Monday, July 19, 2010

Time for a Grid revamp

Grid has been my mainstay raid frame addon since, well since I first started healing on a little baby shaman. I like the clean nature of it, and that it's pretty customizable and easy view. I don't have a problem with little indicator lights to show me things like agro, curses, bubbles, etc., but I do have one thing I'd like to change.

The size

I have not seen another Grid setup that looks like mine. Part of this may be that I have some bastardized German version leftover from the time I let Unbearabull take me on a UI ride (I really did like that UI though). So when you die now, it just says TOT, and something different for FD (I just notice that the box isn't grayed out). Ghost is still ghost though, so go figure.

My biggest challenge will be cleaning every scrap of Grid out of my UI folders. It was a mess when I realm transferred, and as I mentioned in my Carbonite post - my UI is in need of an overhaul. While it may be akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic (with Cataclysm sure to break and change everything), I figure that this is the best time to start playing with a new UI. The worst I have to fear is screwing up in a PUG raid (I do a GDKP to pay the bills for my alts), and given that most GDKPs don't go more than 8/12 - I can do those in my sleep.

The alternatives

I'm really not keen on Vuhdo, though I did give it a spin for a while when we first started working on LK. I like using mouse-over macros, not clique(esque) type setups, which Vuhdo seemed to use right out of the box. Sometimes I just want to target someone, and the last time I used click style macros I wiped the raid on the Four Horseman (Sorry Hanora).

Healbot got a bad name from way back when, and I've never really looked at it seriously. Part of my reasoning is I use Grid as my healing/raid frame package - I don't have separate frames out for anything else. I used to do this when I was raid leading in BC, but I've found that I can get all the info I need from Grid.

The rest of the UI

I'll be putting my whole UI up for others to look at, and I'm busy scouring the blogs for UIs to steal from. At this point anything is on the table, though I have gotten used to having things like a HUD, scrolling combat text, and my Razer. I definately need to move my map though. Trying to keep an eye on it while farming, leveling, and watching for Alliance is getting a bit much.

8 comments:

  1. Personally, I've never been very fond of highly customized UI's. I went from Healbot to Grid not too long ago (maybe 6 months) but I love it. The one thing that annoyed me, though, was that I would still have those pesky party frames in the way, even when I didn't need them. It just looked ugly. And I wasn't planning on going back to Healbot. And I'm too lazy to find the right option for Grid. Sigh.

    But I decided to give WoW LUI a try. And I kinda like it! It is very much customized and it's pretty hard to customize for your own needs, but it has a basic setup that I like. It does replace your entire UI though, so if you don't want that, don't try WoW LUI.

    Maybe I should put up a post about my old and new UI sometime soon. Just to give you some more to read ;-)

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  2. There's a ton of good pre-made interfaces on WoWInterface. I personally made the switch to Injector from Grid--I just have to hack a single file to make changes instead of fiddling with the plug-ins that I like.

    I'm an altoholic, so I have a set-up that I'm happy with for tanking/healing and dps'ing, although there a couple of things I can think of off-hand that I'd like to pick up for raid leading.

    I wish you luck on your overhaul ^^

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  3. By the way, perhaps a bit of an empty comment really, but still...

    Is it only the Holy paladin community that's so easygoing on Alliance and Horde sides? I mean, I play an Dwarf Holy paladin, but somehow, I can really get along with a lot of other Holy paladins, even if they're Blood Elf.

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  4. I don't think that faction/race has anything to do with the community - especially now that faction transfers are available. I spent 4 years playing as Alliance, so it doesn't phase me. I think I separate the game from the community though. When I'm on my PvP server, if it's red it's dead. Yeah, I bite off more than I can chew every once in a while, but that's the way it goes.

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  5. I don't really want to evangelize, but Vuhdo does have mouseover options as part of the addon. I'm a clicker, though, so I can't be 100% sure if standard macros work or if it requires a bunch of @vuhdo style shortcuts to make them work.

    I started out with Healbot in 70s AV when all I had was the default interface and no way to tell I was attempting to cast on a player across the map. Vuhdo is much more information dense and I'm still figuring it out. I haven't yet tried Grid.

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  6. http://www.vranx.com/ <-- has MANY UI compilations if you're feeling lazy and don't want to find and nit-pick all the different addons. It's a good place to find a base and work up from there. It's how I started my UI (seen here: http://i499.photobucket.com/albums/rr354/shocker6663/WoWScrnShot_061010_113240.jpg )

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  7. @toril: For the largest part, I see WoW-LUI there, which I already mentioned. I like it as well. I do see you've made some additions, which is totally fine of course :-)

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  8. I just redid my entire UI and my grid settings. I'm not sure what I did differently, but I really like the new & improved look. But I absolutely refuse to configure grid without using The Video Guide to Grid over at wow.com (I load it on the youtube page and expand it even to it's larger size)

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