My UI goals this time around were more-or-less the same as any of my UI incarnations. First and foremost, I wanted to keep the center of my screen clear of all clutter, windows and bars. Other than the scrolling combat text on either side of the central box, there shouldn't be a single thing obscuring my vision of the game. Per usual, any unused elements should automatically vanish or be hide-able when not in use. I strongly dislike layouts with the giant black bar of death across the entire lower third of the screen. It is not only a huge waste of space, but looks really weird when nothing is happening on screen.

4 sets of 12 buttons (48) is what I deemed minimally necessary to remain functional. I love my buttons and can't really reduce it any further (previous UI versions had 6 sets). 3 of the bars are keybound to my n52te, the 4th being mostly used for random macros and stuff like that. There are two sets of 6 AutoBar buttons on either side of the Dominos bars. I didn't like the little circular buttons in my previous setup so I moved them to the sides, making use of the wider screen.

• Left set: Blessings, Auras, BoP, Raid Wall Macro, DI, LoH.
• Right Set: Health Potions, Mana Potions, Healthstones, Crafting, Food Buffs, Water/Mage Food.

The Raid Interface
I've just conceded to the fact that my UI is probably never going to ever be clean and pretty looking mid-encounter no matter how hard I try. So this layout is as minimalistic as I could get it without sacrificing my precious windows and what have you. Actually, all I really did was shuffle a few mods around. It's a necessary evil I guess, given that I am the raid leader and frequently a tank (I swear that some classes and roles have like, a total of 3 buttons on their screen and little else). Other than the focus frame and any pop-up range warning window from DBM, I think that this is probably the maximum level of crap that I would ever need to have on my screen at any given time.

I went back to the old school thick raid frames versus the skinny perfectraid style bars. Instead of being placed on the left edge of the screen, I have them shoved into the spot to the right of Dominos where Recount and Omen used to be. I am quite happy with this change; the 5 raid groups dock nicely into that spot, leaving the middle almost completely clear. I also moved the party and party target frames to this location.

Omen was moved front and center while recount was shoved in the corner. I wanted to do two things with this interface: one, make use of the gap between the player and target unitframes and two, drag Omen out of the corner into a more prominent position. So this takes care of both. And as far as recount goes, it's happy over in the upper left corner. There's really no reason, other than meterwhoring, why I need to or should have to stare at it during an active encounter. I've caught myself being a naughty retadin and Recount rubbernecking when I should have been looking for giant flaming balls of poo at my feet or something. 

What Else Changed?
I went with Dominos (successor to Bongos) instead of Bartender 4 to move all of the interface elements around. It's a lot easier to keybind and configure, though feature wise I'm not sure if I see much of a difference. But then again, my bar interface needs aren't really all that exotic. Fubar was replaced with ChocolateBar since it is no longer being updated. I also extended it to cover the entire length of the screen instead of being limited to the small box in my previous UI incarnation. eePanels2 was replaced with kgPanels for the same reason.

Oh: I finally jumped on the Deadly Boss Mods train. There was a point when BigWigs was nicer because of the now defunct WoW Ace Updater compatibility as well as several other things that I don't remember. I think Big Wigs is still updated more often, but I find the DBM indicators and bars more useful. It's also seems to be more up to date and complete for newer encounters. It has built in shield monitors for the twins as well as timers for Ony and several other things that were missing from Big Wigs.  

To Do
I am not completely happy with how the combat text is layed out. All of the special warnings for all mods dump right into the center, turning it into a clusterfuck whenever something important happens. Visibility isn't necessarily a bad thing I guess. Being in the center makes them easier to see so that I can react faster, but I could do without the redundancy.

I am also not satisfied with the buff/debuff appearance. I like having the square icons with the timers below them in the upper right hand corner (Elkano style mods bug me), but they are too large and need to extend further leftwards towards the center of the screen. I also need to filter the buffs; Anything that appears on ClassTimer doesn't need to be up top. Blizzard is changing the default buff interface in 3.3 though so, I'll see how that goes before searching for yet another addon.

Regarding my posts on PuG raid leading: On second thought, disregard any of the strategy explaining advice and just tell people to heed Mortigan the Lock's rules on how to raid anything. WoW blog post of the week, I lol'd. But seriously, is it really that difficult for people to not stand in a fire?

I think I'll make more of an effort to blog regularly; Regularly being defined as once a week-ish. So without further adieu. rambling time! AKA non-cohesive bits typed past midnight. All of my daily computer and WoW playing is done in a dual screen setup. It's great for multitasking; I can raid and watch stupid YouTube videos at the same time! But lately my right monitor, which is a 4 or 5 year old 19" LCD, has been slowly taking longer and longer to warm-up. It took 5 minutes at the beginning of last week, which was annoying but tolerable because I could just go make a cup of coffee and read something in the mean time. 15 minutes was pushing it and 1 hour meant a trip to the nerd goody store.

So anyway, I replaced it with a 24". It's not really that much bigger, but I've noticed a reasonable increase in environmental visibility, which helps with the aforementioned task of avoiding circles of fire and keeping an eye on where everyone else is positioned duringcertain encounters. I remember raiding on a setup like this, viewing the game through a small box in the center of the screen. That's the cleaned up UI too, I ran with a few more items on my screen during our Molten Core phase.

Both monitors are in widescreen format, but for some reason the new monitor has a slightly different ratio. Just different enough to force me to reposition half of my user interface elements. I think it's about time to redo some of my UI anyway; Primarily upgrading to Pitbull4 and finding a replacement forFubar since the project went perma -dead (I think No Stock UI has an article on that). I guess I'll make another Keiya's UI post at some point. I'm pretty happy with my general layout though, so I doubt I will change much.

raidNot much of a "redo" since it looks more or less the same as version 3.0 except for the smaller button grid and the unit frame change. I went with Pitbull because of its layout flexibility. X-Perl was becoming and eyesore with the plethora of windows that needed to be displayed.

I tried to compress all interface elements to the edges as much as possible, because I dislike having junk stay in the center of my screen. I also wanted any unused elements to fold or fade away when not in use so that I didn't have a giant black bar of death obscuring precious screen real estate.

Class buffs, auras and oh shit spells are grouped and auto-barred on the top left round buttons so that I could keep all of the paladin blessings off of my bars (giant waste of space). Consumables, food buffs, mage food, tradeskills, quest items and stuff like that are autobarred on the opposite side.

idleThe chat log will fade away after 30 seconds of no activity. The combat log, general chat and trade chat are tabbed. Recount and Omen are docked to the far right. recount visibility is hotkeyed on my G15 and Omen will automatically appear upon enter ring combat.

I like having my bajillion buttons and my combat information displayed, but I also appreciate clean interfaces and to some extent simplicity. So this layout is a compromise...I guess. (Addons listed below)

For posterityExpect many WoW posts and very little of anything else for the next couple of months for obvious reasons. I need to remember to turn the music back on while leveling the new content. I've had it off for a long ass time and don't want to miss the new soundtrack.

I cleared out Keiya's inventory space, fixed her addons, added in the experience bar and parked her at Stormwind Harbor. If anyone else is looking for a good customizable experience bar mod, XPBarNone works very well (pic). Curse all of you people who got their game early and have no work/school. QQ me.

I finally respec'd both my hunter and my cat. I went with the cookie cutter 51/10/0 BM build. I am really liking the pet talent trees because it makes so much sense versus having to wander around taming random animals. I took the Beast Mastery talent after all for the extra skill points. I might tame a Core Hound or aDevilsaur at some point; I really want one but I honestly cannot stand the stomping sound.

One of the reasons why I am looking forward to Wrath of the Lich King is because of the Lore. The Burning Crusade was an absolute blast, but aside from Illidan and a few other things, it was a little out there in terms of the Warcraft continuum (spacegoats!). Anyway, I am going to take my time reading all of the quest text (especially since I wasn't in beta and thus haven't done any of them). I have a bad TL;DR habit.

While idlingDesigned for 1650x1080 widescreen windowed. Ugh it took hours to reconfigure everything to my anal UI needs. I am using WowMatrix to update my mods since WoW Ace Updater has been discontinued (the Curse client is crap). My old interface had two button bars, each with 3 rows of 12 buttons (72 total). I downsized it a bit so that there is one button bar with 3 rows of 20 buttons (60 total).

Instead of having FuBar run the entire bottom length of my screen, I shrunk it down to match the width of my buttons. There are actually two FuBars: the other one spans the top and is only visible on mouse over. Any non-essential plugin has been moved up top.

In combat (raid). I clearly do not have enough buffs.The chat log will automatically fade after 30 seconds of no activity. The combat log is tabbed; I used to have it on the right side of my buttons, but since I have SCT setup to display everything that I would need to stare at in combat, there's no use having it permanently visible. Instead, Omen and Recount are located on the far right. Recount is hot-keyed and Omen automatically pops-up in combat.

My raid UI is still messy, but what can you do? I'm not willing to sacrifice visibility for minimalism. I need to move the MT target list somewhere else. I am still missing BigBrother, which hasn't been updated in 3 weeks and Cartographer, which wasn't functioning well the last time I had checked. Here is a full list:

• AutoBar: The upper right set of circular buttons are from AutoBar. This mod automatically sorts and displays things like consumables, oils, etc. For example, I have an AutoBar button for food consumables. When I mouse over it, all food items will be displayed. That way, I don't have to place them all on my bars.
• Bartender4: Allows you to completely customize your action bars in almost every sense. Location, size, spacing, number of buttons, keybindings, whatever.
• ButtonFacade: Using this to replace CyCircled. Allows you to customize the appearance of your action bars. Compatible with Bartender4, AutoBar, and a bunch of other things.
  • ButtonFacade_Serenity: The skin I am using for all of the square buttons
  • ButtonFacade_simpleSquare: The skin I am using for all of the circular buttons.
• eePanels2: Allows you to create background panels to place UI elements on. The transparent gray rectangle under the center button chunk is an eePanel.

• FuBar: The black bar on the bottom with my gold, the time, etc.
• Quartz: A modular casting bar addon. Allows you to customize the appearance, size, and location of the cast bars.
• TipTac: Using this to replace TinyTip. Allows you to customize the tooltips.
• X-Perl Unit Frames: My unitframe mod of choice. This is being used for the player, target, party, and raid frames.
• ClassTimer: The timers above the player and target nameplates on the raid screenshot are from this mod. ClassTimer tracks all of the buffs that I cast on myself as well as debuffs on my target. It makes it easier to keep track of when I need to recast a seal or rejudge an enemy.
• Prat 3.0: Chat log customization.
• ScrollingCombatText: I don't like the Blizzard scrolling text so I use SCT.
• Recount: Damage, healing and performance meter. I've tried most of them and Recount, in my opinion is the most comprehensive and easy to use. It does though require more resources than most other mods...
• Omen: Threat meter.

• ArkInventory: This is the mod that I use for inventory management, it will automatically sort all of your crap into categories based off of user set preferences. For example, I have a section for healing gear, a section for consumables, and a section for quest items, etc. It also allows for inventory searches. Some people hate it, some like it.
• Bejeweled: lol
• Clique: Click casting. Example: I have Cleanse bound to my right mouse button and X-Perl set to highlight all dispellable debuffs. That way, all I have to do is right click on the raid and party portraits to cleanse, versus actually targeting them.
• Outfitter: Gear profiler.

• BigWigs: Boss mod.
• Deadly Boss Mods: Boss mod. 
• PallyPower: Paladin buff manager. This mod also allows you to assign buffs to other paladins in the raid who have PallyPower.
• oRA2: I'm not happy with the way the main tank targets are being displayed, but since I can't get the oRA2 configuration menu to display, I can't change anything.