I love this post over at Hots and Dots, and it almost makes me wish I'd done the same thing with my UI (though truthfully, I don't get too complicated, so most of my pictures would look like her first one). Lathere has collected a series of screenshots of her UI, showing off how much its changed over the years, from her first raids in Karazhan up to the current raids in VoA and Ulduar. And it's very cool to see how things have changed -- early on, she really adhered to addons and what they did as a default, and as time passes, you can see that not only are the addons getting better at giving you the tools to lay out the UI the way you want it (not to mention that other tech has gotten better as well -- she goes widescreen about halfway through), but she's getting better at customizing things exactly the way they should be. The UI gets much more abstract and simplistic as time goes on, though you'd presume that it actually lets her do more in terms of her character.
In fact, aside from the actual graphics in the background and the icons, it's almost hard to tell this is the same game. Of course, Blizzard has to
keep a lot of things in the default UI the same, so they leave a lot of the really creative edits in the UI to the addon developers (and then, of course,
steal the most interesting back). And they can get very creative indeed -- when you put these screenshots over a period of years up against each other, it's interesting to see how both the addon code and the player has changed the interface they use to play the game.
Tags: addons, changes, changes-over-time, evolution, healbot, hots-and-dots, screenshots, titanbar, ui, vuhdo
Filed under: Fan stuff, Odds and ends, Blizzard, Add-Ons, Screenshots, Raiding, Leveling, Hardware
Aug 6th 2009 at 4:00PM 
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
noelkytty Aug 6th 2009 4:12PM
I've been doing a ton of UI tweaking as well. After you get started, it can get addicting! You have to decide what presents the things you need to know most, and organize it so that it is displayed naturally, where your eyes are going to be able to pick up everything quickly.
So far I have managed to do so while maximizing screen real-estate.
Still, I find myself always looking for a better way to do it all.
Itanius Aug 6th 2009 4:17PM
One of the more challenging aspects of UI customization is attempting to make the interface feel seamless when switching between characters. When you're an altaholic like I am, that's important; it lets you focus on your character's class instead of having to re-learn a different interface layout for each alt.
t0xic Aug 6th 2009 4:50PM
I agree about having an interface that works across multiple alts/classes. That's one of my biggest issues. As it is I use Healbot for a lot of things that I doubt it was originally intended for. It serves the purpose well enough when my paladin is spec'd Holy. For my mage it serves up Mana Strudels and Heavy Frostweave Bandages with a Remove Curse here and there. The interface is located in the same place across all of my alts, but serves various functions depending on the class I'm playing.
Varaan Aug 6th 2009 4:26PM
I wish I had kept pictures of my evolving UI, it appears to have taken a somewhat similar path with increasing complexity. I still have a few fixes to make to mine, I should probably scale down the bar sizes, as they're 100% scale, but it's got most everything I want out of it.
jurandr Aug 6th 2009 4:36PM
I didn't keep my screenshots:/
I started out with the huge black box at the bottom with over-sized buttons and everything overlapping each other.
After awhile I ditched the bar (It took up a quarter of my screen!!) and stuck my player and target health bars close to where my character is, and put action bars directly beneath it (just one with cooldowns). Moved down the minimap and also adjusted the opacity on my buffs so I only see them when I need them. Now that I got rid of all those frivolous addons like DBM, hotkeyed a macro to show/unshow recount, and made my action bar a reasonable size, I can see a lot more about me. I can see when my teammates need a peel in a BG, or that the healer is in a void zone and I should yell at him over vent. That kind of stuff used to be hidden from view by.. addons.
A good player doesn't just use addons. He only uses what he absolutely needs, and if he doesn't need it, hides it or disables it.
noelkytty Aug 6th 2009 5:17PM
I kept plenty of screenshots - the problem is, they do not differ for the LONGEST time. All I used for at least a year and a half were DBM, Omen and Recap. These do little to the screen.
It wasn't until I hit 80 and decided to spec Mutilate that I needed to really keep an eye on timers [before the change to Hunger For Blood]. That started me into more mods, and the first was Cutup to help me track Hunger For Blood, Rupture and Slice n' Dice. Once the change to Hunger For Blood happened, I was too impatient to wait for an update and tried another mod.
Usually something would come up in Vent or Guild chat around patch time - people would buzz about what they use for certain things. On the guild forum, some people posted pics of the UIs, which prompts questions from others - "What mods are you using?"
Eventually, you find yourself cluttered with a bunch of stuff on screen. That is when I was lucky enough to find another Rogues "UI Compilation" that he zipped together. I did my own tweaks to it, disabled a few things that I didn't need, enabled a few extra addons that I wanted, and I'm pretty happy.
It's tough to find that even balance of "everything I need" and "I can still see everything going on around me".
Taladan Aug 6th 2009 7:05PM
Although customization of your interface may make you think you'll be better, it could be the other way around.
I started using Bartender to keep the first bar near the center of the screen, so I could keep an eye on cooldowns while tanking. Patch 3.2 came and bartender doesn't work anymore (unless you count the beta.) Thing is, after farming heroics for emblems, I now know the rotation by heart. I can keep casting stuff even without looking at my bars.
I still need to learn how to heal in PvP (large groups) without Grid+Clique, though. ;)
Varaan Aug 6th 2009 9:07PM
What? I've had no problem in 3.2 with bartender, just allow out of date addons.
usagizero Aug 6th 2009 9:35PM
I tried Bartender today, deleted it shortly after. For me the big fail is when i shift into shadow form it doesn't bring up that specially arranged buttons that the default ui does. Not sure where all the love for this comes from really.
Mr. Tastix Aug 6th 2009 10:29PM
People like Bartender and other, similar, ActionBar modifications is because it's so customizable. You can change what it looks like, you can change when the ActionBar is actually visible or hidden, you can change where the ActionBar is situated, etc etc.
You can't do that with the normal ActionBar. Though I preferred the original Bongos before the developer changed the name, the features and ultimately made it pure bullshit for myself.
Steven Peck Aug 7th 2009 1:50AM
@usagizadero - sure they do/can. Change form, configure new bar. If you have the feature disabled you can enable it int he config options.
Keith Aug 7th 2009 1:01PM
I prefer dominos over bartender, as it allows for so much customization.
It really is an amazing add-on.
Mr. Tastix Aug 6th 2009 10:19PM
I love tweaking the UI and customizing my AddOn's to suit me, I honestly do consider it a meta-gaming activity because sometimes it requires a lot more time than people would think.
I used to customize my UI a lot, I used to have a shitload of AddOn's cluttering my screen and so much memory (RAM) being taken up by them. I used to play around with things like the ActionBar AddOn's that let me change how my ActionBars looked, where they were on the screen and when they showed.
I used to use OTHER peoples interfaces - and still do - and customize them. Edit fancy images and Warcraft 3-style interfaces into them (which look wicked if done right, and I can never do it right). I've used AddOn's that add Diablo-esque graphics such as Health and Mana Orbs, both looked goddamn awesome IMO.
But then one day I just got bored with it. And the standard interface appealed to me more. It didn't use much RAM, I could add more ActionBars if needed (I used to have ALL 10 ActionBars showing, which I now know was utterly pointless). I love a cool-looking UI but for the most part, it's for aesthetics. It's just for show.
So now I pretty much have the "basic" AddOns with a few extras. Grid, Omen, Recount, QuestHelper/LightHeaded (I love alts but hate questing), Cartographer and Atlas. And some class-specific AddOns to help me in situations such as combats and groups.
A custom interface looks cool, but isn't needed. This is incredibly subjective, but I truly believe no AddOn is necessary to play the game, or even play it good. You don't need to know how much you're healing for or how much DPS you're doing. You can control your threat WITHOUT Omen too. But it sure does make life SO much simpler when you've got a visual representation there to help you.
Nuts Aug 7th 2009 3:52AM
Ive removed the gryphons with Hide Blizzard, Ive replaced the minimap with SexyMap, Ive added some bars with Extrabars, I use Quartz to keep track of cooldowns and spells, I use TomTom to get directions and I use Lightheaded to get extensive info on quests (including coords)
Dharmabhum Aug 7th 2009 10:03AM
Can you all please weigh in on how much RAM and processor it takes to run addons? I'm not looking for specific numbers or anything, but assuming we're all using 2-4GB of RAM and have a decent CPU, would you say that addons take up a lot of bandwidth and decrease game performance? Specifically, I'm looking at a few to replace some very general default UI pieces: Grid/VuhDo, Bartender/Dominos, Elkano BuffBars, Quartz, Gladius, SexyMap, eePanel/kgPanel, ViewPort mods. Thanks for the input!
Taeo Aug 7th 2009 6:06PM
It can vary Dharmabhum. Some AddOns aren't as well optimized as others and can take up more ram/processing power. Some AddOns just perform really intensive tasks such as Recount or just about any other AddOn that actively parses through your combat log.
On the whole tho I think if you're smart about using only the mods you really need and keep them up to date/avoid badly optimized ones then you'll be fine.
I have released an AddOn compilation of my own and it's pretty lightweight. I use most of the AddOns you've mentioned and memory usage stays around 10mb and processor load remains pretty low. Grid and Recount are the only AddOns that affect my performance and that's while in raid combat - and it's not much - a loss of maybe 5-10 fps on an above average computer. I consider that an acceptable loss considering how useful they are.
You can find my UI compilation at http://www.taeoui.com
K Aug 8th 2009 10:38AM
This.
I haven't been playing WoW for a few months and I just want to log in and finish my UI.
It was beautiful, with only buffs and the map visible out of combat, one tiny action bar visible in combat, with everything besides my main rotation mapped to OPie rings, visual cues set up via Powerauras etc, damage and healing set to move in a curved manner on either sides of the character. All minimap buttons were in a small tray on my titanbar, which was faded out and everything else like Omen, Recount and Grid made as minimalistic as possible and set to the left side of the screen. Everything I needed was set to appear automatically once I was in combat and everything that couldnt be automated was bound to a toggle macro.
It's great when you finally finish tweaking an addon and it works flawlessly, and it's really not that difficult to pull off.
Go nuts, It really improves your gaming experience.
Taladan Aug 8th 2009 5:01PM
Surely you can "allow updated addons" to use Bartender, but that was NOT the point. Point is, because I didn't click that checkbox, I'm better now than I was WITH the addon. That was the point.
Taladan Aug 8th 2009 5:06PM
Ugh, broken reply system is broken.