Stoney's New UI
Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 10:34PM | Stoneybaby 
Custom UI's are a blessing and a curse. It can take an entire day to customize and then configure, you're constantly tweaking bits and pieces, and if a particular mod stops being supported then you're pretty much starting over. Once they're done though a custom UI gives you a new lease on the game. And done right it aids game play whether raiding, soloing, PvPing, or just Turkey Shootin filthy Rogues in Dalaran.
I built out a new UI a few weeks ago and I've been tweaking it to near-perfection since then. It isn't based on anyone's setup, it was a creation I sketched out offline and put together one Lazy Sunday.
Here's the before:
Stoney's old UI. Messy. Not so sexy
And the after:
Sexy new UI. Similar... yet different. (click to see the notes in Flickr)
I needed to accomplish a few specific things with this UI:
- Clear Playing Area
- Larger, Fewer buttons
- Sexy Unit Frames
Clear Playing Area
For playing at a large resolution on a big widescreen I was always feeling cramped in game. My Too many bars, warnings, messages and general nonsense was happening in the middle of my screen. I needed to clear out as much of the play area as possible.
For starters I eliminated a lot of things from Scrolling Combat Text and moved the spammy damage items farther up on my screen. I completely killed off all errors using cError. I also moved all the DBM warnings and bars out to the sides and up to the top.
That took care of the clutter but there was still a feeling of being cramped. I realized it was due to the backgrounds I was using at the bottom. I eliminated those backgrounds and it immediately felt better. They're nice aesthetically and might add a nice touch for a screen that displays less information, but for me it was too much.
Making the switch to Skada was another big move. I eliminated both Recount and Omen, replacing both with one new mod. Skada is less robust than Recount but it's a far lighter load. Skada also features the ability to switch to become a threat meter during combat and then switch back to your last view after combat. It's really slick.
Larger, Fewer Buttons
I needed to change the focal point of my information area to an important piece: spell buttons. To do this I moved my main action bar to the center and made them larger. Some spells that are important but not a part of the regular rotation were moved out to smaller bars on the side and keybound to match up with my G15.
Not only do I take advantage of my G15 buttons but I also use modifier=alt on a lot of my keybound macros. For example, my ` key is bound to Wind Shear and [alt] Lightning Shield.
You'll notice I don't use the "next up" feature of Shock And Awe. I just pay attention to everything that's happening around me and find that the 1.5 second GCD is more than enough time to see my next spell and start mashing that button.
Sexy Unit Frames
I picked up some extra memory topping out Window XP's capacity at 4GB, my HDD spins at 10k, and my connection is usually rock solid: I wanted some sexxxy unit frames damnit.
Stuf had the right stuff. I'm going to warn you though: they are NOT for the light of heart. They are infinitely customizable, which is why I chose them, but man do they require a lot of work to get right. I wish that I could say "hey, here's how you set them up." But honestly I just kept clicking, changing, saving, testing, and on and on and on for hours until I had exactly what I wanted.
I also cleaned up all the buffs and debuffs. For my part I just care about my debuffs on the boss and the debuffs on myself. You can see the results in the header image above.
The New UI in Action
Here's the new UI in action as we took down Freya+3 for my final achievement of Glory of the Ulduar Raider (10). Yeah I know, I'm a slacker. We have a dedicate 10s-Achievement group that runs U10 every Sunday for the achievements but I couldn't commit to the schedule so I was just fill-in when they came up short. I was appreciative they got me in there for the achievements I needed. Thanks guys!
I think it still needs some work. I'm considering shrinking the buff bars (far right) down even further and pushing SCT up even more. I'd also like to make the cast bars more prominent but without overtaking the totem bar. And I think I need to make the sRaidFrames background color more transparent. Forever a work in progress.
Now I just need to do something with my freshly minted level 80 Warrior's UI:
Facerolling my way to 80!
May all your hits be crits!
Reader Comments (11)
One of the things I really enjoy about this game is the ability to customize it. Here is my comp: Teb UI. I love looking at other UI's and your looks like it works well. I like the Freya video. I missed the Uld 10 HM's and now we are onto ToGC 25. Oh well, here's hoping I can get one of the mounts form Icecrown :)
Tebla that is an amazing UI. Seriously awesome. Maybe I'll try to do something like that for my Warrior. I mean, how many buttons do I need for Bladestorm afterall?
I find Satrina Buff Frames to be perfect for my buff bar needs - I used something similar to yours before but found they took up too much of my screen.
Satrina Buff Frames allows you to set them up similar to yours now - with an actual bar for a countdown or similar to the original blizzard ones as a small square with a timer underneath. You can also configure the size of the icons.
I have it setup similar to Blizzard standard but have Debuffs slightly larger so I can see when I've been Debuffed more clearly.
You have to remember the idea behind most of these mods is to make information easier to come by while concentrating on playing - if you move everything to the corners and edges of your screen you rarely pay them any attention and may aswell remove them.
I would love to have my Portrait and my targets portrait similar to where yours are now - I might look into that.
Sorry for the double post but the bottom image is more relevent for a Ret Paladin than an Arms Warrior - You'd die very quickly as an Arms warrior waiting for the BS cooldown and never charging, MS, Rend, Execute, Overpower, where as a Ret paladin with a castrandom macro for Stun, Judgement, Divinestorm would kill very sufficiently.
And OMG you have THE HAIR STYLE... Dragon Ball Z... Hair.... delete the toon ASAP.
Check out LeveeUI here
Quite simply the best UI that I have seen. It gives you the information you need and plenty of screen real estate for the game.
I'm a sucker for trying out new addons and UI compilations. Check out Neav UI.
I'd suggest you do the following for your auras. This assumes you are using SBF or can replicate it's functionality in whatever addon you are actually using.
Make a seperate frame out of the way specifically for auras. Pull auras out of your primary buff frames (flowing/filtering). Switch it to just a standard buff icon view (since you don't need anything pertaining to duration or name or stacks, just to know it's up). I personally keep mine just above my chat box in the bottom left.
This leaves the information on my screen, but it's in a simpler, easier to grok format. And more importantly, it keeps it out of my actual buff frames.
Cataclysmic - the Warrior UI was supposed to be a joke... all Bladestorm... supposed to be for lols. :( And yeah Van's original hairstyle was the clean shave. I'll swap it back from the fancy boy cut.
Thanks for the additional UI links guys and for the auras suggestion.
Aye, reading it back I came across a lil moody, I didn't mean to be though, I was trying to be more jokingly laughing at a paladin, but kinda came across as defensive for the warrior lol.
Hey Stoney, your WIP UI is coming along nicely, and kinda reminds me of when I first started customizing my own UI.
As your looking into getting a more minimalistic yet informative UI, there are some things that I'd like to recommend you change in your setup, and depending on your comfort level may/may not want to change them.
The buff frames: Stacking them like that really doesn't give any useful information during a raid encounter, might want to change it from the stacked bar format to two 'just icons and their timers' lines.
The raid frames: Get rid of the blue backdrop, and since your not resto, you can get rid of the percent information. Or maybe try out a grid mod.
Use Addon Control Panel: I've just recently started using this and it is AWESOME. No more logging in and out to turn on/off addons. Just do it from the in game menu and reload the UI. You can also set profiles, so you can quickly swap between raid addons and those you use all the time but take up a lot memory or take up screen space for no reason (like auctioneer, cartographer, quest helper, WG Timers)
LINK: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/acp.aspx
And from the looks of it your using Mik's Scrolling Battle Text which I use also. You mentioned that it got too spammy and you moved it up. I suggest you disable the "Spell Names" for the damage and go through the inbound and outbound prompts and disable those that you don't need information about or that information is already provided to you by another addon.
The following are links to some screen shot of my current UI, which I tweak on a weekly basis :P
Out of Combat: http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/3379/wowscrnshot103109170647.jpg
In Raid: http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/1728/wowscrnshot112409202721.jpg
I'd post a FRAPS but the game runs a little sluggish during a 25 man raid while it's on :S
I know I'm posting this way late now, but what totem timer do you use right under your player frame? I've been looking for one that's just timers and not a totem manager forever and that one looks nice.