My UI is an absolute mess. But somehow, I’m able to make sense of all that information and I’m able to act on it (usually). As a Priest, I spend most of my time with my eyes glued on the raid. With new encounters in Hyjal and BT, situational awareness becomes much more important.
Here’s a sample screenshot of the current state of my UI. It’s a complete and utter mess. There’s a lot of crap on my screen and a lot of it is redundant.
With that in mind, I decided to do a quick 2 parter before and after series about my UI. I figured I’d share my thoughts and my approach in overhauling my interface so that it’s more zentastic. Yup, that’s right. I intend to apply a minimalist zen approach to my UI. I play on a large screen. It’s quite tiring to traverse my eyes from the left side to the right. I want to start compacting information in one area so that I don’t have to scan the entire monitor for it.
Note: The addons I have below are those that can be visually seen.
Text Chat
First, I’m going to write about the non-addon related stuff: Namely, the text chat.
I’ve split up my chat windows from 1 window into 3 separate windows.
Left window: Handles general, trade, LFG, and Say chat.
Middle window: Raid chat, Guild chat, Healer Chat, and Priest Chat
Right window: This is meant for a separate channel that I share with my friends on the server. They’re all in different guilds but we keep in touch in our channel.
Addons
Aloft: This replaces the default nameplates that Blizzard has packaged with the game. You can see it in action over some of my guildmates on the right. Their health bar is colored to reflect their class. It also shows their mana bar below (or rage or energy). It’s very handy for me if I need to find a player and physically get to them.
Omen: Omen has replace KTM as my personal threat meter of choice. At the moment, I’m seriously considering removing it from my screen or disabling it. I’m almost never going to pull aggro. Knowing the threat levels of other players isn’t going to help me much in any way. I will keep the addon activated in order to transmit, however.
Bongos2: I use Bongos in order to manage my bars. As you can see, I’ve reduced my bar size to something fairly smaller than normal. I do most of my spell casting via my keyboard anyway. The alpha (transparency) has been set to 50%. XP bar is disabled, along with my bags, latency, and keyrings. I use Shift B in order to open all of them.
Elkano’s Buffbars: You can see my buffs in action on the right side of the screen. It shows buffs, debuffs, and durations. I’m trying to figure out how to disable that "Blessing of Demonstration" or whatever it is on the bottom.
Recount: I’ve mentioned Recount before but I mainly use it to analyze my own performance and troubleshoot player deaths. Note that the one linked is to Recount (Preservation). It’s meant for use in 2.4 but I believe it should still work for 2.3.
Pitbull: This is what I use for raid management. There’s a lot of options and a lot of flexibility and I need to spend some serious time going through it and messing with it. Those raid windows are large and I need to figure out how to shrink them among other things.
NECB: Natur EnemyCastBar is what I use to help track spell casts of other entities around me. I just need to find a better place to put it. Maybe to the right of the middle.
DoTimer: It can tell me at a glance how long before my HoTs and DoTs expire and when my cooldowns can be used again (Stoneskin, trinkets).
Targets
As you can see, I have target windows all over the place. There’s my player window, my target’s window, my target’s target window, my focus window, etc.
I don’t use focus macros that often, if at all. Therefore I’m considering removing that. I might move my own player window to the far left side. I plan on downloading a HuD eventually. I’m going to do away with Pitbull’s Main Tanks and tank targets window. I’ll probably axe pet targets and party pet targets as well.
You will also notice the raid in various states of transparency. That’s my range finder. If the player is transparent, they are not in range. If they frame isn’t transparent, then I can hit them with a heal.
Check back next week when I post the results of my modifications.
