A (not) So Typical Weekend

Part 1–

Friday morning: The crew and I started our day with several hours of viewing youtube videos. This journey stemmed from our morning reading session. We happened to be purusing WowInsider’s Reader UI of the Week. It’s a great place to get some visual ideas for UI’s, kind of like a brainstorming bin of sorts. What’s also nice about it is that the UI creator lists all the addon’s they’re using.

In the comments section, some kind person was answering another commenters’ question about the Weak Auras addon, and suggested they go to youtube for some tutorials. Wait! I have a youtube account. Why not browse around and see what I can dig up? Off we went, me and the crew.

In our searches, we came across one “Touchymcfeel.” (site link) Low and behold, he had a series of UI addon videos for a priest. There are others, but the priest one grabbed our attention. This is the link for the priest videos we went through.

It is quite true that most of the addons I have in use are pretty much in their “out-of-the-box” state. Minor adjustments for size and positioning aside, they’re mostly game ready. What this really means though, is that I’m not getting full use of all the possibilities these addons possess. Granted, there is usually more than what I really need, so I found this series of videos both interesting and informative. Integrating all these addons into a productive, effective and interesting UI is another challenge one faces. Overall, I found all the videos, even those slightly outdated, to be very helpful.

Friday afternoon: We spent some time with Thdoria, our brave test subject. I must say, she’s been wonderful risking life and limb in shabbily thrown together armor and braving the world at war to test out our whims. Of coarse, this was after all three adventurers had taken care to harvest and replant their farms, and, made their obligatory visits to the Greenstone Quarry. (Ay has decreed his desire to possess that mining pick, at any costs)

During the testing portion of the afternoon, several bars found they’re way to the far side of the playing field, and duely marked “hidden.” lol! They only show on mouse-over. Ah, the clutter is getting an overhaul 🙂 For someone who just -has to have- everything available somewhere on some bar, this is turning out to be very interesting.

“Good fortune to our friends!”

UI: unit/raid frame addons

It’s been quite a day in Azeroth, both interesting and challenging. Having briefly mentioned in previous posts about having several projects going on, today was one of those “work-on-UI” days.

Up until the past couple of weeks, I’ve had my UI pretty well established. All neat and pretty-like, comfortable to work with and useful across all characters. Keybinds were stable, only adjustments of which spells went on which key was needed in the beginning. I had this “Default” profile on most things that everyone used. Pretty simple. Right?

I’ve used Pitbull4 unit frames forever it seems like. One rule I go by, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Then I got into learning serious tanking with Killona. Started to notice some small changes were needed, nothing too serious, just little things popping up now and then.

Then, I decided (perhaps foolishly), to attempt learning the Healing trade. Now, we have some serious problems with unit frames. My baby healer needed something more suitable, more useful, to figure out what she’s doing.

Luckily, somewhere along the line in the past, I had installed this Addon Control Panel mod. It is certainly getting it’s workout time in now!

“ACP”, an in-game time saver!

I started with an old favorite, Grid. Still trying to get the configurations figured out so far. It’s a contender for Pitbull replacement, but questionable.

Then I gave HealBot a look over. I’m getting a bit further along with it than I did with Grid. I credit the HealBot website for the progress I’ve made so far. They have some good info available on set-ups, including some videos.

Part way through config

Neither of these unit frame mods have been on trial runs as yet. It looks like Healbot will get the first opportunity. My baby healer is level 14 atm. She chose to start her healing practice in battlegrounds today, using the stock raid frames. That’s a story for another time though. Tomorrow, we’ll be back to touching up the Healbot, and giving it a trial run.

If you happen to be a Healer with some insight about these unit frames, feel free to add them to your comments.