"Grid honestly scares me"

Me too. I think they had a cool idea but are kind of ignoring how it's going to be unusable for anyone apart from Dustin Hoffman in Rainman.

Here's my current 8x5 in 5x5 size for TBC raids:



It shows health decifit, mana and health bars, names, class, range, aggro and debuffs (ie. basically everything) in a highly readable form and occupies approx. 500x200 pixels.

AFAICT Grid will make this far less readable and will save you a few hundred pixels which is the definition of meh unless you are using a retro 1992 monitor @ 800x600. It seems to be solving a problem that doesn't exist which puts me off even before we get to the obvious useability concerns.

"You could modify an existing raid frames such as PerfectRaid or sRaidFrames (my personal favorite at the moment) to color boxes different based on range."

SRF will set the alpha based on range. This works very well with the "make important stuff stand out" idea as reducing the alpha of OOR units obviously makes the stuff you can heal stand out.

I agree that srf pretty much rocks and i much prefer it over perfect raid and AG. If I were DPS i'd use perfect i think and AG has some great stuff but srf's basic format and the efficeitn way it converys lots of information in a compact space is unbeatable for me.

Does anyone else think the "skein" feature RDX is doing for the expansion is a hilarious grasp for straw?

Its definately going to be funny watching it ina ction on some fight with AOE that hits only parts of the raids at once

Nice hadn't even noticed Saroz had added that feature in.

What is this skein feature dispadre? I've not kept up on RDX because I'm not a fan of pay to use mods.

It draws lines from a moving name plates to the fixed nameplates

Maybe Im dense, but what does all that skein stuff represent?

Due to being unable to dynamically sort raid frames AND allow them to be targetted / click-cast within that frame, ie. current day emergency monitor. The Skein is used to draw lines from the "Skein Out" (Emergency Monitor) frame which is sorted by HP, but can't be used to cast, to the main frame, which can't be dynamically sorted, but can be used to cast.

Heh okay its hard to tell from that one since its just a test. But the row of buttons on the left is people's health from lowest to highest going downwards. Then the lines connect from the lowest 5 to their name in the nonsorted list. The one on the right is mana.

And if thats not confusing enough for you there is also this version.

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense now.

No that's not right. In BC you can't have an emergency monitor because health bars can't be ordered dynamically. So what you have is one window that is ordered dynamically that you can't click on with lines going to the other window, which you can click on. It's hilariously idiotic and a desperate attempt to get people to pay them for a product which really won't do much of anything in the expansion.

Not exactly a revolutionary UI per-se, but what I often do as a healer for position-intensive fights is to arrange the raid bars's locations in a rough approximation of their actual positioning around the room. It makes for a very efficient means of telling which areas may need backup should people screw up and die, as well as a rough range gauge for cross-group patch healing. Situational awareness++ for calling shots mid-fight, too.

For example in C'Thun -

I used to do it for Onyxia, Ragnaros, Razorgore, Skeram, Fankriss (for the bug tanking groups), Huhuran but don't really bother with those anymore due to outgearing the fights. I still use it for Noth though, since we assign corner DPS via groups in p2 and it -still- gets messy at times.

Now, if only Perl Classic could save and recall multiple layouts with minimal hassle...

The Skein thing is just one of several things that the RDX6 Author initially thought up as ways to help people visualize the sortings in the Xpack. Skein is not the end-all-be-all solution, he's not advertising it as such. Veni is working to come with up with multiple ways to help people achieve the data viewing that they want. I admit, the Skein is a bit silly I think, but hey, maybe someone will like it.

Edit - per the post above, I used to do the same thing on C'thun with my groups, it helped a lot so that healers could cross heal groups that were nearby if someone was slow after a beam.

I'm happy to test this out, but you're going to have to hold my hand for a second here. How exactly do I apply these commands? Just copy and paste both of these into a macro? I have a feeling I'm missing something important.

PS: Why don't you just submit this as a small mod and get a beta key? :P

That would be far more overseeable in regards to people needing help if the bar fill order is reversed (That is, a bar fills up as someone needs more healing) or possibly by simply drawing some obvious icon next to people needing healing (A fairly large arrow?).

Drawing lines between the two just means you get a confusing mess.

I don't have a Beta key, but I've been reading up on the various changes made to what is and isn't allowed in the LUA a bit. So...looking at this crazy sorted, not sorted Emergency Monitor stuff....

You're not allowed to dynamically sort and create clickable frames in TBC? That seems kinda silly. But if that's true, what about destroying and recreating entire frames? I suppose that'd perhaps be too memory intensive? Or would dynamic GC take care of the removal of the extra frames? Doesn't Ace2 normally created and destroy a large number of frames when dealing with mods like Squishy?

I see. Perhaps between now (not raiding) and TBC is a good time for me to enter the modding programming world...

And another idea...Since you can't destroy the frames, and you can't programatically move clickable frames...Can you change the contents of clickable frames? Why not simply change the contents of these frames (that means you'll have to redraw say 5 frames on every refresh, I can't see that being a very consuming process).

You can change the visible contents, but not the action caused by interacting with the frames, or the size the frame has for purposes of interacting. So you can, for instance, make someone's name appear in twice the normal size if there's some kind of emergency going on, but you can't make the clickable health bar twice the size while keeping it clickable, or change the information it's displaying to a different Unit ID and expect it to target the new Unit ID.
For clarity, a Unit ID is for instance 'target' or 'raid32target'. ;)

That's unfortunate. So you can't programatically change the target of a frame, or move the frame once the combat flag has been raised? That seems somewhat silly. Targetting isn't much of an issue, but target -> casting in one button seems to be an issue.

Perhaps I'm not approaching this properly. Let's pretend nobody clicks. You can still create a sorted list of health defecit members. Can you have keybindings (like in CTRA/Squishy) to target the top most, 2nd, 3rd, etc? These wouldn't be clickable frames, but is it still possible for keybindings to target party/raid members?

Let's all pretend for a second that there is a thread already in the forum for discussing the WoW 2.0 UI changes to LUA and the macro/scripting environment.
Oh wait, here it is!
http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=8849

You can bind a key to assist "raid1target".

You cannot bind a key to assist "raidNtarget", where N is chosen programmatically.

Basically, think of it this way: Inside of combat, any function which casts a spell or targets can't have it's target or spellname/rank determined by anything that would involve an IF clause. That's a slight simplification, but close enough.

(Skein is stupid. Grid looks nice, especially since you can turn off a lot of it's functions, being that it's a modular design, and scale it up if the size bothers you.)

I'm a long time reader of these forums, and this thread finally got me to register and post. I'm a bit of UI junky - no formal training in UI design, but I get to do layouts for projects at work, and have always been in to both form and function - which of course can be applied easily to WoW.

This post is probably going to be somewhat tangential, as my layout is reflective on a device I just purchased: a Nostromo N52 speedpad.

First, let me lead with a screenshot:



Now, the part I want to draw attention to are the buttons, which oddly enough are all located along the right side, and grouped. If you are familiar with the Nostromo at all, you know it has basically 3 "states" in addition to the default - a Red state, Blue state, and Green state. With that said, the button layout probably makes a bit more sense, but let me elaborate.

My main character, of course, is a priest - holy/disc for both PVE AND PVP (on the PVP side, I'm an armor priest, taking ZHB, etc. etc.) What I found, especially as I was advancing my gameplay in tough PVP matches (our guild runs essentially nothing but premades, and dipsticks specifically to fight against premades) is that I needed more things bound. I needed faster access to key functions, such as trinkets, pots, and the like. What I was finding, basically, is that I was running out of easily-accessible keybindings - things were spread out, forced me to take my hand either off my mouse or the left side of the keyboard (I use both the mouse and WASD for movement as I can switch between them both fluidly depending on if I am hitting a keybinding, or using the mouse to click on something) and things were becoming inefficient. I was losing time and patience with both determining keybindings and actually executing said keybindings. The main thing to top all of that off - TBC was going to make this phenomenon even worse: prayer of mending, binding heal, etc.

I decided I needed to do something about it now if I was going to build the proper "foundation" for the future - and that is where the N52 enters. I had read several posts in the WoW and wowace forums about it, and the praise was generally good - there is a learning curve, but it will completely change how you play. I purchased one around the middle of last week, and basically sat on it for several days, just letting it sit beside me while I played "as usual." This allowed me to start getting my head around how I was going to utilize the device the best - what do I click the most, what do I not like specifically about my current layout, how can I address it with the N52, etc.

What you see in the screenshot is the culmination of that effort: 4 "blocks" of buttons. The buttons were set using Bongos - each bar consists of 15 buttons, arranged in a block of 5. This matches the layout of the Nostromo, and provides a visual similarity to the hardware device. This both eases the learning curve (yes, there is one) and will hopefully help when adding new things - each button on the block of buttons corresponds to the actual key on the N52. The backgrounds behind these buttons (red, green, blue, and clear) basically correspond to my shift states, and again provides another visual cue to the N52 - there are LEDs on the device that show the shift state that you currently have set - if I see the green out of the corner of my eye, I know that I'm going to be using the buttons in the green space. Shifting states for me is done by the D-Pad.

Now the main thing behind this is not the actual layout, but how I selected where each spell ended up. I also did this visually, especially when I realized something - I could easily categorize my spells and abilities in to sections - I had "essential" instant cast stuff, for example dispel, I had healing spells, I had offensive spells, and then things I like to categorize as "miscellaneous." Things like shadowmeld, or Elune's grace - things that are handy to have, but are not primary skills. Most every class can do this: casters with spell schools, warriors with stances, etc. Everything can be categorized. This also helps if I actually DO need to click something with the mouse - the green section are my healing spells, etc. Even my color choice was made deliberately - green because in my head green is generally a "positive" color, hence that is where my healing is. Red as generally a "negative" color, hence where all my offensive abilities are. Again, it's just another connection between the device, my monitor, and my brain. I have the shift states set based on ease-of-use in clicking - green is the easiest for my thumb to set, and therefore is my top "shifted" block of buttons, while blue is the hardest and hence contains all my "once-in-a-while" abilities, and is at the bottom of the block.

As you can see, I have a lot of buttons unused. This is the future. Basically everything is open except for the 6 buttons located in the very top block, because those still correspond to WASD for me. As I need to tweak, or add, I can just throw an ability on the button and be good to go. This will be done as I get new spells, and even make tweaks after I get more use out of the device (going on about a day of use now) as I see what is easier to hit, what I mess up on, what I consider offensive ability versus healing (for example, Holy Nova I'm finding I equate with offense rather than healing as I first thought I would), etc. I can just move what I want around, and have it work with the Nostromo as well as provide a visual indication of where the ability currently is. As I get more familiar, I'll be able to back off what I show - for example, empty buttons and the like. But as I'm still learning this, I have it set to show this stuff - again, so I can have an easier time with visualization. I want to get to the point where I don't even need buttons showing at all.


One more thing...

I want to point out one more thing - the small box with the three letters Asy in it. That is Grid. I know there has been some discussion that Grid is going to be overload, or not useful. Let me tell you, in just two uses of it in AV - you could not be more wrong. I was in the same boat as the doubters, but just using it convinced me otherwise. Having the amount of information shown in a concise, easy-to-read location, is amazingly useful. Even not having to move the mouse as far to click on units to cast something makes it alone worth it, and is probably shaving fractions of a second in my reaction time. I still need to tweak the display some and what it is showing me, but I personally am finding it very useful and would encourage everyone to get it a try, especially if you doubt it. This will eventually rest below my unit frame/target unit frame, so all health is set in a consolidated space, at the lower center of my screen.

Sorry for the novella, but I hope I explained myself clearly and brought something new to the table for people to discuss!