DrainingSouls.net

When I decided to go about completely redoing my UI, I figured the easiest way to go about it would be to break the UI down into its various sections, and then work on it in an orderly fashion. Here’s my old UI, broken down into the sections that I wanted to work on.

Sections:

1) Action Bars
2) Raid Frames
3) Target Frame (It’s technically part of the raid frames, but I want to pay special attention to it when I get to this part.)
4) Buffs
5) Mini-map
6) Chat Window
7) Omen

As I said last time, my goal is to move as much as possible off to the sides of the screen, so that I’ve got more screen area devoted to gameplay/combat. The first section I decided to tackle are the action bars. I’ve played around with a couple of the different action bar addons out there at various times, so I went and got Bartender 3 since I’ve used it in the past.

The first thing I did was remove all of the shortcuts from the action bars that are not combat-related. It’s handy having all of the tradeskill menus on the action bars, but I’m not willing to trade that screen space for the convenience anymore. Once I did that, I set up three new action bars with Bartender, and stacked them right in the middle for easy access. After transferring all of the combat shortcuts I needed, I still had a good bit of room open on the bottom bar, so I was able to put some of the non-combat options back on (like my mounts, trinkets, bandages and food).

Here’s a screenshot from last night in Kara showing the changes I made:

As you can see, there’s a whole lot more room available now. I was able to move Omen and the chat window down to where the old action bars used to be and free up a good bit of real estate. I’ve even got more addons running in that screenshot and there’s still a good bit more room.

I haven’t yet figured out how to bind a key with Bartender, which would be helpful as I’m trying to become less of clicker. I bet I can figure it out, but doing so has not proven to be intuitive so far. Also, things still look very piecemeal. I would like to make it look more neat and professional, but I’ll probably save working on that until I have a better idea of what the finished product is going to look like.

Another drawback is that I have to go through the setup process again for each individual character. It’s not a huge hassle, but it does take 15 to 20 minutes each time. I have to look through all of my spells, figure out which ones I want to put on the bars, and then decide where I want to put them. Characters that have different stances or forms require even more time, as they have a different bar for each.

Overall I’m definitely very pleased with the improvements. I think I will work on the raid frames next, once I’ve got Bartender set up for everyone.

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