As a healer, your game ui can be your greatest assistant or your worse enemy. Yes, even worse than that dk who seems to think fire gives him an attack bonus. Probably it ups his spellpower. As I’ve mentioned before it’s important not to get tunnel vision when you’re healing, and your ui can help – or hurt – with that.
Here’s a screenshot from when I was 65. A lot has changed since then (my name used to be Metaphor. When we server changed I was forced to change to Analogue). You can see that a lot of what I’ve got here is straight out of the box WoW. I’ve got the extra bars turn on and a couple addons in place.
I actually did not use raid frames until after I was 80 – here’s the story. I was having fun at 80 healing 5 mans, even went into Naxx 10s sometimes. Did this for months. Then 3.2 dropped – Argent Tournament patch – and a member of my then-guild was complaining that he couldn’t heal any more because the patch had broken his raid frames.
My first reaction was “Hah, see, I knew there was a reason I didn’t use those. He can’t heal any more without crutches”. My second reaction was – “Wait a minute, if they do that much, what am I missing?” So I took a whole day and played with raid frames. I’m the sort to research things thoroughly, so I learned that everyone seemed to use Grid or Healbot, both of which I’d heard of. I tried Grid first. My main reaction was “how many addons do I have to download here?” It was about a dozen, I think. I tweaked for two hours and couldn’t get something I liked, so I tried Healbot. I pretty much hated Healbot right off – if Grid had too many options, Healbot didn’t have enough – so then I tried the addon with a weird name some people on plusheal.com were swearing by, Vuhdo, and like Goldilock’s taste of the little bear’s porridge, I thought it was ‘just right’.
This was the result. Vuhdo wasn’t the only ui tweak; I’d made a lot of changes, specifically and most importantly to use Vuhdo to show my healing targets. I had a really bad tendency to shove things to the edge of the screen – I knew I wanted lots of room to see stuff around me but this layout makes almost no sense to me any more. I had to remember where all my things were, there was no real logical layout. I have no idea why I had buffs and debuffs halfway down the screen like that
Now here’s my current UI, first in combat and then out. I personally think it’s a lot better than the previous ones. I’ve got my action bars grouped at the bottom, except one tiny sliver along the side. (The side bar has buffs and a downranked version of Rejuv that I use on stupid people occasionally, idiot hunters and such who pull aggro, won’t drop it, and whine about not getting heals). The bar with my profession skills disappears in combat, leaving me a solid view of the SexyCooldown bar (the big blue bar at the bottom). I’ve got my Vuhdo frames anchored just right of my character and my own and target frame just below me. This helps me keep an eye on what’s happening to me and around me as well as just the bars.
I’ve set Recount and Omen to use the same spot on my screen. Recount shows out of combat, Omen shows in combat. It’s a nice trick to save space. Along the bottom I have ChocolateBar with various plugins that I don’t really need much – gold totals, clock, mail icon. Bartender manages my button bars – I have one bar in the middle and on either side, another bar that I’ve arranged in 3×4 format. Personal preference there, nothing fascinating.
If you look at the in combat shot you’ll see I have buffs and debuffs on my target’s unit frame but not my own. They’re redundant since I have Elkano’s Buff Bars in the corner (I like the nice verbose version of my buffs; I play enough characters that it gets annoying to remember what symbol means what for who.)
As a druid, if I’m in a raid I’m supposed to be raid healing and that means being able to tell at a glance who has what HOTs and for how much longer. I’ve tweaked Vuhdo to show me exactly that. Each HOT has its assigned place on a health bar, and displays how many seconds it has left. Here’s a bigger version of a Vuhdo square so you can see it. Vuhdo has options to show other people’s hots too and I have it set to show me if another druid has something on a target that I can Swiftmend – the red dot icon in the corner of the unit frame says “Regrowth or Rejuv active on this target and Swiftmend is off cooldown”. The Lifebloom stack is really cool – when I have one stack up, it shows a red number of seconds remaining, when I have two stacks it’s yellow and when I have three stacks, it’s green.
You may have noticed in my “in combat” shot that some of the Vuhdo bars showed little red >> << marks. That means someone has aggro from somewhere (sometimes it’s laggy but it’s pretty solid) and also a third small bar along the top of each player’s health bar showing a visual representation of how much aggro they’ve got. This, Omen, and TidyPlates are all tools I use to try to keep track of who is likely to take damage soon.If I can see that the mage has threat and is getting more all the time, I can maybe save him.
Finally here’s a screen shot of what Vuhdo looks like in this setup in a 25 man raid. This is the “test” mode – those aren’t real people in a raid, I’m sitting in Ironforge by my lonesome.
I recommend you see what raid frames work best for you; Grid and Healbot are both popular for reasons. Here are a few links for setting up Vuhdo from people who do it better than I would:
Vuhdo manual – And this forum has the creator of Vuhdo, Iza, as a very active participant! He’ll answer your questions if you can’t find them elsewhere. Look for the Vuhdo subforum off of the Mods & UI forum there.
My takeaway for you would be, don’t settle for “ok” in your interface. Find what works for you. Keep tweaking until it shines. Try new things, get rid of what doesn’t work. Some people put their raid frames below their character, or to the left, or along the top. Figure out what helps you keep yourself and everyone else alive the most. Some people hide most of their abilities, others need everything on screen at once. Look at other peoples’ ui screenshots – that PlusHeal forum I mentioned before has a long, long thread for just that – and copy the elements you like, ignore the ones you hate. There’s no one perfect setup for healing in WoW.
This makes me happy because I think you’re the first person I’ve seen in awhile that has a set-up very, very similar to mine. I also use Vuhdo, and I keep my bars in exactly the same place. I see many UIs where folks prefer to have them neatly at the bottom, but I’ve always found that having them right up in the action is better for me – it leads to less tunnel vision and far from blocking my view, allows me to stay out of death fires while doing my job. Of course I’m an off-spec healer now so Vuhdo is often shuffled down to the bottom while I’m DPSing, but it still plays a debuff sound if I need to help with decursing or poisons or whatnot. I’m due for some UI tweaking though, thanks for the inspiration. 🙂
See? We’re not crazy! At the bottom means I can’t see the fire I’m standing in. Or the globs of death coming at my head.
ThreatPlates is my latest addition, just in the last few days, and boy do I love it! I try to have elements of my ui that I can use for all my characters, from my mage to my tree to my prot pally, and ThreatPlates are going to join Vuhdo as a “useful to everyone” addon.
I like to drag my vuhdo panel right close into the center left of the screen when I have to heal – but when I’m dpsing I leave it smack up against the left side of my screen (easier to ignore).
Placing large Vuhdo (25 or 40 man) frames under your feet/at the bottom center of the screen can be a dangerous thing to do if it covers up what you might be standing in.
I think Lathere has another addon though that actually changes the video output from WoW so that rescales her point of view and fills only the upper 3/4 of her monitor so that the bottom 1/4 isn’t covering up anything. Does that make sense?
I want to give Vuhdo a try, but Grid+Clique is so ingrained in my raiding that I probably won’t switch off it unless a patch comes along that really breaks it.
I’m one of those who likes my raid frames on the bottom. I like to keep the center of my screen as clear as possible so I can see what’s going on.
The best rule of UIs is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. If Grid + Clique is working, that’s fantastic. I do love Vuhdo though; Iza keeps it very up to date and I like only having to update one mod, plus I can use its buff features to replace PallyPower for my paladin tank.
Another Grid fan here, although I’ve not tried Vuhdo or Healbot. I used to use Pitbull but after endless tweaking of the raid frames and never being happy with the result, I figgered I might as well try something else. Since a lot of people I respect use Grid, that was my first choice, and I found it suits me well, at least for priest and shaman healing.
I also really like Tidy/ThreatPlates, it’s a godsend for tanking.
I keep my vuhdo in the center left, off the edge so I can see party frames on the left of it and also see around it for more situational awarness. I have the party frames up on all characters and vudo up on all tanks and healers. Vudo is great for seeing who has agro and also targetting them for certain abilities like that pally taunt that hits three targets.