How To Optimize Your WoW UI
With the plethora of interface mods available for World of Warcraft, it can be a daunting task for someone new to the game to setup their UI. This article is primarily targeted at helping warlocks who are interested in getting into arena, yet feel overwhelmed when they hear about all of different things they have to keep track of and responsibilities they are held to. If you have been PVPing for several seasons you might not get as much out of this article, but hopefully everyone will be able to take away something. I will include a list of mods I use at the end of this article for those who are interested.
Before setting up your layout, let’s take a moment to consider the purpose of the interface. When you are in the arena, there are many pieces of information that are critical to success. It is the job of your interface layout to present this information in a clean and organized way so that your eyes are not constantly darting around the screen trying to figure out what just happened. Here is a list of basic pieces of information I believe you need to keep track of when playing in the arena (for the moment we will only consider 2v2):
- The health/mana/class of your target, focus target, partner, and pet
- The spells/abilities your target, focus target, and partner are using
- The status of your opponents cooldowns
- What buffs and debuffs (especially DOTs) are on your target and focus target
Here is a screenshot to illustrate how I have my unit frames set up (I use Xperl for my unit frames mod):
The side labeled A is my target’s unit frame. My target’s cast bar (I am targeting myself in this picture) is located right below the unit frame. The side labeled B is my focus target’s unit frame with cast bar similarly located. The big cast bar underneath is my cast bar. The placement of these unit frames is very important. Knowing what abilities your opponents are using/casting (i.e.: what they are doing) is one of the most important pieces of information you need to succeed in arenas. If your kill target is low on health and you don’t notice his partner healing him you would never know that you need to use spell lock. If you don’t know that the enemy warlock is casting fear on you, then would never know to run behind a pillar to break line of sight. If you look carefully at my party (consists of a death knight in this picture) you can see that his unit frame shows what he is casting (labeled C). This is good information to have displayed, but it is not as high a priority (and therefore not placed in the center of the screen) because your partner should ideally be talking to you over vent and letting you know what he is doing.
That takes care of #2 on our list, so now let’s talk about #1 (going in order is for stiffs!). My pet’s health bar is located at label D. I have changed the default Xperl settings to increase the size of the health bar considerably (the default is pretty tiny). It is important to keep your pet’s health bar large because you’re a warlock, your pet sucks, and it’s going to get focused a lot. Sometimes in the heat of battle this is easy to miss, but if you enlarge your pet’s health bar you will miss it less often. Your health bar is also important and shouldn’t be too small, since knowing if you are dying is pretty important. To this end, a scrolling battle text mod (places combat messages, such as damage take, above your character) is helpful to remind you that, yes, the rogue on you is doing way too much damage. Finally, your partner’s health is also important, but less important from a UI perspective because they should be communicating with you over vent as to their condition (”I’m dying, why aren’t you fearing?” is a popular method).
Tracking your opponent’s cooldowns is one of the most important jobs your UI can do in an arena match. When facing a rogue/healer team, for example, you will only know when the rogue is vulnerable if you know when his cloak of shadows, kick, etc. are on cooldown. In the following screenshot (label A) you can see a popular mod that players use to track the cooldowns of their opponents. This mod is called Afflicted2. Since I was not in an arena match, the cooldowns shown are just random samples. Afflicted2 is highly versatile, and can even announce in party chat when a cooldown is used. I personally don’t use a mod to track my partner’s cooldowns, since he announces them to me over vent.
In the above screenshot you can also see a popular action bar mod called Dominos (label B). I prefer using Dominos over the default action bar because Dominos is much more compact. Any mod that can save you screen real estate is worth using, in my opinion. Dominos also has handy features to easily increase the number of keybinds available to you. For example, when I hold down the shift key my main action bar (the one with death coil, spell lock, and all the dots) turns into a completely different action bar. This way I can have keybinds set to 1-5 and QWERASD on one action bar as well as several others. The end result of this is that pressing SHIFT+1, CTRL+1, ALT+1, or just 1 all use different abilities. When you let go of the modifier key (shift, ctrl, or alt) the action bar turns back into the default one (which is pictured).
The last thing to talk about is debuffs on your target and focus target. I am a huge fan of TimerButtons, which is pictured below (label A).
What makes TimerButtons so great is that it shows you what dots you have on the target as well as which dots are not on the target. Most DOT trackers only show the dots you currently have up. I find it much easier to determine what is missing this way. Timerbuttons can also keep track of other debuffs like fear. Also pictured in the above screenshot is Gladius (label B). Gladius is an arena unit frames mod that shows you who your arena opponents are when you enter a match (although here it is enabled for the purposes of the screenshot). Gladius is the one must have mod for arenas. In addition to showing you who you are facing, Gladius also tracks the cooldown of your opponents’ trinkets (the big trinket icon on the right side of the box). You can also left click on someone’s name in Gladius to set them as your target or right click to set them as your focus.
This article ended up being way longer than I originally planned, but I hope you found it helpful. Here is a list of mods I am using in the above screenshots: Afflicted2, Dominos, Gladius, Quartz, Scrolling Combat Text, Titan Bar, and XPerl. I have many more mods, but they are not pictured.
No objections from me: my layout is pretty similar and other than Witchhunt (reviewed here some time ago) I even use the same addons. Didn’t know about TimerButtons but sounds pretty good!
Your post has been useful at least to me!
woot new posters! Love your UI though it seems a bit crowded at times.
BTW horns if you are reading this i would love to be able to post =)
Well I will have to see at least one post first so if you’re up for it send it my way
I agree it is crowded, but that’s because I’m playing a laptop right now. A general goes to war with the army he is given!
This is a fantastic post.
I haven’t arena’d since S4, but my config was pretty similar. I was using Proximo, which it seems has been replaced by Gladius. Also, most of my target and cooldown info was near the top, which was often too far away from my target. I like where you’ve moved the target’s health bar and debuff info, especially since I keep my rune bar (oops, I’m not a Warlock) in between your target and focus target areas.
Thanks for the ideas, and I’ll be updating my UI to mostly look like this soon.
Aluraud! great post. I’m thinking about doing some arena after lots of PvE’ing, and this is perfect timing for me
My biggest consern about arena is the specc, though. I’m not going to tell you what to do, but a wish from my side would be what you (or anyone else from locksucks.com) talk about different lock speccs, both PvP and PvE. I think that would be most interesting for us subscribers 
As mentioned, great post. thumbs up (y)
I think I can handle that :). Expect it sometime this weekend.
Very nice guide. The UI in the screenshots is pretty close to the layout I use. Also picked up a few pointers that I’m going to add into mine.
Spectacular post.
I was playing in arena with my pally healer against a rogue and a priest. The rogue managed to kill my pally. Then I managed to kill the rogue. And so it was me against the priest. I worked him a bit to get my mana and health up and as I was getting ready to attack him and win (as i never lost to a priest) I look at my toolbar and it was a freakin mess. The buttons where duplicated and I had no attack buttons at all!. I had fel armor twice, bluh bluh you get the picture. So dominos is epic failure
So dominos bugged out on you? That’s never happened to me. Still, you should be able to click P to open your spell book and beat a disc priest by tabbing through pages and clicking everything
It’s not a bug. My guess is you were using mouse scroll while holding down shift - that combo switches the bars. I usually bind shift+scroll up/down to something else (you can bind it to empty slots on bars at least) so it doesn’t happen. Dominos is fine :=)
meh ok. I still lost to a priest!! And ffs whats with their mana burn? its so OP
i wanna ask you, how you move when you have WASD bind to spells?
I bind auto run to one of the side buttons on my mouse, then hold the right button to move the camera around as I run. Alternatively, you can hold the left + right mouse buttons down to run forward.
Cool. I wonder though and this may be a silly question. You are using WASD etc for actions. How do you walk/run? Did you put all that on your mouse or what?
I have auto run mapped to one of the side buttons on my mouse (I can also hold down the left and right mouse button to move forward). Once moving forward, I hold down the right mouse button to move the camera and my character around.
Know its a bit outdated but I cobbled together a sort of UI similar to Mazzle using Skinner, Bartender, Sexyminimap and Pearl. Works well for me and have had no problems. Have kept the target windows in their defalt places tho, don’t see the point in messing with a winning formula.