Wednesday, May 6, 2009

UI Review - What's Left

My little cleanup from yesterday did make me feel slightly better about the number of addons I'll have to update on a regular bases now. And as said already, today I will have a look at which addons I use, and why.


This is my ui showing almost all the addons that I currently have installed.

This is my UI as I normally see it. Though when in group or raid grid is replacing the wow frames.

So why do I have it set up like I have, and what is it all that you see in the screenshots. I'll go through all the different mods and will specify one by one.

Ones you can always see:
  • Dominos
    I use Dominos to replace my buttons. I have stuck most of them in the middle where I can easily reach them, though I mostly use the buttons as cooldown monitors because I use clique and grid to actually cast my spells. The reason I finally got convinced to use a button mod was that I simply started running out of space. Dominos helped me to clean up my UI and still allowed me to keep the same number of buttons available.

    I have to add here though that if Blizzard allowed me to just place the buttons where I want them I would still be using the standard action bars.

  • Elkano's buff bars
    By keeping them in the middle of my screen I achieve a couple of things. I get a sort of divider for my buttons so that I can stick damaging spells on one side, and healing ones on the other. The second thing it does for me is that I now get reminded all the time whether I have certain buffs or not. And lastly it cleared up the right corner of my screen, meaning I have less items in the corner of my eye drawing my attention away from where my attention should be.

  • Omen
    I'm a discpline priest, I don't use omen to watch my thread, I use it to watch the tank's threat. When I have to drop a pain suppresion I want to be absolutely sure that me dropping pain suppresion is not going to kill the rogue who is next in line on the agro list.

  • MinimapButtonBag
    Simple clean addon to gather all my minimapbuttons up in one button and keep the minimap free from button clutter.

  • MonkeyQuest
    I have tried the blizz quest tracking, I really did. But it's clunky, doesn't prioritize, leaves big gaps in between quests, and generally is just too unhandy. So I went back to my faitful monkey quest. It shows me all the quest I want to see, is resizable (yes, I like this small as well) and gives me neat sounds upon completion. It doesn't have quest arrows to play the game for me, but I tried using Carbonite during levelling, and not only did I feel cheapish, it just seemed to take the fun out of questing. On top of all that, it's buggy as all hell.

  • OPie
    This is a mod that allows me to quickly access some key buttons. I press ctrl+q and I get a small circle of quest items around my mouse buttons, ctrl+t gives me my trade skills, and there are a couple others like that.

    It's another one of those mods making sure I have stuff available at a keystroke, just not in my face constantly.

  • Grid + Clique
    These are two different mods, but I name them together since I have never used them separately. Grid replaces your raid frames, and clique allows you to bind your spells to mousebuttons. I only use a 3 button mouse, but I have all my important spells on there somehow.

    While healing it is also rare that I use my keyboard for anything then turning and running, while I use my mouse to click cast and turn my camera as needed. DPSing I normally do have my spam buttons bound to some key or the other.

    There are those that say you cannot possibly heal without keybindings, I say they're wrong. You need to heal the way that you are comfortable healing, I have never healed differently, this is my playstyle. It makes that I'm never uncomfortable about where my targets are, I also don't have to mouse over and then find the keybinding, I just click. To each his own.

  • DrDamage
    The mod allows you to see at the glance of an eye which spells do most damage, and there are a lot of other configurable options to do in game theory crafting. I use this mod more on my dps characters than on my healer, I know my priest inside out, and I also know which spell heals for which amount.

    I also think that if you need this mod on your main, you should play more. On your main you should know exactly which spell does what, and for how much without needing the mod.

  • Itemrack
    Switch gear with the click of a button. I don't use all the fancy 'dress for the occasion' (stance changes, etc) so once the in game equipment manager finally comes out, I'm likely to switch to using that one.

  • Ratingbuster
    I used to have complete lists of gearupgrades, sidegrades, and specific purpose gear lying next to my computer. Ratingbuster now calculates stuff for me. I've heard of pawn, but I don't very much like giving my stats weight, the weight of each stat depends on the gear I already have on me. I can tell a mod that int is very important, but without at least a little bit of the other stats I will still have a problem. So I let ratingbuster calculate the difference between stats on items for me, and then I will decide if I need it, not the mod.

  • Atlasloot
    This mod shows you all the possible loot drops of bosses in the game. Not too much use anymore on my main, I know where my upgrades drop, but I can't help but liking the window shopping you can do with this mod. And for alts it definitely is handy when you're trying to decide which dungeon you want to go to.

  • InspectEquip
    I use this for the same purpose as Atlasloot. It allows you to see in a quick window what someone else is wearing when you inspect them. I use it for window shopping. Sort of like 'oh, pretty robe, wonder where it dropped'.

  • Swatter
    This is a bug catcher. It's sits in a slidebar at the side of your window, and you don't see it, but it catches nasty mod errors for you.

  • Minimalist
    Finally a handy little mod that auto sells greys, skips useless chatter at vendors, auto accepts rezzes, allows me to scroll through my chat log, etc Doesn't take much memory, does a bunch of handy little things.
So all in all quite a bit still, but hey, if it does get to unbearable with updating. The only two I can absolutely not play without are grid and clique, not too bad.

If you have any questions, feel free to poke me about them.

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