UI and Addons 4.01

Bit of a work in progress as some addon authors were caught on the hop and I’m still downloading updated versions (some being updated every day since the patch went live)

Will add more to this in a few days

Action Bars and Unit frames

Bartender 4 my main action bar replacement. It’s extremely customisable and supports dual specs and druid form changes. It’s one of the big boys of addons so one can be pretty sure its updated on a regular basis.

Cooldowns not updated for 4.01 but seems to be working anyway. A simple add on that makes it easier to see the length of a cooldown on the actionbar button because its in big yellow numbers (my old eyes appreciate it)

Healbot Continued  yes I know I’m dps, I’ve been using versions of this since well it feels like forever. It’s good for off healing, keeping an eye on buffs and decursing,  and is my main raid bars addon. It’s also there for when if I need to main heal. I like that the  mouse over’s come semi pre set (you can define what click does what) and only works within those unit frames.

If it has a downside it’s that the author assumes you want it in the same place on your UI on every healer toon you have. I don’t, I may only move it by centimetres between UI’s but move it I do. So I’m using:

Healium on my alts. You’ll notice that with Healium the heals are beside the the unit frame & clickable (rather than mouse clicks you have to remember). I suspect in a 25 man that would look very messy but as my alts are only healing 5 mans and it can be weeks between me playing them having the heals visible and clickable works better than hoping I remember what key I bound what heal to.

Icehud Hud stands for Heads Up Display, it provides information in the centre of the screen  where your attention should be focussed when in combat, making it easier to see the fires you’re meant to be stepping out of.  First time I tried a HUD I didn’t like it, and I don’t think it’ll ever totally replace my Unit frames, but I the more I poke around with this the more I like it. I discovered it had a threat bar. Something I find much more useful curving around my health/mana bars than having to  glance down at Omen to check what’s going on. Since 4.01 I’ve been running without Omen as I realised I’d stopped looking at it since I enabled IceHUD’s threat bar. I may have to reinstall Omen at some point as its a standard ‘have you got?‘ for raiders but we’ll see.

It also comes with an Eclipse power bar for 4.01 if you don’t want a separate add-on just for that

Opie a radial action ring binder (I always want to call it radical as its quite different from most action bar replacements) for  putting just about anything on.  I have my shifting ring set up for the middle mouse button, and am so used to it that when it’s not working  (which is rarely) I feel completly lost. You can also create macros inside Opie that don’t use up the macro spaces on the Default UI. Something I find great for RP emote macros.

Lunarsphere not updated yet (17/10/10) but I will be reloading it when it is and don’t consider my UI complete without it

The core of the addon is a sphere with up to 10 buttons encircling it, and each of the main buttons can be set to open a menu of 10 more. Each button supports  right mid & left click mouse options. So thats a lot of options. It also has some less visible features that are little gems too Reagent restocking; Auto-Repair; Auto selling Junk;  Setting the tool-tip location, Speeches – you can assign sayings to actions.

Shadowed Unit Frames the 4.01 version is still in alpha (17/10/10) and being updated daily, but seems pretty stable for all that.

I tried a number of other options when I thought SUF was dead but I like the simplistic nature of SUF, and the relatively simple configuration options. It also now comes with an eclipse power bar (too small to watch in combat given my UI set up but useful to have visible out of combat so I know what spell to kick off with.

Auction

Auctionator I switched to this from Auctioneer a while back. It does what I need in terms of selling and buying without being such a  ’drain’ on system resources as Auctioneer. Pretty much all my alts have it enabled now rather than just the bank alt.  It has it’s own website but that doesn’t always have the latest version available. So check curse which seems to be where the latest version is located

Bags

Arkinventory Been using this since forever. Very customisable and works across characters. So once I tag something as RP gear all my toons store it in the same place. I have a lot of RP gear if it sat in the same place as  my usable gear I’d never find anything.

Buffs/Debuffs

Balance Power Tracker This is new for 4.01 to track where Eclipse has got to. The default sits under the charcter picture right out of any line of sight.  BPT is moveable and resizable so you can locate it where it makes sense for your eyes. You can also have it invisible out of combat which helps with an uncluttered look to the UI when I’m RPing or generally running around not doing much.

Power Auras Classic It took a while to get into the swing of this but with the help of it’s wiki pages I now have information about pretty much every thing I need to know in combat arranged just above Ari’s head, the way I want it. I gave Blizzards  default buffs all of about fifteen minutes before toggling them off and enabling Power Auras

Satrina Buff Frames. This wasn’t ready for 4.01, but has been updated since. May well use the Blizzard default ones for a while as they’ve been tweaked since I last ran around au-natruel with them Or maybe its just I haven’t raided since 4.01 that I think the blizz version can cope

Castbars

Quartz old favourite  (updates don’t seem to be on wowinterface  anymore so check Curse for the latest version)

Chat

Chatter after much messing about with various addons I settled for this.  It hides the lanuages option (but so do the others) so I found a macro for switching between languages:

/run local e,l = DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME.editBox,GetLanguageByIndex local l1,l2 = l(1),l(2) e.language = e.language == l1 and l2 or l1 print(“Now speaking”, e.language)

It should work for any faction/racial language switching depending on the race of the toon not just Common/Darnassian. Probably not a priority if you’re not a role-player though

Gear

Close Up I’m told Blizz intend to let people zoom in and out with their ‘paper dolls’ soon (or maybe already do in 4.01) I like the functionality of ‘undress’ on Closeup too much to let it go just yet though

Outfitter. I switched from Itemrack because it wasn’t ‘seeing’ one of my pieces of gear so couldn’t swap it in and out, and it looks like it’s no longer being maintained