Building an Efficient Interface: Part 3 — Functionality and the Remains

So far we have focused on the graphical user interface. That is, stuff that you see and interact with immediately on your screen. While certain points like layout apply most particularly to this subset of the UI, it is merely the tip of the iceberg.

The vast majority of my addon collection contributes smaller features with lower profiles. These may be tiny components which improve and further personalise the game to a player’s taste. Then there are the addons which you use only in certain situations, such as in a raid or on an auction house alt. I’ll be going through some of these addons in this part, though some may seem completely useless depending on your needs.

Raids

Raiding addons are largely governed by a player’s guild. With the exception of unit frames — assuming you have a setup that allows the usual requirements — your guild will most likely let you know what you’ll need to participate in their raids. Often the only addon on your guild’s agenda is the obligatory boss mods addon, which is usually either DBM or BigWigs.

There are other useful addons that really require everyone to use them for full functionality. The two I find most useful are below.

RaidCooldowns

Displays certain ability cooldowns of raid members, such as Divine Intervention, Rebirth and Bloodlust. Not everyone requires the addon for it to be useful, but it will increase accuracy.

ArtPad

A horribly overlooked gem for any raiding guild (or PUG!). It’s a basic whiteboard which lets you draw and collaborate with raid members. Outstanding for learning new encounters or explaining things where a picture is worth a thousand wipes.

Bags

I have searched far and wide for The Ultimate Bag Addon™ with varied levels of success. What’s wrong with the default bag setup, I hear you ask? What’s right with it?! It splits up your bag space based on the bags you carry — 5 un-configurable sections of slots. New items are thrown into the first available slot with no concern for organisation. There is no search feature. There is no sort function.

I could go into a discussion about productivity and efficiency, but it’s not necessary. Other than ignorance, there is no reason to use the default bag setup. If you do, you are a masochist. You are Doing It Wrong.

But as I said, I haven’t been successful in finding the perfect bag addon. There would appear something for everyone — from the player with OCD who has every item sorted into its own sub-sub-sub-category to the One Big Bag which compresses everything into a mosaic of staves and animal bits and cackles manically when you’re actually trying to find something.

I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said I’d tried every bag addon out there, and even started writing my own, but I’ve been rather settled with Bagnon since its 2.0 release. It’s one of the “mosaic” types, but has enough features to keep it sane. Its key feature, for me, is the incredibly powerful search box. Pair it up with Genie — an automated bag sorting addon — and bag sanity may be yours!

Buffs

Buffs are irritating creatures. There’s no right way to organise them and they come in the hundreds. I’m still trying to find an acceptable way to sort and display the pesky buggers, and I’m convinced that these addons are part of the solution.

Satrina Buff Frames

As much as I like my addons lite and simple where possible, this monolithic buff addon really stands on its own — and I mean this in a good way! SBF allows you to do (almost) anything you would ever want to do with buffs/debuffs. If you don’t think you need SBF, you may be wrong. It’s excellent for keeping track of important information and splitting it up for quick access. I have neither the time nor the will to touch on SBF’s mountain of features here, but I probably will in a future post. If you’d like to read about it, you may do so at its website.

Power Auras Classic

Power Auras Classic probably fits best under the “Buffs” header, though it has a number of uses. Once again this is an exceptionally powerful addon which really needs its own post, but the general concept is that it displays textures based on conditions which have effects. For example, upon receiving Bloodlust you could have a texture slide into view and pulse for the duration. Flashy? Yes. Practical? Very!

Map

The default map and minimap do the job, but like everything I tend to focus my opinions on, they could be better.

pMinimap

A minimap addon which does things to your minimap which will probably be what you want: minimalism and a square shape. If nothing else, you should at least look into removing that massive number of minimap buttons. Yes, I’m talking to you!

tekMapEnhancer

A beautifully minimal addon which fixes the map. In Tekkub‘s own words:

• Scale down the map a bit
• Remove the “blackout” behind the map so you can interact with the world
• Allow you to use the chat editbox while the map is open

Do you need more? Well maybe, but that’s where other addons come in.

HandyNotes

I honestly haven’t used any sort of map notes in years, but could use the functionality at times. I haven’t tested HandyNotes yet, but it is ideal from the description. Even has some modules to load certain notes.

Questing

As I see it, there are three ways to quest in WoW these days, and one of these is without addons. The other two are Carbonite and TourGuide. I prefer to use Carbonite when attempting to fully complete zones or ensure maximum reputation gain, whereas I use TourGuide to speed level a character to 80.

Carbonite

Carbonite is a huge addon originally developed as a commercial product. Following a change in WoW’s T&C, they no longer charge. While it reeks of commercial quality, it also makes the assumption that the user is using little to no other addons, and attempts to do many things that it has no place doing as a questing addon. With ten minutes of configuration, however, you’ll be able to turn off most of the unnecessary features and get it working the way you want.

In a nutshell, Carbonite comes with a huge, fairly smart quest database which will tell you where to go and what to do on your questing adventures. It completely replaces the map in doing so, and gives you another minimap-like object, which you may or may not like. If using Carbonite, I tend to have it enabled only on levelling alts as a result of this.

Carbonite takes some getting used to — particularly the map portion — but it is a truly excellent questing tool. I switched from the nightmare-inducing QuestHelper and never looked back.

TourGuide

TourGuide really requires the assistance of other addons to be a full questing solution. Those addons are Jame’s Leveling Guide, TomTom and LightHeaded.

TourGuide allows users to essentially play the game through with an interactive levelling guide. That means human-made, tried and tested. As you complete quests, visit new areas, hearthstone, etc., TourGuide will switch to your next objective and you need only mindlessly follow its orders! The great thing about this is that you are basically guaranteed to skip time-wasting quests and locations provided the person who wrote the guide is competent.

All of the above addons work hand-in-hand to produce a better experience, but what do they do? Jame’s Leveling Guide is pretty self explanatory — it’s a guide written by Jame which helps you level via TourGuide. There are others, so you may prefer to use another. TomTom allows you to play waypoints (blips) on the map and gives you a Crazy Taxi style arrow to help you find them. This works with TourGuide co-ordinates and automatically places the blip based on your current objective. Finally, LightHeaded is an in-game database of WoWHead comments which you can show in the quest log. This works with the bunch to provide TomTom with any waypoints that TourGuide is missing.

Tooltips

I’d like to recommend something here, but I really can’t. I initially liked sToolTip, but that stopped working for me so I switched to CowTip. Then that stopped working so I tried TipTac. TipTac now causes a strange and ridiculous frame skip, leaving me without anything practical.

One big feature to look out for: hide unit frame tooltips in combat! Gotta love those blinding tooltips when you’re actually trying to heal something.

Leftover Leftovers

Here’s a collection of the stuff that either doesn’t fit into any of the above or I can’t be bothered to go into too deeply.

Button Facade

Basically a library which lets you change the look of most buttons (action bars, buffs, etc.) provided the related addon supports it. Widely supported and an excellent final touch to a functional but otherwise ugly UI.

Chat

In my opinion, chat doesn’t need many changes to make it functional. The biggest requirement I find is hiding the background and making the text readable in doing so, which comes from setting each string to have an outline. I use pChat to do the latter which I cannot seem to find elsewhere, along with a number of smaller addons which I’ll name if there’s sufficient interest. Say no to Prat — you really don’t need all those options.

Equipment Manager

Again, this is something for another post and I plan to make one. Gone are the days where we need a full suite of an addon to manage our equipment, as the Blizzard default is fine with a couple of tweaks.

Summary

You should now have more or less a fully-functional, efficient UI. Just remember that a UI is never complete — it should continue to evolve along with your play style and requirements. Of course, the best thing you can do to ensure that is to continue reading this blog! I hope you liked the series, even if most everything got thrown into the last post. Comments are more than welcome.