Needed addons?Follow

Yes.

Pretty much mandatory are:

A) An encounter warning mod.
The most famous addons in this category are BigWigs and DeadlyBossMods. What these mods do is add literally TONS of warnings for all boss fights in the game. They warn you when you're standing in a spot you're not supposed to be. They warn you when the tank is going to get a burst. They warn you when you need to stop DPSing. These mods are so effective in improving your raid awareness that it's become almost impossible to play without them. If you'd really want to, you probably could, but you'd just making it hard on yourself.

B) An addon replacing your unit frames. The most famous ones here are Pitbull4, Grid, X-Perl and Vuhdoo. Healbot is also an option, but is by most healers looked down upon for use in raids because it lacks a ******** of options all other addons do have (making the frame of a raid member with a specific debuff highlight, for example). For other roles this isn't mandatory, but as a healer your primary role will be to keep track of the health of all other players in your raid - the standard Blizzard interface simply doesn't give you enough utility for this.

Recommended are:

A) An action bar mod, like Dominos or Bartender4. Depending on your spec, macros you might use and playstyle, you might have more spells than you can comfortably fit on your action bars. Grabbing an addon like Bartender4 allows you to have more room to put your spells on as well as allowing you to move your action bars and hide/show them when specific conditions are met, which allows you to make sure your bars aren't shown if you don't need them. If you know your hotkeys well enough, you can even hide your bars permanently to free up screen space.
A,5) Doing this, though, means you will need an addon to track your cooldowns for you as you can no longer see them on your bars. Regardless, even with your bars shown you might want to consider downloading an addon like Fortexorcist or Powerauras to easily keep track of your most important spells - you want to be able to see instantly at any time whether your Penance is usable, for instance.

B) PoMtracker. This is an addon and category in itself; what the addon does is show you how many charges your Prayer of Mending has left and on who it is currently sitting. This addon isn't mandatory, but knowing when and where ProM is up can help you A) decide whether you are going to heal the target in question or let ProM handle it and B) make sure you don't recast ProM if you still have four charges of it up, conserving your mana.

Furthermore you might want to consider picking up:
A) Align, an addon that projects a grid on your screen when turned on, allowing you to make your interface more symmetrical.
B) A buff frame mod, to keep track of buffs easier. Satrina Buff Frames is the only mod in this category I know to work and work well.
C) Omen, a mod to keep track of who has threat on the boss. A healer generally doesn't need it (and I don't use it myself), but if you happen to have room for it you might want to consider getting it anyway; knowing if someone is about to aggro the boss can in very rare ocassions save his life.
D) Tiptac, a tooltip addon that allows you to modify and move your tooltip - if you end up customizing your entire interface you will want to look into this to give your tooltip a better spot on your screen.
E) Recount, a mod that tracks damage, healing, dispells done and deaths among other things. Especially if you have a leading function in raids (or even groups) this mod is able to give you a general indication about why you are wiping on a boss. There's a healer doing absolutely ***** work? Are all the DPS slacking? Did the tank forget to pop his cooldown and blames you for his death? Recount will be able to tell you, if you know how to use it.


For starters, this depends on your gear. If your gear isn't all that great yet, trinkets are usually used to 'fill up' the missing stats with. Are you alrightish on intellect, spirit, mp5 and crit but do you lack spellpower? Equip a spellpower trinket. Do you tend to run out of mana? Equip an intellect or mp5 trinket.

Once your gear reaches the point where you have ample amounts of intellect, spirit, mp5, crit ánd spellpower you can start customizing your trinkets per fight. Are you constantly going out of mana on this specific fight? Equip a mp5 trinket. Are you having troubles keeping people up? Equip a spellpower trinket. Are you doing a fight where you somehow need to heal through one big burst of damage on the tank? Equip a trinket with a "Use: Increases spellpower by X" function. I myself have 12 different trinkets, who all serve a different purpose on a different fight. For example, on General Vezax, a fight where all mana regeneration is disabled, the Soul Preserver does a MUCH better job than Sif's Remembrance, the Soul of the Dead or even the Spark of Hope because all forms of spirit or "mana regeneration" are disabled while preventing a spell to cost mana does work to conserve mana. On a fight like the Faction Champions, who use Bloodlust and fight like a real arena team, a trinket like the Elemental Focus Stone is better because the hit will ensure your precious dispels are less likely to miss.

In the end my suggestion would be to pick up as many trinkets as you can get, as you will generally find some use for each one on a specific encounter - once you're wiping on that boss, you'll be glad you saved the trinket. Try to be fair though, and don't pick up "luxury trinkets" over other healers who simply really need to upgrade theirs. If you have for example the Talisman of Resurgence and Althors Abacus, you are equipped with two 'all-purpose' trinkets that should do a fine (though not 100% optimal) job on pretty much all bosses. If you reach this point, you shouldn't be rolling for a trinket like the Forethought Talisman if it is a genuine upgrade for another healer in your group who is currently using some kind of pre-heroic blue trinket.

TL;DR: For multi-purpose trinkets, you're always good to go with anything that has a static spellpower or intellect buff (or spirit if you're holy). Aside from that though, try and collect as much trinkets as possible if you care about optimizing your stats for specific fights, assuming you're not doing it over the backs of your fellow healers. Gotta catch 'em all.

Thank you for the help Dadanox and Mozared I am happy that there are some nice people left play this game (LFG really makes you think only jerks play)



I was that guild member. For the longest time I was in the mind set that if blizzard did not have the function built in then I should not need it. But after much pressure from my friends and them showing me just how helpful the addons they had were it made me final giving in and start looking into getting addons.

Teacake, have you ever actually posted a screenshot of your UI?

Make some solo screenies for good looks

Assuming I do the link right, this is me in AV. Solo really isn't any different except there aren't 40 frames under the top 3. My action buttons don't normally show like that, but I'm still working out the new keypad and need the cheat sheet.

Wow, you all have interfaces that are so interesting. Excellent.

Edited, Jan 31st 2010 7:25pm by dadanox

I have no idea why but i really hate it when there are no bars on my screen with my priest, I think i just forget all my key bindings but anyway my ui

I dunno, assuming they're opaque enough for him to see through during combat, I agree with what he said earlier about it being better to be looking at stuff in the middle of the screen where he can see everything versus looking off to one side where he might miss some of the action.



While you are right from a GUI design perspective, it wouldn't work for me. There's a difference between "not distracting" and "so not distracting that my eye goes right over it." It's true all 40 are a little much right there, but during prep is the only time they're all lit up like that. The only time I'm in a raid is in situations where you're not all together all the time, and the frames are at 20% opacity unless the person is in range. You're usually talking about only a few frames at a time lighting up, and I like those ones being bright and shiny.



I still have the Dominos cast bar showing my casts up over those top three frames, a holdover from the cancel-casting days, but TBH I rarely look at it and should just get rid of it. I use the cast bar on the bottom of each Pitbull frame. I notice my casts and enemy casts and other healers casting healing spells and all that other stuff I need to know just fine. IMO it doesn't matter how small it is as long as you're in the habit of looking at it.

The big black bar of doom alone covers up over 25% of your screen.
I don't think my entire UI covers up that much.

Edit: and I play on a 15 inch screen.

Edited, Feb 1st 2010 3:27pm by Aethien

That is my UI on my hunter.
In combat, in a 10 man raid.
The only thing that can be added is 3 more rows of people in grid for a 25 man.

That's why I say that you can barely see the fight.
Or more specifically, you can't see right below your feet so you don't really know if you're standing in **** until you start taking damage.
Which is too late.

You can just go into the normal game settings and lower your UI scale. Judging by the size of your SBT, you are still at the default UI scale, which is huge. Lowering that scale will keep your same UI, but scale everything down making the game much more visible and making your custom UI much, much smaller.

What Aethien said.

Basically what I see is that you have the core of your UI in the bottom third of your screen, but not being able to fit everything there, put some stuff above your character.

Also, your self frame is way off to the side.

That should fix the functionality issues, prettiness is important too, though.


Also, my UI is basically a building site right now -- I am thinking of making a few changes, I'm currently kind of dissatisfied with my self and target frames but have no real idea how to go about it. HUD health/mana bars are out because I wouldn't notice them more than the Pitbull frames with my current setup. I tried it. It gets even more complicated when you have to actually watch your power bar, which I normally don't much on my priest.

So yeah, gonna post a screenie later or something.

I started a priest - my UI is fugly, but I am OCD about putting all my abilities, etc. on the actionbar. I also found it easier to look down from my character to the minimap, so use Chinchilla. I am playing with the idea of taking everything I don't use frequently off the actionbars and just using two rows, but every time I try I find it hard to take them off, "just in case" I may need to use it after I remove it.



Edited, Feb 1st 2010 4:57pm by Wondroustremor