UI and Addons 3.2

I had to do a rebuild of my UI thanks to my hard drive dying so here’s the current version. When I’m looking for add ons but feel overwhelmed by the lsits that WowInterface and Curse throw up I go to  a site maintained by Vranx who lists recommended add ons for most categories. Most of the links below go to WoWinterface, or the  developers own site I find there’s usually more information about the  add on there than Curse.

Action Bars

Bartender 4 is the add on you can see at the bottom of the screen. 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

OPie Oh how I love this add on to use the author’s phrase “is a radial action-binding addon for World of Warcraft. The addon allows you to bind groups of infrequently used actions to a ring that appears when you trigger it using a hot key / mouse binding.” I wouldn’t say shifting is infrequently used but I have my shapeshifting bound to the middle mouse button. If you have dual spec you can have both moonkin and ToL on the  ring but only the one you’re currently specced for will show up when you open it.

Cooldowns 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)

Lunarsphere 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; Speeches – you can assign sayings to actions. Having OPiE & Lunarsphere may be overkill for most people but it suits me to have both.

Auction

Auctioneer This is only enabled on my banker alt, but it certainly makes  working the AH easier and the rebuilt  WotLK  version has a very useful tool in Appraiser

Bags

Ark Inventory my inventory management add- on. I’ve tried others but I keep coming back to this  one. You can see all bags in one frame & you can  get the add on to sort them

Buffs/DeBuffs

Satrina Buff Frames This is a great little add on as you can  break up the buff bars, resize bars individually and move them about the screen.

NeedToKnow I grabbed this to use as a work around to a problem I was having with quartz. It allows you to pre-set  specific buffs and debuffs, and show them as timer bars. I use it to control what dots I want to know are on my target, quartz tends to tell you everything which isn’t always helpful. The bars are movable and scalable and I have them set up to pretty much ape the quartz ones

Power Auras Classic another buff/debuff mod on Ari I use it to let me know when abilities with a cooldown are available to use (on the screenshot the  crescent moon and leaf icons show Power Auras in action)

Castbars

Quartz a casting bar with more info than  blizz’s default one. I particularly like that it has an optional addon for monitoring Eclipse cooldowns that takes up a lot less space than the  add ons designed purely for Balance druids.

It went a bit wonky when 3.2 came out and I’ve been looking at possible alternatives, but it was updated last night so hopefully its sorted now

Chat

I umm and aah about chat addons, to be honest the standard ones does most of what I need and it may just be my bad luck but they seem buggy compared to other add ons. I tried a few before setting on Phanx Chat which adds functionality like being able to link urls in chat, removing the scroll bars for a cleaner look but doesn’t over customise

Gear

I did try the new inbuilt equipment manager when it came out, but quickly reverted to an old friend

Itemrack This is a wardrobe add on, it allows me to have preset  gear sets for important things like RPing and also raiding. It can handle events such as shifting into bear or mounting. Not that I use the bear one much these days but it was great to have the FAP weapon swap as I shifted forms.

CloseUp is another one for my eyesight, it simply lets you zoom in on wardrobe views to see something close up

Ratingbuster this totals up the stats from a piece of equipment (or other items) so you can see if it’s an upgrade or not. Invaluable for me with those  semi hidden bonus’s from int and spirit (though I need to be in Moonkin form to get the +dmg from spirit info). It can be set to check only the stats you’re interested in and to ignore gems/enchants on gear if you want to see baseline stats (can be useful otherwise you pass over something that would be better once gemmed etc)

Healing

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.

HUD (Head up Display)

The theory with using a HUD is 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. I tried them a while back and didn’t get on with them but am giving them another go and finding them  more useful, possibly because there are more things chucked on the floor to avoid. I went for IceHUD over others because I liked the option for combat points.

Odds and Sods

NugMinipet a fun addon for making sure you’re never without a pet (not even in BG’s when being petless might be a good idea). It simply hooks a pet (or pets) of your choice to moving, so you zone in run forward and your pet is summoned.

SexyMap another relatively new one and one I’m underusing on Ari as its set to a very simple look. I may play with this for more sexiness on other characters though.

TipTac this simply moves the anchor point for tooltips. Well it does more but that’s what I’m using it for, new add on and may switch it out for something similar

Titan This is a classic it adds a control panel bar  – or up to four if you really want  – to the screen. It comes with some  pre set functions that cover the basics but there are a lot of independantly developed plug-ins as well.

Quests

Questhelper Have I mentioned I’m directionally challenged?  A quest says ” North west of here” and even though I know NW is  approx 10 o’clock on the map I still fly NE. Questhelper  has nice big dots on the map which I can point my arrow at and head towards. (More helpful when I can’t fly as the terrain turns me around when on foot or mounted). It allows me to move the anchor for the on screen quest information.

I did try other quest addons but returned to Questhelper

Raiding

Deadly Boss Mods (DBM) Almost a must have if you want to raid It comes fully functional with raid warnings, mob ability timers and range finders (for not standing to close to other players and while I know what 10 yards is in RL I find it harder to convert that to a  19inch screen).

Omen. It’s a threat meter, no dps should leave home without one. Mine is currently set to exclaim “You’re going to die!” if I go over 110% of the tanks threat, sometimes I’m so in the zone I need to be told that bluntly to ease off

Ora2 this is a lightweight  raid assist add on.  As a ‘normal raider’ I use it mainly for having tank windows up, and the who’s ressing who info. When I RL (not something that’s happened recently) it comes into its own allowing you to set up the tanks, do informed ready checks, and probably a lot more.  Its a lightweight alternative to CTRaid Assist. I switched to it when my PC was underpowered and have never felt any desire to go back when I upgraded PC’s

Ozraid My second set of raid bars. Why do I need two? My failing eyesight mainly  healbot is great is throwing a heal based on HP or buffing/decursing based on colour codes , but sometimes spotting an individual in hurry means peering at the screen trying to figure out if that’s a dead player or just out of range. Ozraid handles it better, for me anyway. It also allows you to set up subgroups and while I no longer worry about the priests & their mana I used to have a group just for seeing who needed an innervate and one for warriors & thorns. It also shows who has my aura (more useful when it was party wide and 30 yards as I could try and position myself to max the aura). I’m underusing it these days but its an old favourite.

Recount It’s a damage meter, and no they’re not just for meter whores. It’s more than that it stores all sorts of useful data like buffing, what happened before you died and what actually killed someone. In combat watch Omen after combat read Recount.

Unit Frames

AG Unit frames I use these for player & target mainly. It can be configured for party raid etc I’ve just  tended to stick to old favourites for that. It’s another one that went a bit wonky after 3.2 so I switched to:

Shadowed Unit Frames then set it up to mimic what I had with AG Unit Frames. It does what I need it to do so I’m in no mad rush to switch back

Viewport

I was using CBH_Viewport. Very lightweight mod which to provide the black area at the bottom of the screen. Makes the whole UI a lot cleaner and allows me to see what’s happening in the game window

Now I use  Sunn – Viewport Art it offers more options than CBH but I don’t use most of them preferring the simple black background, main reason for the swap was that Sunn updated for 3.2  CBH  hasn’t updated since 2008. I also wanted to try out the options, if I had a bigger monitor I’d set it to  have a black frame and have even more of my addons outside the rendered area.

Old UI’s

Screenshot  of what my UI looked like in December 2008, for nostalgia really: