MSBT will automatically filter out DOTs if you tell it to, no need to play with thresholds. I find it to be a lot better than SCT.

I've personally found that horizontal bars for rune cooldowns is just too much extra stuff I really don't need to know about, and all that extra movement isn't helping me do my job any better. Disease timers are almost entirely unnecessary since they're only going to be refreshed at the predesignated and predetermined point in your rotation. The exception being Unholy with the Scourge Strike Glyph... but even then you don't need to think about it until you're using a FU and notice your diseases have about 2 seconds left. So I really don't want to know about them at all unless I'm in that situation.
I just use Big Debuffs on Xperl and it works great for me.

I use SimpleRune for my rune cooldowns, I find that having the 2 Rows, 3 Columns perfectly displays my Blood's to the Left and the Frost Unholy pairs on the right. With any spec's rotations I quickly form a distinctive pattern and can tell where I am in the rotation by a glance at my runes.
The runes fill up top to bottom and at a lower opacity, reach full height but still at lower opacity and I know there is 1 GCD until that rune is due to be used, it pops into full colour and I fire it off right away.
For any more detailed timing information I can look at the clock wipe on any of my rune abilities.

I hide the background and keep the rune graphics on, Death Runes colour to purple but keep the original rune graphic so I know what type is "behind" the death rune by position as well as icon.
The closest to coming off cooldown is at the top, but other than that the runes never move or pop around the place... they can always be found where I left them.

If you haven't yet... definitely try something out in a 2 Row, 3 Column format... it just feels so intuitive and delivers all the information you could want in a way that just feels natural.

My only gripe with SimpleRune is that the graphics used are very low res so you can't really scale it up to be nice and huge.

Really? I spec Blood for raids and it is by far the least disease dependent of the spec's but I still keep a disease timer up. Sometimes you miss and have to reapply and just watching the target's debuffs is no good what with at least 20 other people putting up debuffs. And a disease timer like NeedToKnow or Classtimer is invaluable for Blood and Frost spec'd folks looking for Death Coil and Howling Blast procs.

As for your take on Rune monitoring that's perfectly cool. Personally I do horizontal bars to the side and keep them fairly large. That way I don't have to keep an eye on them but can still have an idea of when to next obliterate or heart strike.

Xperl Big Debuffs moves your diseases to prime position and at double the size along with a countdown, so it's easy to notice if it's missing, I prefer a numerical display for dots however, rather than too many horizontal bars.
I'm more likely to notice a missed ability from the rune itself... or as Blood or Frost I'll be using a cast sequence to deal with that anyway.
I do have trouble watching for my Freezing Fog proc when frost however... I'll have a look at NeedToKnow and Classtimer for that. Though naturally if I'm in the Runic Dump phase and the Howling Blast key is available, then it's due to a Fog Proc since no runes are up yet.
You get loads of information about your runes just from the default cooldown wipes that appear on all your abilities when different rune combination are on cooldown. Most people could play exactly the same without seeing the runes at all... it's just a complex ability cooldown system.

Of course UI's are always going to be personal preference, I just feel a lot of people are taking on information they don't need, but neglecting more important things like good visual representation of Frost and Unholy or Death Rune pairs becoming available.

I just wanted to post this only because I've been toying around with it for a few days now and its kind of new and funky, not sure if it's a DPS improvement though!

I use various Power Aura's at the top of my screen with various conditionals. The 3 main top ones, Gargoyle, Bone Shield and Horn, are relatively self explanatory, there are in my face reminders that my buffs are missing or that I could use Gargoyle, I am terrible at forgetting to reuse him near the end of fights!

The 5 others, are for a kind of priority system I've been using. Howling blast shows if I have the Freezing Fog buff, then I have a reminder if Frost Fever is missing, the middle one, most important, can I cast Icy Touch. Then bloodstrike (but this only shows if icy touch is not possible, so I don't waste death runes). Then blood plague, and finally Death Coil if I have over 60 rune power, I am toying with this threshold as a reminder.

Anyway, it's nothing magical, but its a fun way, I never look at my action bars now, or spam buttons, I keep simplerune there because I love it as the above poster mentioned I couldn't use bars/timers etc. But even that could go if I get this feeling right.

On a side note, thanks for all the advice and information on these boards

This.

I love that functionality. I tried DoTimers to handle my diseases but discovered that with Big Debuffs it was quicker and easier to just glance at the target frame. Also, DoTimers could badly spam the screen if I Pestilence a bunch of mobs. As a result, I use DoTimers to handle my cooldowns but that's about it.

I'm still considering switching back to Pitbull, though, because I can create a more minimalist frame with it. Does anyone know if it also has some sort of Big Debuff functionality?

One other suggestion: Quartz has a GCD bar that you can use. I use it for my mage a lot (because of the stopcasting macro thing a while back, I got into the habit of not spamming my fireball button on the mage), and will probably add it back to the DK. It's pretty handy.

I couldn't play without DoTimer and NeedToKnow anymore. Especially as I can't find a good buff/debuff mod I have to settle for CT_BuffMod which does take alot of room.

Here's the screen, basically I use ag_UF's own rune timers to keep track of them, has worked for me so far. Besides, when you get your rotation going, you don't need to see the runes at all, just the CD of Obliterate.

I was wondering if anyone had changed that warrior add-on (sorry I'm not sure the name) to display some graphic on your character when Horn isn't up. The mod was for B - shout and commanding shout previously.

Any help would be awesome.

You can see my UI in action here: Pacifist - Media

Video of a patchwerk 10man kill weeks ago. UI hasn't changed since. What I don't like about it is the damage output on the screen. I set the SCTdamage threshold to 500 but now with better gear my screen still gets filled up with numbers. Even worse when im unholy spec.

Has anyone found a cooldown timer mod that puts a CD number over the icon on blizz's standard UI yet? Last time I checked there weren't any working ones yet.

Well, I've have OmniCC for CD in the button, and its quite fine!

I also prefer Runewatch.

It's clean and simple, just how I like my UIs. I don't use any fancy rune addon or disease monitor. I stick with XPearl's big unit debuffs which track my diseases just fine, and the built in rune bar for XPearl works just fine for me, too. I really do like NeedToKnow and the ability to put timer bars up when I proc things, which is very handy so that i'm not stuck staring at my buff bar for Sudden Doom procs.

Yes, I have the mudflap girl on my UI.

I use Satrina Buff Frames (SBF), which is nicely customisable in terms of tweaking buff timers, buff sizes and placement/arrangement of buffs and debuffs.

Satrina Buff Frames 3 : WoWInterface Downloads : Buff/Debuff/Spell Mods

I use Xperl for the rest of my unit frames, which seems to hide the runes by default... so I never had to deal with that problem.
If another rune mod knows how to kill the default rune bar it shouldn't be too much trouble to get that put into SimpleRune as well... though the author hasn't done any updates since it was created, so I'm not sure.

Not that I remember (though my memory is shoddy to say the least), but you can set different border colours for your *own* debuffs.

Different question:
My own death knight hit 67 yesterday and despite being used to playing a druid... I'm getting somewhat overwhelmed with all the different abilities. Especially since I've been speccing back and forth between Blood and Unholy (and will likely try Frost shortly as well), it's hard to figure out what the 'must have' abilities are. Naturally, that has an impact on how you hotkey things, but I'd like to keep the important stuff within easy reach. The Skills/Hotbar management thread seemed to devolve largely into "these are my keybinds", which isn't remotely interesting. However, where you put things does have an impact on how you build the UI, so I think it may be appropriate here as well. I'm not interested in hotkeys, but button/barplacement.

I place my action bars to bottom (in the middle of the screen). I stack three bars of 12 buttons on top of each other. The bottom most bar uses the normal number keys, the second bar (middle one) uses shift-modifer with <,z,x,c,q,e,§,f thrown in to the right most buttons (using scandinavian keyboard) and the top action bar uses ctrl-modifier. I change presences with alt+1/2/3 (did the same with stances as warrior).

On the bottom action bar I have my most used abilities on 1-5:

1. Plague Strike
2. Icy Touch
3. Blood Strike/Heartstrike
4. Obliterate/Scourge Strike
5. Death Coil/Frost Strike

These are the actions that belong to the most common DK rotations, in a nice order as well. The rest of the bottom bar is inhabitated by skills I use extremely rarely, such as Summon Ghoul and Army of the Dead.

On the middle bar I have the abilities that I use a lot but that are (mostly) outside the common rotations. I use Shift+1-5 for Horn of Winter, Runestrike, Death Strike, Pestilence and Blood Boil. After that comes the special keys that use for crowd control, AoE and special abilities (Rune Tap if blood, Howling Blast if frost and Unholy Blight if unholy).

On the top bar I have my common macros (Mount, Pot/Healthstone, Trinkets, etc) and longer, but more common cooldowns (Dancing Rune Weapon/Gargoyle, Empower Rune Weapon) and survivability abilities (Bone Shield, Anti-Magic Shell, Icebound Fortitude, Every Man For Himself). I'm not hardcore enough and I usually click these top row abilities.

That's pretty much the way I have it. I don't use any fancy cooldown bars (except for (de)buffs) so I mostly use my action bars to track my cooldowns. Everything is nicely stacked in same place, even unit frames which I have put above of the action bars. I've always found having the important stuff in the bottom middle of the screen is the most efficient and ergonomic way to play MMOs.

It appears that is what hides the rune frame, but I can't tell if I need to initialize the _G table/array or if it is a global. Wow wiki is a little confusing as I see it referred to as a global but then see other examples where it is being set to the output of a get env variables function. Can anyone give me a quick answer?

EDIT: Worked. you can either put it in the onload event of the SimpleRune.LUA during the onload function or else just make a macro for it and run it.

You can get the general gist of my priorities from the snippet screenie here This Thread: Post 11 - I have a key bar of 12 which has my most commonly used abilities, or priority abilities (mindfreeze, IBF, Bone Shield, AMS). I then have two additional bars dropped to a faint transparency with increased opacity on mouseover to house the rest of the stuff I'd typically make use of. Ctrl + same buttons handles the left side bar, which has the more commonly used abilities that cover certain scenarios (deathgrip & taunt, strangulate, empower rune weapon and gargoyle, bloodboil, racial, etc), while the right hand bar uses a shift modifier and has things like mount macros, health pots, health stones, uncommon abilities and long cooldowns (army of the dead, obliterate).

This system works pretty well for me for all specs, roles and classes, although the key to it working for the deathknight was the integration with the mouse; I have my thumb buttons bound to ctrl and shift, and runic power dumps bound to wheel up (death coil) and wheel down (rune strike). I have considered moving some of the powers around - shifting defensive cooldowns over to the ctrl bar, and putting all offensive abilities onto the core bar (bloodboil, gargoyle, empower rune weapon would be the ones I'd move), but so far, I've not felt the need to, and it saves me from having to shift stuff around if I do a spot of tanking. Hope that helps.

To get back to Sympa's original question - I've actually used one of Sympa's UI layouts on my abandoned feral tank, and there were two issues that prevented it from being completely effective - as all of the information is so condensed, it can be easy to get lost in the detail - there aren't natural spaces to delimit the various sections, although I suspect that is a preference issue. The big thing was that whilst all of the key infomation is in one place, that block is effectively dead space - if an add moves into that space, you have to shift your view to be able to click to select it, costing time. I think the more traditional centred bottom approach doesn't suffer as much from this dead space effect, although there are other drawbacks.

Thought I'd add mine in here:



I'm using the Magic Runes addon in between the two unit frames.

The textures are mostly original.

I went through about 10 different setups before finding one that I enjoyed. I went back to using a HUD mod like I did on my rogue way back during the AQ40 days, because it gets the job done while keeping my runes and runic power in my face at all times. I didn't like most of the creative new ideas people were throwing out there for watching runes, and found this simplistic approach to be more then enough.

Here's a video of my UI in action: Sartharion and Drakes movie.

My party frames are pretty cluttered in a raid, but I don't really use them for anything while in a raid. I use them primarily for PvP, unfortunately being in the arena qualifies as being in a raid, so there's no easy way for me to disable them the rest of the time. If anyone could figure out a way to fix that, it would be awesome.