I've been running with primarily the default UI for pretty much my entire WoW career. That's not to say that I've never used UI mods, it's just that majority of the mods I've used have been additions/overlays - unintrusive things that generally don't overwrite the default UI. My reasons for this are

- I didn't like the idea of becoming too "mod dependant", it's always a pain whenever there's a patch
- Like most people, I have a natural aversion to change and I dislike having to learn new things :P

Of course I've always been envious of people who have sexy UIs, and I always promised myself I would delve into stuff like Discord when the time was right. Well, now that the BC has been out for a week it seems the time is in fact right.

My question is where do I start? I'm assuming that I want to become familiar with the various Discord components. Is there any general advice people can give me on what to avoid in terms of mods? Should I just start downloading things and fiddling with settings? Are they any guides or FAQs I should be aware of?

I apologize if these questions are too abstract, but I just want to get an idea of what I'm in for. Any advice or info would be much appreciated at this point.

Discord is quite a pain to get to grips with, well, I found it to be anyway.

You'd be better off thinking about specific things in the UI which you think could work better for you, and then find a mod to do things the way you want them. Using the wowaceupdater (if you have ace-based addons) takes away much of the patch-day pain which you get with outdated code etc :)

Don't use discord, it isn't 2.0 compatible, and the versions that were edited to work only do so half-assedly. DUB may someday see release, but I don't know if Loz is going to keep playing WoW since his guild/friends sorta ditched him.

I've found bongos to be an excellent replacement for DAB - very easy to set up.

For more info: http://preview.tinyurl.com/2owaok

I was a pretty entrenched Discord user since I first discovered it, and I was very disheartened when I originally heard that Discord wasn't going to work with 2.0. That said, I've managed to make a decent approximation of my pre-2.0 UI with a combination of Bongos and ag_UF. My unit frames aren't exactly what they were before, but they're good enough. For the standard bar placement/modification stuff, Bongos does work similarly enough to Discord that it's not too bad. I miss floaters, but they can be emulated, as well, if you don't use up all 10 bars.

The one piece that I'm missing a replacement for is DFM. There are a few mods that let you move the minimap around (I believe Bongos even does this), but I miss the precision and wide range of options that DFM gave me. Oh well.

In any event, if you were interested in Discord as a way to make your screen less cluttered, Bongos and a resizable unit frame AddOn of your choice is the best place to start. You can, at least, shrink down the default UI's bars/unit frames and reposition them to better spots.

Regarding the minimap, I like simpleminimap a lot. No UF mod has really replaced my DUF frames, but my partial version of XPerl has the right info.

MarsBar is a great addon for making floaters.

Thanks for the reponses. Sounds like Discord might not be worth the trouble at this point, I'll give Bongos a try tonight.

PM me if you want a working copy of DFM.

http://www.discordmods.com/cgi-bin/s...al&msgnum=1159

includes the link to the 2.0 discord mods port.

DFM still works fine, although I did ditch it when I moved over to ACE-based things, since it is a big tough on my small amount of available memory

ag_UnitFrames - Unit Frames
Bongos - Action Bars
simpleminimap - Everything to do with the minimap
Buffalo - Everything to do with the default buff icons
Prat - Everything to do with chat
Cartographer - Atlas/Gatherer replacement
CT_MailMod - Handy

These are the primary ones I use and I love the results I am getting. Still need to work with Prat a bit, but overall these guys do everything I could ever need.

I've actually warmed up to Bartender3 for a bar mod recently. I'm still using Bongos on my main because I'm too lazy to rearrange the shots and keybinds but all of my alts use B3.

I tried Perl Classic and X-Perl and found them too pretty to be functional (too much other stuff in the way of what I want to see). What I need out of frames are health/mana/buffs/debuffs and nothing else. Special hate for X-Perl's fade in/out of hp changes, ugh.

coming from a long time DUF user, I liked how out of the box it was similar to my DUF, and that it "just works."

I've also grown to love the aggro plugin that changes the health bar color for someone being targeted by an enemy.

This makes healing so much easier. Knowing who has aggro lets me figure out if a HoT is adequate or if that squishy is going to need PW:S / spam healing. It tells me within a couple of pulls whether the PuG is going to finish the instance.

Of course, it also leads to healer tunnel vision, where I'm watching bars instead of watching the fight.

Does the aggro plugin need separate downloading, or is it part of the main package for AG unit frames? (haven't dl'd that one yet, but I'm probably about to). Also, oh healer users of ag_uf, could you tell me whether it allows you to rearrange the bars of the people in your party? Not move the whole block of bars, but the order of the bars within that block?