There has been a flurry of Raiding interface posts (courtesy of Kirk and Galadria). I’m going to show a screen shot of mine in a moment and label all the present addons in the screen. But first, I want to show you an addon that will blow your mind away as a healer and make you drool. Check out the following shots:
Edit: Forgot to enable comments
Now that I’ve caught your attention, you will most likely be asking yourself “OMG WTF IS THAT?”. This, my friends, is a raid user interface called Pitbull. You can find a copy from Curse Gaming.
As you’ve seen from the shots above, it has a special feature which functions like bullet tracers. It graphically generates a line from you and your raidmates to the players they are healing so you can visually see on your screen who is healing who, with what heal, and when it hits in real time. Is that not mindblowingly awesome? It’s like little lasers! Now healers can really pew pew. I believe the numbers you see on their names are the estimated heal amount.
But there is a problem.
With all the graphic generation, heal calculation, and so on and so forth, you will need a nuclear reactor to power your computer. As much as I want to run this, I know my computer would buckle especially in a raiding environment. So to you healers who have kickass machines, give this a shot. It’s got a ton of more features as well, but that part caught my eye the most.
Here’s the interface that I use. Make a note of the numbers that I photoshopped in there:
1: This is singlehandedly the most important addon you will ever use in your WoW Raiding career. You can skimp out on the heal addons, and the threat addons, and the pretty addons. But get Deadly Boss Mods. It highlights important knowledge and phases during your encounters. It is an absolute must.
2: X-Perl Unit Frames is my primary UI of choice when interacting with my party and my raid. It boasts a whole slew of options and is compatible with CT Raid, oRA2 and a few others. It’s able to show me the target of my target’s target (four windows). It can show all MT targets. It shows who’s targeting you. It shows who’s also assisting you. It also shows players with buffs that you can provide. It’s an easy way to spot if a player is missing Fortitude or DS. It’s also got a built in range finder, spell cooldown (you can see how long before you need to refresh renew), if the raid is down it shows who has soulstones or Shaman’s self res active, and most importantly, your screen flashes if you pull aggro.
3: I use Bongos 2 to manage my extensive array of options and choices for my bars. If you look really carefully, you can even see the way I bind my keys. It allows me to flexibly move my map, my bars, my FPS and castbars all around. Note that I don’t have my menu’s or my bags on screen (I rely on Esc. and Shift + B for that respectively).
4: I like my map square so I can see more surface area. Thank you Squeenix.
5: I didn’t like the way Blizzard organized my buffs, so I turned to CT_Buffmod. I do believe you need to download the core, however…
6: KLH Threatmeter (or KTM). It’s a way to graphically view your own aggro and threat generation. Normally I disable the view but keep the transmission enabled to free up more real estate on the screen.
7: Finally the last one I use is Natur EnemyCastBar so that I can see at a glance what is being cast by my target. It’s an excellent tactical addon to download to help you prepare for any incoming spells or attacks. Allows you to deliver an appropriate and timely response.
There ya go! That’s how my setup is at currently and it’s served me well. It delivers a lot of information that I need so I can calculate my next move.
Nice stuff.
However, could use a little tweaking.
Omen >> KTM
Omen is backwards compatible with KTM, so you’ll get the feed from other raid members and they will see yours even if using different threat meters. Biggest difference between the two though, is that you can separate the mob aggro (assuming the mobs have different names). Take trash pulls for example. KTM is USELESS against larger trash packs. With omen, you can switch between the aggro on each mob in the pull so you never have to guess if you’re going to pull off the tank. It’s not perfect, but it’s a vast improvement over KTM.
Get Grid. It is amazingly customizable. Basically what it is, is a grid with everyone in the raid. You can have it show HP deficiency, mana pool, buffs, debuffs, timers, all sorts of stuff. When I heal (tree-druid) I have mine set to show the lifebloom timer, and the color changes for every stack on the player. This makes it infinitely easier to keep a rolling stack on 2-3 tanks while spot healing the raid. I used to watch Natur but with tons of buffs/debuffs going on the numbers get lost. I also have an icon flash up on the player’s box if they get poisoned/cursed for ease of curing, and also an indicator if a heal is incoming from someone. What I like about it best, is that all of my heals are macros to cast on mouseover. So with grid I can heal multiple targets as fast as the GCD is up without having to click a thing.
There are many other ways to customize grid to your own liking, but once it’s set, chances are you’ll love it (it will also replace your ctraid bars on the left, and pretty much render your party icons useless too). Also amazing for PvP healing; never having to untarget an opponent that you’ve root/cyclone on, to heal your teammates. Probably a ton more I’ve missed, but you get the basics.