My New UI WIP

[Hor]

With Legion almost here I decided to get to work on my new UI, since I'm starting the expansion boxing I'm putting it together with that in mind. My goal is a streamlined UI that doesn't have a lot of clutter. Still working out the kinks, but I'm actually really happy with it so far. I've got 2 hidden bars right now for professions, general purpose items (Hearthstone, etc), and of course a few abilities I don't use often enough to warrant keeping constant tabs on them. Let me know what you guys think.

1747

I'll be updating this as I go along with my new Macros, etc.

[kalos72]

Nice!

I guess if I wasn't so concerned with addon memory usage and ran Wow at higher quality, this sort of setup would make sense. I am all about minimal UI's typically...

Very clean indeed.... :)

[Wubsie]

I quite like it. Clear and simplistic. The extra action button in the middle would irritate me, but that's personal preference I guess.

Personally I've started following a "less is more" type of philosophy when it comes to my UIs. If it isn't telling me something that I should be aware of, I hide it.

One change I've made that I've been really happy with is completely getting rid of the player frame. I've found it completely irrelevant as you need to track the party/raid health instead of just 1 toon. Only problem was when running a toon solo for whatever reason, but now the introduced personal resource display has solved that too.

Similarly I don't have any visible action bars anymore and instead just track party/raid cooldowns through an add-on, specifically Ora3.

[ebony]

i don't know i love seeing a lot of junk on my screen

maybe am odd

[kalos72]

Now ya know, I will need to see a list of whats what and where I can get it right? :)

[Hor]

@kalos72 You've hit on something there I should've mentioned earlier, since I plan to be streaming/recording a lot in this expansion I've decided to go to 1080p and bury the needle on the quality settings. I still think 4k, even with lower quality settings looks better, but Twitch REALLY doesn't like streaming 4k. That and my connection just isn't good enough to stream at that quality. So far, this is a very compact UI in terms of memory usage. Though, I'm adding more today and with the computer upgrade I've got planned I'm even less concerned about the memory usage issue than I already was, but that's a topic for another time.

Current AddOns pictured:
Bartender4 - There is only 1 Bar visible, just split into 2 rows. There are an additional two bars, one in 3 rows of 4 beneath the visible one and another 1 row bar between that and the stat tracker to the right. I keep additional less used abilities like AOEs and taunt there, along with professions. The long bar holds all of my travel stuff like mounts and hearthstone(s).
Chinchilla Minimap - This one's a new one for me, but I think it's got me. I really like having the Location displayed with the minimap, and the overall aesthetic.
Shadowed Unit Frames - This one's a little tricky, but I used the predecessor to this as far back as BC. The only real trouble I have with it is that you have to preposition frames entirely by x / y text location on the screen. That's not the most terrible thing in the world, and definitely what I prefer for fine tuning. But when I'm just getting set up, I really just want to be able to unlock it and move it in the general area where I want it.
Skada - Damage, Threat, etc meters. Still have some customization to do there, but I really love this addon.
TipTac - Really simple Tooltip addon that lets you move and configure the appearance of tooltips. Otherwise tooltips would cover Skada.

@Wubsie This is something I think we can agree on Bellular Gaming did a great video recently about his new UI (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9M2uSwZhzs) that I think sums it up best. I'm trying to do similarly, in that I want the UI to display the information I need/want rather than just ALL of the information. Additionally, I'm going with the philosophy of conditional UI elements. Such as the Part/Solo bars. That's the major thing I'm tackling today (along with Clique integration). In a group, the play bar will become part of the group window. That's the plan anyway. When I break out the raid however the player window will disappear completely in favor of a raid grid.

I used to use oRA long, LONG time ago. I might have to have a look at it again, probably that or WeakAuras. I may, in the end hide the last action bar when it's all done. But I'm not entirely sure yet. I've left the Extra Action Button untouched at this point, I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with it, I might move it to the top / center of the screen (just under where I put the Micro Menu Bar).

@ebony I think upgrading my monitor is what made me change my philosophy toward what's on the screen, when I realized how gorgeous the scenery really can look in the game I wanted to see more of it.

Some parting thoughts:
I've decided I'm definitely going to be adding a hidden Healing bar somewhere, I plan to upgrade my mouse in a bit. And the eventual goal is to move all healing to clique on the mouse itself with movement and attack rotations handled by the keyboard. So, expect more a bit later.

[kalos72]

One other question, how does it look with a full party?

[Hor]

Here's how it looks right now with the group, currently.

1749

When I join a raid, the player and group unit frames are replaced by Grid.

[kalos72]

Nice again! I like the Invasion Timers...

I like Gird so I might go that route instead of the Jamba Display.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

i don't know i love seeing a lot of junk on my screen

maybe am odd

It's not just you. :p

[JohnGabriel]

Nice work.

I spend next to no time working on my UI but lots and lots of time on my dxNothing window.

[CDNProdigy]

To OP:

I love working on my UI.

Have you ever considered turning off the action bars during combat? Let's face it ... when multiboxing and in combat are you really paying attention to the bars, DPS meters, or even the damage scrolling across your screen?

I created an addon dedicated turn all that stuff off. When you multibox the only time combat logs etc are important is when you die, not during combat. :)

[Hor]

@kalos72 for the Invasion timers I'm using this:

https://mods.curse.com/addons/wow/legioninvasiontimer

I actually like the Jamba group window, but as I'm trying to work out some more custom/flexible healing for different situations I decided to go this way. I'm hoping to tag team some raid bosses this time around with one or more boxers.

@JohnGabriel I plan to devote some serious time to my isboxer setup after the UI is finished and I've upgraded my machine a bit. I have a feeling it's going to be just as involved with the functionality I'm wanting to include in my setup.

@CDNProdigy That's actually something I'm seriously considering. Possibly with WeakAuras alerts (or whatever equivalent I decide on) to tell me when an ability is off cooldown. I'm trying to make this one give me feedback that I want/when I want it rather than just all the bars all the time. At most, I think the rotational abilities and possibly consumables will be visible. But the consumables will definitely be added into my alerts.

Skada is definitely going to be hidden during combat, I like having it after combat. But it's more distracting than anything during combat.

When I'm finished I'll probably make a short video to display the UI in action.

[kalos72]

Ok so now you got me thinking Hor, thats not nice! :)

One question I have about UI's in general is how do you setup all "55" toons the same way? I would love to get a more minimalist UI setup but doing it one at a time is deal breaker.

I have the same issue with Jamba actually, setting the same configuration on each time, one at a time.

[Hor]

I'll do a walkthrough of setting it up across game licenses, it occurs to me that might be useful info for a lot of people. I'll get to work on it tonight.

[luxlunae]

I start over with a minimalist UI every couple of years and then slowly get junk bloat.

Maybe this month I declutter again.

[Hor]

1751

Here's how the UI is looking currently, and I'm pretty happy with it. It's clean and aside from a few minor hiccups I'm still figuring out as I get my team going, it's just about ready for public consumption.

@kalos72 - Here's the short answer, I do all of the UI setup on my main here.

I do all of the UI setup on a single character, then I delete the WTF folders for all other characters when I'm ready. I save the settings on an AddOn basis to something memorable, in my case SRS. Then I make a macro for the addons that use those settings.

/suf profiles
/bt profiles choose srs

All I have to do is select SRS on the Shadow Unit Frames profile dialog for each character. Everything else should be fixed, it's just a matter of moving spells/macros to where they go.

Speaking of, here's one such macro that's come in quite handy.

#showtooltip item:11122
/dismount [mounted]
/run SetMapToCurrentZone() local f,g,c,s="Pureblood Fire Hawk","Ironhoof Destroyer",GetCurrentMapContinent() s=(IsFlyableArea() and c>-1 and c<7) and f or g CastSpellByName(s) SetMacroSpell(GetRunningMacro(),s)

This macro when pressed uses the Pureblood Fire Hawk if in an area where you can fly, if not it will instead use the Ironhoof Destroyer. And, just so it doesn't constantly show a big black box with a red question mark I made it show the tooltip for Carrot on a Stick. Be aware, this macro is 254 characters long in it's current state. If you make any substitutions you'll need to either have an addon to extend macro length, or be careful about the length of the mount names you use.

This UI is made for 1080p res, I've still got to do a little tinkering with the scaling. It looks kinda stupid when you start boxing with it right now.

[MiRai]

#showtooltip item:11122
/dismount [mounted]
/run SetMapToCurrentZone() local f,g,c,s="Pureblood Fire Hawk","Ironhoof Destroyer",GetCurrentMapContinent() s=(IsFlyableArea() and c>-1 and c<7) and f or g CastSpellByName(s) SetMacroSpell(GetRunningMacro(),s)

This macro when pressed uses the Pureblood Fire Hawk if in an area where you can fly, if not it will instead use the Ironhoof Destroyer. And, just so it doesn't constantly show a big black box with a red question mark I made it show the tooltip for Carrot on a Stick. Be aware, this macro is 254 characters long in it's current state. If you make any substitutions you'll need to either have an addon to extend macro length, or be careful about the length of the mount names you use.
You can cut 90% of that out with:

#showtooltip
/use [flyable] Pureblood Fire Hawk; Ironhoof Destroyer
Or flip it:

#showtooltip
/use [noflyable] Ironhoof Destroyer; Pureblood Fire Hawk

You can keep your dismount line in there if you want, but simply pressing the key again (when mounted) will dismount you.

http://wow.gamepedia.com/Macro_conditionals#flyable

[Hor]

Thanks MiRai! I'm going to play around with that just a little, but so far looks like it's working perfectly.

That gives me room to make this macro even better than I originally intended.

Here's how it looks now.

#showtooltip item:11122
/dismount [mounted]
/use [modifier: alt] Grand Expedition Yak
/use [flyable] Pureblood Fire Hawk; Ironhoof Destroyer

Lets me use Expedition Yak when I hold alt or do as originally planned, Fire Hawk if flying is usable, Destroyer otherwise. And leaves PLENTY of room for other mounts. Thanks again MiRai.