Ok, so maybe obligatory is too strong.  Not EVERY blogger posts or talks about their UI, but many do.  Anyhow, I checked the old PTD inbox the other day to find this:

I love your blog; it is incredibly entertaining and informative.

Could you please give me an idea of what add-ons you use? I am particularly interested in your UI adds. I like the simplicity of your UI.

John P. Bacon

First of all, John made the right move by buttering me up first.  If you have a question, it’s best to compliment me first.    Anyhow, it’s not the first time someone has asked about my UI, so let’s get to it.

My UI, like most of yours I’m sure, is a mish mash of different elements tailored to my liking.  The evolution of my UI took place over time.  In the beginning I used Cosmos, which if you’ve never used it is basically an all-inclusive UI mod.  In the early days of WoW, it was one of the only major “mods” out there.  It’s been a long time since I used it, so I’m sure it’s changed a lot over the years.

After I played with Cosmos for a long time, I realized I wanted more flexibility, so I started using CTMod.  It gave me a lot of the things I wanted as far as improving my UI, and it was still fairly close to the default Blizzard UI.

I soon got irritated with CTMod as it never worked right after patches, and not too long ago I heard about Ace Mods, and started using them.  That’s when I started getting serious about modding my UI.  Before that, I had just used bits and pieces to enhance the existing UI, but once I moved to Ace I began to tear the whole thing down and tweak everything.

Here is a shot of my UI as it stands today:

It’s not the most heavily modded UI out there, but it is fairly far from the default UI.  No, I didn’t do any fancy graphics work to tie it all together, I wouldn’t know where to start with that.  I did, however, overhaul it completely.

The Elements of My UI

Red Box:  eePanels

The area in the red box is the background for the bottom of my UI.  I decided I wanted most of the “big” stuff to sit at the bottom of my screen.  eePanels is a mod that I use to create the background box.  I don’t do anything fancy with it, but it helps tie the UI together.

Orange Circles:  Bartender3

Bartender3 is one of the most important parts of my UI.  It’s the mod I use to tweak, nip and tuck all of my action bars.  It’s a very robust addon, and does everything I want it to do.  You’ll notice a box of action bar buttons in the middle left of my screen, that’s where I store most raid/group usable items.  You’ll see drums, pots, my Prayer Book, and other stuff.  I keep it there because I spend so much time clicking on party members in Grid, so it’s easy to hit a pot or whatever when I need it.

Blue Circle:  Elk Buff Bars

Elk Buff Bars is a recent addition to my UI.  It replaces the default buff icons with a list of bars with exact timers.  I like the way it cleans up the look and feel of my UI.

Pink Circle:  PitBull

I use PitBull for a few different unit frames, though not the main party and raid frames.  (I use Grid for that, but more on Grid later.)  I use PitBull for my frame, my target, target of target, pet and other “secondary” unit frames.

Purple Circle:  Quest Helper

Everyone uses Quest Helper by now, right?  Go get it.  It gives me that cool arrow to show me where to find stuff, and gives a better on screen quest tracker.  The only thing I don’t like about it is I sometimes have trouble getting rid of the arrow if I want to.  I don’t need quest waypoints while in a raid for Pete’s sake!

Light Blue Square:  Recount

I use Recount to track my mad DPS (yes, DPS!!), and it fits nicely in that corner of my UI.

Yellow Circle (Yes, I know this isn’t yellow, but I don’t want to make anyone’s eyes bleed, including my own!): XPBar

I mostly put this in because I couldn’t adjust the Bartender3 EXP bar to my liking.  I wanted something more compact yet readable, and XPBar was the ticket.

Map Mod:  Simple Mini Map

I didn’t circle it, as it was already getting too busy down there.  I changed the size, shape and moved my Map with SimpleMiniMap

Green Circle:  Grid

Grid is another mod that I couldn’t live without.  It’s a very compact yet customizable set of raid frames.  I’ve tried Pitbull and others, but nothing beats Grid IMO.  It takes some work to get it set up, but once you do it’s golden.  In this shot I am not in a group, but below is a shot that shows Grid in a 25 man setting.  Keep in mind I have made some tweaks to my UI since this shot, but I haven’t gotten a shot from a 25 man since then.

One other important mod to note that is not in the other shot is HOTCandy.  It’s the set of green bars just below my Grid setup.  This is what I use to keep track of my HOTs on various targets.  You can also see a couple other mods that I use in this shot, like Prat that handles my chat and Omen that I use to monitor threat.  I also use a whole bucket load of FuBar addons that you can see here.  I still use them all, I’ve just now made it so they auto-hide unless I mouse to the top of the screen.  I couldn’t live without all the little things FuBar does for me.  I used to use Titan Panel for this, but like the customizability that FuBar gives me with a smaller memory footprint.

Anyhow, that about does it I think.  I could probably spend another four pages just talking about the different mods I use, but this was more about the mods that make up my UI.  It’s not the fanciest UI out there, but I feel like I accomplished what I wanted to with it.  I wanted to streamline things a bit and open up the viewable area, and I’ve done that.  I hope you like it, and keep those emails coming!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 10:57 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.