Do you use one? If yes, which one and why? If no, why not?

Lately I've tried archud and I like the functionality of it, but I feel like it's very hard to get used to/read on the fly. Anyone have one they particularly recommend?

No, takes up too much space and could never get used to looking at them or have them look the way I wanted.

the other thing I noticed is that very few people in the post your interface thread use one, which doesn't seem to be a good sign either.

I'm completely habituated to ArcHUD now. That plus SCT means I'm never looking at anything other than the middle of my screen. Out of combat, it fades to ~90% transparency, so it's pretty nonintrusive.

Edit for why: Well, it was the first one I tried, and it had a good obvious combo point counter, health/energy, and so forth. Also, I prefer the layout of it.

I used to have the Nurfed HUD, way way way back, but in the end just got rid of it, as I never looked at it, and it ended up taking space from my already limited game field.

It really entirely depends on what they do, I see little need for having one in PVE, but I think having one in PVP is essential. As for judging how useful something is by looking at other people's UIs is, that's a bad idea, I mean most of those people use Skinner and still have their action buttons on their screen :/

I personally find HUDs one of those things which are very role dependent on whether they're useful or not. When I'm healing or tanking I don't find them particularly useful, but if I'm playing my rogue I find that something about the class just fits well with using a HUD; that could be because I favor playing him with daggers (Even if Swords is a wiser choice for leveling) and thus want to pay attention to both my energy and how I'm facing in regards to what I'm attacking at the same time of course.

So verdict, as far as I'm concerned, is that HUDs are either distracting and obscuring or extremely valuable sources of information. It just depends. I used to enjoy having a HUD back when I was playing my Priest as Shadow as well.

IceHud is wonderful. Gives me all the info I need in an easy to see and concise manner. No need for extraneous party windows and I don't need to see what my toon's portrait looks like. Plus, it fades to 0 when out of combat which keeps my screen nice and clutter-free.

This.

Aye, have to say I've been using icehud for a while and although it took me ages to get use to looking at it, it was time well spent.

I used MetaHud whilst levelling up - as it had some good functionality, but due to the huge advantage in using Wowaceupdater I changed to Icehud which is also very good.

I did try to go back to not using a hud but once you are used to looking at the centre of the screen for all your info, it is a retrograde step to be glancing all over your screen in the middle of combat.

How do you guys generally set your huds up? I tried Icehud, and I arranged my bars on the left, and my target's on the rights, to make it more like a unit frame to read. Any suggestions for the setup of bars?

Been using HUD's since I first forced myself to get used to them. I find it's alot better to consolidate the info in the game around SCT and HUD at the center of the screen.

Using health-bars on one side, and mana/power-bars on the other, works like a charm once you get used to it.

Plus, completely transparent when out of combat is so squeaky nice and clean. Using IceHUD.

I tried out some HUDs but ended up just moving unit frames close to middle of the screen. At least at the time when I tried them they didn't offer enough flexibility to display exactly the stuff I want and not display the stuff I don't want.

I use MetaHUD and I really like how I can watch my combo points and energy right by my character. Positioning is important to a raiding dagger rogue, so I try to minimize eye drift as I'm trying to find the ass of whatever we're fighting. I prefer to have the unit frames up in the top left of the screen, even if it's a little redundant with the HUD.

I'm an archud user. I've always been a fan of keeping all pertinent information in the center of my screen so i don't have to look around to much. I'd agree with some of the above posters and say that whether a hud is useful or not depends on the person.

Same. I've only made minor changes to DHud - class colored names on target, health % colored names on target of target, and some other minor formatting things that I can't recall. I've been considering trying to hack an enemy cast bar onto it in the same style as the player cast bar. What kind of changes have you made?

It definitely takes some getting used to and it's been tough to integrate a focus target into a HUD setup - right now I just have a giant cast bar across the top of my HUD for my focus. I like the HUD because it keeps my eyes on the game, rather than flicking back and forth between game and unit frame. Moving unit frames to a central location is a tolerable compromise, but if you acknowledge that the goal is to minimize eye travel between that information and the game screen, why not go for the overlay approach and use a HUD?

Used to use IceHUD, but combined with SCT it led to me barely being able to see my character, which bugged the heck out of me when I was playing a rogue and really seeing my character and his position relative to things was important. So, I redid my SCT and nixed the HUD and that began a movement towards cleaner UI.

Instead of a HUD I now have my unitframes closer to the middle and MSBT framing my character (Inc heals/dmg on the right, outgoing heals/dmg left, messages above, cooldown warnings below rising up) and can see what's happening much better and still have great info available easily.

I've tried every HUD out there and at first they seem nice but after awhile I can't get used to it. It's harder for me to look at the HUD bars than a unit frame at my character's feet for some reason.

I built my own HUD with everything important arranged around my character. Keeps my mouse move distance to a few inces in pretty much all cases, especially arena whhere it really matters.

I use a combination of MetaHUD and DebuffFilter for my middle-screen goodness.

I like the HUD so that I have a basic level of health and rage information in the middle of the screen -- its scaled down and spread out a bit so it isn't obtrusive, but its just enough so I know when I need to press oh-shit buttons and when I should/shouldn't use heroic strike.

The vast majority of the HUD features are turned off. I just want the bars. And, I have it set to my my bars on the left and the target bars on the right -- having 2 health bars next to each other on the left side isn't exactly confusing, but it just isnt obvious to the point where I realize I'm about to die without stopping to look at it.

DFilter show my short class-specific buffs under my feet -- Shouts and Shield Block are the big ones. I also use it to get timers on Shield Wall and procs/trinket uses (lightning speed, time's favor, gnome ingenuity, set bonus procs, etc). I started using this long ago when I was DPS, so that my party would never need to yell at me for a battle shout, and fell in love with it. All the same, I should probably turn off procs light lightning speed -- its not like I do anything differently just because mongoose procced.

I also use DFilter to list important buffs down the side of my target's health bar -- sunder, clap, demo shout/demo roar/CoW, conc blow, revenge stun, rogue stuns (so i dont waste stuns on stunned trash).

I'll admit it is a little noisy... there is a lot of information there. But, thats what I'm going for -- while it doesnt win screenshot awards, it still looks nice enough, I know everything I really need to know just from lookin center screen, and dfilter means I dont have to sort through stuff that I dont care about to find the information I'm looking for.

The only thing I have to move my eyes for in combat are ability cooldowns, but they are only about a half inch further down.

Same here. Having energy, combo points and boss ass in the same 5 cm2 is invaluable.

Though HUD doesn't bother me much when I'm healing on the shammy, as I focus my attention on Grid and GotWood timers (sometimes too much, but that's another story).