Last night, one of my guildies was asking a bunch of us about our UI's to see what was out there that he liked, which prompted about 10 of us uploading screenshots of our UI to show off our own package. I figured I'd talk about my UI and why it works for my setup.
Heads up: I lack Photoshop experience, so I'm using MS Paint to highlight elements and reference specifically.
Light Blue: Buffs/Debuffs
First, the Light Blue. The addons of importance here are Elkano's Buff Bars (top right), and ForteXorcist. I personally like EBB because, well, for one I've been using it for so long. I hated the default buff frame because to me it just wasn't intuitive and I like seeing the names of buffs and debuffs as opposed to an icon for them. You anchor them where you'd like, how you'd like them to 'grow'...and done. It's always worked for me. Apparently you can't click off buffs in-combat with EBB, but that's something I've never had to do (yet). ForteXorcist is something I started using specifically for cooldown timers back in Wrath. This was also before I made my macro with Elemental Mastery macro'd into Lava Burst so it'd use it whenever it was off CD. I liked ForteXorcist because it's simple...and it's a moving bar and I wanted to track when EM was off CD to use it asap. The DOT timers slightly above it are also part of it as well, and might be something that at some point I'll disable because I never use them or care to look at them.
Pink: Bars
Easy enough - this is Bartender. I hated the default bar style without being able to customize the layout, rows/columns, etc. I'm sure Dominos or some other bar addon will do the job for others, I'm just familiar with Bartender at this point. The left-most bars are the things I use the most - the 2x6 row is my keybinds for 1 through =. To the right, I have my volcanic potions for pre-potting on a nice big button I can't miss by accident. The bar directly below them is a bunch of other frequently used things as well. Note this was taken during 4.2 at some point, which is why you'll see Fire Nova up there. Aside from that, I've got Healthstone, Earthbind, Stoneclaw, Rocket Jump, Wind Shear (keybound to Q), Tremor, Searing Totem (bound to the ` button). The middle set of pink bars is my Fire Ele, Earth Ele, SWG macro, and totem bars. On the right side you'll find my professions, rez, milling/prospecting macro, Farsight, Water Walking, and other random odds and ends that I need but aren't terribly useful in combat and as such are dimmed out unless cursor'd over. To their right - SexyMap. I needed something simple with no bells and whistles that I could move out of the top right corner to make room for Elkano's. SexyMap has quite a few different themes for its maps, as well as scaling options to make it bigger or smaller.
Red: Power Auras/SCT
In the red area is Power Auras and Scrolling Combat Text, or SCT. I came across Power Auras when I was having some difficulty managing my Lightning Shield stacks and Lava Burst CD. While Power Auras can be daunting to set up at first, once you get slightly familiar with what you need done and their menus, it's rather simple to get set up. I currently use Power Auras to alert me when LS is at 7+ stacks (which is the blue/green thing, accompanied by Navi from Zelda saying "Watch Out!"); Lava Burst is off CD (which will be the same icon as LS, only red, and mirrored to the left, and I make it play a cat meow sound); a squeaky toy sound whenever I'm in combat without a fire totem. I also just recently set up a Flame Shock timer to show the time left on my current target. This was important to me and I didn't know I could do it within Power Auras until last night, but having a visual number of how much time is left is immensely helpful when managing Flame Shock with Fulmination. SCT was more useful to me when I healed more often, I liked seeing how much I healed for and how much heals I had incoming to myself. I also like it for incoming damage as well that gets color coded by spell type/ability type, crits are larger, etc. It's also got sound alerts for when my mana and health are below a certain threshold. I found, especially for PvP, these alerts as well as seeing the incoming damage were extremely useful to know when I was getting pounded and if I had a healer that was starting to heal me.
Green: Chat
This one's simple. For chat, I use Prat. A lot of its features were built into WoW. I liked the class colors in chat channels, and I also like being able to copy links from chat to pull up outside of WoW. Also, the black background behind my bars and chat window is KGPanels. I used this to kind of accentuate the bars/chat for a little pizazz as well as help with the contrast for abilities and chat. For some reason, Blizz likes its bright colors which tend to contrast horribly with green guild chat. I'm also a creature of habit, so the default chat colors I haven't changed much and can't stand changing them, so the opaque grey backdrops helps make my screen a little easier on the eyes.
Blue: Default UI
The medium-ish blue areas are my default UI areas. Unit frames are probably the thing I need the most help with finding a solution for. I liked the old default raid frames because you could move groups individually, so I was able to set them up into a good position/layout that didn't interfere with the center of the screen or obscure anything important. The new ones also serve their purpose for me. I wouldn't necessarily be OPPOSED to using something else, but when the target, player, focus, frames get messed around with, it kinda screws with me too. I was never a huge fan of Grid because, to me, it requires too much configuration to get going out of the box. Xperl I've never been a fan of either, but that was also because on my old computer it tanked my resources during raids. I could probably stand to change them at this point, especially now that I don't heal as often. My biggest gripe, and this is solely because of how my UI is set up now, is that anything beyond a 25 person raid causes the groups to overlap on the right side of my bar frames. Luckily, this is usually only when I'm in an AV or IoC, and most times a lot of people are out of range and their frames are faded.
Yellow: Other Stuff
My raiding addon of choice is DBM. My DBM timers will display near/in the smaller, upper yellow square. When the timers are ending, they move between my character's feet and ForteXorcist. This way, the critical alerts coming up are in the center of my screen, which is usually where my focus is. The lower, right-most yellow square is where WoW Instant Messenger, or WIM, shows out of combat. I like WIM because it gives an IM-tabbed-conversation feature to whispers and removes them from the chat frame. It works for me because it's easy to keep track of conversations with individual people. During combat, the frame disappears and whispers return to the chatframe as normal. I use BagNon for my bag addon, which gives me one giant grid for my bags. This is easier for me to organize things in then separate bags. I also like that it incorporates inventory/items on other characters. If I cursor over an item in my bag, it will tell me below the tooltip if an alt has it and how many - which is invaluable when I know I had an enchanting mat, or a gem, or something, on an alt but couldn't remember which.
What do you guys think? Anyone have any input, or suggestions for unit frames that aren't terribly complicated?
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