Pimped my UI, part 4
When I was putting together this post, I noticed something funny. The first time I majorly changed up my UI and posted about it was April 2009. The second time was October 2009. The third, April 2010. It’s now mid-September 2010 and I realize there seems to be about a six month life span to each iteration of my user interface. Coming April 2011: Pimped my UI, part 5!
Anyway, I’m really proud of what I’ve come up with this time. I originally set out to make the most minimalistic UI yet, and I think I’ve succeeded. And there’s still a lot of tweaks I can make, especially to the in-combat “version”. Shrinking DXE’s bars, scaling down TipTac’s tooltips (they do not need to be wider than grid, imo), and shrinking Omen to show maybe half an many rows.
A huge part of what makes the UI so uncluttered is the sharp reduction of how many buttons are on-screen. I went from my full rotation and various ancillary abilities being completely on screen–44 buttons worth of precious real estate. Now I have 13, 8 for cooldowns, and 5 for buffs. Everything else is keybound and invisible. (Well, except for auras and the micromenu, which are visible on mouse over.)
The only problem this presents is that hiding my full rotation and all these buttons requires a lot of faith in my own muscle memory. The other major problem: not being able to see when abilities are on cooldown. Right now I’m not finding it hard to watch when an attack is used based on my cooldown bar reacting to GCDs being expended, but sometimes I’ll lose track and have to restart at the beginning of the rotation. It’s a pain, but something I think practice can allow me to work around.
If worse comes to worse I’ll make the primary rotation bar visible on mouse over so I can quickly eyeball cooldowns if needed. I expect to be be fine though.
I also set up click for my various Hand abilities. Shift+right click is Hand of Sacrifice. Alt+right click is Hand of Protection. Ctrl+right click is Hand of Salvation.
Probably one of the less drastic changes, but one of the most effective, was what I did to my unit frames. The way it is now, I have my player frame on the bottom, with health being the driver of how full or empty the bar is. I removed the separate mana bar, and instead just have my % of mana remaining on the left. The little spark under the mana number indicates if Divine Plea is active (that’s Power Auras).
Above the player frame is the target. Buffs and debuffs show just above the target (which are a bit too small right now, at least for ones I’m applying), and on the top right is the target of target. Just the name though, because that’s ultimately all I really need. I don’t show any indicator of target mana, which I really need to fix, if only to check healer mana levels before pulls.
And lastly, on the right is the focus frame. Pretty simplistic, just name and health. I need to put focus target in there somewhere.
One other big change I wanted to mention was I completely dumped the whole “have a bar with various sub-addons at the top of your screen” model. Instead I have nice, clean, minimalistic SLDataText under my unit frames. It’s not not have this line of crap bordering the top of my window.
Just to review, here are the addons I used:
- Satrina’s Buff Bars for buffs/debuffs
- basicMiniMap for map
- Pitbull for unit frames
- Grid for raid frames
- Chatter for the chat window
- TipTac for tooltips
- Deus Vox Encounters for bossmods
I still have a few things I want to change or streamline (as I mentioned above), Once I do that, I’ll finagle a way to offer this UI as a packaged download. Once I figure out which folders I would need to include.
Feel free to ask any questions about it in the comments! I’m sure I left tons of small details out.
Armory Feed
I believe both wowinterface.com and curse.com offer the ability to create compilations of mods. Unfortunately, most mods like that create saved variables per character, which means it pulls up that interface by referencing your server and character name, which means packaging it up to distribute would just end up with a lot of folks getting the mods but not the actual set up.
Varying monitor sizes and resolutions would also present a problem, I’d imagine.
@Rhidach
17 September 2010 at 2:00 pm #
Ah, good point. That’s unfortunate.
It is true that character variables are used but thats not that big of a problem (seeing that there are a lot of compilations out there). Normaly there is a little manual how to set up the compilation starting with “Go into the WTF -> Account folder and change the accountname, servername and charactername to yours.” ^^
Then you have to load all the rhidach named configurations and so on.
It doesn’t get much harder than that. Take a look at Damia’s UI for example.
regarding manabars
Afaik you can show the manabars of mana-users via Grid :-) That way you don’t need to mess with the target.
@Rhidach
20 September 2010 at 9:15 am #
Oo, good tips, thanks! :)
@hazmacewillraid
17 September 2010 at 1:28 pm #
Hey Rhi, take another look at that Put screenshot…
YOU DIDN’T HAVE RIGHTEOUS FURY ON?!
@Rhidach
17 September 2010 at 1:58 pm #
That ain’t right. I might have hit Alt+4 and taken it off while fumbling for DI, haha. It was on at the start of the pull!
I did the same with my buttons for a while, though I eventually found the minimalism wasn’t worth the effort when my bars are as small as they are anyhow. But, nonetheless I found Event Horizon an amazing way to track your 969, especially after modifying it to get rid of exorcism. Granted, it’s slightly against the minimalist direction of your UI, but its fairly uninvasive most of the time. It is also an amazing way of keeping your rotation as tight as possible.
@Rhidach
17 September 2010 at 2:00 pm #
I was thinking of that, but like you said, it’d go heavily against the minimalism intent.
I like a lot the look of it, but I can’t help from feeling that those raid frames are a bit too far away, even for a tank. Hand of protection/freedom/sacrifice, lay on hands, there’s just too much a pally can give with just a click.
Maybe just above your target’s frame?
the idea of hiding my action keys fills me with terror. you have more faith in your muscle memory then i do!
http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/4582/screenshot091710172148.jpg
your pitbull frame is really pretty, you should share it.
@Rhidach
20 September 2010 at 9:13 am #
It’s pretty easy to make: gradient texture, a tiny border, power bar disabled with just the value for mana on the left. Took a bit to play with but it’s not crazy complicated, I swear.
I do like the simplicity of this; my UI (which gets tweaked every couple months) keeps moving more and more to that end as I find addons that can give me the info I need (lots) in a more minimalistic fashion.
I could never hide my action bars like that; among other things I’m MS ret and I despise CLCRET (and all the variations therof; I use ForteXorcist for internal cooldown, dot and proc tracking, but I ditched the ability cooldown tracker part early), so visible action bars are a necessity. All my buttons are keybound, I haven’t clicked anything in forever, but i still like em visible.
How will you work with hidden bars in the very different rotation environment that 4.0 and cata will bring to prot? It seems like it would be difficult to work with to me.
I personally keep the clutter of things like buffs out of the way with an addon called Opie; it opens rings of buttons around your mouse when a keybind is hit; that allows me to keep my keybinds for buffs, mounts, pets, consumables and so forth down to four or 5 keybinds total (a few more on mage/warlock/shammy alts).
I agree with Mite about having your raid frames tucked away in a corner; i’ve seen a lot of tank and dps guys doing that, but I started keeping mine in the usual healer position way before I started healing; it is just too useful for all the utility pallies have. I’d never be able to throw out a Hand or RD trash off a healer mid-faceroll with my raid frames so far away.
None of that is a criticism, by the way; it is a pretty damn sweet UI you have there. Just questions brought up by experience with the issues of UI design; i’ve gimped myself with a new UI that I missed something about more than few times.
@Rhidach
20 September 2010 at 9:14 am #
For Cata I’ll definitely have to show my rotation buttons. With all the ducking and weaving and the priority system, it seems impossible manage the rotation without the buttons visible.