Personalizing Your UI: Part 2

 

Modding gone horribly wrong. Courtsey of Techchee.com

 

 

Personalizing your UI is about more than good looks, its about convenience. This time around I am going to show you some great add-ons that are not flashy but get the job done right. This includes chat, inventory management, and auction house mods that will help you to use your play time more efficiently and make it more profitable.

Chat Add-ons:

In game chat can sometimes be tedious and even irritating. If you have ever been in trade chat during a murloc/chuck norris/anal spamfest then you know what I am talking about. However, Warcraft’s chat can be a powerful tool if you know how to use it correctly.

At the time of this post I was using ChatMOD as my only chat add-on. It has been an excellent add-on that has provided me with everything I thought I needed out of a chat mod. This includes the ability to easily join/leave, colorize, and organize channels. It gives users the ability to scroll up the window using a mousewheel and remove the default scroll buttons. ChatMOD can add sound effects to notify when a message has been received from group, raid, guild, or whisper. And finally, it gives you the ability to click on the word invite or inv to invite the whisperer into a group or raid.

The one thing that seems to be missing from ChatMOD was more customization options for whispers. Whispers are independent from the rest of the random, meaningless chat that often flies by and require special attention. For this reason I decided to try out WIM. (WoW Instant Messenger) At first glance I did not like this add-on at all. It seemed bulky and literally felt like a program was opening on top of WoW. However,  after using it for a few hours I saw that it was useful and convenient with many customization options that made have a 1 on 1 conversation easier. 

This is a multi conversation chat panel. The tabs at the top control each of the seperate conversations.

 

This is the options interface for WoW Instant Messenger.

An additional feature is the History Viewer, which is really nice so going back to see if you missed a message from a friend.

 

In researching this post I also tried using Chatter,  which is currently the highest rated chat mod available, and Chatr, a relatively new chat mod. Chatter had more customization options than ChatMod but the bugginess and semi-intimidating configuration menu left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Overall, neither Chatter or Chatr seemed to do anything that ChatMod couldn’t do. so if you are looking for a simple, light, chad mod I suggests ChatMOD. For experienced modders, give Chatter a try.

Another aspect of chat is who you are talking to. I found several options for friends list available, but ended up with FriendFu, a FuBar add-on. FriendFu seems to do everything a person could want out of a friends list with actually having to bring up your friends list. You just scroll over the icon in your FuBar to bring up a list of friends.

On a side note, Carbonite, which is a questing add-on I use already, includes many friends list features that may be enough without wasting more memory.

 

Main options menu for ChatMOD

 

Sound options for warnings.

Channel options

The menu is for a cool feature that highlights words of interest that scroll by.

Bag Add-ons:

Bag add-ons are another set of mods that can be almost limitlessly useful even though most people just use them to turn all of their bags into one bigger bag. I have used Bagnon, Ark Inventory, Onebag, and several others. Each of these mods has its specialty or area in which it excells. Bagnon is a great lightweight mod that has all of the basic options such as changing size, color, and opacity. Not to mention the ability to see what all of you other characters are carrying without logging over. Unlike Onebag, which is also a lightweight bag mod, you get the bank mod included.

Onebag is similar is most ways and adds a few options for sorting items, but you must also download Onebank for your bank bags.

In my opinion, the best bang for your buck is Ark Inventory. Immeadiantly after installing, the default bags look horrible and are huge, taking up a third of my 1920×1080 screen. However, typing /arkinventory config brings up a simple options screen that has everything you need to customize your bags in whatever way is useful to you. My favorite thing about Ark Inventory though, is the bag customizing. This options lets you set types of items that go in imaginary bags. This means you can set a bag to be for gear and the mod creates a space for all of the gear you currently have in your bags. This option is great for reagents, quest item, and off sets that just get mixed up and hard to find in one big bag.

My bags seperated by category. Ark auto places my reagents in the first bag, my gear in the second bag, and so forth. If you fill a bag Ark allocates more slots to that bag.

 

Main options menu for Ark Inventory

Options for automatic bag opening

Options by bag type

Bag color and size options

Auction House Add-ons:

I actually regret having added this into Personalizing Your UI because the amount of detail and options make this a topic that I could not completely cover in several posts. Not to mention that there are a very large number of add-ons that are cover all sorts of auction house related issues that can be really useful but are not actually ah mods. So to keep things short I covered 3 ah add-ons that I think cover the widest range of and most popular features of a good ah mod.

The first I tested was Auctioneer and was impressed with the options and speed at which it allowed me to list items.Using with Auctioneer was kinda like getting addicted to crack. I couldnt stop playing with it and kept finding new add-on that worked with it. One example of the really useful add-ons is Enchantrix, which tells you what an item will disenchant into. When I uninstalled Auctioneer to test the other add-ons I lost the ability to use these other great features and felt like someone had cut off my hand. Luckily, both other ah add-ons had built in features that were similar to, though not as good as the ones that come with Auctioneer. The real benefit was that my loading times dropped signifigantly when uninstalling Auctioneer and switching to AuctionLite. I found AuctionLite to be pretty much perfect for what I need when trying to play the ah game. Its easy to use and  has great buying and selling options, including the ability to auto buy a certain amount of items. If this feature has to purchase extra to get the amount you wanted, it tells you how much you can resell the extra items for.

Auctionator was very similar to AuctionLite but just felt inferior in its presentation. It did have all of the basic features and was more memory efficent than Auctioneer.

 

The detailed view of the auction house interface.

A breakdown of features from the basic auction house interface, courtesy of the Auctioneer website

This is a view of an item tooltip using all of the Auctioneer accompanying add-ons. The name of each addon is listed below.

 As you probably noticed I didnt go into a lot of detail regarding each add-ons setup and confiugurations. Instead I will be linking to other articles, posts and videos that give specifics and attention to detial that I did not have time for. Please see the Add-Ons page at the top of the screen for links to this information. Stayed tuned till next week and I will wrap up my Personalizing Your UI post with Part 3 on map, loot, and raid mods.

Connection Issues

I just wanted to apologize for the lack of posts at the beginning of this week. My internet has been down. Damn you Verizon!!!!!!! A new router showed up yesterday but after installing I am still having a few connection issues, although not as bad. Don’t worry though, I will still be posting the second part of the Personalizing Your UI post before the end of this week. Also, I am going to be upgrading the site quite a bit more and hopefully that will be done on Saturday. If you have any questions or recommendations for topics or improvements them email me at darkenedsoul1@rocketmail.com.

Today’s Menu: Fish Feast

Chef Chuck here again with another great recipe to make mouths water. This special dish will make you the favorite of any party with its robust flavor and ability to give buffs to all members of a raid or party. Just take 2 Musselback Sculpin, 2 Glacial Salmon, 2 Nettlefish, and a dash of Northern Spices, throw it all in a baking dish and have your Green Proto-Drake breathe on it for about 30 seconds. Chef Chuck promises you will be everyones new best friend after whipping up one of these babies for a hungry crowd.

Fish Feast
Binds when picked up
Requires Level 70Use: Set out a great feast that will feed your party!   Restores 15000 health and 12960 mana over 30 sec.  If you spend at least 10 seconds eating you will become well fed and gain 80 Attack Power, 46 Spell Power and 40 Stamina for 1.00 hour.

Darkened Soul: A Mission Statement

Courtesy of Apanthrope, Shadow Priest

Originally, I started Darkened Soul so that I would have a way to discuss and help others with different topics relating to playing a shadow priest. What I didn’t understand was that there is no way I can cover as much as I want or is needed on a thorough class site by myself. So what I have decided to do instead is create a shadow priest portal.

Don’t worry if you regularly read my blog posts because I will still be writing them. However, my priority has changed and the main focus of this site will now be to help shadow priests find every bit of information that is available no matter how small. I will be categorizing, reviewing, and researching the already existing and constantly updated world of shadow priest literature.

Meaning……if there is a blog on shadow priests that really rocks, I will send you there.

If a new add-on comes out that is great for melting faces I will find it, review it, and tell you what sites have it.

I will even be mindless pouring through gigabytes of YouTube videos for PvP, PvE, or other type of interesting videos I think might be entertaining or amusing.

The site will be constantly changing as fast as I can make it happen. The best way to keep up with these changes is to follow my Twitter, which is always showing the latest updates on the left hand side of the site. You can also follow it by clicking here. Feel free to contact me through Twitter or my email (darkenedsoul1@rocketmail.com) if you have any suggestions, information about content, or questions about the changes being made.

Personalizing your UI: Part 1

Customizing your UI FTW!!!!

Sometimes even the best gaming companies do not have the time to make every feature kick ass. The developers at Blizzard deliberately designed World of Warcraft to be almost infinitely customizable through modding, so that they would not have to try to make each player happy with a single way of doing things. Omfg there are mods that do just about anything you can imagine, from changing your gear with a single click, to warning you when bosses are going to rip your face off, to letting you play games whenever you die. I am kind of an add-on freak. I use so many add-ons that my screen takes about two full minutes to load. One of the main things that I use my mods to do is to customize my user interface and how I interact with it. How can anyone play with the basic WoW interface? Its boring and there are so many things that you can’t do, can’t move, or can’t change. So…..I am going to divulge my small amount of experience and knowledge of customization in a three part post starting with bar mods and player frames. Part 2 will be over chat, bags, and the auction house and how they can save you time and make you mucho moola. Finally,Part 3 will be over maps, loot, and raid mods that will keep you alive when your lame ass healer doing Naxx in greens can not.

Part 1

Bar Mods:

One of the first things that irritated me when I began playing World of Warcraft several years ago, was the inability to move  the action bars and player frames. Okay, great I can make a few more bars appear, but I can even move them where I want them to go. Luckily, several mod developers took on this problem immediately and gave us some great solutions. As far as bar mods go, the best of the best (and pretty much the only two) are Bartender and Dominos (whic used to be Bongos). Both are well done and consistently updated with content. Personally, I use Bartender4 because of its almost unlimited configuration options. Bartender4 gives you the ability to use as many bars as you want and to customize the size, number of buttons and rows, and visuals. Bartender also has many bar-related action options like a range finder, self-cast options, and assisting targets. For players that swear by key bindings, Bartender uses a much simpler approach to setting your hot keys through a click to bind system. In the screen shot below you can see the easy to understand options menu for Bartender4 and some of the customization options.

Here are a few button configurations using Bartender4 that I have found online. The bottom picture is of my current UI on Chuckenorris while fishing in Ironforge.

You can have as many or as few bars on screen as you like. Also, each bar can be customized with different amounts of buttons

Interesting button set up. I think it uses another mod called CyCircle to get the rounded edges.

A nice minimalist scheme free of addon clutter

Nice raiding UI

My Current UI on Chuckenorris

One thing that id like to point out on my  UI, is that I use hidden buttons. These are bars that disappear when you are either in combat or you have to mouse-over to see them. I like this option because it keeps mount and buff buttons off my screen when they are unnecessary.

Dominos has similar options and customization to Bartender4 so I am not going to repeat them all. Both are great choices for moving your action bars into a position more suited towards your playing style. I wont go into configuration techniques, however, if you have any questions you can email me at darkenedsoul1@rocketmail.com and I would be glad to help you out. Also, there are some great UI threads at MMO-Champion and Elitist Jerks that not only post pics but answer questions and give advice.

Player Unit Frames:

Next up we have player unit frames add-ons. Player unit frames show your character’s health and mana along with party, raid and enemy information. Mods such as Pitbull, X-Perl, and Glass Unit Frames give players the ability to change the look and placement of there unit frames to meet there needs. There are an enormous amount of these mods available but I will only go over the general capabilities of them and not there specifics for the sake of keeping this post readable and short.

Player unit frames are probably the most difficult thing Blizzard would have had to compromise to try and keep players happy. I have seen so many different set-ups ranging from a simple movement of the existing frames, to a complete skinning and modification. All of these mods will give you the ability to move your unit frames, but for the really detailed stuff you will probably want to stick with the bigger names such as Pitbull or X-Perl.

Recently I switched to Pitbull for a few reasons, but for almost 2 years I used X-Perl so I have had very detailed experiences with both. My switch to Pitbull was due to X-Perl’s inability to dumb down the unit frames as much as I was wanting at the time. By dumb down I mean two bars, one for health, one for mana, with no player picture and no icons or graphics. I was going for a super simple UI with an open center that felt clutter free. Pitbull gave me the customization I wanted of my unit frames but I had to give up several features that I really liked about X-Perl. For instance, X-Perl has a very useful set of options for buffing, debuffing, and timers to track them. As a shadow priest I find it infinitely important to keep accurate timing on my DoTs. I basically combated this loss by searching until I found a DoT timer that worked for me. (ShadowMOD 1.4) Pitbull on the other hand gave me the ability to customize the shape and size of my unit frame bars to a degree that I could not accomplish with X-Perl. In addition, I found Pitbull’s raiding unit frames to be cleaner looking while still having all the necessary information. Other than that both of these mods have there own take on all kinds of features including: raiding unit frames, pet frames, pet target frames, target frames, target of target frames, target of target of target frames, main tank frames, range finders, cast bars, threat bars, and many more. Here are a few of the more interesting unit frames I have seen.

This set up is some what similar to mine, with the party frames near the bottom and the player and enemy frames near the center

A clever use of of Pitbull to have the player frames and party frames around the actions bars.

This is a raid frame set up for a healer.

A slightly more cluttered yet useful single target set-up using bigger bars for targets and bright colors to maintain focus during intense combat.

There were some unit frames that were so complicated that I felt showing the pictures would be asking for questions that were out of my knowledge range. But, as you can see these mods can completely change the way you interact with your unit frames and the information they display for you. Hopefully, this will make your WoW life a little easier, at least until they change something that breaks all the add-ons again

That is it for this section on bar mods and unit frames. These are just a few of the neat and interesting customizations that you can achieve to create a UI that fits your play style. Whether you are a healer, tank, or damage dealer there is a unit frame or bar mod to suit your needs. Please see Darkened Soul’s add-on page by clicking the link at the top of the screen to find locations for all the mods talked about here today and many more. For any question you may have  please email me at darkenedsoul1@rocketmail.com and stay tuned next week for Part 2 on chat, bags, and auction house mods.

Photos in this post are courtesy of the Elitist Jerks “Post Your UI” thread