Silly UI stuff

After looking around at some other UI's, I decided it was time for a change of pace. See, I have been running with the standard, old, hot bars the blizz gave us a million years ago. I have tried to have different ones, but it was getting frustrating when the hot bar mods couldn't keep up with the shapeshifting bar. Either the bar would be hiding behind something, completely broken, or not save buttons that each shape provided. I gave up for a couple years.

Recently I DL'd Dominos and I must say it's very nice. Granted it's not the best thing out there maybe, and seems similar to Bartender (which my boyfriend uses) but compared to my life before, it rocks. Making things smaller or larger or move it out of the way entirely was cool. In addition, I finally cleaned up what was on my bars. I think I had Regrowth and Rejuv in the same places since I first got the spells, and with Clique+Grid, there was no reason to keep them there anymore. Same goes for a few other spells I have bound to buttons.

Also, I am not sure why I felt it was necessary to have the group up when I would be staring at grid anyway. In fact, it was so bad that Grid overlaped the party frames and was just more clutter. This is what happens when you are stuck in a rut.

The result is a much more steamlined version of the crap I have on my screen. This may seem silly when you consider that Grid is HUGE and therefore engulfs everything. But, considering everything else I have is small, I end up with a lot of open spaces on my screen which goes a long way to situational awarness.

It's funny, I started this post a couple days ago and finally am getting around to actually posting it. In the meantime, I was reading the WoW forums on how someone feels Grid kills situational awarness.

The problem is not the mods, at least not 100 percent. It's a two part issue. First, Blizzard has decided to heed the call of healers who claimed that healing was boring. They don't call it wack-a-mole for nothing. To combat that issue, there are now a ton of things happening at the same time and in the midst of it all, sometimes the healers are asked to move or switch to critical targets (think Slag Pot, Lazer beams, what have you). This requires a high level of not only situational awareness, but maintaining an eye on raid frames at the same time. This leads to the second issue which is the player. Some healers are just not wired for the level of information saturation Blizz has given us. This requires a lot of work on the part of the player to train themselves to move beyond the boxes and listen or look for other things going on.

Old set up:



Lots of crap on my screen, a defunct NeedtoKnow mod sitting off to the side because I didn't have it configured and Grid overlapping party frames.

New set up:



Still could some work, but it's so much better than it was before.

After watching a video of Healbot set up, I have to admit it looks very attractive. Sadly, I can't give up my Grid+Clique set up. I am sure Healbot could keep up with all my hots and boss debuffs I watch for, but I am not in the mood to relearn a whole new raid frames set up.


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Slightly off topic, it's now summer time for me. I am writing this from work. Now it's not a paying job, but I decided to stay on with this agency after my internship was down for the term. It's quiet now (thankfully) leaving me some time to type. Summer also means more time to play around with the blog, my characters, and getting my house cleaned before the rash of company invades us.