An actual post! Hunter UI Modification.

To give credit where it's due for the previous post: the idea was totally my boyfriend's. It made me laugh, though, so I had to embellish on it and make it into a blog post. Now, though, I should write a real post, or at least as close to a real post as anything I do. There seems to be more interest in interface modification than there is in slogging through uploaded combat parses - and now that I put it like that, I'm not really very surprised. I'm definitely going to do a post on hunter log evaluation, but it can wait a couple days.

Before I get into posting a UI screenshot and talking about configuration, however, I want to talk about how I think about my UI.

I see a number of people that post threads in forums that are along the lines of "I'm playing a hunter! What mods should I get?" and I really don't think this is a very helpful way to go about it. Not least because 30 different people will give you 30 different recommendations, and without any way to choose between them you're going to end up looking at blurry screenshots of mods and trying to figure out if you should get it or not.

I think everyone should ask themselves this question: "what are the problems with my UI that I want to fix?" It might even help to get out a piece of paper and write down your answers to that question. Without asking that question you're groping blindly, and you're just as likely to confuse yourself as you are to help yourself.

So before I post the big screenshot, here are my answers to that question:

1. I need to have all my most important information near the middle of my screen, so I can easily see when I'm Standing In Bad.
2. I need to be able to accurately and easily monitor a wide variety of different buffs, debuffs, and cooldowns.
3. I need to be able to see adds instantly as well as switch targets quickly and accurately and I have to be able to misdirect to and use Master's Call on anyone in the raid in the middle of an encounter.
4. All of the above have to be accomplished with as much visual economy as possible: cluttering up my screen with bars and timers and flashing buttons defeats the purpose by making it impossible to see that I'm Standing In Bad.

Those are my four goals. Every addon I have I picked and customized specifically to address one or more of them. Here's what my UI looks like shooting at a target dummy:

Click for full size.

I'll talk a little bit about each of the mods, in numerical order. I'm not really going to go into step-by-step configuration of individual mods, because they all for the most part have guides out there already. It's more important to think about the mods I use might or might not help you fix the problems with how you use your UI.

1. TidyPlates/ThreatPlates

This pair of addons works together to clean up the game's default health plates and add features to them such as transparency, resizing, and additional visual effects that can be used to display threat information. Tanks, for example, can set the health plates for mobs targeting them to be smaller, more transparent and green while the plates for mobs targeting other people can be big and red with an attention-grabbing aura around them. As a hunter, I have the plates for mobs not targeting me a little smaller, transparent and green; mobs that targeting or could target me are big and red and so on. This makes tasks like picking a particular mob out of a whole pile of them much easier, while doing so with a minimum of distracting visual clutter.

2. Power Auras Classic

I make fairly sparing use of Power Auras. It's a venerable old mod, widely used because it's so powerful. As is often the case though, all that customizability means it takes a little more effort to configure. I only do fairly basic things with it: you can see in the screenshot a small, somewhat transparent icon letting me know that I've got a haste proc from a trinket. I need to know this so I can adjust my expectation for things like "how many steady shots can I fit in before CS comes off cooldown?" I also use it to really scream at me when I've got Fading Light on Ultraxxion or I'm being targeted for Shrapnel on Madness.

3. Serenity

I love this addon very, very, very much. Here's a closeup:

As you can see, the center of the mod is a focus bar. The tick mark is the amount of focus it would cost to use a Chimera shot, and the number is the amount of focus I have at that second. To the right is an animated indicator warning me that I don't have Hunter's Mark active on my target. Below that is an indicator so I know that I'm in Aspect of the Hawk.

Now, you can see that there are two Rapid Fire icons, one above the focus bar and one below. The one on top is because Rapid Fire is currently active on me, with 12 seconds remaining. The duration of the buff from Improved Steady Shot is displayed here in the same way, as is the cooldown of Chimera shot. As the cooldowns or durations tick down to 0, the icon moves from the right side of the bar to the left. So it's both an intuitive visual indicator of time left, as well as text indicating number of seconds.

I use the space under the focus bar to display my longer cooldowns, so the "3" there is white to indicate that it's referring to minutes rather than the yellow seconds of the icon on top. Once that cooldown is under a minute, it will display in seconds as well. This makes it super-easy to use make sure I use Rapid Fire again as soon as I possibly can.

Not pictured here are other things you can have Serenity monitor and display, such as notices that your current target has a buff that Tranquilizing shot can remove or the time left until Freezing Trap wears off of something you've got trapped.

This is a really great mod, and I would encourage all hunters to at least consider it.

4. Quartz

This is another classic mod that I've used since BC. Basically it lets you change the size, location, and appearance of any and all castbars (your own, your target's, target's target, focus, etc). It can also monitor things like the GCD, your autoshot/swing timer, debuffs and buffs on your target, and so on. If you're moving everything else in your UI around, like I am, you need to be able to move around your castbars.

5. Pitbull Unit Frames 4.0

I use Pitbull for much the same reasons that I use Quartz. Having my own healthbar stuck in the upper right-hand corner of my screen was resulting in my death occasionally, and anyway it was ugly! So I use this mod to make my healthbars prettier and move and resize them to fit my own desires. You can see I have my pet's healthbar visible but small, sitting atop my own. My target's target is displayed in a similar fashion, and everything is tucked in neat and clean in the bottom-center of my screen, so I don't have move my eyes very far off-center to scan them. I also use it to display large, easy-to-see icons of the buffs on my current target so I can easily watch things like the stacks of Warlord Zon'ozz's increased damage-done buff.

6,7. Grid/Clique

I first picked up using this pair of cooldowns as I was learning to heal on my priest, and I've found that they lend themselves to things like answering the question "is everyone in the raid alive?" and "where's the healer so I can use Master's Call on him?" These are also highly customizable mods, and if you decide to use them make sure you do so with a clear goal in mind. I wanted extremely clean, compact raid frames that I could tuck in a corner and use for very specific purposes; I didn't want a massive set of healthbars covering half my screen and covered in vibrating, pulsating icons.

8. Bartender 4

Continuing the theme of many of my other mods, BT4 allowed me to resize, move, rearrange, and change the appearance and transparency of my various action bars and menu buttons. My mini-menu and pet bar have been made tiny and tucked under the chat box so they don't obscure anything. I've got an action bar hidden along the left-hand side of my screen where I've got bindings for a few macros for pet control and aspect swapping as well as placing traps (it becomes visible if I mouse over it). My regular action bars are still visible, but are much smaller, reducing visual clutter.

Other considerations/not pictured.

You can't see it but I used a tiny little addon called Tipsy to move my tooltips to the upper left-hand corner of my screen, so they wouldn't get in the way of my raid frames. I have Omen and Recount installed, but Omen is hidden unless I'm in a party/raid and Recount is hidden unless I specifically bring it up to look at something (during raid time, this is usually the "Deaths" page).

You can see that I've set up a few custom chat tabs and made the background of the chat window transparent. The tabs are so that I can restrict the chat I can see to just party, raid and guild, and the transparency is so that it doesn't get in the way.

Anyway, altogether I hope you can see how I've chosen my addons to fix my UI problems. Maybe some of these would be the right ones for you and maybe they wouldn't! There's no way for anyone else to know what addons are best for you.

That said, I am always curious about how other people play! So if you have any favorites that I've missed, please do drop me a note, tweet it, or leave a comment!

Actual UI update!

Click to enlarge

Well, there she is! At least as she stands. I had the presence of mind to put omen in test mode for this one, so you can see where it is. Some of this is just moving things around so they fit together better. I also changed my watcher settings so watcher tells me when my ISS buff is going to fall off - that's the icon you can see sliding in along the timeline from the right. I also got around to reinstalling tipsy, so although you can't see them, I've moved my tooltips to the upper left-hand corner of the screen, allowing me to tuck grid back down in the lower right. Chat is still using blizzard default, as are buffs/debuffs, although I've enabled durations on those. Oh, and I hid the top-most action bar, which just had mounts on it. It still exists and I still press those buttons to mount up, I just can't see it.

Oh, and in case you didn't notice it, I updated my banner image!

UI in progress

Prompted by a post on WoW Ladies, I thought I'd update my old UI post. Since the last post I've taken two breaks from playing as well as spent several months raiding as a discipline priest so: quite a lot has changed. Further, although I've made my UI functional, it's not really where I'd like it to be. Heck, after having taken a look at my old UI post, that one wasn't where I'd like it to be either. But part of my vision for this blog has always been that I want to talk as much about the process as I do about the results. I know it's intimidating to just like... jump into the front page of Curse or whatever and go OK GUYS I'M GONNA MOD MY UI NOW without really having any idea of what or how.

To begin with, the biggest part of UI modification is paring your screen down so you only see the things you want to see. And to get to that point, you're going to have to spend some time deciding what those things are. What information is important to you? Focus? Cooldowns? Raid status? Ability to see if you're standing in fire? And so on. Then you try to figure out how to change your UI to get the results you want. Let's take a look at what I've got so far:

As you can see, I don't have a whole lot going on there so far. I'm still using the default minimap. I'm using the default chat window. I'm using default buff frames. Already, though, it's pretty far changed from what you might expect to see. I'll go through what I've got, and why I'm using it, just by the numbers.

Click to enlarge

1. Quartz. This is a highly customizable castbar modification. It lets me move my castbars around, resize them, add a GCD monitor to them, and (as you can see) add timers that monitor my debuffs on my target. You can see that right now I've applied the Marked for Death affect to the target dummy, as well as having the Piercing Shots and Serpent Sting dots ticking on it. The castbar for my current target appears just to the right - directly over the target's healthbar. Which brings us to:
2. PitBull4. This is another very powerful, highly customizable addon, but this one takes care of what are called frames. You know how, in the default UI, you get a portrait and healthbar, your party members do, your pet does, your target does, etc? Well those are all unit frames, and you can't do much with them in the default UI. Pitbull4 lets me (much like Quartz with castbars) move them around, resize them, add little 3d portraits, and decide exactly what gets displayed on which frame. You can see my kitty (Yann) right above my portrait, and if my target had a target, it would be another small box to the right of its frame. My target will also display a power bar if it has mana, rage, or whatever.
3. Watcher. Watcher is a really cool little addon that, as you can see, adds a scrolling timeline of your abilities. To be honest, keeping chimera shot on cooldown is not as important as it was pre-patch (I will frequently delay a chimer to renew my ISS buff), but I can also do things like add Rapid Fire to my priority list in it, so I'll know when it's available. Something like Watcher is almost required to play Survival, though, because it's honestly the best way to try to keep all of your dots and short cooldown abilities lined up. It would be a huge help with BM managing bestial wrath as well.
4. Bartender 4. BT4 lets me move my action bars where I want them as well as resize them (are we starting to detect a pattern here?). It also, as you can see, lets me keep things such as my mini-menu, pet bar, and stance bar mostly hidden, although they pop into full opacity when I mouse over them. I only rarely need to interact with those menus, and never during a boss attempt, so keeping them transparent frees up a lot of screen space. I also always open my bags just by hitting "B," so I have that menu totally disabled.
5. Grid. Grid is actually another unit-frames addon, but this one is geared more for use by healers. Nonetheless, having a compact and very clean raid-frames area lets me do things like target people for summons, monitor readychecks, and cast misdirect on the fly. My priest, of course, has a separate grid profile, and hers is located right in the middle of her screen and takes up more space, because she needs it to heal.

I've also outlined the location where Omen shows up. A raiding necessity since forever, Omen keeps me from pulling off the tank and wiping the raid.

You can see how, just by looking at my UI, you can tell what information is important to me and what is not. In the future I'd like to find a way to reduce the watcher/portrait/quartz bulky lump in the middle of my screen, and I'd like to make my minimap hideable as well. The chat box does a decent job of fading out when I'm not actively using it, but it still eats a pretty decent-sized chunk of space. Overall, though, I think this gives a pretty good sense of how to start modifying your UI: decide what you want to see and what you do not want to see and find mods that help make that happen. Of course, it's a WoW truism that, for some of us, our UI is always a work in progress.

Mod Configuration: Watcher

In the Burning Crusade, hunters needed one button.  In my case, it was the 3 button, and you would laugh at the difficulties that caused.  I actually bound that action bar button to a fourth button on my mouse, and I would alternate between pressing that button with my right thumb and pressing "3" with right and left index fingers.  Oh my god I hated long fights in the blistering and cramping they caused.  I actually in large part loved Archimonde (even though melee destroyed me on the meters) because it gave me so much extra stuff to do.

Thankfully, those days are behind us, and hunters actually use a few different buttons these days.  This, of course, introduced some new difficulties of its own.  When I first came back to the game and did a Naxx10, I stared at the timers on my action bars and tried to manage a Survival priority system with nothing else.  I actually managed 3k DPS on Patch10 wearing BoE 80 blues and 70 raid gear, which isn't terrible, but the more I raided that way, the more I hated it.  I didn't actually do anything to fix it, though, until I saw my boyfriend setting up his UI to play offspec ret on his holydin.  He found this mod - and I can't remember what it was called - where he set up a simple priority list.  Then the mod would display a large icon of which ability he should be using at that second, with a smaller icon to the right of the next ability he would be using.  If a higher priority ability came off of cooldown during the global cooldown (or rare cast time), the "on deck" icon would change.

It was an epiphany, and the second he finished showing me how it worked, I went back to my computer to find something similar.  The eyestrain-eliminating mod I found was Watcher.

I'll begin by quickly summarizing what the mod is intended to do.  It's pretty simple: first, you set your own shot priorities in the mod's configuration screens.  Then it shows you when those abilities are going to come off of cooldown in an intuitive, scrolling timeline fashion.  It also prioritizes them according to your settings, stacking lower priorities behind higher priorities.  Here's a shot of the mod in action:

Here's what you're seeing in this screen shot:

• The dark gray vertical bar to the right is where abilities will "stack up".  When an ability's icon reaches this bar, it's off cooldown.
• The light gray horizontal bar on the bottom is the timeline.  This counts down your cooldowns for you.  I have it set to go out 6 seconds, so I have time to plan what I'm going to do.
• The icons for Chimera and Aimed Shot are showing how far out those abilities are.  CS will be available in 1.8 seconds, while AiS will be available in 2.6.  The global cooldown is 1.5s, so the rule to follow is: "don't fire a steady shot if you've got a high-priority ability 1.5 seconds or fewer away".
• You can also see that CS is "behind" AiS, which indicates that Aimed is a higher priority ability.  In this case, however, I would probably choose to go with CS - CS actually does more damage, Aimed's priority is higher because, over the course of a long fight, you're hoping to outweigh lost Chimera Shots with gained Aimed Shots.  If AiS is .8s behind CS, though, I'm just going to use CS.

Next, a shot of the first configuration screen:

Here's what you're seeing in this one, leaving out the self-explanatory stuff:

• "Bar Scale" is set to 1 because I liked the default size, but you could scale it up and down to make the whole thing bigger or smaller without changing the length of time shown on the timeline.
• "Alpha" is another word for transparency.  An alpha of "1" is completely opaque, while an alpha of "0" is completely transparent.  I chose an alpha of .5 so it's easy to see, but doesn't obscure the screen behind it.  I've since chosen to set "Background Alpha" to 0, since I only care about the timeline and ability icons.
• "Max Time" is the number of seconds out the timeline will go.  I've found six to be a good fit for me, but experimentation can't hurt.
• "Interval", as far as I can tell, sets the first time mark.  Since 1.5s is the length of the GCD, that's what I've chosen.
• I use Quartz to watch my swing timer and GCD, so I have them disabled here.

And the last shot:

Here's the all-important screen where you set your shot priorities, so there's no bulleted list here.  I've chosen a Survival list here, just because it illustrates how things work better.  I've got Kill Shot as my top priority, because it does more damage than anything else.  Explosive, as my primary damaging ability, is second.  Black Arrow, as my source of LnL procs, edges out AiS, since Aimed is just not very important to SV damage while BA is.  Last listed is AiS.

I've left two things off of this list: Serpent Sting and Steady Shot.  The reason is that neither of these abilities have cooldowns, so they just clutter up the timeline.  I monitor SrS with Quartz and fire Steadies whenever nothing else is available.

I'm sure you've noticed I haven't touched several of the options screens.  I played with the labels and keybind settings, and they do what you'd expect: put extra text on the icons.  If, to use the SV example above, I set the label for my fourth priority as "AiS," then that text would appear in the middle of the icon on the timeline.  The keybind screens are just the same: in my case, AiS is bound to "6", so I would enter 6 for the fourth priority for the primary spec.  Then the icon would have a "6" in the middle when it was visible on the timeline.  I didn't really find either of these options helpful, so I elected not to use them.  Like, I know what the Aimed Shot icon is and I know I've bound to 6, right? I don't really see the point, but maybe those options are good for you. Spell Settings is there for you to add custom spells to the mod, since as you saw, you set your priorities from dropdowns.  As the mod is no longer updated, this screen should hopefully extend its life a bit.

Anyway, this should be enough information to get you up and running with the mod.  As always, I'd be happy to answer any questions about it, about priorities, or anything else!  I would also be more than thrilled if anyone could link in a comment or email me their alternative ability watching mods, especially ones that support priority systems.  If you've got a mod you use and love for this purpose, please let me know!

UI customization

Very few raiders keep the default UI, and I'm not one of them. It does a good job at providing new players with most of the information they'll need for leveling and even instances, but tends to fall apart once the player reaches endgame. It doesn't make the information you need readily available, while it displays a lot of extraneous information in ways that obscure the visual field. There are a lot of mods out there, though, and simply going to curse and trying to build a UI from scratch without any familiarity with the possibilities is an intimiating prospect. So I'm going to post a picture of my UI in a raid so you can see what decisions I've made and why, and what mods I used to get the results I wanted.

First, here's a sized-down version of the screenshot:

And here's a list of the mods in the screenshot:

1. SLDT
2. Tipsy
3. Satrina Buff Frames
4. SexyMap
5. Scrolling Combat Text + Scrolling Combat Text Damage
6. Pitbull4
7. Watcher
8. Quartz
9. Chatter
10. Bartender4 + ButtonFacade
11. DoTimer
12. Omen
13. Grid

Now I'll go down the list and explain briefly why I chose each mod and what it does for me, starting with:

1. SLDT stands for "Simple Light Data Text", and is the most compact way I've found to easily and intuitively track a couple things. It's highly configurable and has many more modules available than I actually use, like bag space and FPS monitors. It displays more information upon mousing over one of its elements, such as the "Guild: 33" text. When you mouse over that text, a simple, scrollable list of everyone online in your guild appears, along with their rank, location, etc. You can click on a name to whisper that person or alt-click to invite them to a group. Mousing over durability displays a dropdown of the percentage durability left on each item slot. So easy!

2. Tipsy is a tiny, intuitive mod to move your tooltip around your screen. With all the other moving around of things that the other mods did, I needed to move my tooltips to keep them from obscuring other things.

3. Satrina Buff Frames, or SBF, is an easy way to configure display of buffs and debuffs. As you can see, I've configured my buffs to be smaller and and half-transparent, because that's good enough to check them before the pull, but keeps them from getting too distracting as they multiply and overwrite each other during an attempt. Debuffs, on the other hand, are big and bright, so the second I get something like Mark of the Faceless I know to disengage away, get out of the fire, etc.

4. SexyMap lets you resize your map, move it around, control which buttons display on it and when, anchor it or hide it, or make it sexier with cool glowing blue borders (not pictured).

5. Scrolling Combat Text (SCT) in combination with SCTD lets you define which sorts of events (heals received, heals cast, debuffs or buffs gained, reactive abilities activated) go to which of three "frames". I have Frame 1 display most of the stuff that happens (heals received, energy gains, damage taken, buffs gained) displayed to the left, in an upward scrolling curved hud configuration. I also use reduced opacity to keep it from being too much in the way - I mostly glance over at it to see if I'm, for example, getting mana gains from Judgement of Wisdom. Damage out goes to the right, and debuff gains scroll a message right under my feet in a larger font and at full opacity (again, great for things like Mark of the Faceless).

6. Pitbull4 is an example of what are termed "raid frames". Once more, I've elected to disable most of the mod's functionality. I choose to display my healthbar, my pet's healthbar, my target, and my target-of-target. I also have the focus frame enabled, and it appears above Grid to the right side of my screen when I have a focus target set.

7. Watcher is an ability timer. As abilities come off of cooldown they scroll from the right to the left, then stack up in order of highest priority first. When I took the screenshot, both aimed and arcane shot were off of cooldown. Aimed is displayed in front of arcane because it's a higher priority. This mod is great for two reasons. The most obvious is that it saves my eyes from staring at the teensy-tiny buttons on my action bars. The second, less obvious one, relates to steady shot's cast time. Steady shot does less damage than anything else I could do and, under raid buffs, it frequently has a cast time about the length of the global cooldown. So if casting a steady shot will delay a much more valuable arcane or chimera shot, I'll just wait the half a second or second and fire the other shot.

8. Quartz is, mostly, a castbar and swing timer mod. Sadly, I didn't choose the time of my screenshot ideally, or you'd be able to see the very large, obvious castbar displayed when my target is casting something. Very, very many bosses in the game cast or channel something as a warning that they're about to use one of their abilities requiring a specific reaction (Brundir's overload, Mimiron's laser barrage, Yogg's lunatic gaze), so I've made it very easy to see and respond to those abilities. I have a second, smaller castbar above that one for myself. Attached my castbar's location are my debuffs on the boss. This is more important for Survival hunters than it is for Marksman hunters, but it's still good to have an easy place to check to make sure serpent sting is on the boss. You don't see hunter's mark there because the other hunter in the raid has improved hunter's mark, so we both do more damage if I don't overwrite his.

9. Chatter just lets me resize and reconfigure my chatbox. Nothing too exciting!

10. Bartender 4 is a highly configurable actionbar/menu bar mod. It lets you resize, move, and change the configuration of your action bars, as well as hide and display them. I have my pet bar hidden, my mini-menu hidden but available on mouseover in the lower left corner of my screen, and my main action bars scaled down so they don't take up quite so much room. I also use Button Facade to reskin my buttons to make them a little prettier. This mod is especially nice because it works with Satrina Buff Frames too!

11. DoTimer, as the name implies, is mostly designed to watch your dots. It also, however, can watch your cooldowns, which is what I use it for. You can move it around, resize the bars, change the style of the bars, and configure the abilities that appear in a couple different ways. You can either have it display everything and then selectively block abilities, or you can set it up like I have, with a "whitelist." That means I list specifically the abilities that I want to know about. This mod helps me make sure I get the maximum use out of my cooldowns.

12. Omen threatmeter is an essential for any and every raiding tank or DPSer. Use omen or pull off the tank, die, and wipe the raid.

13. Grid is another, different raid frames addon. More popular with healers than with DPS, I still find it invaluable. From a convenience standpoint, it's excellent for summoning the raid to the instance, and you can also keep an eye on it to get an idea of the raid's average health. Further, as hunters, we can use it to do things like easily Misdirect to the tanks mid-battle or use master's call on a healer rooted in fire.

As you've probably gotten a sense of from my descriptions, my primary goal with my UI is for it to display the information I need in an accessible way without cluttering my screen or making it hard to see when I'm standing in fire. That's why I've made several elements semi-transparent and shifted a lot of the remaining elements to the borders of the screen, leaving the middle as wide-open as possible. Your goals and priorities for your UI may be different, but hopefully this post has given you some starting points so you can build something that works for you.