My buddy Adgamorix posted his UI on his blog across the way, and it's a pretty slick setup. It's got everything that he needs for tanking and managing the raids. He is something of our de facto leader just because he actually has time to watch timers and the like given the fact that his screen usually consists of nothing but the crotch of whatever boss we're fighting. Ask him, he loves Anub'arak's crotch, it's all he sees. Me on the other hand, I'm sort of an ass man, it's all I see...raid after raid of ??-quality ass. As something of a side note, bring back those chick bosses. I'd much rather stare at the rear end of High Astromancer Solarian for five minutes than Gormok the Impaler.
Regardless, Adgamorix's UI works for him, and he's still tweaking it--a work in progress. I suppose that's the sign of a good player: the ability to continually tweak your setup to get it just right. Now, that's not saying that if you don't, you're a terrible player. The standard Warcraft UI has come a long way since release, and more and more I'm finding myself relying on what it offers as opposed to those packaged UI's. Maybe this is just because I'm not too fond of my Warcraft client utterly disemboweling itself after every minor patch because XYZ mod decided to not work given the new bit of LUA code.
Anyone else remember those days? Like I said, I used to have a slick little UI. It was clean, minimalist, and definitely not made for raiding. I liked it, but the only problem was that at every minor patch 45 of the 79 required add-ons would break, causing my Warcraft client to look like Enron's pension plan. Now, the breaking I could put up with; it was the waiting for the mod authors to update which was the real killer for me. Granted, it would only take maybe a week or so at the worst, but still, sometimes the mods they authored could make or break a UI i.e. PitBull. PitBull was the main reason I got rid of my slick old UI. I just got sick of having to micromanage LUA errors to the point where I made a one-button macro to reload my UI.
So, I dumped just about everything in terms of UI and went back to mostly old school Blizzard UI, and it it's worked out pretty well so far. I'll give you something of a run down of what I use and why I use it. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of other mods out there that would make my life easier, but this is what works for me, I do do 18k DPS. I think if I got a slick new add-on to up that number our rogue would have an aneurysm.
There it is, freshly-pulled out of a Wintergrasp this evening. I've attached numbers to the most important items of my UI, there are only five. You might have to click on this sucker to fully expand it out and see my utter deliciousness because I play on a monitor that dwarfs some IMAX theater screens.
1. Omen Threat Meter. As a DPS class, this is the most important add-on for me. While you can't necessarily see how it all works, that gray box will fill up with fancy-colored lines. As long as the colored line with my name on it isn't at the very top, I know that I'm okay to put it on cruise control for cool. Though, sadly, this isn't always the case, especially when our feral druid is tanking and ends up with his first three attacks being: parry, parry, dodge. To that end, Omen is more than happy to tell me that I am, or will soon be tanking and to mash my bubble macro ASAP. This warning usually comes in the form of a rampant screen flash that blurs out my surroundings in a bloody red haze, but I've had a few issues with this simply because I've begun to associate the bloody red haze with me popping my wings while under the effect of bloodlust. To combat this, I've opted for an aural (that's sound) warning in the form of a blaring horn reminiscent of a DIVE DIVE DIVE command the likes of which even The Hunt for Red October has never seen. Coincidentally, this aural warning matches up nicely when our rogue's phone can be heard over his open ventrilo client giving off a single ping in response to a text message. Remember. one ping, Vasily. One ping.
2. Grid. This is one of the few mods that I've brought with me since my old healing days. For healing, Grid was simply amazing at showing the raid at a glance. While I don't really have much of a need for it anymore being a DPS class, I figure it's something good to kick around if the need comes around to actually buff a resurrected raid member or BOP some idiot. Oh, and it's also nice to see if you're in range of healers, and see who does, or does not have aggro from a mob. The ability to check poisons/cleanse options at a glance is nice, too. Healers should live by this mod, I just use it out of habit so that I am forced to remember that yes, there are other people in the raid and it's not just me pulling the weight of the raid.
3. PallyPower. All good paladins are OCD. If you want to see if you should play a paladin, download this mod. If the row of green classes on the right pleases you, congratulations, you're playing the correct class. I sort of have to live by this mod simply because it tells me who is, who isn't, who should, and shouldn't be buffed. It has some fancy timers and counts everything down in a nicely organized fashion. The way I see it, it's like a NASA space launch in the 1960's, as long as everything's green, we're good to go. It only really makes my OCD flare up when that one mage or shaman continually dies and throws a critical red warning light into my go for launch countdown.
4. Focus. It's not really and add-on, but I use it. It's standard Warcraft UI. It's kind of ugly, but it works. I usually set my focus target as the main tank so I can LoH him in a pinch. Basically, it's another way of watching the raid and reminding myself that there are other people in the raid. Here's a note from me: if you're my focus target, you're slightly more important than all those other scrubs in my Grid setup. Congratulations, Aggravation, you're the man.
5. Stopwatch. Once again, not really an add-on, but it's a standard part of the Warcraft UI and I know it won't ever randomly break after a patch. I've got this stopwatch set with a macro tied to my sacred shield. Check my buffs on the right against the stopwatch timer, like Einstein's watch in the DeLorean compared to Doc Brown's watch in the parking lot, the times are offset so I know that I have either gone back in time, or that I need to put sacred shield back on myself.
It's not shown, but I also run Deadly Boss Mods, so that I've got something to tell me when I'm standing in fire, or when I should be standing in fire, or whatever else I can do with fire. Furthermore, it should also be noted that I don't have any DPS meters. Like I said in a previous post, I don't run recount because it chews up my system memory, and I don't need to know how much DPS I do. I already know that I do 18k. Besides, my current package runs me about 350k of memory, which is a drop in the bucket compared to some of those out there I've seen that are pushing 65 megs...and are entirely in German.
So, do you need mods to raid seriously? Probably not. Do they help and make you not look like a complete tool? Yes. I run the bare minimum out there and I manage pretty well, but there are still some days when I wish I could post my UI and have others marvel over it.
Sigh. Those were the days...
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