While I can't say if these suggestions will make your UI better, I can offer suggestions that would make your screen cleaner.

1. You display your buffs (and debuffs) twice. At the top right by your minimap, and above your player unit frame. For me, debuffs are very important and so I place those (using Satrina Buffs) centered on the screen so I always know which ones I have active. For buffs that are relevant (such as Hand of Protection on Anub), I white list those and center them as well.

2. Your minimap (aside from the fact that it's the base minimap... I use Chinchilla) has several icons around it. I found that making macros and placing them on a separate bar which only appears on mouse over cleans up a lot of that. Examples include /grid config or /calendar.

3. Your micro bar (I think that's what it's called) that shows Character, Spellbook, etc can be set to only appear on mouse-over or removed completely using hot keys (which they are by default, already assigned to C, P, etc).

4. Your bag bar can be done similarly. I use bagnon which consolidates all my bags into a single big bag and use B to display it.

5. I prefer to have my damage meters closed during encounters. It's rare that I ever need to know exactly how much dps someone is doing during an attempt. I use a hotkey to display or hide the meter after an encounter is over.

6. Grid can notify you of curses and poisons and you can cleanse using mouse-over hotkeys (or clicks if you like that). This will allow your eyes to focus on Grid even while you are cleansing. For example, I use borders to notify me if a player needs cleansing: green for poison, purple for curse.

7. I prefer my boss timers to be dead smack middle of my screen just right above Grid. Boss timers are very important for me and this minimizes the movement my eyes have to make.

8. Things like tradeskills, again, can be made to only appear on mouse over unless you'll be Enchanting and stuff while in combat xD. Personally, I use oPie for miscellaneous things. oPie is basically a "Secret of Mana" style action bar.

I think I'll stop here, but hopefully some of this was useful for you and perhaps to others.

Is that full size? The numbers on your Rejuv/Regrowth are TINY! I had to lean forward and squint to read the Rejuv numbers.

This is exactly what I meant when I said they were hard to read unless you scaled up your frames. You may be used to those tiny icons and perhaps don't mind them, but to me that is counterproductive, having to squint to read the numbers. I don't want to waste a second trying to work out if the number on my screen is a 3 or a 8, etc. You could make the text larger on the icon, but then more of the icon becomes obscured, and it becomes hard to see whether it's a purple Rejuv leaf or a green Regrowth leaf. And Lifebloom counter/timers become mashed together.

Your frames are also much bigger than mine; probably nearly twice as wide. This is not a criticism, they still look good - but I prefer my frames to be as small as possible. If they were the width that I prefer, then the icons would take up almost the entire width of one person's frame, if someone had full HoTs on them - which would interfere with me seeing the person's name and health deficit. This is what I meant when I said that you would have to scale up your frames (either wider or higher) in order to make sure that the HoTs don't obscure name or health information. I don't want to make my frames big just to be able to read my timers.

To me, frames are supposed to give you all of your information in as compact a display as possible. I don't want to have to make my frames double the size in order to read my HoT timers quickly and easily.

My HoT timer font is probably twice the size of yours, yet my frames are about half as big. I have the same information, but the text is much larger and easier to see, and doesn't ever get in the way of the other important information on the frame:




The crux is this: It's all about maximum information displayed on minimal screen space. I like my raid frames as small as possible, but I don't want to have to squint or interpret which-icon-is-which. Healbot does not allow me to have both.




Grid (Vuhdo, etc) shows you the information in more customisable ways (icons or text, or both); it allows you to choose the position of your timers to suit you, and displays them in a way that never obscures other information on the frame. The texts are clearer to read, even when quite tiny. Side by side, Grid's timers are much easier to read, and Grid doesn't require you to make your frames large to be able to fit everything in and be legible. I'm not saying Healbot doesn't do good timers; I'm just saying that at the moment, they are not as good as some of the other options at the moment. It's fine for people who want a turnkey raid frame mod; but as a resto druid, if you want to customise your timers (possibly the most important thing for us to display on our frame), the options are very limited, and other mods will serve you better.

There is no right or wrong when it comes to your UI; if it works well for you, then that's fine - but there's really no denying that Healbot's HoT timers are lagging behind the other frame mods in terms of flexibility, customisation, and, if you want minimalist frames - legibility.

I'm certain that it will improve over time, though.

You've said it! Just to answer, yes these are fullsize screenies and yes, numbers are quite small. To be honest, i dont have problem reading them from about a 4 feet distance (from my head to monitor). Size wise... it is big, i agree... And it is really bad if healbot is made the size of usual grid bars i see around here... So u are correct about everything... Healbot was just the fisrt addon i've had for healing, and as i said, it has worked for me so far...

Once again, about preferences - i minimazed everything i could as much as i could... and could never get rid of dependence of the "1/4 screen strip" - chat box, healbot, bars, recount and map. It either goes vertical, or horizontal. So i decided to use my bottom of the screen as much as i could, thus leaving lots of space up top for more important info (debuffs+dbm warnings+where my char is standing)... That's why i actually enlengthed my healbot bars, usually they are 25pixels*100pixels, mine are 25*175... And it seems lots bigger than usual ui's

Also, i've started playin wow about 9 months ago, and been on elitistjerks for about 6-7 months. And i always wondered why everyone uses grid, and noone uses healbot.

To be fair, i will install grid+clicker today, and test it out for the anubHM tomorrow. Maybe it is so much better... And i'll write back what how compatible I am with grid (not the other way around , since it's me getting used to grid)

btw, to be honest i never pay close attention to timers in healbot... cause i live in canada, but play on ru servers, thus my ping is 400+ So having accurate timers is not that important for me, i just play with the flow =)

I did the same thing as you are planning to do with Grid - I decided to try Healbot out for myself to see if I could sort out some of the myths and truths about it, and see whether I actually liked what I saw.

A big problem is that Healbot used to be a mod that would select ranks of spells for you according to how much health someone was missing - so all you had to do was click their frame when you saw they were losing health, and Healbot would decide which heal to cast. It automated and trivialised healing, and a lot of healers thought that was cheap.

That's an opinion that has endured - "Healbot users are lazy/bad healers" because they use a mod that heals for you.

Except that it no longer does that - it's just another option for raid frames, with click-casting built in. Nothing is automated, you still have to drive it. A lot of people don't know that the mod has changed, so that's where a lot of the Healbot bashing comes from - they still think it's a mod that does all the hard work for you.

The reality is that Healbot has come along in leaps and bounds and now closely matches Grid and its other competitors. There were only a few things that I didn't like about it:

1. I can't set up different colours for custom debuffs; all custom debuffs are the same colour
2. I don't like seeing (100%) if someone is at full health (petty, but annoying!)
3. The HoT timers were harder to see than Grid's, and not able to be customised

1&2 are entirely trivial and I could adjust if I had to. The HoT timers though are a big deal, and I really wouldn't want to use Healbot unless the timers were able to be put in set positions, at the very least. I don't know how I got by before my timers!

A couple of pages ago i was asking for help tracking my cooldowns, i found the perfect fit in rFilter2, thought this might help other druids.

So my UI looks like this now.



It's based on great compilation by alza. Very cool and lightweight. All except Grid. So i thought, if most raiding druids agree on what our grid should look like, may be some day an enthusiast would create an oUF based unitframe, with all the neccesary stuff? Like tracking our hots as text? Lifeblooms as manabar? My skills in LUA are obviously lacking to create stuff like that, but probably someone could point me where to search for such knowledge.

Also, I have a problem, with reporting my cooldowns. I really would not like to have oRA2, just to show when my brez is ready. I've tried Raid cooldowns, but that addon was not updated for quite some time now, and as i tested it today it wouldn't communicate with my RL's oRA2, as promised on it's page. Anyone had better luck with this issue or could suggest something?

EDIT: should have done more research, when you think you came up with something clever, first check if someone has already done it. So there it is oUF_Freebgrid.

You may want to check out Injector.

Anyone using the new glyph with Grid Status Hots and corner text able to report if the timer recognizes the hasted rejuv?

I use Grid Status Hots and it is working just fine with the Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation.

I can confirm this too. I have the timer show up as text too. I have only used the glyph in cities and not in action on Live Server, but it worked there for multiple targets.

This seems to be the most relevant spot to post this.

My guild has just started taking on Heroic Anub 25 (yes I know, the progression on my server sucks) and I noticed something very distressing - my healbot lags! I never really noticed before because it was close enough I suppose but with Anub every instant counts. At one point, after I died I was suspicious so I moved my healbot over right next to my x-perl raid frames and saw the x-perl healthbars move before the healbot did. Has anyone else noticed this? Is this a common issue with other healing addons like grid? Its got me a bit panicked because I am not sure I will be able to heal Anub like this and the thought of switching to a new addon is mind blowing at this point.

Not that I am questioning your judgment , but the patch did come out Tuesday, and addons (updated or not) do sometimes become faulty. Did you notice this before 3.3 was released. I do not personally use healbot, but if this is a post 3.3 issue, check curse comments about healbot, or other healbot using forums. I haven't noticed this with grid, however, 3.3 released, and I raided with non-updated addons due to my raid starting at the time I get home from work, so I lagged quite a bit. I'll be sure to look into this when I get home.

Did the healthbars calculate healing/health gain at the same time as x-perl, or did that also lag?

I just came back from a WoW sabbatical (and a fresh install due to a HDD swap), and I have to say that I'm impressed by Vuhdo. The config menus still suck terribly, but once you get it set up decently it's great. The addon has come a long way since last I tried it (last summer, IIRC).

Similar to the aura I explained for Innervate at Resto UI Discussion, I have made one to indicate when Sliver of Pure Ice is off cooldown AND I'm below 90% mana. This helps get max use out of the mana regen on this trinket and will be even more relevant assuming heroic version is on a 1 min cooldown.

Screen shots below:

Create this aura first and set it to OFF:



Then create this aura and set it to ON. Note that it refers to the slot that the first aura was created in (i.e. slot 6 in my case).




YouTube - ICC 10 Professor Putricide - Resto Druid View shows this aura and others that I'm using (Innervate, Low Health, etc.) in action as well as gives a good moving view of what my UI currently looks like.

On Putricide fight, when the player turns into the abomination, it shows up as a boarded vehicle in my healbot bars that cannot be healed. I'm trying to get help on the Curse forums under Healbot's addon page but since I'm having the problem, I'm hoping others might as well. Any help? Levitree, Alliance, US Nerzhul

I have create a addon. It permits to know who can receive a Swiftmend in Grid.

You can download this on curse.com: GridCooldownSwiftmend - Addons - Curse

Does anyone knows a way to target raid member with a mouseover on the Grid unit frame ? (I broke my index :X)

/tar [@mouseover]
but I'd use /cast [@mouseover] heal (and clique)

Bagnon, Healbot, Bartender, Chatter, +Buffalo3, Power Auras (Thanks to Arythorn)

Out of Combat


In Combat


e: Minimalist suggestions appreciated.

Also, Keeva, you can turn off the percentage display in hB (as seen in my screenshot). It's under skills > text > show health on bar. Unless you still want to see < 100%, in that case there isn't an option I'm aware of.

Wouldn't it just be "/tar mouseover"?

Also, may as well point out that /use is the same thing as /cast and saves a character!

Elkano's buffbar can be very minimalistic

My problem with Elkano's is that (as far as I know), it is limited to one buff column.

e: Trying out Buffalo3, looks more my speed.