Totally reworked every one of my key binds and changed my whole UI. Not just because I'm addicted to constantly changing my UI. It was necessary after I made the completely frivolous but oh-so-satisfying purchase of the Razer Naga mouse. I know, but, see, I was in Best Buy? And it was right there? And it was shiny? So. You know. Visa, it's everywhere I want to be.
Anyway.
I downloaded VuhDo and gave it another go because I'd like a cleaner way to show my shields, HoTs, and weakened soul on the unit frames and Pitbull is just too messy about it. Plus VuhDo is the only healing mod that allows you to bind heals to the mousewheel. Clique won't do it and neither will Healbot. That makes VuhDo the winner. Yeah, I know they're just mouseover macros, but I don't want to use my own mouseover macros because I already have the mousewheel bound to do other stuff except when VuhDo overrides that over its own frames.
Love VuhDo.
But OMG I hate the way it looks! Circus clown colors everywhere. No good way to change them or no way at all (you can change the color of health bars for other players but not, for example, the color of NPCs' frames). Complicated to set opacity because you have to do it for each element rather than the whole frame, and no way to customize opacity based on combat status etc. It's just ugly and not customizable enough. And I ended up having to put Pitbull back on just for my target and ToT because I couldn't get VuhDo to show me what I needed to know about enemies.
None of that is VuhDo's fault really. It's not meant to replace your unit frames entirely.
Which got me thinking, why not? Why do we always have to use two different mods for unit frames and healing? What I need is Pitbull plus VuhDo in a single mod. Would that not be awesome? And yes, I want someone to spend time developing and maintaining this mod for free. So what, I already told you I bought the new mouse, you already know I'm spoiled.
Incidentally, Razer provides an addon for this mouse, essentially a bar mod so you can bind its bajillion buttons easily. I assumed I'd never use it because I love Dominos, but I loaded it just to check it out. Guess what? It's Dominos. I don't mean it's like Dominos. I mean it is Dominos, exactly, down to every dialog box, with just a couple of minor things added. I hope they paid the Dominos guy a tidy sum.
- Forums
- World of Warcraft
- Class Discussion
- I did it again, because I am an addict and cannot stop
I did it again, because I am an addict and cannot stopFollow
You tease.
Making a whole post about your sexy UI and then not showing it.
Making a whole post about your sexy UI and then not showing it.
Mozared wrote:
You tease.
Making a whole post about your sexy UI and then not showing it.
Making a whole post about your sexy UI and then not showing it.
It's still a work in progress. I'm debating between DoTimer and three other mods that combined do what DoTimer does but without taking up so much space.
I like using Satrina Buff Frames for some things like keeping DOTS on a target when in shadow, and Power Auras for showing when certain abilities are available.
Vuhdo actually is pretty customizable, although a little complicated to setup at times. The Bouquets feature allows you to prioritize effects. I like having the bar color go from green to red with health, and blue for custom magic debuffs, purple for diseases, and brown for special raid debuffs I define. You can decide which buffs or debuffs show icons on the frames, make noises, etc.
I particularly like the way I have PW:Shield indicated. I show an Icon with timer and percent remaining for PW:Shield on each unit frame. I also show an inner border with Dark Blue for Weakened Soul, Light Blue for Shielded and no Weakend Soul, and Yellow for no shield, no weakend soul. I combine that with a bright red outer border for Agro.
There is a hostile target keybinding settings page. It doesn't allow macros, so I have bound a swipe macro to my friendly target frame within Vuhdo on my Druid for example.
Yeah, I'm a Vuhdo fanboy, and the developer Iza frequents the Vuhdo support forum over on Plusheal.com .
I put myself and the other healers in my leftmost frame, the tank (as private tank) and focus in the second frame, and everyone else in the rightmost frame. I also show target of target on my tank's frame. Tanks and healers get priority treatment for Shields, etc. Here's a sample layout, although as a sample, there are way too many people in the healer and tank frame on the left and center.
![Screenshot]()
Edited, Aug 10th 2010 2:55pm by dadanox
Vuhdo actually is pretty customizable, although a little complicated to setup at times. The Bouquets feature allows you to prioritize effects. I like having the bar color go from green to red with health, and blue for custom magic debuffs, purple for diseases, and brown for special raid debuffs I define. You can decide which buffs or debuffs show icons on the frames, make noises, etc.
I particularly like the way I have PW:Shield indicated. I show an Icon with timer and percent remaining for PW:Shield on each unit frame. I also show an inner border with Dark Blue for Weakened Soul, Light Blue for Shielded and no Weakend Soul, and Yellow for no shield, no weakend soul. I combine that with a bright red outer border for Agro.
There is a hostile target keybinding settings page. It doesn't allow macros, so I have bound a swipe macro to my friendly target frame within Vuhdo on my Druid for example.
Yeah, I'm a Vuhdo fanboy, and the developer Iza frequents the Vuhdo support forum over on Plusheal.com .
I put myself and the other healers in my leftmost frame, the tank (as private tank) and focus in the second frame, and everyone else in the rightmost frame. I also show target of target on my tank's frame. Tanks and healers get priority treatment for Shields, etc. Here's a sample layout, although as a sample, there are way too many people in the healer and tank frame on the left and center.
Edited, Aug 10th 2010 2:55pm by dadanox
It is very customizable for what it's supposed to do, and I love it for that reason. I love having all the information I need to know as a healer so conveniently displayed, and choosing which HoTs and such I show and where on the frame I put them. The capacity for that is why I started looking at healing addons again in the first place.
But what I was trying to do was more-or-less replace all my frames with it. If I'm going to use something like VuhDo for friendly frames, then I hate having another huge addon like Pitbull just to show a couple of enemy frames. But none of the healing addons are meant to be a total frame replacement. With VuhDo I can't customize the color of, say, an NPC's frame (they'll just show a big bright green background for friendly, big bright red for unfriendly, and you can't change that option). I can't customize how an enemy target's health and mana information are displayed. The tooltips don't work on NPC's or unfriendly targets. Etc. etc. Like I said, not VuhDo's fault. It's a healing addon when what I really want is a healing addon plus an all-purpose unit frames addon.
I love your example of how you're handling shield and weakened soul. Seems neater and prettier than how I set it up to do it. I may copy off your paper on that one. I've spent a lot of time with it but so far haven't gotten to the point where my frames look exactly "done" to me. Pitbull for all its faults just looks cleaner. You can make your screen a nice, 70% see-through, consistently colored, peaceful place. All these bright colors are going to give me a seizure.
I like Satrina Buff Frames. But same problem - it's meant for what the author wrote it for rather than every single thing I might ever want it to do.
I can use that for buffs/debuffs, CooldownButtons for cooldowns, and PowerAuras for whatever else I need to know. Or I can just get DoTimer to handle all that with one addon. I love the efficiency of it being all in one, but I have a love/hate relationship with DoTimer.
But what I was trying to do was more-or-less replace all my frames with it. If I'm going to use something like VuhDo for friendly frames, then I hate having another huge addon like Pitbull just to show a couple of enemy frames. But none of the healing addons are meant to be a total frame replacement. With VuhDo I can't customize the color of, say, an NPC's frame (they'll just show a big bright green background for friendly, big bright red for unfriendly, and you can't change that option). I can't customize how an enemy target's health and mana information are displayed. The tooltips don't work on NPC's or unfriendly targets. Etc. etc. Like I said, not VuhDo's fault. It's a healing addon when what I really want is a healing addon plus an all-purpose unit frames addon.
I love your example of how you're handling shield and weakened soul. Seems neater and prettier than how I set it up to do it. I may copy off your paper on that one. I've spent a lot of time with it but so far haven't gotten to the point where my frames look exactly "done" to me. Pitbull for all its faults just looks cleaner. You can make your screen a nice, 70% see-through, consistently colored, peaceful place. All these bright colors are going to give me a seizure.
I like Satrina Buff Frames. But same problem - it's meant for what the author wrote it for rather than every single thing I might ever want it to do.
I can use that for buffs/debuffs, CooldownButtons for cooldowns, and PowerAuras for whatever else I need to know. Or I can just get DoTimer to handle all that with one addon. I love the efficiency of it being all in one, but I have a love/hate relationship with DoTimer.I can understand that Vuhdo doesn't do everything, especially with regard to hostile target of targets. When I'm healing, I guess I don't worry about them too much, other than their remaining health and what ever dbm is shouting about. Right now, my other unit frame is the default Blizzard frame, but I have bounced back an forth to others in the past. It just seems to get complicated.
All right, well, my VuhDo experiment was short-lived. But worthwhile. Because I officially declare it to be Neato, and using it gave me a really good idea of how I'd like my frames to look. I was just obsessed with the inefficiency of having two mods to handle one thing. Not just because I'm insane, but I really want all my frames to behave the same way. I don't want a different set of rules for Target and ToT. So I downloaded a ton of other frame mods. No luck. Finally decided that since Pitbull still came the closest I'd just slap it around a while until I made it behave how I want.
Thanks to Google and two hours I'll never get back, I came pretty close to adding everything I was doing with VuhDo to my Pitbull frames. My party frames are little and square and efficiently display information. All my frames display borders for Shield (light purple) and Weakened Soul (dark purple). Other auras of my choosing have icons in the corners. I can click or mousewheel cast over frames. As always, they light up for auras I can dispel or abolish.
At some point if I can learn enough about Lua I'll figure out how to write a text to notify me when a buff (Fort, Spirit, Inner Fire) is missing. Meanwhile DoTimer handles that fine.
Still a work in progress, so no ss. It could still be prettier.
Thanks to Google and two hours I'll never get back, I came pretty close to adding everything I was doing with VuhDo to my Pitbull frames. My party frames are little and square and efficiently display information. All my frames display borders for Shield (light purple) and Weakened Soul (dark purple). Other auras of my choosing have icons in the corners. I can click or mousewheel cast over frames. As always, they light up for auras I can dispel or abolish.
At some point if I can learn enough about Lua I'll figure out how to write a text to notify me when a buff (Fort, Spirit, Inner Fire) is missing. Meanwhile DoTimer handles that fine.
Still a work in progress, so no ss. It could still be prettier.
Scholar
28 posts
First off, seeing the Razer Naga and how awesome if could be makes me deeply hate you damn right handed people. YOU GET EVERYTHING!! I'm currently using a Logitech M610 Lefthanded version. It really is a great left handed mouse with 2 thumb buttons, 3 buttons just to the left of the left mouse button - oops, right mouse button, but in my head to conform to you dominating right handers I think of it as the right button - and the scrollwheel clicks left and right. So between Shift Ctrl and Alt modifiers I can get nearly every worthwhile ability on it. But to have an entire numberpad?? And to not have to deal with the (relatively rare, but still annoying) lag from being wireless...lets just say that I seethe with rage and leave it at that.
As for handling buffs, I highly recommend Smartbuff. It's very customizable for different groupings (party, solo, raid, even specific raids, Battlegrounds, etc). You can set it to reapply buffs on scroll wheel movement (which I don't like) or there is a small, easy to move button that you can click. Definitely worth checking out. It gives reminders at intervals you can set for when buffs are about to expire, so clicking the SB button will reapply them before they expire. And it will warn you when you are down to, say, 3 charges of Inner Fire left.
As for handling buffs, I highly recommend Smartbuff. It's very customizable for different groupings (party, solo, raid, even specific raids, Battlegrounds, etc). You can set it to reapply buffs on scroll wheel movement (which I don't like) or there is a small, easy to move button that you can click. Definitely worth checking out. It gives reminders at intervals you can set for when buffs are about to expire, so clicking the SB button will reapply them before they expire. And it will warn you when you are down to, say, 3 charges of Inner Fire left.
Quote:
I was just obsessed with the inefficiency of having two mods to handle one thing. Not just because I'm insane, but I really want all my frames to behave the same way. I don't want a different set of rules for Target and ToT.
To be fair, I don't think that's you - I couldn't play with something like that either. It'd just get seriously confusing.
Mozared wrote:
Quote:
I was just obsessed with the inefficiency of having two mods to handle one thing. Not just because I'm insane, but I really want all my frames to behave the same way. I don't want a different set of rules for Target and ToT.
To be fair, I don't think that's you - I couldn't play with something like that either. It'd just get seriously confusing.
But isn't that how most people play? Aren't you using Grid or somesuch for your raid frames and something else (or the Blizzard default frames) for your other units? If not, I'd love to hear how other people are getting around the fact that general unit frame replacement mods are not healing mods and healing mods are not general unit frame replacement mods.
As far as the Blizzard unit frame, I only use self, target, and sometimes focus. Usually it's just to right click and bring up a menu. If I really wanted them to mimic my healing raidframes, I could use Clique. When I did that it wasn't a big benefit to me, and I've since quit using clique (although its a nice addon).
I think the main thing is to know your options. Each person needs to make that personal decision about their UI from an informed perspective. The only thing that drives me crazy is to hear a healer proudly proclaim "I don't use addons because I'm a purist", then go on to cry about being taken off healing duty by their raid group.
It's about getting a ui you like, that works, and is effective for you.
Edited, Aug 11th 2010 1:31pm by dadanox
I think the main thing is to know your options. Each person needs to make that personal decision about their UI from an informed perspective. The only thing that drives me crazy is to hear a healer proudly proclaim "I don't use addons because I'm a purist", then go on to cry about being taken off healing duty by their raid group.
It's about getting a ui you like, that works, and is effective for you.
Edited, Aug 11th 2010 1:31pm by dadanox
Quote:
But isn't that how most people play? Aren't you using Grid or somesuch for your raid frames and something else (or the Blizzard default frames) for your other units? If not, I'd love to hear how other people are getting around the fact that general unit frame replacement mods are not healing mods and healing mods are not general unit frame replacement mods.
Ehm... Well...
Yes, no, no and yes. In no particular order.
Now that you mention it, it might be how most people play, which means it might be pet peeves of ours, as I don't play like that myself. I have seperate raid frames (even though I use them all with the same mod, Pitbull4), but I do not use mouseover macros or anything. I heal everyone by selecting them and then using my spell. I never heal anybody who isn't my target. Unless I'm using PoH, CoH, ProM, a Renew tick, etc - you get the idea.
Mozared wrote:
I never heal anybody who isn't my target.
Okay, we are siblings in the Pitbull 4 usage, but this? You're a weirdie.
Recent Visitors: 83
All times are in CST
Anonymous Guests (83)
- Forums
- World of Warcraft
- Class Discussion
- I did it again, because I am an addict and cannot stop
© 2024 Fanbyte LLC