Sixthy

The overall purpose of this thread will be to assist shaman of all specs in creating the most functional UI possible for PVE and PVP situations. The goal of the thread will be to not only function as a ground for sharing different personalized UI features, but to establish the important features of a raiding interface. Unlike the UI forum, any screen shots or information posted in this thread should be specific to the shaman class and should include descriptions and reasoning as to how it benefits the shaman UI. This thread is not meant to turn into a single posted screen shot of your UI with no further details.

My UI is currently setup for restoration functionality, so that is what I will start this post off with. My goal is for other enhancement and elemental shaman to post something similar in this thread (and perhaps I can add it to this first post later) in order to spark discussion amongst all three of our specs (as each UI will ultimately serve a different purpose).

The following thread can be used for further discussion of specific shaman mods: Shaman Mods.

The Restoration Shaman UI

Raid Frames

Unlike the standard DPS UI, the primary function of the restoration shaman’s UI (or any healer’s UI) is to centralize information necessary in order to properly heal a raid. This means putting your raid frames in a centralized location. A centralized raid frame will allow you to maintain visual situational awareness of your character while still focusing your attention on your raid frames. This means seeing void zones and other environmental effects while properly picking targets to heal or decurse (and while tracking debuffs on your raid frames). Many healers run into the problem of tunnel visioning on their raid frames while foregoing environmental awareness. More often than not, it’s due to raid frames being placed in odd locations (off to a random side for some reason) instead of centralized.

For the purpose of raid frames, I recommend Grid.

Grid is a lightweight, customizable raid frame mod. Its biggest perk is that you can add buffs and debuffs and then display them in the form of a center icon. This allows for very customizable buff / debuff tracking, and is even better for learning encounters in which mechanics aren't always a certainty (or for instance something simple like wanting to know who just took a flame wall on Sartharion and will require extra healing - type in the debuff, set it as a center icon and you're good to go).

Unit Frames

The next important piece of your interface is your unit frames. The default UI places unit frames in the upper left hand corner of the screen, forcing your eyes away from (once again) the center of the screen and where everything pertinent to the game generally takes place. Once again, centralization is key. The purpose of your unit frames should be functionality. Quick information at a glance.

You want your unit frames to display health (exact value preferably), mana and class information. Since you want information quickly, unit frames colored by class is what I'd recommend.

The most important information that you're going to want from your unit frames are buffs and debuffs. Buffs should always be visible on your unit frame - as a class that can purge that information is 100% necessary. Debuffs are also important to track - both for cleansing purposes and healing compensation purposes (mortal strike, for instance).

As for specific unit frames, you'll want a frame for yourself, your target, your target's target, your focus and finally your focus' target.

You have a few options for your unit frame mod, but I personally use and recommend Pitbull. It's the most customizable and functional of the unit frame mods out there and is constantly updated. It takes a bit of getting used to and absolutely is not ready to use "out of the box." This will require setup and time spent learning the ins and outs of every option it has. Fortunately, it's good for both people who enjoy a lot of information and for those that are minimalists. The other options are mods such as Xperl and AG.

Cast Bar

This is another absolutely necessary mod. I recommend Quartz. You'll want to setup Quartz to display the three important cast bars: player, target and focus.

Customize your own cast bar however you want. I like to keep mine fairly large and I like it to display information such as my heal target, cast time and latency of the current cast. You'll want your target's cast bar setup in a place that easy to see and displays the name of the spell being cast and the cast time. Make sure it's highly visible for the purpose of shocks. Last but not least you'll want to set up a focus cast bar. This is the one I use the most and it's dead center of my screen (right below my focus target frame). The information I have shown is spell name, target of spell and cast time.

An example of focus cast bar function would to set Sartharion as your focus and watch for flame breaths. Time a heal to land directly after the flame breath to top off your Sarth tank. Another would be to set Thaddius as your focus and watch the 3.0 second phase shift cast. In PVP it's pretty obvious what you would use your focus cast bar for, but always keep it centralized.

Action Bars

Obviously this one isn't nearly as necessary as your raid frames, unit frames and cast bars, but it's still nice to have a functional and customized UI. I personally use Bartender 4 for my action bar mod. Bartender essentially allows you to clean up the default UI and customize your bars a lot more. I use 2 primary action bars. Every spell / ability on those 2 action bars have some sort of cool down. This allows me to track every cool down I have at a quick glance without diverting my attention elsewhere. I then use 2 other sets of bars that I keep hidden. These bars will appear when I mouse over their location - this basically just allows me to clean up my UI while keeping my spells and abilities without cool downs hot keyed.

For instance I keep my key bound totems such as tremor, poison cleansing, disease cleansing, searing, etc. that don't have cool downs on these bars. Things like my mounts, astral recall and things of that nature end up on these bars as well.

A cool down timer mod will go hand in hand with your action bar mod. I personally use OMNICC as it allows you to put timers on your Pitbull buffs as well.

Combat Text

A combat text mod is pertinent to any classes UI. I recommend and use MikScrollingBattleText : WoWInterface Downloads : Combat Mods - it is probably hands down the one mod I couldn't play without besides Grid. MSBT not only shows your scrolling combat text but allows you to setup triggers. For instance, anytime my Greatness trinket procs, a sound file plays as a gratuitously large message flashes across my screen - this way I know my trinket has activated and I can time a tide if necessary.

Example:



I have something like 35 triggers setup for different things (besides the default triggers that come prepackaged). You can also really personalize the scroll areas so that the information is displayed for you in the best way possible for you to receive it. Also, many mods (such as Shaman Friend) will let you setup the message output through an MSBT scroll area (which means you can change the font, size, etc of that mod's messages).

MSBT does more than I could ever write in this post - just use it.

Totem Mods

For specific information regarding various totem mods, visit the Shaman Mods thread.

I personally use YATA for my totem mod. I like to keep it near the center of my screen for the oddball totem that I don't have key bound. I primarily use YATA for the totem timers (I'm aware that there are better mods out there - this is just the one I'm used to and enjoy). I keep my timers below my totem sets boxed off in an eepanel.

As long as your totem mod displays current totem timers and cool downs, and you can see the information at a quick glance, then it doesn't really matter where these end up. Just keep it functional.

*** 3.1 Update ***

I dropped YATA and picked up TotemManager in its place. If YATA is ever updated and becomes bug free again then I'll probably switch back. I also added ShieldsUp just as another way to track my ES / WS.

General UI Information

Everything else that has to do with your UI is mainly going to be cosmetic. You want your UI to be functional for your needs without being cluttered to the point of confusion. If something exists on your UI that you don't need to see or isn't important, then get rid of it. There are a few mods that I use to clean up certain aspects of my UI that I'll list in a moment. I'll also recommend a few other things to get your UI looking good and clean.

First thing I like to clean up are my buffs. I use Elkano's BuffBars and keep my buffs and debuffs off on the right hand side of my screen. Now that buff information is just secondary. I also keep my buffs and debuffs listed on my Pitbull unit frame.

Next is cleaning up your minimap. I use Simple Minimap and like to keep it down at the bottom of my screen. I hate having to look up in the corners of my monitor to find information so I centralize everything - my map included. Also, I like to clean up the little addon icons around the map. I use Fubar to accomplish that and only keep coordinates and the clock visible on my map. I know some people use a clean version of Fubar that doesn't really show much on it, but I don't mind the menu so I can pull up mod information rather quickly.

My last piece of cosmetic advice would be to use a common texture theme amongst all of your mods. Don't use blizzard texture for your unit frames and then banto bar for your totem timers. Keep it unified - it looks better. Also, if you have the time, use something like eepanels to clean up sections of your UI so that it doesn't look thrown together. Trust me, if you take pride in your UI, you'll start to make it functional - the more functional your UI is, the better of a player you will become!

Throwing It All Together

With the basic gist of where everything should be out of the way, here are a few screen shots to demonstrate the centralization I was trying to drive home.

This is just a basic screenshot of me targeting a priest - my unit frame is on the left, my grid is in the center (although I'm not grouped) with my target on the right. Below my target frame is my target's target (lower right):



This is an example of my target's cast bar (targeting me):



This is an example of me as the focus (my focus frame is directly beneath my unit frame - in PVP this is set up quite differently so that I can see my focus' buffs) with my focus' cast bar (while targeting someone else):



An older screenshot to demonstrate what my grid looks like while in a raid:



A shot of my current addon folder:



My UI in a Raid

I've used this video a few times just to demonstrate my UI while also showing an early Sarth 10 / 3d kill from my point of view. I think it demonstrates the functionality of my UI pretty well although I've made a few minor changes since then (this is about 4 months old):

YouTube - Vis Maior - Sarth 10 Man 3D (Resto Shaman POV)

The quality shows everything pretty well if you watch it in HD.

Conclusion

Hopefully this thread sparks some good shaman UI discussion. I hope to see an excellent enhancement and elemental UI posted as well. Working on my UI is something that I really enjoy. I'm constantly tweaking small things in order to increase its functionality - so please post your own UI's and suggestions to help people build their own UI's. I've gotten a lot of my own ideas from these forums, so I hope that we can all get a few new ideas from this thread.

Current 3.1 UI



Elkano's + Raid Example (Avenging Wrath):



Addons:



Dropped YATA (I edited the .lua file to fix the mana tide issue, but every time I zoned the mod would turn itself off - got annoying rather quickly) and picked up TotemManager in its place. I also added ShieldsUp and a few SLDT options (latency and FPS, etc).

I also edited my Elkano's BuffBars a tad bit - mainly cosmetic, but also added a target buff bar that appears center screen with certain white listed buffs (hand of protection, hand of freedom, etc - things that need to be purged quickly).

UI Upload: www.vismaior.org/images/misc/Sixthyui.rar

 

Hoochiemami

Any chance I can get a download of your UI + WTF folder >.>

Your UI is nice! even though I am elemental, I would love to just take your UI and add another row of buttons and use it for DPS

Nice work.

-Tiimmy <Second Attempt> of Eonar

P.S. What resolution do you play at?

 

Sixthy

Added it to the bottom.

 

Jessamy

There are a lot of choices for raid frames and unit frames. They have different strengths and weaknesses. Grid is a fine addon, but there are alternatives that might work better for some. I use Pitbull for both raid frames and unit frames. Its strength is its extremely flexible configuration. This is also its weakness. Everything that Grid can do, Pitbull can do, in a variety of ways. (I have tried both.) There are many options, and there is no default configuration, so Pitbull's initial setup is time consuming and takes a lot of tweaking. The end result is always personalized though.

Along with whatever unit frame / raid frame you use, I highly recommend Clique. Any spell can be assigned to any click-cast key combination. It can provide the functionality of Healbot or Decursive with any unit frames. Even when I spec enhance it's handy to be able to cure a poison on someone without pausing my dps.

I use ShieldsUp for a HUD tracking of my earth shield target. I've been using the addon since before the author implemented "solo mode," which I dislike, so I use an old version. Thus I can't comment on features implemented in newer versions.

Edit2: Although that was the best screenshot I could find, it's still not very good, and on reflection doesn't add to the discussion. Debuff highlighting is actually one of the biggest reasons I prefer Pitbull over Grid. It's not better, but it is different. That was my main point -- there are options out there.

 

ashopedies

With my UI I always want to achieve two goals: functionality and pleasant looks. Of course functionality always comes first, yet sometimes I allow my UI to present information I don't actually need (e.g. target picture), because tweaking an UI to look slick just affects how much I enjoy the game.

As stated, it is absolutely crucial to have your unit frames and as a healer your raid frames somewhere centered or at least at the height of your eyes. Also take notice of the fact, that the human peripheral view to the left and right is excellent, while not so much for upwards and downwards. Important timers, cooldowns etc. should be placed in the center or at the left or right side of your character. Everything at the top or bottom of the screen should be reserved for important, but not crucial information (minimap, buffs, chat, non-crucial cooldown) etc.

Raidframes

I've been a long time grid user and I will stick to it, even if I started having strange bugs lately. The biggest advantage over other raidframes is the amount of information I can display with 4 corner indicators and a center icon and how easy it is to set up for different characters (this doesn't apply if you don't play any alts). Further, the addition of plugins to grid can help you make the right decision in a split second: If you add gridstatusraiddebuff, all important boss debuffs can be shown and people that need extra attention can be spotted easier.

Unitframes

My unit frames of choice are oUF. Very low memory usage combined with unlimited tweaking options and a ton of nice looking layouts really make the difference for me. I don't show target debuffs except my own on target frame, those huge piles of warlocks dots just don't hold any information of value for me. Most oUF frames include castbars as well. My layout on screenshot is oUF_Asym.

Actionbars

This is where I personally have a lot of work to do. And the topic of actionbars goes hand in hand with keybindings. I have all my healing spells on my 5 mouse buttons + ctrl as modifier. Having played a protection warrior lately I got used to use a lot more keybindings and got to clean up my actionbars. I'm in the process of getting rid of every ability I have keybound on my actionbars without a cooldown, and use actionbars only for the few things I click (e.g. mana potion, bloodlust) and everything that has a cooldown (NS, Manatide) to track with omniCC. The actual addon I use is ractionbarstyler.

Totem + Shield Mods

I use Totemtimers, the only reason for that is the genius TT macro. I might switch back to a castsequence macro and hotkey the most important totems. For timing issues I'm trying out cTotems, which looks really nice and uses a minimum of screen space. For shieldtracking I use ShieldsUp.

Varia

Chicchai minimizes my chat frame after some seconds and maximizes on mouseover/specific events only. Itemrack is used for different gear sets.



This screenshot is rather old, I'll update it on tonights raid. At this point I'm down to 2 actionbars and 2 on mouseover, I have dropped all the backpanel art and party is not shown during a raid.

edit: solo + raid screenshots with cleaned up actionbars, upper bar shows most of the stuff I click, lower bar shows cooldowns, bar at the bottom not shown, will show on mouseover.

Shields Up! - Resto Shaman Blog

 

Jaxc

This is my UI.

There are some addons that i installed, but havnt confured properly (mainly that white box).

What i value most is to have to look on as few places as possible, so with this UI i look on mostly the grid. But bosstimers are pretty close, so i do only have to take a quick look, while casting chain heal as example. My own unit frame i dont really use as i can see it clearly on grid. As for Action bars i only use them for my mana tide totem and a totem macro, rest is bound to clique (includine some totems)

 

sovelis41

It would help a bit if the SS was from your shaman.

Anyways, it seems like you went to a lot of trouble to configure your pitbull raid frames and they ended up looking just like an unruly Grid setup. Healers are looking for quick feedback on debuff/buff status on the raid, and in my opinion, Pitbull does not have nearly as robust a system for tracking this as Grid does. Also, if we're measuring setup time, Grid still wins in this case. Maybe there's something I'm missing from a quick glance at that SS. Seeing it in a raid with you healing would make it easier to pick out differences.


My UI for the thread's sake.
I've actually done a pass on this since uploading this shot. There are even less visible buttons and the extra stuff (chat boxes, omen, map) have been cleaned up a bit. I'll upload an in-combat version after next raid.

You pay for the whole chair, but you only need the edge.

 

Sixthy

They're called eepanels. Very easy to setup - Can download customized skins, borders, textures, etc. from various uploaded shared media files (from uploaded interfaces).

I use Hal's textures from Hal's original UI upload (the border textures) - Hal's UI : WoWInterface Downloads : Generic Compilations. He might still have his textures available.

 

zaiboss

Thanks for that. That's just what I needed to to put the final polish on my UI. I basically have everything towards the center for the ease of finding it quickly. Most of my abilities are keybinded. The really important ones, i.e. totems/shields, are right by my unitframes/character. (Totemtimers).

My secondary abilities are off to the far left and faded out almost all the way. (Bartender/Buttonfacade). And finally, my tertiary abilities that I don't use too often are still on the screen but just hidden until mouseover. The two big boxes are the chat windows. Left for the general/trade/misc. The right for Guild/Officer/Raid. SLDT and Sexymap are on the bottom right. I know it's kind of trivial that I moved it from one corner to another, but I wanted to have a big window space around my character.

Lastly, Grid is the big hole in the bottom middle. In a 25man raid, it fits to cover the whole space so it looks pretty seamless. And, of course, Quartz and EEpanels to tie it all together. My whole vision was to give myself a huge space without any windows/panels/etc, around my character to give myself a better visual awareness and to also just make the HUD look a little smaller. The resolution is 1600x1200 so although the pic is scaled down, it does give me a lot of free space on my monitor.

But, just to reiterate on Sixthy's approach, I do believe the best way for any healer to be effective is to work from the inside out. The more you are looking at your character and what's around it while still being able to see raid frames/buffs/debuffs, the better off you will be. I have my totems/shields and raid frames all available to me in about a 1-2 sqin area. This definitely allows me to be fast and effective with my limited time in whatever I'm doing.

Forgot to add that all my raid timers, a la, DBM are up towards the upper right of my screen, then when they get close to expiring, they come down to just below my character. Just adding more emphasis to pay attention to them when they are going off.

 

Nobunda

Anyone know of a good tutorial for setting up grid... just started to touch on healing recently and really like grid... however its been nothing but a pain to work with.

 

AlphaJew

Remarkably similar to what I use, actually.

http://nullvector.com/images/spartanshammyraid.jpg

Mine's an evolution of a UI a buddy of mine from my FFXI days published (SPARTAN by Astika/Ceramic). I personally use a lot of the same addons (Pitbull, Quartz, BT4, MSBT). I personally prefer TotemTimers over YATA for the ability to load totem sets and have them assigned to my numpad 1-4, and switch them out before fights as necessary. It also handles Water/Earth Shield and Weapon imbue tracking rather nicely. Others are easily swappable (Chinchilla instead of Simpleminimap, kgPanels instead of eePanels).

One thing I might suggest since I use this. With Bartender, I have three main bars set to keybinds: 1 thru =, Shift+1 thru Shift+=, and Ctrl+1 thru Ctrl+=. Rather than having the Shift/Ctrl modifier bars hidden, I set my main bar (which is situated at the bottom center of my screen) to page on a modifier. When I press Shift, it pages to the bar with the Shift keybinds, same deal with Ctrl. Saves a lot of space, and don't run into issues of accidentally clicking on those bars if you mouse over them.

(edit) Quick edit since I was writing that post in class and my battery was dying so I tried to make it quick. I very much so agree on trying to keep things centralized for healing. I raided in BC as a 0/21/40 Warlock, and the original version of SPARTAN had unitframes in the top left corner. That's fine for a DPS who just has to look at them occasionally, but for a healer it's much more important to see them easily along with your environmental situation. I'm almost considering swapping mine to have my own/target unitframe at the bottom right above my hotbars, and have my raid frames above those.

 

◊ Ghli

So, here is my UI. It is pretty basic. I don't use that many addons that change the playstyle of the game, due to patch issues. I know most addons anymore tend to have survived long enough that we know which ones are going to stay around (and be updated early before patches, but still).

Here is a basic rundown of the addons I use:

Nurfed (unit frames and available action bars)
Grid
IceHud
Recount
Clique
Omen
TotemTimers
EventHorizon (replaced DotTimers)
DeadlyBossMods
FuBar
(My own mod), that hooks SCT to track water shield duration/fading


Its a pretty minimalitic UI comparatively, but allows me to access everything pretty quickly and I have almost no issues when patch day arives, and I can play uninhibited if every mod breaks.

 

tubelight

I have noticed that none of you use Healbot, is there a particular reason? From what I see, Healbot offers almost the same functionality as Grid. I ask this because I use Healbot and have been using it since I spec'd Resto(Shaman).

 

exschwizer

My UI is quite minimal. Especially in fights where environmental awareness plays a major role (Sarth3D, for example) I found that too much information is really far worse than too few. So I tried to meet my needs with the leanest possible solution.
The aim is to perfect the UI in an optimal design sense: a design is not optimal when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Raidframes
I'm running Grid since my first steps as a healer. There are really few things that are not possible to realise, and yet it is - in comparison to other Raidframes - quite easy to tweak to my liking. I migrated to Pitbull for a while because I found Dogtags a nice addition to the information-repertoire.
I redesign my UI quite often, so it's the relative ease of configuration why I'm staying with Grid.

Unitframes
Unitframes play a very minor role in my UI. I'm currently using Pitbull (again, relative ease of configuration when changing the UI in comparison to oUF), but the situations are far and few between when I really need the information. I found that I need basically three aspects of UFs in a raid-environment that are not covered by Grid: Current Boss-Health (%), hostile Castbar and hostile Buffs/Debuffs. On my next UI-revision I'll probably scrape the UF to its' very backbone.
My own health and mana is displayed by OnScreenHealth.

Actionbars
I'm using Bartender 4 at the moment, but by default all bars are hidden. I'm tracking cooldowns with Forte, and the Spells I'm using irregularly (like Heroism, Astral Recall, etc) are mapped to OPie.

Totems/Shields
TotemTimers and ShieldsUp. To be honest, I haven't tried another Totem-Addon for a long time, so I'm not really able to draw comparisons here.

Battle Text
MSBT, configured so that incoming Damage/Auras are centered, and my Heals off to the side.

To the topic of Healbot: I didn't use it since the time when it was possible that Healbot chose the appropriate spell for you. I really, really disliked this functionality and never revisited the addon.

 

wintera

While this is not strictly a tutorial set up to provide the best aid out Shaman UI it does run though many config options of some of the most commonly used mods. Its written as a PVP ui tut but i think the majority of the set up will stay the same.

Introduction | WoW UI Tutorial - pvptutorial.com

Contains video for set up of

Keybindings
Pitbull
Bartender4
Quartz
MSBT
OmniCC - Doom Cooldown Pulse - Cooldown watch
Elkano's Buff Bar
Power Auras
Afflicted2

*Edit*

@ Sixthy: Is that link at the end of your post directed at the compressed version of your UI set up still a functional link? From this machine (mac at work) It fails to find the source. Has the link expired?

 

Teenee

Apart from having alot of totems, which usually means people will be using extra bars, or addons to manage these, I'm not sure what makes shaman interfaces stand out, in comparisons to so many other classes? Wouldn't (and isn't) this better just posted in the UI forums?

 

ashopedies

I guess it largely depends on the contributors of this thread, if it's going to be a UI show off thread or a great resource and inspiration to improve a shaman UI. The sister thread in the rogue forums shows what a meaningful discussion could look like, even if one could argue, that rogues aren't like any other class, just with combo points.

 

Trivial

The link's working just fine, I just tried it.

 

Kalazar

While Healbot is a great add-on, if you are looking to simplify your UI, (which many people want to do, as too much clutter is always a bad thing) a combo of grid and clique is superior for healing. It offers the same customization in mouse clicks (probably more, I don't often go resto, so I haven't had much time to check it out) without the need for what is essentially another set of raid frames.

Secondly, grid offers a large amount of customization for look, feel, and functionality.

At least, that's why I use it instead of healbot, and I just imagine that's what most use it for as well.

 

Dorrinal

I have questions for the players who keep grid in a central location like Sixthy. As a Mage it is beneficial to see curses on the raid pets. When healing on my Shaman, admittedly a rare occurrence, I find nothing wrong with bouncing a chain heal off a pet if there are no better targets. But with your centralized, packed-in Grid, there's no room for pets, and to me that's a flaw of the design. Is this acceptable to you? Why? How do you handle pets?

 

• Nagisamuro

Grid has the option to display pets in 10 and 25 man raids. They start to show up in the 3rd column (if it's a 10 man) or the 6th column (if it's a five man). If it fills up one column it starts another. They're units just like any other in grid at that point.

edit: As for positioning, I have mine in roughly the same area as Sixthy keeps his, and I just leave room on the right for two additional columns of pets in a 25 man raid, or one additional column in a ten man raid. That's usually sufficient for the various pets in the raid.

 

Sixthy

What I used to do was pretty much that: my unit frames were spread apart just a few more pixels allowing for another row of pets to show up in 25 mans (and there's obviously already room in 10 mans), but now I do something a little different. My UI is just tailored to the fact that I raid with VM and never really have to pug anything, so I raid with the same consistent set of people each and every week, because of that, I have Pitbull raid pet frames setup to give me a little box in the corner specifically for pets if it's a fight where they'll need heals / decurses of their own. Otherwise, I just let chain bounces off the melee take care of them.

A shaman UI may not stand out from any other healer's UI, and while a general UI forum is nice, I figured it'd be beneficial to be able to specifically browse the UI's of people that play your class. As a resto especially, your UI's overall setup should be quite different than someone that's a full time DPS. Could one UI work for both specs? Of course. My Ret pally alt just uses my Resto Shaman UI and I drag grid out of the center and put a debuff mod in its place - but there are definitely better ways to optimize a UI for specific roles.

There have been some pretty good ideas posted already and I'm sure over time as mods are changed and updated we'll get new and exciting ideas for interfaces. This is just a place to keep other shaman in the loop.

(And many people just don't know how to build a UI - hopefully at least a few people get some decent ideas from this thread and it improves their play).

I've never personally used Healbot - as far as I know it's just a completely separate addition to a raid frame that accomplishes what grid + clique do in a tighter, more customizable unit. From what I've gathered from random forum trolling, Healbot users tend to be new to mods or new to healing - it's a really easy interface that doesn't require you to think outside of the box, etc. I suppose it's like the difference between Pitbull and Xperl users - one set of people just really put more effort into customization.

I'm sure Healbot will get the job done just fine, but the grid + clique combination is a lot more efficient and probably more advanced (even though it's still quite easy).

 

sovelis41

My ui shot above doesn't show it, but what I basically did was just shrink my grid frames down so that pets would fit on the bottom row in the same space. Even with the smaller boxes (and getting Grid: Mana Bars working again), it's still plenty of space.

You pay for the whole chair, but you only need the edge.

 

Cassiopia

Here's mine, taken in combat in 25 man Sarth. My main intent was to keep things as clean and simple as possible, and to keep the middle of my screen open to watch what's happening around me. I've found HealBot actually very helpful as an Elemental Shaman, since it lets me check on the raid and easily throw an off heal every now and again. I'm currently using TotemCaddy along with the standard blizzard timers linked off the side of my XPerl unit frame, but after hearing about Totem Timers I may try that. My focus and focus's target are the frames to the middle right. My only trouble right now is that i'm running into an issue with the top middle of my screen being used by both DBM and SCT, so I'm still toying with that area.

I'm greatly looking foward to seeing other shaman UI's also!
http://tmitchell.thepromiselan.net/wow/interface.jpg
The main addons you see here are:

Dominos (action bars)
Xperl (unit frames)
HealBot (unit frames for the raid and the occasional healing)
Quartz (casting bar)
Recount
Omen
SCT (combat text)
DBM
Sexy Map
TinyTip
ElkBuffBars
TotemCaddy
KGPanels
ChatMod

 

Electrofreak

I've been reworking my UI recently in preparation for Dual Spec. I like the way I have my Enhancement Shaman UI set up currently, but I much prefer the way the OP's shaman looks for my upcoming alternate Resto spec.

Does anyone know of an easy means of swapping between addons and UIs? I'd like to click something in an addon that reloads my entire UI with a pre-determined set of addons and settings.

Thus, when I switch between Enhance and Resto, I can load the appropriate UI easily.

Is this possible? Or am I going to be stuck making a UI config that will work for both specs?