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