Saturday, January 29, 2011

My dirty little secret

Hi everyone. My name's Raevyn and I'm an addon addict.

This is the exact opposite of my husband, who has Omen, DBM, and not much else. I laugh about my penchant for latching onto new addons along with everyone else, but it's not something I'm looking to fix. Around once every month a new addon will catch my eye or an old one will show me something new, and I'll frantically go about changing my UI to make it better. Unlike other addictions, my addon addiction is keyed toward making my life (in this case my gaming experience) better. For the most part, my addons reflect that.

Back in the early days of EverQuest, I tried to work with addons. They were cumbersome, gangly things that didn't really do much besides alter the appearance of your UI. I tried with four of five different styles but I could never get them to function well in the game. I think part of it is that Sony made modifying your UI a herculean effort, so few people used mods and fewer still made them. Blizzard has done just the opposite, making UI modification a cottage industry that's open to anyone with a little time and a clear idea of what they want to do.

Players can change the look of their bars, their maps, their buttons, their raid frames, their chat, their buffs, add timers, overlays, extra buttons, frames that indicate distances, aggro, healing done, damage done, and more! At the end of the day, with some time spent searching sites like Curse or WoW Interface your UI can look however you want it to. The problem, of course, is where do you stop?

My answer: I don't.

The shot above is pretty crowded. My Vuhdo bars are in the middle and my buffs take up a hefty chunk of space along the side while my bars crowd the bottom. I have countdown bars seemingly all over the place and healing done and received scrolls over the other spots. This is actually better than it used to be. I searched for a screenshot of an early UI compilation. I remember it well. My Grid bars were nearly an inch wide per raider and extended over half my screen. With everything else bumping up against that, I had a very small box in the middle that was my view of my character. I could see the fire so I could get out of it, but very little else.

The difference between then and now is pretty big.


Recently I went through and updated my UI to make it less cluttered and easier to see everything. I moved my player and target frames to the center of the screen under my character and took a lot of my superfluous buttons (the two blocks of bars on the left) and made them show up only when I moused over them, and not in combat at all. Then the bits that I need in combat, like healthstones and potions, I put on the other side of the screen. They only show up while I'm in combat. Overall, it's a lot easier to play with.

I use a lot of addons. I enjoy using them because each of them serves a purpose for me.

Vuhdo The big debate between Vuhdo and Healbot and Grid will rage indefinitely. I just don't really tend to get into it. I like what Vuhdo can do with hot placement. It's easy to configure and customize. Although I don't use it, I could easily configure it to use click healing. It's got a lot of features I don't use, but I'm ok with that. I'm comfortable with it. I used Grid for a long time, but eventually having to update two or three addons to get what I had in one, along with the easier to maneuver interface, led me away from Grid. My only real experience with Healbot was in BC and I didn't use it for long. I hear it's a very good addon. When people ask what they should use, I recommend Vuhdo, but I amend it with a caveat to use what they like. Every healer is different.

Shadowed UF I use this addon on every one of my characters. The amount of information you can display (or not display) on player, target, target of target, target of target of target, and boss frames is amazing. All I need is bars with numbers. This addon gives me bars with numbers, and I can say which bars have which numbers. For example, the percentage on the mana/energy/rage bar on my target is actually their percentage of health, rather than their percentage of power. I find that easier to look at than having another number up with the boss health numbers.

Prat A basic chat frame addon. I like class names in chat. I like to know the level of the person I'm talking to. I like having time stamps on whispers. Prat does all these things simply and effectively.

Bartender4 Gotta mod the buttons up! I use this to help unclutter my macros and to make the cool clusters of buttons that only show up in combat or on mouseover. Great for getting things out of the way and easy to configure my preferences for keybinds.

Quartz Everyone's go-to cast bar. I use it to show my own and my target's cast bars and the spells they're casting. Useful, functional, unintrusive.  I love it.

Tidy Plates/Threat Plates I totally grabbed this from Big Bear Butt's tanking guide when I was learning how to tank and now I totally love it for healing and my DPS characters as well. If you're a tank, the nameplates are green when mobs are aggroed on you. If you're not, the nameplates are green when mobs aren't aggroed on you. Perfect for fights like Omnitron Defense System where it's kind of important to know if an ooze is attached to me and if so, which one. I thought having nameplates in my face would be annoying, but I've embraced them. I can see mob health, aggro, and a cast bar for things I don't have targeted at a glance.

Satrina Buff Frames I've heard this is going the way of the dodo and I'm extremely sad. SBF is a huge asset, letting me move my buff frames from up top to a smaller list along the left side. Recently I've configured it to paste a big column showing the buffs (hostile) or debuffs (friendly) of my target. This makes it easier to figure out when it's more effective to use our now-expensive dispels and when the boss is about to start hitting extra hard.

ForteXorcist I used to use SO many of this addons cool features, but nowadays I really only use the cooldown bar. I've since moved the bar back down to the right hand side under my Skada frame, so the screenshot above isn't entirely accurate. It lets me watch how close my cooldowns are to being ready again. I suppose I could add a set of Power Auras to do the same thing, but I still like my bar. It stays for now.

Chinchilla Map This makes my map square on two sides and round on two sides. It also tells me who is pinging the map and what my map coordinates are. It can do other things that I'm not interested in. But that may change. I have been known to go back and make use of old features when I get a wild hair to do so :P.

Mik Scrolling Battle Text This is the addon I'd most like to either replace or get rid of. I like seeing my healing numbers, knowing what's coming in, but I'm not entirely sure it's not just background noise getting lost in the ocean of the raid environment. I haven't seen anything better yet, though, so right now it teeters on the edge of oblivion.

Power Auras Classic This is my current favorite addon. It does a little bit of everything if you take the time to configure it. It can also make your screen look like a complete mess.

Don't try this at home! Actually, do, it's funny to see all your various timers and auras up all at once and try to pick them apart. I have auras that tell me when my Wildgrowth and Swiftmend are off cooldown, when the haste buff from Nature's Grace is active and for how long, how long my Omen of Clarity has to run (thanks to Keeva at TBJ), how long my tree form has left, and then that cluster in the middle are mostly get-out-of-crap warnings for the Twilight Ascendant Council fight (thanks to Beru at Falling Leaves and Wings). There's also a couple that show me the number of Lacerate stacks I have up as a bear. Power Auras is imminently versatile and definitely a mod I use for many, many things.


Skada Probably my newest addon, Skada replaces the functionality of both Omen and Recount, acting as an aggro table during combat and a damage/healing done table out of it. I can track individual fights and Skada comes with absorbs built into the healing numbers, which gives me a better picture of disc priest output.

DBM/Spell Timers Duh, who doesn't use this (or its cousin BigWigs) for raiding? Get out of the bad, here comes the big boss strike, everybody turn away from the boss RIGHT NOW -- it tells you all that and more. I also download DBM Spell Timers (from the DBM site) so that I can see when druid innervates and brezes are up along with the cooldown on heroism. More useful to have in a 25-man raid, but still nifty. If something HAD to go and I'd already ditched MSBT, I'd probably get rid of the spell timers next.

I guess my point in listing all these addons is that they have a purpose (mostly). I'm fully addicted to making modifications to my UI in order to improve my game. I try new things, put them into practice, and if they work, I keep them. If they fall flat (as so many have), then I ditch them. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Hi, my name is Raevyn and I'm an addon addict. And I feel fine :).

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