Kehoe

I have been using Magic Rune for over a week now, and it works decently enough for me, but I have a hard time with the DDR style scrolling of the graphics drawing my eye too far away from debuff cooldowns.

This is just a quick graphic I whipped up which shows what would likely work better for me (and possibly other people). This is a larger than I would have on my screen (I would put it about half the size), and the animation is choppy because I don't have the time to do it frame by frame,but it should give a good idea.



Notes
-With death runes, the frame takes on a gray color
-Instead of having the bar fade from black, cooldown could be indicated by black moving horizonal like timer mods
-Cooldown timer could be disabled or placed inside frame
-Runic power bar (thin horizontal) could be added to top/bottom of this frame
-Use of mod like debuff filter can place disease timers directly above or below this bar
-Flash (indicating cooldown finished) could be more subtle
-Enabling symbols inside the frames for added clarity (and help the colorblind)
-Someone with better color design talents than I can make the red, blue and yellow a more interesting color)

So if there is an addon maker who likes this design and wants to run with it, go for it.

 

Dristig

Ebon Plague does not have it's own DoT damage that I can find.

 

SurferX0

When thinking about what sort of rune display we need to very quickly and effectively gather the information we need to make decisions during combat, I still haven't found one that really meets that criteria. All these rune bar graphs, moving/flying runes all over the place, and guitar hero style displays are all well and good for soloing when we can stare at the UI and not really care what's happening but I find when I need to actually pay more attention to the fight than the UI (tanking and PvP), that UI design really doesn't work out well at all.

Ultimately what do we need? We need to know what rune is available now, and when the next rune will be up. So I think instead of building rune displays around showing 6 runes, build a rune display that only shows 3.

So 3 runes, nice and clear, simple rotating OmniCC style cooldowns, showing only the cooldown of when the next available rune of that type will be up. We don't really need to know in the heat of battle the cooldown of every rune as we just spend too much time looking at the UI, we need to know what's there, what's next, and how long, that's it.

Death runes will replace their respective runes as they come. And for example when you have a rune set that has both a death rune and regular rune active, it will show whichever has the shortest cooldown, and in the event both have the same cooldown, the death rune takes priority on the display.

Basically how the UI would look would be very similar to LynRune, which is just the default rune UI scaled bigger in the center of the screen with OmniCC cooldowns, except there would be only 3 runes instead of 6. Add a clean runic power bar and clear disease tracker and I think it would be perfect.

 

Janraea

I'm using magicrunes with a sound ('bell') attached to a rune being ready. After only a week or so, I don't really have to look at the runes to know what I have available, unless I've been interrupted by something - you tend to know what you have ready, as long as you have audible indicators to tell you when runes come up (and assuming you don't have 2/5 in BotN or the like). The sorting behavior is wonderful - I can tell at a glance what ability I should use (and where I am in a rotation).

The bottom line is that you shouldn't tell people what they need, the best you can say is what works for you. And there is no 'perfect'.

 

Decius

I like it. It looks a lot like a nicer looking, more flexible version of DeeKay, which is the Rune addon I'm currently using (and which works very well for me). It is small and compact while still giving you the most important information.

The only thing missing for me with this (and DeeKay) is a three digits display of Runic power like for example Rune Watch has.

Edit: Small screenshot of DeeKay:

 

level12wizard

This isn't directly related to rune displays, but it's close enough.

As anyone who's played the class knows, when you've used up all of a rune type, all abilities that use that rune type go on cooldown. It's been mentioned that this type of thing can be buggy with abilities that have an actual cooldown (rune tap, DnD, etc) appearing as not on cooldown when the runes come back up.

It also poses another huge, hairpulling problem for me. Any cooldown mod (I've tried a few different things, trying the one from the Forte package right now) will pick up EVERY single rune based ability when you use your runes. Some addons have options like "don't show cooldowns less than x seconds", but if you do that, you're excluding things like Mind Freeze that I would much rather have in the centralized cooldown display than on my action bars.

Does anyone have some kind of work around for this? It seems impossible, and I'm really frustrated that Blizzard set it up this way. Now that I'm using an actual rune tracker, it's a distracting waste of resources to constantly display more than half my abilities as on cooldown.

 

diospadre

Sadly I think that someone is going to have to write a DK specific cooldown tracking mod that only tracks IBF, Bone Shield, DnD, etc..

Even if all of the other cooldowns didn't show up, there are too many bugs with rune cooldowns for other mods to really deal with. As an example, watch yoour Bone Shield button during a fight. If it's on cooldown, it will seem to become available multiple times as Unholy runes refresh, even though the actual ability is nowhere near ready. Instead of using the cooldown provided by the client, the mod would have to determine the cooldown itself based on when you used it.

 

Jelloshots

I can't speak to the cooldown bug, but I'm pretty sure some cooldown mods allow you to blacklist, whitelist, or both. I believe the cooldown mod that comes with DoTimer does this.

 

level12wizard

Right, that's what I'm talking about. The action button cooldown display is bugged to absolute hell.

Be that as it may, I can track things like Bone Shield accurately with mods like CooldownTimers (or whatever). They never pre-maturely show it as "up", at least in my experiences. The problem is that they track abilities like Icy Touch, Chains of Ice, Obliterate, etc, when you run out of runes.

Something like blacklisting all spellbook cooldowns under 11 seconds, while making an exception for crucial abilities like Mind Freeze, Pestilence, Dark Command, Howling Blast, etc...would be ideal, but that's way over my head. Blacklisting abilities under 11 seconds does indeed work, and quite a few addons have that option, but it becomes an incomplete set of cooldowns.

I'd like to find a way to do that in a way that will work with most cooldown mods, as everyone has their preference. I'm not looking to make a mod, just to filter out all these pointless <10 second calls. I doubt anything has such advanced filtering for this in an option panel, but I'm hoping it's possible through an .lua edit.

 

Janraea

I don't know a way that would work with 'most cooldown mods' (and I doubt one exists), but TellMeWhen handles DK cooldowns very well, though it takes some configuration each time you change specs (since there are some new cooldowns in each tree).

I've also noticed that my action bar cooldowns sometimes don't light up when the ability can only be cast with use of a death rune. I think this only happens with abilities that take more than one rune.

 

Leaflock

Your graphic is basically already possible to create with Magic Rune, and it's similar in principle to what I use. I set up something simple and non-intrusive-- it's small and sits under my character. I wanted something I didn't have to look at, which is sort of the point. When you're raiding or pvping, you can't stare at rune cooldowns or debuffs. You have to be able to get that information quickly and easily when you want it. So what I settled on was small, short bars, using the alpha settings to make ready runes obvious. The alpha is about 25% for runes on cooldown, so you can see their timer if you look, but the runes off cooldown are the most visible at a glance. Alpha is set to 0 when out of combat to hide the display.

 

Dristig

Those of you looking for more alpha setting controls I just added background alpha and OOC alpha to Rune Pack.

 

Kaveli

I've been using Dristig RunePack mod for weeks now and the recent changes have been icing on the cake. It is an excellent rune addon that is ready to go out of the box. I highly recommend it.

 

richard

I'm using ForteWarlock (or ForteXorcist, whatever), for cooldowns, and you can either rightclick the icons you want to ignore, or set them yourself in the options menu under Filtering -> Customize.
Works great for me and the reason I like it so much is because it's just a single bar with all my cooldowns instead of a seperate bar for every cooldown .

 

level12wizard

Yes, many addons allow you to blacklist spells, and that's great. I can blacklist a ton of spells that don't have actual cooldowns. But it doesn't solve the problem. Abilities I do want to know the cooldown of still have a rune cost and improperly appear as on cooldown when the runes are used up.

TellMeWhen: Yes, I can make it only show what I want, but what I want shows up at improper times because of rune cooldowns. Not to mention I don't like the setup, from what I can find it has no way of telling me how long a cooldown has left.

The one addon I have found that KIND OF works how I want it to is CooldownWatch. It doesn't seem to show abilities when their runes are used up, it probably works different from most cooldown mods. However, whenever you actually use an ability, then use all it's runes, it freaks out and makes giant bars across the screen. Not to mention it has various bugs, can't display pet cooldowns as-is, and is tedious to setup, with the end result not being very effective as an actual cooldown display (I've tried it before, I just don't like it).

All in all, it's extremely frustrating, and I hope Blizzard changes it, or someone comes up with a good solution via mods.



On the subject of actual rune displays, I think people should be taking another look at OOC alpha fading if you plan to do any PvP or are even on a PvP server. Especially if you're fighting a class like a rogue that tries to get out of combat, it isn't a good idea. I can understand not wanting it in your face around Dalaran, but there are times where rune usage is crucial outside of combat.

 

Faerlun

looks like you're right on that one, i somehow got it into my head that each disease does damage, and never actually checked for ebon plaguebringer.

 

Phaux

This is the kind of thing I would like to see for the rune mod. Clean and simple, with square buttons, and compatible with button facade. The timer for the buttons could go something like a fade or could have an omnicc/cooldown count type capability.

Something like this.

 

Silly_Syra

In my experience Omnicc does put a cooldown count on your runes.

Your animations remind me of Runica by Lyn, might wanna check it out.
(works with Omnicc and BF)

 

righ

You can make something very similiar to that with Magic Runes. Disable bars, add CC to runes and voila.

 

boomix

DeathKnight.Info Runes is what you might want. It comes with silly sword graphic you can drop and change to simple square and scale it to 250% like I have. It supports sliding runes or timer over runes via OmniCC. It also has vertical/horizontal positioning. It has numerical value of your RP positioned wherever you want.

Last night was pessimistic skydive in a foolish narcotic shell

 

Phaux

Thanks guys these are both really good and pretty much what I was looking for. Unfortunately Runica has no config menu, you can only edit it through lua. Im not that savvy. Magic rune is great too, you cant get the square buttons or BF capability but I think its the one I am gonna go with. If I only they could become one together.

 

adamant1988

Some things we might want to consider from a usability perspective is a little bit of eye-tracking software. That is:
When we need to access information as quickly as possible, where is the best place to put it?

There is a law in design that states that the 4 corners of the screen are the easiest places to click, but we should be doing some basic usability testing for things like:

Where is the mouse pointer of most players kept? If it is near the mobs, then that is where the players' eyes are focused and it makes more sense to create a design that is compact and presents information at a glance.

What area of the screen is the easiest to see?
Which area is most important to not block?

In terms of design, I'm a minimalist so I think it's prudent to do the following with my rune addon:

1. Compact it
2. Move it
3. And only need to glance to get the info I need.

So, by those standards I think the best (read: quickest) design is going to be something with no more than 4 "spheres" (Blood, unholy, frost, and death) with a quick numerical indicator saying how many of each rune is available. This does, however, bring into question showing rune loading times, and for that I think we should look to the "layered" spheres where you can graphically (at a glance) get a rough idea of what your wait time is going to be like for that next rune.

That's my 2 cents.

 

kirson

Neotron, Can you add the option to hide the icons on the bars when the rune is not available?

In other words, if I see the icon I can assume the rune is ready otherwise I just see the bar.
Additionally, can you add a border/endcap option so i can eyeball the end of the bar.
Any chance we can float a cooldown countdown over the bars?

 

diospadre

Any word on Deathboard? I want to switch away from using Runewatch but I've become so accustomed to having my RP between my 2 disease icons that I just can't do it.

 

Dristig

I've slowed way down once I got Rune Pack stable because I need to hit 80, yes I'm not even 80 yet. I'm using Classtimer for my diseases and it is functional so It might be a while before I get Death Board going.