The evolution of a UI

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

8-06-2009 @ 4:36PM

jurandr said...

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.

8-06-2009 @ 5:17PM

noelkytty said...

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".

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