A Clean Slate
I’ve been tinkering with my UI for ages. My current UI makes my Virgo heart so happy!
I love playing with new toys, and addons are no exception. The downside of this, of course, is that at some point you have to make some choices. Unfortunately, I don’t have any screenshots that show the cluttered mess my UI was starting to become at one point, but this screenshot of Sacrales’s UI that was featured on World of Matticus will give you an idea.
I had so much clutter on my screen that I was peering through a tiny window to see the actual raid, and I started to hate it. Then began my campaign to streamline, keeping everything I needed, while jettisoning all the extraneous stuff.
I got rid of extra visual clutter in a couple of ways. If there were 2 mods giving me the same information, I got rid of one. If a mod offered information that I did not need at all times, but still wanted to have access to, I either turned off the display (toggling Omen off is a good example), or I selected options that made the Mod transparent until relevant (Smart Debuffs is an example of this).
I cut down on the spell bars that I had displayed, although I still have one bar that should go. If you look at my UI, you’ll see the top 2 spell bars are the same. This will go when dual specs come and I don’t have to reset my spell bars after respeccing. The top bar changes when you lose some of your talented spells, so the one below it is to aid my lazy butt in setting the top bar back to the way I like it if I flip to Boomkin and go back Resto. (/blush).
Here are the addons I use that affect my UI, in case you are interested in replicating all or part of what I’ve done.
Cartographer – changes your map, adding all kinds of information and options.
CBH Viewport – adds the black frame at the bottom of the screen.
Chinchilla – changed up the look of my mini-map
Fubar – adds the bar along the top. You can add plugins there to access other addons and information.
Dominos – Allows you to display a large number of spell/ability bars, move them wherever you like on the screen, scale them however you want. Highly customizable. One of my favorite addons.
Healbot – I have it set on raid frames and took this screenshot in a 25 man raid to demonstrate how my UI looks in a full raid. I love how it’s set against the black frame from CBH Viewport, which makes it easier to see the health bars when you need to. I also love how it’s largely transparent until it’s needed.
Recount – This isn’t a UI addon, but I’m including it because you can see it on my UI. No, Really. I just have it shoved all the way over to the right side so that you can just barely see the edge of it in the screen shot. I just click and drag to pull it into view when I want to see it for some reason.
Smart Debuff – You can’t see it on this screenshot because no one needs debuffing. It’s transparent until needed. When it does show up, it is a small box just over the right side of the Healbot frame.
TipTac – allows you to anchor your tooltips wherever you want them on your screen, change the font, etc.
Xperl – A unit frames addon that I really love. This is also very customizable in terms of size, placement, information displayed. I love it. Looking at the screenshot, I realize that I need to straighten up some of the raid columns.
I think it’s inevitable that I’ll go on tweaking this because it’s something I enjoy doing. But in all, I’m so pleased with what it looks like. Everything is so clean, organized, and accessible. And I have plenty of room to see the actual action, to move around in my environment, to enjoy the amazing art of the game. I don’t feel like I’m looking through a tiny window framed by a cacophony of competing information any more. The best things about the game are shining through, and everything I need is at my fingertips. /happy dance!
There are 27 Comments to "A Clean Slate"
Looks good Syll, just wanted suggest you look at Minimap Button Bag. It will condense all your minimap buttons into a single one.
ooo, good call, Fier! going to have to snag that! yay! Thanks!
Excellent! More shinies for me to try out. I finally loaded X-Perl and SmartDebuff last night and spent 30mins tinkering. I probably need a good hour or two more of tweaking but I think I like it. I ran MetaHud for a long time and it was great but became too much with recount, omen, smartdebuff, healbot and xperl.
I tested out smartdebuff after you recommended it with a run through H CoS. Oh sweet bliss no more shift + mouse button 5 to remove a curse or ctrl + right click to de-poison. I had our group instantly fixed with smartdebuff right next to healbot.
I’m considering trying grid out for healing. Any experience with it?
Nice! I’m glad you’re happy with your new toys! I do not have any experience with Grid. I’ve always been pretty satisfied with Healbot, so never saw much reason to change over. Let me know if you try it out what you think.
Good looking UI, Syll. One thing I think is invaluable to a healer is a mod that shows you who has aggro in the the raid. Right now, I use the option in healbot to show me that, but the effect is kinda subtle and not always apparent at a glance. I want to make it a lot more painfully obvious to me when something like that is happening so I can react BEFORE damage is taken, not after (since it’s prolly already too late).
Elk
Running Elk’s last blog post..For the Horde!
Elk, yes very good point. I run Omen, I just have it toggled off in this screenie. =)
Ok Grid not so much. Ugly. I did unload Healbot though and loaded Clique to go with my X-Perl. It may be a configuration issues but I can’t see the HoTs on a persons raid from. It just shows the number of HoTs which is useless. Gee is it a RJ, LB, RG? How much time is left? Plus when I right click on the raid frame I get the damn option window for select focus rather than my cast RJ which is what Clique is set for. If I right click on myself though I don’t get that window and I cast RJ. ARGH! I really like X-Perl but if I can’t get of the right click window on raid frames or see my individual hots with their timers I am gonna be mad. In theory Clique would let me get rid of healbot to free up even more space. Anyone have suggestions?
hmmm… I’ll look at my xperl config tonight and try to post here. I can see all the HoTs on people in my party and whoever my selected target is on Xperl. I don’t have that enabled on the raid frames but I’m pretty sure you can do it. I’ll muddle around and see what I can report.
Bless you! I guess it’s only important to see it on my target which is the MT but I’d like to see everyone’s heals. Off to figure out how to turn off the right click in X-Perls raid frame.
Quick question regarding xPerl. I have really wanted to use this for my unit frames, but I find that it drags down the performance of my computer. I generally run 60 fps but when I try with xperl it drops down to 20! It drives me crazy. I have tried xPerl Classic because it doesn’t have the performance draw that xPerl has, but my biggest complaint with it is a tiny red diamond on the frame shows the agro. (personal hate with it) so now I am back to the Bliz unit frames. Any thoughts about a way to reduce the performance draw with xPerl so I too can have pretty frames?
hmmm… do you know what version you used, or how long ago it was? If it’s been some time, the latest version, 3.0.2a might run better for you. This version was made available in December, so it’s fairly recent. This is from the developer’s notes:
Does that help at all? If not, I’ll try to do a little research for you! =)
Mooriah, I’m sorry I didn’t have time to play with the XPerl config last night. I was hosting a guild event and it got a little crazy. Next time I’m on, I promise =)
It’s no big deal. I’m actually going to use it just for my interface and keep with healbot. I didn’t like Clique at all for my play style. I finally figured my out-of-range not working on healbot out. I can finally see clearly when they are OOR now because their whole bar goes completely clear. The default settings on healbot weren’t good enough but I didn’t know what to change. Finally I saw a post somewhere and now I am back to being content. The best that helped though is your recommendation of SmartDebuff. It sits right next to healbot. People are instantly fixed now!
yay! happy tree dance! Glad you’re all sorted.
My small advice would be the following to remove some more space =]
Click Cast – I have no buttons for spells on my UI. Just the four Tree ones that ave cooldowns, mainly so i can keep track of whats up and down.
Grid – If you use decursive, i find you can set this up nicely to remove the need for another addon. Someone above also mentioned about aggro warnings, i have it set so a small red dot appears on the players grid when they get aggro.
Lifebloomer for keeping track of them psky lifeblooms on multiple targets.
Now for two quick questions =] Why two sets of Raidframes (the ones at the bottom and on the left) and in Xpearl would it be worth disabling party frame for in raid, as its redundant info =]
Ill post link to a SS of my UI tomorrow if it interests you.
I’m not so good at remembering key bindings, which is why I have the spell bars. /blush Also, I play in the dark a lot so it’s hard for me to get my fingers where they should be on the keyboard for the things I do have on keybindings! lol! The reason for the 2 raid frames is that Healbot doesn’t “select” a target for you, so I have the raid frames up on the left so that if I need to select a raid member for a buff or something I can do it. =) I agree that it would be nice to lose one of them, but this system works pretty well for me. If you know of a way to easily select a raid member without seeing a raid frame for them, I’d love to hear it! I am considering downloading a HoT timer like Lifebloomer, but haven’t decided yet. Tell me more about lifebloomer =). Agreed about disabling the party frame for Xperl. I hadn’t thought of it, but it’s a great idea! I’d love to see your UI =) Thanks for the advice!
Sweet. I remember back in BC going to my first 25-man and dragging everyone’s name off the Raid window because I had no mods to speak of. I felt your pain when it came to looking through a little window. I’m ok now though, Healbot is like crack.
hahaha agreed! Love the Healbot!
Well mate, if you get Grid, and say clique you can select and heal members using one frame, which is good for both buffing and ressing etc.
Lifebloomer is nice. I tend to have it set up as three frame, one for my focus, one for my target and one for mouseovetarget.
It doesnt just show your Lifebloom durations either. It shows all hots spells. Hightly useful, I suggest getting it and trying it out.
yes I’ve heard this about grid and clique, but I’ve always been nice and comfy with Healbot. Some day I should break down and try grid and clique, but I’m a little nervous about giving it a go….
Hey there: just found your blog and this happened to be the first post that caught my eye – mostly because I just spent a couple of weeks re-tooling my UI into the efficient beast it is now. I used to have a very similar UI to yours – but have reworked it entirely (shocking at first!).
A few observations on your UI:
1) Why the party frames? Completely unnecessary in a raid setting – mostly because your healer specific raid frames should show your specific party members either horizontally or vertically (customizable). I would definitely drop those frames and free up that entire upper left quadrant.
2) My goodness – switch to grid. Has the same “out of the box” functionality that healbot has – but with a quick gander through Phaelia’s grid4beginners post (www.resto4life.com) you’ll have the druid specific tips that make your life easy. You can use the grid frames as you would your current x-perl frames. You can select (ie. target) a raider by simply clicking on the grid icon.
3) Dominos vs Bartender: I’ve never used dominos, so I can’t really comment – however, in Bartender, I’ve set up the “visibilities” of my bars such that when I’m in tree form, most of my other bars with non-healer or buff spells disappear. Only when I’m in caster form do all of my buttons appear. It frees up tons of space while in any non-caster (tree, bear, cat) form.
4)Player/target bars: I found that my awareness of my health improved a lot when I moved my player bar and info centered below my feet and enlarged it. It’s tough to ignore there.
5) Buffs/debuffs: current you have the basic x-perl buff/debuff “boxes”. I dont know about you – but I can’t really read or discern the differences so I’ve set Pitbull to hide them all. In their place, I use morganti’s buff bars – which cascades on the right hand side of my screen, the various buff/debuffs – with debuffs a red bar, buffs a blue bar. Very visual and provides room to actually see what you’re affected with with a quick glance. Helps on bosses like 4-horsemen, etc.
Anyway – like I said – I’ve been re-tooling for weeks and wanted to share. Good luck!
Great stuff, Lueyy! I already nixxed my party frames. I’ll play around with some of your other ideas, too. It’s forever a work in progress!
Oh – I was a little annoyed with clique and/or click2cast – same thing. My solution was to simply create my own “mouseover” macros for the spells I used the most. I’ve now replaced all healing spells in this way – but it dramatically (I can not emphasize that enough) increases your healing efficiency. If you’re keen to play around with one or two macros for say regrowth or rejuv – I’d be happy to help.
@ Lueyy, thanks for the offer of help! I’ll be sure to give you a shout if I decide to give that a go and need some help on the macros!
A couple of (I hope useful!) comments. I am an X-Perl/Clique user. I’ve tried grid a number of times, and it just doesn’t suit me. But if you got Clique, you could set your heal/cleanse keys to your mouse (as you are likely doing in Healbot) and then only run one UI! I think you’d really like it if you are trying to streamline.
Also, a mod that I find invaulable is a HoT timer. I prefer HoT Candy, but there are other alternatives (I believe GRID users can download a plugin to do this for them, Keeva over at Tree Bark Jacket has a post walking through how to set it up). This mod shows where your HoTs are, and how much time is left on them. It’s really quite fantastic!
Beruthiel’s last blog post..Achievements and PvP…as a Resto Druid
right on! I’ve gotten so much great advice in the comments here that my UI already is pretty different from when I posted this. lol! But a HoT timer was the next thing on my list. Someone had suggested Lifebloomer, so I may try that and HoT Candy and see which one is my own preference. Thanks so much for coming by! Now I’m off to take a look around at your blog! =)
[...] all of this in place and give it a whirl. Thank you so much to those who commented here and on my Clean Slate post. I’m excited about the way that this looks… I mean just LOOK at how clean my [...]