I think minamalist UI lovers are disproportionally represented as they are drawn to threads like these. To balance this a little I'm backing having key information displayed so you can see it easily.

Most fights have surprisingly little to watch for and between deadly boss mods and knowing what to look for you should be fine. Absolute top level pvp needs minimalism the same hasn't been true for pve yet.

Make sure you can see your feet so you don't stand in fires/voidzones, other than that things you need to see are generally huge (flame wall/blizzard on Saphiron/enemies) and are warned anyway with a clutter UI. health bars should show you are standing in blizzard for example DBM will show you when to look for flame wall.

As a note for people with bad PC's, I personally think both omen, raid frames and ora are relatively useless as a rogue (omens main use it to work out when it's ok to ToTT a dps rather than a tank (assumes your tanks are good). I would do away with these mods before deadly boss mods rupture/slice trackers or recount (makes re clearing fun).

When building my UI with all these things in mind and trying new options for minimalism and unclutter, I think I identified the reason why HUD doesn't work for me.

- default HUD bars are transparent. Not an option; they lose very easily to the environment, especially if they are funny model (thin arcs being worst in my opinion).

- default HUD bars are too long. Not an option, I don't want to search the level of my HP.

- default HUD levels go from down to up. Eyes move more comfortably from left to right.

That said, my mess looks like this now. In the middle third of the screen, there are (from up to down, left to right): DBM small bars, parrot notifications, DBM large bars, raid warnings. ClassTimers, Pitbull. NugComboBar, Omen, Auracle, Ora MT, Prat, BarTender4.

Still thinking of the positioning to get more room to the middle. Auracle shows some information I might consider less important, but good for raid leader. There's no scrolling combat text yet (farmcontent was managed pretty well without, actually).

Please, when you post your UI's, show it on real combat. There's not much to see what it looks like when you're hitting wolves under Dalaran. Most of the interesting things are hidden outside raidcombat, and only challenging situations show the utility and effectiveness of the UI when you need to see everything at the same time.

Wanted to share my ui aswell. Taken yesterday.
At the moment there's not much else i want to change apart from filtering some of the buffs from ElkBuffBars.
I really like this one, it's clean, copied some of the layout from a Method enhancement shaman.

Obvious addons: Bartender 4 with ButtonFacade, ElkBuffBars, eePanels, AG_UF, Classtimers, Prat, Omen3, Bigwigs, Grid, Recount and oRA2.

Just tried out Sexymap and i like it, might change coloring and skin on it. Anyway here it is: ImageShack - wowscrnshot.jpg

That is probably the "TickTimer" addon that Alacrity linked in post #11 in this thread.

I've been trying it myself the last couple of days, it's a very simple and effective addon Unfortunately it seems to be incapable of remembering the position of the bar properly, I end up having to reposition it each time I log in.

Couple of notes: Clean UI, lots of room in the middle. I'd filter that Blade twisting spam, no real use. Snd/rupture/cp meters are a bit off, I'd put them closer to the action but maybe I'm looking monitor closer than you. Large crits, not really useful but if seeing those is why you're playing, then why not =)

What idea I got from this pic was about the transparency layer in the bottom of the screen. Would it be bad idea to put *everything* environmental on 90/95% opacity to lessen the flashy movement and effects that's happening? Not to overdo it, but it might be nice to have important things to be always the brightest things in the UI.

Points taken, i actually didn't think of cleaning up my MSBT a bit. About the snd/rupture timers, i like the placement on em and i have no trouble keeping an eye on them during fights.

You mean to make it almost solid down the bottom? Didn't quite understand what meant

Are there any mods available that would filter out the unnecessary spam of "Not Enough Energy" or "Ability is not ready yet."? This is more of an annoyance than anything.

ErrorMonster

This strikes me as a bad idea in that it dims the important part of the display in favor of your UI. Your UI is supposed to support your play experience, not the other way around. To put it another way, the tunnel vision effect described by a previous poster seems even more likely to occur if your visual attention is diverted towards your UI.

On the topic of tunnel vision, since I've only seen one person here mention it so far: it's a common affliction and I think everybody experiences at least some form of tunnel vision. The question is how you deal with it. The default UI essentially encourages poor decision-making and diverts your attention away from important points because your eye is drawn to the top-left if you want to know your current status (energy, combo points) and target debuffs, the top-right if you want to know your self-buffs, and the bottom if you want to know the cooldown status of your abilities. Then, of course, you'd also need to look at the center to know if you were standing in something like a void zone. Although certainly people have adapted to play this way, it is inefficient - everybody who plays with the default UI can play better than they do, if they at least move some frames into a more appropriate position.

Putting all of the important elements in one spot is definitely likely to draw your attention there quite a bit - so the question is, where is the best spot to keep your attention focused so that you can both play your rotation optimally and not die to stupid shit? For rogues, the answer is the center of the screen. However, though you want to put all these elements near the center of the screen, you also want to try to abide by some key principles:

1) Use opaque elements sparingly near the center of the screen. Every inch of real estate near the center is vital, and covering it up with UI elements increases your likelihood of missing something important. It can also make clicking near your character annoying (unless you have those elements set to allow click-through, which can just be confusing since they're opaque).

2) Do not surround yourself with UI elements. Keep at least one side open - preferably multiple sides. Your UI can have psychological effects just by virtue of the way it is laid out, and surrounding yourself with UI elements is one surefire way to make yourself feel claustrophobic. At the very least, surrounding yourself is a poor idea because when you are trying to target something, it is very likely to fall behind one of your UI elements unless it's right up in your grill.

3) Don't attach things together too tightly. This sort of follows from 1 and 2, but it's an important thing to keep in mind regardless. The reason you don't want to do this is that tightly-clumped UI elements create what essentially acts as a "wall." Again, this goes back to the psychological aspects of your UI. You don't want your UI to create dividing lines in your field of view. If you're using sparse/non-opaque elements, then this isn't as huge a deal. Ditto if you have at least one open side around your character. However, the more of these you have, the more confined you will feel.

Pretty sure it is not TickTimer, since Rensy is in Vis Maior (same guild as Latito), so he's probably using that private mod Latito mentioned.

I'm having the same problem with positioning as you are. I'd also like the ability to not show the spell name and time, and basically make a really thin bar that I'll stick under my Deadly Poison DOT bar. I took a peek in the lua file, but couldn't immediately see how to do this. I'm going to ask one of my programmer roommates to help with it this weekend.

I want to keep the center clear; I like minimalism in UI design, for environmental awareness, and maybe for the psychological reasons you mention.

As for the play experience, I don't really think that the several dozen additive elements (magic effects, movement) on the top of the target make crucially better play experience. There's some hundred elements in close-up raidfight, most of them moving or morphing around. I can't follow them all. Patchwerk is usually a big bright blob to me (ok, bad example, but bear with me). In 5man dungeon I can discern most of the spell elements on target. On 25man not at all, even if I'd like. Maybe I'm just older and slower.

On the other hand, I want my UI to help me make informed decisions of the near future playstyle. I want to get that information fast, and all in one glance. Part of that is learning where the information is, part is condensing it to some model that brain digests quickly (cue; difference between different kind of timer bars). Looking at that model gets me up-to-date information, fast. So, yes, I'd claim that the most important parts of decision-making must be pronounced in the UI. And I want to find that information fast, in the bright discolightstorm that normal bossfight is.

That lead to the idea; fast mock-up with ~95% transparent chat-overlay shows difference. Compare http://sisuguild.fi/~len/wow/view_100.jpg to http://sisuguild.fi/~len/wow/view_95.jpg. Not much difference, but, probably helps to locate the UI elements I'm interested in. This, coupled with the fact that only vital, most important UI elements are centered to your char, might be good.

There's something that irritated me with HUD view: if they were click-through, I couldn't (right)click myself or target. If they weren't, in fight I couple times managed to hit the HUD bars when trying to change camera view.

It's relatively unimportant but does anyone have an addon which will show the duration of the overkill effect from stealth/vanish, might be useful for timing abilities to fit inside the 6 second window.

Overkill isn't a real buff, as such there's no way to actually track it. The best you could do it create a bar that counts six seconds after stealth is removed. "Evoslayer loses Stealth." -> Six second timer.

There is a mod called "Overkill" that does pretty much what you just said, yeah. After you lose stealth, it puts up a bar that counts down 6 seconds.

Ya thats the idea I had, the trouble is I don't have the technical skill to create the addon, was wondering if anyone else had one.

I did manage to find the original post where Aldriana first posted the TickTimer zip. he mentioned a guildie had made it and that there would be no support for it

After a little bit of poking around - I pretty much know nothing about lua and addons - I tried putting the latest version of LibBars-1.0 into the TickTimer/libs/ dir and that fixes the problem of TickTimer not remembering it's bar location.

WoW AddOns - LibBars-1.0 - WowAce.com


I just want to throw a thank you out to the contributors in this thread I had been struggling with keeping track of all my timers and yet still being able to avoid things like void zones. With a 30" monitor the physical distances from the center of the screen to the corners are too far to be able to see things out of the corner of my eye.

Now I'm running an arrangement of IceHUD, NeedToKnow, and TickTimer, and everything I need to see is right there in the middle. Sarth+drakes last week was a mess, this week after a couple of nights of getting used to the new layout, it's easy pie.

A simple measure of visibility I'm using is this: hold your hand, fingers spread, out at arms length. Everything you need to be able to see and respond to should be within the area covered by your hand.

The original author is me, but yes you're right, the bug was active for me aswell, I just couldn't see it the way I had my actionbars set up

Overkill has a bufficon on the current PTR, so that problem goes away with 3.1.

Vulajin mentioned several places in default UI to look at:
1) top left for hp/energy/cp/target status
2) top right for buffs
3) bottom for cooldowns and mouse-clickables
4) center for looking at playfield.

While some (if not all) needed information can be moved or extracted for better readability with different addons, I have issue with one more place to look at:
5) top center - warning/error with "you're facing wrong way" / "too far away" etc. Especially in AoEd trash situations, when playfield is one big explosion of spell effects from like 15+ fellow players I often find myself not facing or too far away from my selected target.

How do you people deal with it? Is there any addon than can extract these messages from error frame and show it in more visible way? Rangefinders in common addons (like in IceHUD) can help somehow, but not with facing problem.

Just as addons like SCT can move damage info (and related) things around, many of the "error cleanup" addons will do that same. I think I'm using errormonster or errorredirect right now (can't remember) but it can be set to hide things like "Not enough Energy" and move the others like "You are facing the wrong way." to another location.

There is a mod called "Deaden" that was designed for the RoS encounter in Black Temple, but it still works. One of the features is announcing to whatever channel when you interrupt.

Well, having way too much addons and being way too much dependent on them without getting the whole functionality I want made me poke few days ago with addon development. The result:


Single small addon, 24k memory, 0.00% cpu usage and not even optimized. Features marked with numbers on the image:
1. My health, raw number
2. Combo points
3. Energy, smooth
4. Hunger for blood timer, the number in the icon shows the stacks (will be removed in 3.1 ofc). It provides sound "ticks" every second for 3 seconds before HfB drops, removing the need to actually watch the bar
5. Slice and Dice timer, scans the talents and glyphs on start to find the max time and shows the current value as percent of the max, i.e. 1CP slice won't fill your entire bar making you feel like having half an hour of slice uptime. It also provides sound "ticks" for 4 (yeah 4) seconds every second before SnD drops, sound is different from HfB one
6. Rupture timer. When rupture is off timer dissapears (like the other timers too), but if the target have bleeding effects:
"Lacerate",
"Pounce",
"Rake",
"Rip",
"Savage Rend",
"Garrote",
"Rupture",
"Deep Wounds",
"Rend"
Then the rupture icon is shown, hurray for HfB :p
7. Deadly poison timer plus the stack number in the icon. Again, even if there is no DP on the target the icon will be left lit if there are other poison effects:
"Anesthetic Poison II",
"Deadly Poison IX",
"Wound Poison VII",
"Serpent Sting"
8. Small timer inside the DP bar - it fills to the max every 3 seconds, then resets to 0 when the DP tick. Timing envenoms ftw
9. Target info. Raid icon also shows if available
10. Threat bar (invisible now, as the training dummy refuses to strike back) - 0-100%, at 100% you pull agro
11. Focus info (invisible again, forgot to set focus before taking screen) - just name, level, health

At the end this addon replaced IceHUD, Omen, SliceCommander and NeedToKnow. I did it for myself, but if there are people liking it I can release.