sheer volume of information that it threw at my eyeballs. I didn’t need the vast majority of it to do my job. I realized a few instances ago that I was simply ignoring the party frames entirely. They were so cluttered that it just wasn’t worth focusing in on them to try and pick out the information I needed. This is where Grid comes in.
Grid lets me configure unit frames which only tell me what I need to do my job. The red border around a unit means that a mob is targeting it. If any other party member’s box goes red then I have to go spit on someone’s shoes and make sure they come after me instead of my little buddy. The little blue box in the upper right means that the unit has a debuff that I can Cleanse. The little green dot in the lower left is an incoming heal on the given unit. The class-colored bar and blue bar in the background are health and mana, respectively, and the text under the name is a health deficit. Not included in this picture are the cute tiny raid markers in the corners which match the markers on each player’s target. This helps me to see when pug members aren’t following the kill order and might need a helpful whisper to remind them.
I found it rather eye opening to sit down and think about the information which I truly need to be a decent tank. It was a surprisingly small amount of data and grid seems to be a great platform to display it efficiently. I’m sure I’m missing some things and will add things over time, but this feels like a great start.
The configuration interface sure is a beast, though. There is hope! You might find either of the fantastic post on Grid over at Resto4Life or Marcie’s post on Grid over at WoWInsider helpful. I did.
I combine Grid with Clique to be able to click on the unit frames to cast spells instead of having to target and use a bound key. For example, I shift-left-click on a unit with the red aggro border to cast Righteous Defense on them. I have to admit that I’m still getting the hang of this. There’s no visual reminders of which clicks are needed so there’s some mental load in mapping between indicators and weird mouse button combination. I’m toying with the idea of choosing grid indicators based on the mouse buttons that I should be clicking. For example, maybe the upper left corner means that the left mouse button should be clicked and the lower left corner means that the left thumb mouse button (button “4″?) should be clicked. Something like that.
Here’s my other clever trick. This is Bartender4 showing button bars with customized key bindings. I’ve rebound movement to the mouse to free up my left hand entirely for casting spells. The position of the bars match their position on the keys and the right set are used with the shift key. The spells that I used most often are all on the left side and don’t need a modifier to be used. Prot pallys in the audience will notice the spells from the 96969 threat rotation on the two rows in the lower left — 9 second cooldowns on top and 6 second cooldowns on the bottom. The rotation then follows a rhythm of alternating between the two rows as spells come off cooldown. I also use Bartender to manage the button bar on the far right of the screenshot which is full of spells that usually aren’t time critical. Oh, and that’s OmniCC adding the cooldown times to the button faces.
On either side of the main button bars we have Chatty. It lets us use teeny fonts, add timestamps, truncate channel names, and do all sorts of other crazy things to the chat windows. I leave a bit in the far lower left for the command line prompt.
And finally, Omen. I learned to love it as a BM Hunter who didn’t pull aggro and it’s even more important for tanking. Everyone’s already running with this so I don’t have to keep talking, right? Right!
I think that’s it! For now, at least. UIs are always changing so there’s always something to talk about. Maybe it’d be fun to make another pass at this in a few months to see what has changed.
OK, almost to 80! Back to work!