Omen

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.

 

◊ Keeva

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.

 

volkvin

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 =)

 

◊ Keeva

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!