One thing I’ve always loved about Grid is that I can set up my frames to change to – OH-GOD-LOOK-AT-ME-I’M-BRIGHT-PINK – pink when someone has a nasty debuff. The rapid colour change to something bright and obvious immediately prompts me to bomb them with heals, run away from them, run to them, etc etc.


But with the release of TOC, it seemed that most (if not all) of the custom debuffs weren’t working. This was especially annoying for debuffs such as Jaraxxus’ Incinerate Flesh, which absolutely must be healed through to remove it, or the raid will take massive damage. If you can’t spot the person with the debuff, you lose precious seconds. Boss mods will announce their name, but having to scour through 10 or 25 people to find them (particularly bad in PuGs where you don’t know people’s names and classes) makes things very difficult. PLUS, if you can’t see the debuff drop off (either through being removed properly, or cloaked, iceblocked, etc), you’ll likely throw out 2 or 3 completely wasted heals to a target that no longer has the debuff. I know, because I did.


If you’re a Grid user and you haven’t tried GridStatusRaidDebuffs before, I really can’t recommend it highly enough. The reason I didn’t use it before was because I preferred to just set up my own custom debuffs; but the fact that TOC debuffs didn’t work, coupled with the fact that there seem to be more and more debuffs that I need to be aware of, pushed me to give it a try.


The one major problem for me though was icon placement. The icon needs to be large enough to see easily (since there are often 2 or 3 major debuffs in a fight and you need to be able to see which one your target has), but NOT obscure your frame information. And that’s exactly the problem I had: the icon was great, but it was sitting right over the top of my Lifebloom text, and obscuring the health bar. Bad.


To get around this, grab a module named GridIndicatorSideIcons – so you can place your icons at the side of your frame, not in the middle.


As you can see, the icon is clear, but it doesn’t obscure my HoT counters, texts, health, or any other information.


Perfect!



How to copy it:


1. Grab GridStatusRaidDebuffs here (Curse).

2. Grab GridIndicatorSideIcons here (WowAce).

3. Under Frame > Icon (Sides) > Left Icon, scroll down and check the box “Raid Debuff” (this will make sure that the GridStatusRaidDebuffs are placed on the left side).


4. To adjust the size and positioning, go to Frame > Advanced > Icon (Sides) and use the slider bars to resize and nudge the icon into the position that you want.


Note: if the icon is still showing in the middle of the frame, you may also need to go to Frame > Center Icon and uncheck Raid Debuff, and Status > Raid Debuff and uncheck “center icon”. Make sure the “enable” box is checked.


Your raid debuffs should be a lot easier to track, without obscuring your HoT counters or other information – it should make life a lot easier!

Possibly Related Posts:

• Casual Kingslayer
• Resto Druid calculator!
• Power Auras exports – Ruby Sanctum

Resto druids have a long-standing (it’s been months, now) problem with Wild Growth not playing nice with our mouseover macros. The digest version of the story, if you’re not aware, is that if you have a dead or out-of-range person targeted and you try to cast Wild Growth using a mouseover macro, the Wild Growth won’t fire (you’ll just get a “your target is dead” or similar error).

There are ways around it, specifically a /canceltarget macro:


/canceltarget/cast [target=mouseover]Wild Growth

..but it’s incredibly annoying to have to use clumsy workarounds when the issue shouldn’t be hard to fix (GC even said that himself).

Edit: the above macro may not be correct – if it doesn’t work, try this one:

/cleartarget/cast [target=mouseover,noharm,exists]
Wild Growth/targetlasttarget


This one comes from Restokin from a while ago. (PS – ignore my comments on that Restokin post – I thought my own macro at the time worked, but it turned out I was just lucky enough to go a long time without noticing the problem.)


After months and months, druids are still wondering what’s going on. Why isn’t it fixed? What’s the hold-up?

Then GC said this today, and I had to laugh:


I was going to post that we fixed this, because we did. But I’m glad that I didn’t because sometime during the 3.2 patch it broke again.

Sometimes when we don’t address simple things head on, it’s for reasons like this. We’ll try to get it fixed (again) as soon as we understand what happened.


It’s a serious issue that we want fixed.. but this really made me giggle. Glad they finally gave us word on what’s going on, though.

Back to waiting!



Possibly Related Posts:

• Resto Druid calculator!
• Power Auras exports – Ruby Sanctum
• WTF is my Gearscore?

Disclaimer: this writeup comes from experimenting with Grid and Healbot earlier this year (up to about March). If there have been improvements since then, they will not have been included in this post. If you know of a particular improvement that has since implemented, please let me know and I will edit in a comment to reflect the change. For example, if I say that Grid doesn’t let you put your tanks together, and you know that there has been a change or a new module to change this, let me know and I’ll include it.

However, with the many features constantly being added and improved upon, it would be too much work for me to keep updating the post as each addon evolves. Much like my “How to get 50 mounts before WotLK” it will be fairly static; it won’t be a dynamic, evolving “guide”, but a comparison of the addons in their current forms.

(This is basically to prevent comments in 3 months’ time telling me I’m wrong because Grid CAN do XYZ and Healbot CAN do XYZ… which I bet will still happen!)

Also, once again – these are my personal opinions of the various features and drawbacks of each addon. I have endeavoured to be as fair and objective as possible. Please do not take any negative criticisms against your preferred addon as an insult to you and your choice! Any nasty comments will be deleted. Feel free to disagree – but be constructive, please.

Also, I’m going to have to say it before I hit post: Yes, I do know about VuhDo and I may give it a try sometime – I just haven’t had time to have a look.






So – in the category of:

“Out of the box” functionality
WINNER: Healbot

Out of the box functionality – meaning how quickly after installing the mod you can jump into healing with it – is a huge factor for many people when deciding between different addons. Many people are happy to spend hours tweaking their UI to be perfect, but others prefer to hit the ground running with addons that are ready to go as soon as they are installed. You can have the most super awesome mod in the universe, but if the default looks terrible and it’s difficult to set up, then many people will steer clear.

It’s very cut and dried between the two addons in this case: for a healer, Grid has limited functionality out of the box – at the very least you will need to change the size of the boxes to be able to fit names properly and see health information. Fine for DPS/cleansing classes, but not good for healers. In fact, I think the addon would benefit greatly if the author was to add a couple of pre-packaged layout frameworks, one for DPS (similar to the current default) and one for healers, with the bar-like format that many healers prefer. This would make it much easier for healers to use “out of the box”, and prevent a lot of people from being scared off by Grid’s overwhelming customisation options.




Healers need to tweak Grid a fair bit in order to have an easy-to-read frame display.



On the other hand, Healbot comes out of the box looking pretty darn shiny; and while there are a bunch of things that I personally would want to adjust to suit my own personal style (can’t stand the way it fades bars – I only like faded bars for people who are out of range), I could easily use Healbot in its default state and do a respectable job. I wouldn’t be able to do the same with Grid in its default state.




Healbot’s appearance when you first unpack it, showing tooltip


Customisation
WINNER: Grid

Grid wins in this category, but not by as great a margin as most diehard Grid users might think.

Grid does have options that Healbot doesn’t, for example corner dot indicators, extra icons, extra texts, and of course the flexibility to change the placement, size and colours of each. Healbot really has everything you need to build a good frame display, it’s just that Grid goes further and gives you many more options so that you can truly customise the display to suit your own personal taste.

However, for many of these options, you will need to install additional Grid modules. While this makes for a far more customisable set of frames, the downside to this, obviously, is the need to find and install the modules you need, and keep them updated. As Healbot’s options are all built-in, you only ever have to keep one addon up to date to have them working.




Some of the additional Grid modules available at Curse.com



The big benefit here is that if you have some kind of catastrophic UI failure (we’ve all been there), you’re more likely to be able to get back on the horse as a Healbot user, because you won’t have to spend time doing the simple things like changing the size of the bars to make the raid’s names visible. From running with Healbot users and listening to them, there seem to be a few random minor problems with the addon, whereas Grid seems to be more stable on a daily basis; but if you lost everything, it’s going to be much easier to recover Healbot than to recover Grid, particularly if you rely on a lot of the additional modules.

Basically, Grid gives you tonnes of display flexibility in exchange for a bit of hassle setting it up and keeping it running. Healbot gives you all of the basic things you need to see – health, buffs & debuffs, heals, HoTs, and so on – and you can customise these to a point – but you don’t get all of the extra bells and whistles that Grid gives you.

But Healbot has definitely come a long way and is surprisingly customisable. I think a lot of die-hard Grid fans would be shocked at what you can do with Healbot – it’s definitely not the clunky, boxy, rigid set of frames that I expected.





Navigation and ease of use
WINNER: Healbot

Ease of use ties in with the previous category, logically. Grid’s extensive customisation options mean you also have to navigate…. extensive menus. Depending on what you prefer, of course, I found Healbot’s tabbed windows to be much easier to navigate than Grid’s drop-down style. But then, I think this is due in part to the fact that some of Grid’s options (to me) seem to be put into the wrong categories, and I often wish I could get in there and rearrange things a little.

Once you’ve been using Grid for a while, you’ll know where to find each option in the menus; but even as a seasoned user, I still often find myself getting a little lost in the long list of options in each section. With so many options to customise, it’s only natural that there are lots of boxes to check and fields to fill in, but I do think that Grid’s menus may need a bit of a tidy up so they are less overwhelming. I’d love to see give tabbed menus a try. Whether or not they would be just as overwhelming if they tried to cover the same options, I’m not sure; but surely a whole tab devoted to say, HoTs, would be a nice logical way to customise your frames.





Aesthetics
WINNER: Grid

I feel that Grid wins this category because it just gives you so many more options to customise the look of your frames, meaning that you can have a really slick looking setup according to your tastes.

BUT Healbot has come a long way, and does have quite a few customisation options. It has a couple of options that Grid doesn’t: the ability to display your frames in a single column (old-school style on the left or right of your screen), and the ability to show health bars as green progressing through to red according to health deficit, as a slow colour change. Grid allows you to set thresholds for the health bar to change colour and warn you (eg 85% or below = yellow, 50% or below = red) but many Healbot users enjoy that gradual colour change.

Overall though, Grid just has more bells and whistles, more options to change fonts, colours, icons, indicators, and other layout elements, making it more flexible and giving it the potential to be as attractive as you want to make it.





Information display
WINNER: Grid

Both mods display their information nicely, but I think Grid edges ahead, both because of it’s level of customisation, and because it has the ability to present more information in the same space.

Grid can show various triggers as:

- frame colour
- border colour
- corner indicator (and with extra modules, extra indicators on the sides and more in the corners)
- icons (and with extra modules, extra corner icons and side icons)
- texts (up to 3 texts, I believe)

It also has a better custom debuff system but I will go into that later.

Healbot does frame and border colour, two texts, and icons, but doesn’t have any corner indicators or as many options for changing colours etc. As far as I’m aware it has no options for adding extra texts and icons.

I’d like to stress that both mods will show you everything you want to see; they both display all of the important information that you need. Grid just gives you more options to display it in a way that you want, meaning that if you react faster to colours, you can set it up so that colours are one of your main triggers. If you work better with icons, Grid has the standard center icons but also corner and side icons. Grid makes it very easy for you to set up your frames in the way that YOU will interpret the information fastest – which might be completely the opposite of how someone else likes to see information – but you get the flexibility to choose.





HoTs
WINNER: Grid

In the past, the general opinion that I heard about Healbot was “fantastic healing addon.. Although probably not so great for druids.” During my time experimenting with Healbot, I found this to be true, for one main reason – the most important thing that druids should look for in a UI, in my opinion – HoT tracking.

I have to say that if I had to list what was most important for me to see in a frame mod, the health bar/deficit would be first (obviously), and HoTs would be second.

Grid’s HoT Trackers (GridStatusHoTs and GridStatusLifebloom) do a brilliant job. They allow you to put numerical, coloured counters in the center, sides or corners of the health bar, so that you can track each HoT. The timers can be a set colour, or can be assigned to change colour as the timer runs low; in the case of Lifebloom, you can also assign colours to stack numbers, so a single stack might be a red timer, and 3 stacks a green counter.

All of this information is displayed clearly, but does not obscure the rest of the information on the frame. This is where Healbot falls down in its HoT tracking; in my experience I found that trying to display the HoT icons on the bar meant that the name and health information was obscured. Making the icons smaller (to be able to see the bar) results in not being able to identify the spells very well (as the icons get smaller) and trouble reading the timers, as the texts of the counters are ultimately linked to the size of the icon. Similarly, if you increase the size of the font, it can also obscure the icon itself, making it hard to see if you’re looking at Regrowth or Rejuv, for example.




I found Healbot’s HoT timers made it hard to see information beneath them;
if made smaller, then the icons and texts become hard to see.
This means your frames overall have to be quite large to accommodate
the HoT counters and show the player’s frame clearly.



Healbot’s HoT icons look great. But in practice, they make the health information difficult to see (on a moderate sized UI), and scaling them down makes the HoT hard to see. You have to try to find the happy medium between icons that are large enough to see which spell they are (in turn allowing for decent sized timers), and still being able to see the person’s frame under those icons. With Regrowth, Rejuv, Lifebloom and Wild Growth all up on someone’s frame at once, I found it difficult to see the health bar, and this would make me very nervous in a raid. Grid’s timer information never obscures health information, so you can still make judgments on when to throw an extra emergency heal.




Comparing Healbot and Grid HoT displays when
both mods are set up to have similar sized frames.


As you can see, Grid’s HoT timers do not obscure the rest of the information in the frame. I found Healbot’s timers to either be so big they obscure the frame, or too small to read the text. The alternative then is to increase the size of the frame to allow for good sized icons without obscuring the other information – but this ends up making your raid frame quite large. I like my frames to be neat and compact.

Also, Healbot lays down the HoT icons in the order cast, not in a specific placement, which means that you can’t even get used to Regrowth being say, the one on the left each time – you still need to rely on being able to see the icon properly, as the icons will be in random order on each person’s bar. I find that Grid’s layout, with set positions for HoTs (that you choose according to your own prefences) makes it easier to interpret timers because you can rely on each spell always appearing in a set position. You can use icons if you want, or simply use colored dots or texts, plus the option to have these colors change over time. You can use the standard green/yellow/red, or choose any colour you like; you can also choose the time thresholds for these color changes to occur, to allow for your own style. Healbot does not have this depth of customization.

If I had to pick one major fault (for druids) with Healbot, HoT tracking would be it. I can honestly say that I could manage swapping from Grid to Healbot if the HoT tracking was improved. It’s definitely on the right track, but needs some changes so that HoT information is better displayed. Because we have 4 different HoTs at our disposal, often on many people at once, we need to be able to view and interpret tracking and timer information extremely quickly, to be able to make snap decisions. If the icon is obscured, the display order is random, and the text is difficult to see, then this reaction time suffers. This is a big problem. You don’t want your HoT displays to slow down your reaction time.

Any HoT tracking is better than no HoT tracking; but I strongly feel that Grid’s tracking options give you a much clearer view of your spells at any given time, they don’t detract from the rest of the information, which allows you to process the information faster. A druid with no HoT timers can perform well; but a druid with great HoT displays can really maximise his/her output and fine-tune their timing down to miliseconds.

Basically – if you’re serious about excelling as a healer and you’re doing difficult content, then you need a really good HoT timer to streamline your performance and improve your reaction time. Healbot is almost there – but Grid just does it better.





Buffs
WINNER: Healbot

This is another category where both mods can show you what you want to see, but in this case, Healbot has some cool features that Grid doesn’t.

Both will show you buffs present and buffs missing, depending on what you prefer to see. For example, I prefer to see a pink dot on every frame, denoting Mark of the Wild, and if someone is missing a dot, they need the buff. It’s just what I’m used to seeing. Other people prefer to only have a dot showing on someone who is missing the buff, which you could argue is more logical, since it is easier to see one person out of 25 who has a bright pink dot, compared to one person with no dot, out of a sea of 25 people. It’s just personal preference.

But Healbot goes further and has alerts for when a buff is about to run out – including sounds. I thought that was a really cool little feature. Most of the time I buff by default, and don’t need a reminder, but perhaps there are shorter duration buffs like Thorns that you forget to rebuff. Or it’s a special fight and you need to remember to give people Amp Magic or Shadow Protection.

Of course, Grid does have a little more customisation in that you can assign buffs to corner icons and whatnot, but I don’t think this is particularly noteworthy in this case. If your frame can show you a buff (or a missing buff) it probably doesn’t matter too much how it does it.





Debuffs
WINNER: Tie

Standard debuffs (curses, poisons, magic etc) are basically identical in both mods, aside from (once again) a little more flexibility in display options with Grid. Both will show you debuffs as a centre icon, border, or frame colour. Grid goes a little further and lets you have corner/edge indicators and corner icons (with extra modules). But both mods will show standard debuffs fine.




Poisons & curses – set to display as frame colours (my preference!).
Note: both mods can display these as icons, which many people prefer.



Grid edges forward a little for me personally with its custom debuffs. Healbot still allows you to display custom debuffs (for example, by changing the frame colour or adding a border), but if you want to use frame colour as your indicator, you can only use one colour for ALL custom debuffs. Most people would probably say, “so what?” but this is something that I am particular about, so it stood out for me

I like to be able to colour particular custom debuffs particular things (and sometimes with a particular priority). This is especially important in fights where there may be multiple custom debuffs that I would like to track. For example on XT002, I might colour Gravity Bomb bright pink, and Light Bomb bright green. I need to know who has each, but I also need to be able to discern between the two very quickly. Of course, many people just use icons, but I ditched that method long ago when I found that some curse icons looked like poisons (and vice versa). I find it much easier to react to colours than pictures.

So really it is an extremely trivial and TINY edge that Grid has over Healbot – and it will ONLY matter to you if you like to use frame colour AND have separate colours for each debuff.

Apart from that it is basically a tie.





Mouseover macro/Clique compatibility
WINNER: Healbot

Both mods are compatible with click-casting and mouseover macros.

In the case of Grid, you will need to download and setup another addon, Clique, for this functionality. I have seen many Healbot users criticise this fact in the past. In reality though, many Grid users don’t use click-casting, so this doesn’t matter to them at all.

If you are a click-caster, then Healbot comes ready to go – with no extra modules or setup required; you simply have to assign your spells accordingly. Many people see this as a big plus.






Summary

Healbot was once considered by many to be an “ezmode” healing addon that chose ranks of spells for you, which earned it a bad name as a mod that created lazy healers. Things have changed. It is now a powerful, feature-packed frames mod that shows you all of the things that Grid can show you. It is far easier to use “out of the box”, has easy to follow menus, and is easier to keep up to date. Its main failing for druids is the clunky HoT display; but I am confident this will be improved over time.

Grid simply offers many more options for customising your frames, according to how you want your information to be displayed. It has far superior options for HoT tracking, which is essential for druid healers to excel in their healing. It requires some setting up before use, and quite a lot of tweaking to suit personal taste; adding more modules will also mean more and more extensive dropdown menus, but this is the tradeoff for seemingly limitless options for customising the look and layout of your frames.

I think one of the most common arguments against Grid is that “you need to install so many extra mods to go with it!”. In reality, I think I have 3 extra modules – which is hardly a big deal at all. You could potentially have hundreds of extra modules installed – which would be a bit of a nightmare to keep updated manually – but what non-Grid users need to keep in mind is that while it may seem like a pain to have to use addons for an addon, this is where Grid gets its massive level of customisation.

And on the flip side, I don’t want a whole lot of non-druid addons included by default. Why would I need totem timers, or rune tracking? That would just be bloat, and extra options in my menus that I don’t need to see. With Grid you can “build your own mod” by picking and choosing your addons accordingly.

Many non-Grid users see this as a negative. Grid users understand that it means that the mod only includes options that we choose to use.





Really, I could write about these mods all day – I’ve barely scratched the surface of both. But I do hope I’ve given people a basic idea of some of the main features of each. The best way though is to give them a try and see what suits you. I believe more druids prefer Grid for their frames, but many use Healbot and swear by it.

If you want a mod that requires only minimal setup and shows you all of the information you need, with click-casting built in, Healbot is great.

If you prefer to tweak and customise your UI to exactly how you want it, including HoT timers, extra texts and icons, and custom debuff options, then Grid excels.

There is no right or wrong mod to use – it’s all about whatever helps you best.

Happy healing!

Possibly Related Posts:

• Resto Druid calculator!
• Power Auras exports – Ruby Sanctum
• WTF is my Gearscore?

This is the third installment in my “Grid vs Healbot” series. I had planned this to be a multi-part experiment and feature the other raid frame heavyweights such as Pitbull, XPerl, and so on, but really it’s such a massive job to look at them carefully that I don’t think I can commit to doing another one – not for a while at least.

But the most important challenge, I think, is definitely Grid vs Healbot. So many people ask, on a weekly basis, “Which is better, Grid or Healbot?” The answers given are often incorrect (due to people not understanding the capabilities of the other mod) or simply, “Try them both and see which one you like best” which is actually probably an excellent answer, but not what a lot of people want to hear.

So, without further ado, here is my attempt at giving those people are more definitive answer. This entry will be about Healbot’s features; then I will follow with another to compare the two mods directly (I need to separate the two posts because of their length, I don’t want to overwhelm people too much).


Legend

Once again, here are the symbols that I will be using to show what each mod requires to get them working to my satisfaction (legible, useful, and attractive, etc).




Note that the green check marks come in two flavours: ready to go, and ready to go (but you can adjust the display).

Some features are ready to go by default, but are usually set up in a way that isn’t very attractive or just isn’t quite what I want. For example, poisons will show up, by default, as an icon in the center of the frame, and a corner square also. I don’t like that – I prefer my frame to turn green to indicate poisons. I could certainly get by using the icons, but I prefer to use different display options. So, technically I could install Grid and have poisons showing just fine – but the options are there if I want to make things a little more attractive or to suit my tastes better.

A plain check mark, on the other hand, means that the feature is ready to go and presents in a way that is nice and easy to read, and doesn’t need tweaking to be attractive, and can be left as-is.

Remember – the final goal will be to be able to assess whether I could disable Grid and be satisfied to use Healbot instead. That, as a druid, Healbot can show me all the things I need to see in a raid, in a way that is both easy to interpret, and aesthetically pleasing.


Healbot


healbot -noun 1. a bar-style raid frame addon displaying target health, buffs, debuffs and other information. 2. Informal. a healer who follows his/her target around and acts as their personal healer: Keeva is my healbot for PvP. -verb 3. Informal. to act as a personal healer: Keeva healbots me in PvP.



Old Healbot
Healbot has been around since vanilla WoW; unfortunately, while being very useful, it gained a bit of a negative reputation because it would actually choose the “correct” rank of spell according to how much health your target was missing. This was obviously quite handy, but it did give the mod a bit of a bad name for “playing the game for you” – which is why I never used it. I don’t like mods that make decisions (such as spell ranks) for me. Your opinion on this may vary.

Healbot: Simple, beautiful
But, that nasty business aside, Healbot is well-known for being simple to use “out of the box”, meaning that as soon as you load it up, you can pretty much run with it. This makes it perfect for people who want a solid raid UI but perhaps don’t know much about customising UIs – with Healbot you can just install and run, with minimal tweaking.




Healbot does have some pretty nifty bells and whistles, but its biggest sell point, I believe, is this simplicity – that you can use it immediately with almost no knowledge of addons or UI customisation. If you want to load a raid UI mod and run, Healbot is definitely a great choice.


Alright, let’s get started on the nitty gritty.

1. Aesthetics

So, how is Healbot when you first fire it up? Pretty darn… well, pretty. The bars are a fairly good size, text is good.. and it has a really cool tooltip that shows you what your buttons are bound to, and what your heals should land for (how cool is that – especially if you’re like me and don’t run with any spell buttons on your UI).




Healbot when first loaded – showing tooltip


So if you wanted to walk into a raid right that second, your frames would be a decent size, legible, and attractive, even without tweaking them or personalising them to taste.

Let’s rate things in the same way that I assessed Grid.




There’s really not much to fault here. In terms of basic aesthetics, Healbot is excellent, and it is excellent with very little initial tweaking.

Despite its simplicity, Healbot does have a lot of options for changing its appearance. For example, some people prefer the green bars (that change colour gradually according to health deficit). I personally prefer my bars to be coloured by class, so at a glance I can see the class of person taking damage, and make split-second decisions – ie, triage.

Contrary to popular belief, Healbot doesn’t have to be green bars and only green bars – you can set it up to be coloured by class (like Grid), if you want to, although I think many Healbot users will call me a heathen for doing this




Healbot and Grid, both set to display frames by class colour. Please don’t hurt me.



You can also change the size of the bars, number of columns (something you can’t do in Grid), font type and size, border, background, group headers (and customise those as well). When it comes to displaying buffs and debuffs, you can choose between border and frame colours as well as the standard icons. Not as many options as Grid, but whether this matters to you will depend on the number of things you need to display on your frames at any given time. And.. I think we should pay attention to Mr Confucius’ wisdom above – keeping things simple isn’t a bad thing.

Healbot can show you 5, 10, 25 and 40 man groups. It shows pets, although I am disappointed that you can’t force it to show pets coloured by owner type. I like to see hunter pets as green, warlock pets as purple, for example, so that I can prioritise healing. That is not a huge problem, only a slight niggle.

Another small problem is that there is no background to the individual frames (perhaps this is something I missed). Grid allows you to set a customised background colour (eg red or black) to make health deficits easier to see. If you use the green bars on Healbot this is not a problem, because the bar will change to red as the person loses health; but if you are like me and prefer class coloured frames, this isn’t the case. I like to have a colour behind the bar to show me more easily how much health is missing. But – this is more a personal preference than anything.


2. HoTs and HoT tracking




HoT counters are now built into Healbot. They are shown as numbers on top of HoT icons on the target’s bar. Very attractive and simple. My main gripe here is that the counter doesn’t show up until the time remaining has dropped under double digits (ie, 9 seconds or less). This annoys me because I prefer to see exactly how much time is remaining, so that I know how many other things I can do before I need to refresh my Regrowth, for example.

I also found that the counters are quite cluttered on the icons; in order to make the counters legible, I had to increase the size of the icon and text, and this obscures the person’s frame, meaning that if they have a health deficit, it can be difficult to see. This would not be an issue for someone who chooses to display the HoTs off to one side (not on the frame itself) but as I prefer to have my HoT counters inside the frame, it is a problem for me. I found that having several HoTs on a target made things very cluttered.



Left: Healbot, set up to my preferred frame size, and showing all four HoTs. Disclaimer: different frame configurations will make your HoTs easier to see; this is merely to demonstrate that on my chosen frame layout, the HoTs are quite cluttered.


I don’t like that there isn’t a set position for each HoT; they are just put up in order of casting.

The Lifebloom counter also doesn’t count down with a decimal place; it only counts in whole seconds. If this is what you are used to, you will probably be quite efficient, regardless; but having fractions of a second display can make your Lifebloom rotations much cleaner and tighter.

As a druid, I think that the HoT display is possibly the most important thing on our UI, and as such, this is what I really focused on when I was looking at Healbot. I will go into this more in my comparison of the two mods.


3. Buffs and debuffs




Healbot shows missing buffs, rather than showing everyone who has a buff. You can choose a colour to display when someone is missing a buff, for example, red for someone who is missing Thorns. You can tell it who to check for these buffs – by class, by type such as ‘healers’ or ‘ranged’, and of course, the tanks. This is brilliant. Basically, you set it up to tell you when the tanks are missing thorns, and if they are, it turns them red. When they get their buff, they go back to normal.

And on top of that, you can have Healbot play a warning sound as well – in case you missed them changing colours.

I definitely give Healbot an 11/10 for “missing buffs display”.

However if you want to display who has particular buffs, then it falls down a little. Again, this is personal preference – some people like to be able to see if there is a renew on the tank, or weakened soul, etc – not necessarily their own pre-combat buffs. A minor issue for most, but probably something that some people don’t want to do without.

Custom debuffs, another important part of my UI, are also handled fine with Healbot. You can enter your own debuffs, such as Frost Blast, and have it display in a special colour (and again, a warning sound if you like!). The colour can be set to the border, icon or frame colour (but not to corners as with Grid). The only minor problem is that you can only choose one colour for all custom debuffs; if you want two different debuffs to display as different colours, you can’t do that.


4. Other




Most of these things are built in and turned on by default (or require a quick check mark or slider bar adjustment). I can’t find the low mana alert (if there is one) or feign death warning. Death is shown as an empty bar (zero health), but I prefer DEAD to show on the frame.


Overall

I’ll go into better detail when I write the final installment comparing the two mods, but for now, my super brief summary would be that Healbot:

- is really attractive out of the box, has plenty of great features and requires little tweaking

- has pretty good HoT display options built-in (no need for extra modules)

- has quite a lot of options for changing the appearance of the mod – and would probably surprise a lot of die-hard Grid fans. Still not as flexible and customisable as Grid, but it honestly has all the main stuff that most people would need.

- would be good for UI newbies and seasoned healers alike

Overall, Healbot shows you a lot of buff, debuff, HoT and healing information as soon as you load it. If you want to spend a little more time on it, you can pretty it up even more, but if you don’t have that time, you’ll still have just about everything you need as soon as you start.

Stay tuned for the final installment – Healbot & Grid side by side (dun dun dunnn).



Do you know of a great How-To guide for Healbot? There are a few out there for Grid but I had problems finding an up to date guide for Healbot. If you know of one, please let me know so that I can list them here to help out Healbot users.



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Healbot and Grid stuff again!

I’m nearly done with my side-by-side assessment of Healbot and Grid, and whether Healbot can do all of the things that I like Grid to do for me.

But aside from that, because I’m not an expert on Healbot, I am POSITIVE there are some cool bells and whistles that Healbot can do that I don’t know about.

So – Healbot fans: what are the features of Healbot that you just can’t live without?

I want to gather together a list of “must haves” in Healbot and examine whether Grid can do them, and if so, how well. I’ve already found a few things that Healbot can do that Grid can’t – but I’m sure there’s other stuff out there that Healbot can do a little better (or that Grid can’t do at all).

Can you help me find them? Because I don’t have the time to be able to get into all the nitty gritty cool stuff, and I want people to know all the cool things that the mod has to offer. The more info that we can give people on the two mods, the better they will be able to choose what suits them.

The main problem is that I know what *I* like in Grid, but if I were to go through all of the options and things that you could display, it would take me forever. Instead, it’s best if I ask people what they can’t live without, in case it’s something I don’t use and haven’t covered.

If you can point me in the direction of the cool stuff that you just adore, and a quick idea of where to change the settings, that would be great.

Thanks in advance everyone!





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BIG DISCLAIMER: Please see this and future posts on the subject for what they are: experiments and exploration, a chance to test out the other mods and report back to you on A) how easy or difficult they are to understand at first, and B) how they compare to what I want out of a raid frame mod. Yes, I love Grid to bits, I think it is fantastic. But I am perfectly capable of examining other mods and giving an honest and objective assessment of their cool points and failings.

PLEASE DO NOT leave comments attacking me because you think I am insulting your choice of addons.

This is a project to help the healing community get more of a balanced idea of the old Grid vs Healbot debate, the main points of which are usually “Healbot can’t do what Grid does” and “Grid is stupidly complicated and takes hours and hours to set up.” I’m here to actually give you an honest and frank assessment of what I think of the other mods, and where possible, compare the features (as much as I can as someone who hasn’t used them for a long time).

Certainly if you think I have made a mistake, that I’ve missed a feature or said Healbot can’t do something that it actually can, feel free to let me know, but please don’t frame it as though I am launching an attack on Healbot. I am actually doing this to dispel the old idea that ‘Healbot is bad and Grid is good and if you like Healbot you’re bad’.

I DON’T HATE HEALBOT. I’m doing this to help, so please don’t get your knickers in a knot over it.

Thank you.






Well, so far I’m impressed with Healbot out of the box.

I wanted to approach it without reading any instructions, how-tos, or anything. A complete Healbot newbie. I wanted to see how easy it was for me to set it up considering that I have never touched the mod before – so I could see through the eyes of someone who is new to UIs and may be looking for advice on which mod to use.

I won’t go into big detail because I’m still in the middle of trying to set it up to be a second raid frame to use this week, but I have to say I really like how simple it is. Some things I like so far:


• very simple menus; everything is in front of you on tabs, rather than in dropdown/hierarchy lists, which can be a pain to remember and navigate




• detailed tooltips at your cursor tell you exactly which heals are assigned to your buttons




• the entire frame can be displayed as one column (as many old school raiders prefer), or in as many columns as you prefer. Grid is not as flexible in this way (I believe you need an extra addon, if this is even possible). I prefer a grid, but I know lots of people prefer to have one vertical column of health bars on the side of their screen, so it’s good to have that option.




• it’s also extremely easy to swap between traditional “green health bar” style frames and by-class colouring (I prefer the latter). By using a few slider boxes and checking a couple of buttons, I made my Healbot’s basic bar layout look just like Grid (ignore the HoTs!):


Healbot and Grid side by side – Healbot changed to look like my Grid settings



I would estimate that making Grid look like that, if you hadn’t played with the mod before, would probably take close to an hour to find the right options and then get everything done by trial and error. Most of the time would be taken trying to find which of the menus to go to for each option (again, though, this is mostly related to the huge number of options Grid gives you). The ability to immediately find and change the look of Healbot really impressed me.

At first glance it seems that my assumptions (and what I’ve heard) were correct – the level of customisation isn’t as great as with Grid. I can tell that immediately; all of the basics are there (and that’s all that a beginner would need), but I can tell that I wouldn’t get anywhere near the customisation options. The tradeoff, though, is that you can virtually use this mod immediately (after you assign your heals and cleanses). This would make it extremely easy for a complete UI beginner to use.

I’m also not sold on Healbot’s HoT display; to a beginner it is probably great, but to me it is inflexible (I can’t choose to separate them to different corners) and cluttered. But I will go into that in more detail when I actually do the write-up.

So far though, I’m pretty impressed. Looking forward to tweaking it more and actually testing it out.

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Once I began to write everything up, I realised how much information there was to share – even though I’m really only writing about the parts of the mod that I personally make use of. I think I will need to break it up into the following format:

Part 1a: Grid    What can Grid do? Where does it let you down?
Part 1b: Healbot – impressions as a new user    What’s great about Healbot? What’s a pain?
Part 1c: Grid & Healbot side by side    How do they compare – can Healbot do what Grid does?

For simplicity I will add these parts to my sidebar so that they’re easy to find later.



There are features and modules that I don’t use but many people do, for example showing tanks, using dynamic layout, etc. I can’t possibly go through all the different options because it would take forever (and I would undoubtedly miss a bunch anyway), so instead I’ll be going through the common things that I personally need to see on my raid frames. I’ll assess the common things such as aesthetics, ease of use, HoT tracking, buffs. Obviously that means that this won’t be a comprehensive comparison of the mods, comparing every feature; but that would just be too massive a task. So I won’t be able to tell you everything that the mods can and can’t do, but hopefully I will be able to give you a decent comparison of how easy they are to set up and show the basics like buffs, debuffs, hots, and general layout, and how useful they are for a resto druid.


And once again, the final goal will be to be able to assess whether I could disable Grid and be satisfied to use one of the other frames instead.


Throughout these posts I’ll be using visual guides and symbols to help make it a little easier to see what each mod requires to get them working to my satisfaction (legible, useful, and attractive).




Note that the green check marks come in two flavours: ready to go, and ready to go (but you can adjust the display).

Some features are ready to go by default, but are usually set up in a way that isn’t very attractive or just isn’t quite what I want. For example, poisons will show up, by default, as an icon in the center of the frame, and a corner square also. I don’t like that – I prefer my frame to turn green to indicate poisons. I could certainly get by using the icons, but I prefer to use different display options. So, technically I could install Grid and have poisons showing just fine – but the options are there if I want to make things a little more attractive or to suit my tastes better.

A plain check mark, on the other hand, means that the feature is ready to go and presents in a way that is nice and easy to read, and doesn’t need tweaking to be attractive, and can be left as-is.

I hope this makes sense!



Part 1a: Grid

Grid has been around since 2006, and was designed to present as much information that healers (and decursers) would need, while taking up minimal screen real estate. Grid is famous for its (somewhat overwhelming) abundance of display options and the fact that users can freely change the look of their frames to suit personal taste and available space. It is equally famous (or infamous) though for the fact that it isn’t particularly user-friendly “out of the box” as other raid frame mods are, and that is seen as a big negative for new users or for people who don’t want to invest much time in configuring their frames.

Here are some guides to setting up Grid:
Warcraft-news.com – Unkicking Butt – a Grid Story
Resto4Life – Grid – Thinking Within the Boxes

plus my own guides for copying my Grid layout or setting up HoT tracking.

Again, I can’t possibly go through every feature of the addon, but I will try to give a good overview of the features that I use on a daily basis and consider important (if not essential) for a resto druid raid frame display.


1. Aesthetics

When you first start it up, Grid looks terrible. I’m not afraid to admit that. The boxes are tiny, drab squares that only display part of the player’s name, eek. It’s hard to think where to start to turn it into the frames you really want to see.




You can see why new users feel a little lost at first..


I think Grid’s creators should perhaps consider having Grid install with more of a horizontal, bar-shape, so that it’s not such of a shock when you fire it up and you’re looking at these tiny grey squares. But honestly, if you can get past the initial bewilderment, and spend some time setting Grid up, you will end up with an extremely powerful frame mod that will show you anything you want to see, and in any way you want to see it.

Let’s rate things properly, though.




Default Grid settings are probably fine if you’re a dps class and you just want to see who has your buff and who has aggro, but for a healer, it’s not very good “out of the box”, and this is what turns many Grid-newbies away – the scary prospect of having to take those tiny grey squares and turn them into something that you can actually read and use.

However, if you take the time to set it up, Grid has incredible flexibility in terms of appearance. You can change the squares to be bar-style (by changing width and scale), change fonts, font size and text lengths, change the colours and assign custom colours to different classes, use different gradients, backgrounds and borders to taste. When it comes to displaying buffs, debuffs and other visuals, you can choose between text indicators, border colours, corner squares (in various colours), center icons, frame color, and opacity. With additional modules you can add extra corner squares, texts, and icons – to display any number and combination of buffs and debuffs as you see fit.

You can also use Grid as your 5 man party frames; I have mine set to only show one row of frames when I’m in a 5 man; in a 10 man it grows upwards to become two rows, and in a raid it grows upwards further to be 25+pets or 40 (for BGs). This is something that I really value because I don’t like using standard party frames for small groups and then switching to raid frames for larger groups.

The ability to change the overall look of the frames is by far one of Grid’s biggest selling points, and a major complaint against the other raid frame mods in the past.


2. HoTs and HoT tracking




HoT counters are not built into the standard Grid addon. You can assign your HoTs to corners and assign them colours (for example, I use purple for Rejuv, green for Regrowth, and yellow for WG), but this will display a corner square if that target has any druid’s HoTs on them, not just your own. While it is helpful to see if there is any HoT on your target, it’s much more important to know when your own HoTs are up so you know when to refresh.

Installing the GridStatusHots module (and GridStatusLifebloom if you prefer), plus the GridIndicatorCornerText module will allow you to put HoT counters in the corners of your Grid frames. Personally I like to have Rejuv and Regrowth in the top left and right corners, with Lifebloom as my Center Text 2 (bottom middle). Apologies for recycling this image for the third time, but this shows how great GSHoTs, GSLifebloom and the indicator corner text addons are:





Setting up HoT tracking is one of the more complicated tasks in Grid, and may cause you some frustration if you’re new to the mod – but it is definitely very valuable to have actual counters and not just an icon or dot telling you that there is a HoT on your target or not.


3. Buffs and debuffs




Although buffs such as Mark/Gift and Thorns are not set up by default, they are very easy to assign to corners and color them appropriately (I use pink/purple for Mark and brown for Thorns). Grid’s menus can be a little confusing and it takes a little while to get used to the fact that you need to first assign the buff to a corner under Frame and then choose the appropriate color under Status > Auras. It would be good if you could instead configure everything inside the Auras area; set the color, set where/how you want it to display, the priority, etc. Aside from being ugly out of the box, Grid’s menus are definitely one of its big drawbacks, even for experienced users.

You can also set up custom debuffs that you want to track (but will not necessarily be able to remove). For example, I used to have Felmyst’s Encapsulate set to colour the frame bright pink, so I would know in an instant who was encapsulated, and to either heal them fast, or if it was my group, run. The ability to set up these custom debuffs is something I find extremely valuable and would not want to give up. The fact that I can set them up as a frame colour means that I don’t have to watch for dots or icons; instead I can keep healing and as soon as something turns bright pink, I can react without thinking. This is extremely valuable to me.


4. Other




There’s not much to say about these other items that I like to have on my frames, aside from the fact that if you want mana/rage/energy bars to show, you’ll need to install the GridManaBars module. The rez monitor also requires an additional module.

Other things such as aggro alert, low mana, offline warning etc are all enabled by default and will show up out of the box (but you might want to pretty them up a little from the default settings).


Overall

I’ll go into better detail when I put Grid side by side with the other mods, but for now, my super brief summary would be that Grid:

- is definitely ugly and overwhelming when you first open it (where on earth do I start changing things??)

- doesn’t show mana by default, which is annoying, but it’s easy enough to install

- has FANTASTIC HoT display options but you’ll need a couple of extra modules first

- has great options for size, bar orientation, display, colours, etc – meaning you have tonnes of flexibility to change the look of your frames to suit your UI – but this will take you a while to set up and perfect


Overall, Grid basically shows you every buff, debuff, HoT or state that you ever want to see on a raid frame, you just need to put in a bit of work to arrange them just-so. It will take you probably an hour or two to get running, from scratch, but the results are well worth it. I’m really looking forward to putting the others to the test to see how they measure up.


Stay tuned for the next installment – Healbot: first impressions.

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Major project time! *rubs hands together*

This is going to require a fairly hefty investment of my time, but I’m really keen to do it.

There are Grid lovers and Grid bashers. Healbot devotees and Healbot haters. Healbot, Pitbull, XPerl… how do they all measure up against Grid, the once standout leader in the raid frame race?

Let’s settle this like gentlemen, shall we?

Healbot, Grid, XPerl, Pitbull. If you like your mod, you’ll likely advertise that fact, and defend it when other people announce that theirs is better. I’ve seen some pretty nasty Grid vs Healbot fights, and I know that I have been very strongly opposed to Healbot in the past. I’m not the kind of person to shove Grid in people’s faces and force them to use it, but I was always very vocal in my belief that it was the best option for raid frames (and I still believe that until fairly recently, there was no real competition).

But.. is that opinion justified now – or have the other mods been improved to the point where they can do everything Grid can do?

It’s difficult to really know which mod is better on one hand you have people who are vehemently opposed to one or the other, or so passionate about their own mod being the best that they’re simply not willing to listen to reason about the other addon options out there. On the other hand there are players who have used their mod for so long that they simply don’t know the improvements that have been made to the other addons over time. They’ll say something like, “I’ve used Grid for 3 years and it’s the best because it can do X, Y, Z” but then a Healbot user will say, “Healbot can do X, Y, Z, too!”. Similarly, you have some players who tried Grid or Healbot years ago, hated it, and stuck with something else ever since – and aren’t willing to budge (not realising that the mods have come a long way since then).

Nobody seems to be comparing today’s Grid with today’s Healbot, XPerl and Pitbull. At least not in a meaningful way that helps us directly compare the mods and help people to understand their different features and any limitations. They just say why they love the mod they have – with no actual, meaningful comparisons.

I’ve decided it’s time to inject some objectivity into this age-old debate.

So here’s the plan:

I run an extremely minimalist UI with lots of free space – so I was inspired to do just that – compare them. Directly. I intend to download each raid frame mod, set it up, and see how well I can have it match what I want out of Grid in terms of aesthetics, HoT display, buffs and debuffs, etc. Side by side, Grid vs the others. I want to see if I can make them look the way I want, display what I want, and perform how I want in raids.

Now is the time to do it, while we are farming Naxx and things are easy enough that I can afford to take some focus away from healing trash to look at two sets of raid frames and decide which of them is working the best. Come Ulduar I probably won’t have the luxury of messing around with experiments in raids

Also, importantly, I intend to show people how they look “out of the box”, because this is something that new users or players new to addons always want to know. One mod may be fantastic and packed full of features, but if it takes hours to set up, someone may prefer something a little simpler and less dynamic but that comes pre-configured with common settings.

Anything you can do, I can do better.

I intend to rate the mods on various points such as ease of use, HoT display, buffs & debuffs, general aesthetics and readability, as well as point out any advantages or limitations compared to the others. I’d like to be able to present it in a tabular format so people can directly compare each of the features. At the end of the series of tests, I’ll make a summary post comparing all four mods.

The questions I’ll be asking will be:

1. Can the other mods show me what Grid can show me?
2. Can they show me in the way I prefer, or at the very least, in a pleasing and easy to interpret way?
3. What really makes this mod shine – what’s the major drawcard?
4. What are the major limitations?

If you guys have any particular questions you would like me to address, or things you’d like to see tested and compared, please let me know


The 64,000g question -

Finally, the big question: After all these years of loving Grid, could I happily disable it and raid effectively with one of the other mods in its stead?




So – standby for Part 1: Grid vs Healbot, sometime in the next week or so.

Objective mode on – watch this space!

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Following my post showing my current UI, a few people asked for me to list the addons I use – so here goes! Unfortunately I will have to be fairly brief in my descriptions or it will turn into a massive wall of text – but if there’s something I haven’t described fully enough, let me know and I will try to help you out.





Gradient panels
The pretty black gradient panels you see on the top right, left and bottom of the screen are made with eePanels2. It seems this addon is no longer being updated, but it works fine currently.

It’s a very nifty little addon that you can use to make frames to put your bars onto, add custom art to your UI, funky gradients, etc. I use it in the simplest of ways – I have three gradient panels, very plain, no borders. The ones at the top and left are used as spots for buffs or other buttons, without being obtrusive – if there are no buffs up, they simply look like a nice border. I like the asymmetrical look of them, but you could ditch the gradient look and have solid panels if you wanted.

The gradient at the bottom of the screen is a couple of inches tall, and although I can see through it and it doesn’t obstruct my view of bad things at my feet, it makes text and other UI elements easier to see, rather than just have them floating on your screen.


Unit frames
Down in the bottom right are my player and target (ToT, focus etc) frames. For this I use Pitbull.

Pitbull is very, very customisable, and I can’t really go into all of the different things you can do with it, because it would take forever. Pitbull is responsible for those funky unit frames you might have seen with the character portrait that runs through the middle of the bar. Very stylish – there are lots of different things you can do. If you spot a sleek looking unitframe on someone’s UI, there’s a good chance it’s Pitbull.

As you can see on mine, I have changed my own frame to green (rather than druid orange). I’ve left a blank space between my health and mana bars, and inside that I put my cast bar.

On the target frame I have done the same thing, but also asked it to put the target’s buffs inside that blank space as well, so I can see my buffs and HoTs on them (this is more for aesthetics than for any practical use, though!).

I find it really cute to be able to put things right inside your unit frames. For example, my old hunter UI had a pet bar that was inside my pet’s health bar – things like feed pet, passive/aggressive stance, growl, and mend pet were right on his unit frame. Here’s an old version I dug up:




It’s a cute way of doing things; but I stopped when I decided I wanted to try and have a UI with absolutely zero buttons showing

Pitbull is also used for party frames and raid frames, but I don’t use these features; I just use the player, target, ToT, ToTT and focus/focus target frames.


Action Bars
Well, as you can see I don’t really have action bars as such; no buttons are visible when I play. But I still use action bars for things like food, trade skills, mounts etc – they are just hidden, and show up when I use modifier keys like ctrl, shift or alt, or simply when I mouse over the spot that I know they live in.

For this I use Macaroon, which is the 3.0 replacement addon for Trinity.

It handles almost the same as Trinity did, although you need to get used to the fact that it uses mouse-scrolling to increase or decrease values (such as button count). That took me a while.. but now I love it.

Like most bar mods, you can make bars invisible as described above, which is handy if you’re building an minimalist UI. Obviously if you don’t have bars, you’ll need to have your abilities bound – I use BindPad for this (see below).


Action keybinding
Bindpad is wonderful.

This is something you can’t see on my interface, because it works behind the scenes; but if you use any action bar mod then I highly recommend grabbing it.

Bindpad gives you a window into which you can drag spells, items, macros – just about anything really, and then bind them how you like. Here’s what mine looks like at the moment:




So you can see I have a bunch of spells in there, all bound. This pic shows that I use G for poisons and shift-G for curses.


Buffs and Debuffs
For buff and debuff displays, I use Buffalo. Buffalo lets you move your buffs and debuffs around, resize them, decide which way they grow, etc.

I chiefly use it to make my debuffs huge liek xbox, under my map, so I can easily spot them. I’m not really concerned with my buffs as much.


Map
I use Simpleminimap to let me move my map around, change the size, border, shape, etc. It’s a very simple little map addon. I basically just use it because I wanted a simple way to move my map around, make it square, and change to a simple thin border.


Cast bars
YOU MUST GET QUARTZ.

Quartz is an absolute must for DPS classes, but even for healers it is fantastic. Most importantly, it has a little red section on the cast bar that shows you when it is safe to start casting again to account for lag. Again this is mostly something that DPSers use to maximise DPS and avoid “clipping” shots, but if you’re chain casting Regrowth or HT for example, it makes a huge difference if you can tell when the soonest time is that you can begin to cast your next heal.




So as soon as the cast bar gets into the red section, it is safe to cast again and you won’t get an error message saying that another action is in progress.

Quartz also has a GCD bar that will show you your GCD; I use this because I don’t have any buttons on my screen to show me the GCD


Other stuff

Chat: Prat – allows you to customise your chat windows with different fonts, layouts, colours, etc.

Cowtip: Allows you to move your tooltip to any position, and customise the look and what information you would like it to show.

MiniMapButtonBag: Puts all of your minimap buttons inside one, to save clutter around your map.

MSBT: an alternative to Blizzard’s scrolling text. Lots of configuration options, different texts, etc.

Outfitter: one-button wardrobe changes! Allows you to set up “outfits” such as healing gear, dps, tanking, fishing, resist sets, haste gear, or even just town sets, without having to dig through your bags to find all of the pieces. Also has a very handy “birthday suit” outfit which will strip off all of your durability gear in the case of needing to suicide. In combat it will remove your weapons to save you a bit of money if you’re about to die.

Grid: Obviously!



I think that’s it!

If there’s something you see on my UI that you’re not sure about, or you’d like to replicate but you’re not sure how, let me know and I’ll try to explain what to do, or perhaps do another entry on that particular addon.





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• Resto Druid calculator!
• Power Auras exports – Ruby Sanctum
• WTF is my Gearscore?

It’s been a while since I took UI shots. I often get people asking to see my UI, but the last time I took a screenshot to post was of us just starting to attempt Felmyst.. so the shots were slightly dated.

Here’s what I use currently (click for larger images):

Solo (no target):

Showing the fact that I have no visible buttons on my UI. Any buttons that I do use are hidden; most of my abilities are bound and only seldomly used items are on invisible bars (see pictures below).

Solo (target, ToT, cast bars):


Secret stuff revealed:

This mostly speaks for itself – all of the hidden elements on my screen. I don’t use any bars to play; the hidden button bars in this shot are for things like mounts, tradeskills, food, etc. I have a few oversized empty buttons that I use for gimmicks or quest items. Generally speaking though, there are no buttons on my screen that I use in combat – everything is bound.

Raiding:


Tada!





Possibly Related Posts:

• Resto Druid calculator!
• Power Auras exports – Ruby Sanctum
• WTF is my Gearscore?