Archive for category Addons & UI Related
My UI in parts. Part 1: What do I want to achieve with my UI?
Posted by Brunty in Addons & UI Related on September 12, 2009
I’ll be going through my UI as a tank in separate (more manageable) parts structed like so:
- What do I want to achieve with my UI?
- Positioning, spacing and visibility.
- Unitframes: What they mean and what they can do.
- Action bars, keybindings and (useful) macros.
- Other essentials: ‘Meters’ and Monitors
- The ‘frilly’ stuff.
The addons and elements of my UI function for a DPS-offspec too, but as tanking is my main spec, I would think it’s fairly obvious that my UI suits that aspect of my game first and foremost.
So, what do I want to achieve with my User Interface?
I’ve seen many UI’s from players that need many addons, and just seem to cram them on-screen as much as they can. Now if that’s the way they want to play, I can only try and convince them to tidy things up a bit. Whenever I’m adjusting a UI, or looking at ways to make things a bit cleaner, I always think of the phrase: “don’t stand in the fire” as my primary objective. If I can’t see what I’m standing in, I’d be waiting for a mod / addon to alert me to it, I prefer to trust my own eyes (as good as mods are, it’s just one of those things) so a clear view of what’s around me is necessary. So for me, I want to achieve a UI that’s functional, has all the elements and mods that I need, but with clear viewing room and good visibility. I play on a 1280 x 800 screen, so I’m lacking in the pixel-department compared to say a 19″ or 22″ screen (1440 x 900 or 1680 x 1050 resolutions) but that doesn’t mean my UI still can’t fit, work and look good.
I won’t elaborate much more, I think I’ve covered the points, possibly even rambled on a bit more and avoided the point somewhere along the line.
Coming in Part 2 of this series of posts will be explanations of my positioning, spacing and that all important visibility! There’ll also be more diagrams & pictures!
Before I go, I shall include a picture of my UI with some annotations of what’s there, just to give you all an idea of what the game looks like for me.
The UI on Schnoobins
-Brunty
Do you ‘focus’ in WoW?
Posted by Brunty in Addons & UI Related, Mods on September 11, 2009
I’ll admit it, for a long period, I didn’t use the Focus Frame. Partly due to the fact I used AG_Unitframes as my unit frame addon and it (for some strange reason) didn’t support the Focus Frame for me. I tried setting it and would simply get a message that it had been disabled with AG_UF and to use it I’d have to disable the unit frames and go back to the standard Blizzard ones.
I’d heard good things about using Focus Frames, being able to track the health and ‘actions’ (such as casting, target switching) of a mob whilst you deal with others but I’d always got by without it and never thought it could be so useful that I’d have to do something about it.
I recently changed my unit frames addon to ‘Pitbull’, it has the Focus Frame enabled (and is accessed by typing /focus while having a target selected). Not only is Pitbull more customisable, but I’ve realised the power of the Focus Frame. I’ve setup a hidden bar with keybindings for a macro:
/focus [target=mouseover]
I have this key-bound to ‘Shift-F’ and all it does it use my current mouse-over target to set my focus, no need to even switch targets to create a focus and enable my focus frame!
So what can you now do with a focus frame?
In terms of a boss fight, it can be as simple as tracking the HP of a boss while you deal with adds, pair it with a nice cast-bar addon and you can track casting of the boss to (for interrupts if needed) as well as tracking the focus’ target to ensure that it’s targetting and / or attacking the right thing (which will mostly be me as a tank).
You can setup macros to use your focus target to cast abilities, again without switching targets, an example for a rogue or hunter could be using Tricks of the Trade or Misdirection respectively. As such they could set the Main Tank as their focus, then without needing to switch targets, they can cast their respective abilities on them to help boost threat etc.
There are many other ways to use your Focus Frame, so in what ways do you use yours? What do you have showing for your focus? Cast bars? Focus’ target?
-Brunty