interface | Secret Agent Cat

Through The Eyes of The Tiger

Interface time!

Handy-Dandy Numbers Included! Click for Larger

This is what I see on a daily basis while raiding. This is my window into the world of WoW. I present to you all, humbly, kittens and long-toothed cats alike, my User Interface.

Pitbull – I used to use xPearl for my raid frames, then I used nothing, and now I use Pitbull. It’s a headache and a half to set up, but allows me to know things I wouldn’t otherwise know. My favorite features are VisualHeal, and the Aggro/Curse/Poison warnings. VisualHeal you can see in full effect if you’ll look at the priest on the bottom, getting healed and there’s that nice shadowy green bar. With a flick of my eyes to the left I can see if anyone’s low and if anyone is actually paying attention to them or not.
oRA2 – The first of my ‘big brother’ addons. These are my tank targets. I can assign them if I’m the raid leader or the assistant and they’re damned handy. A bonus is, anyone in the raid who has an addon to look for tank targets (like xPearl) can use the info I set in oRA2 to setup their own targets.
Deadly Boss Mods – this is the DBM range-finder. You’ll notice there’s only two names on that list so I’m doing my job correctly (this particular raid was pretty melee-heavy so we stack onto the 4 corners leaving the tank all by his lonesome) I don’t have this turned on all the time, but when I do, that’s where it goes
Recount – Damage and healing meter. I use this mostly for stoking my own ego whenever I get to DPS, but sometimes when a boss fight necessitates a splitting of the dps I’ll consult this in an attempt to make things even.
Outfitter – A hybrid’s best friend. The buttons shown below are, from left to right: Naked, Bear, Cat, Jousting. Now there’s a snappy little icon of a flaming person for my Stam/FR set, but that’s the general gist.
Omen – Threat-meter. No raider should be without a way to watch their threat, and tanks especially need to be able to watch their threat. I’ve got it front-and-center from tanking, and I like it front-and-center for dpsing because cats generate a lot of threat. You’ll see below that I’m 4th on threat. Many fights I have to throttle back a bit as well. (Especially Malygos)
IceHud – my Head’s Up Display. I’ve used many HUD mods in the past, starting with ArcHud, then trying out MetaHud and dHud. I settled on IceHud and personally find it to be superior in customization options. Health is on the left, mana/energy/rage and cast bars are on the right. You’ll see my combo points right in the center. In bear form I have it set to display my lacerate stacks there as well. I’ve also got the range-finder turned on and the buffs/debuffs (and mob information) turned OFF. Normally, target’s buffs would be on the left and target’s debuffs would be on the right.
Rogue Power Bars – This is what I use to help me with kitty dps. It doesn’t tell me what skills to use, it simply helps me by displaying all the buffs and debuffs I need to keep an eye on in one place with a visual representation of how long is left. If you look at my bars, my energy, and my skills, you’ll notice that I’ll need to hit Tiger’s Fury, then Rip, and then Rake to start the cycle over again. Mangle doesn’t show because I had a mangle-bot doing it for me and RPB gives me errors when I try to track others’ debuffs.
Prat – Chat frame addon. I wouldn’t need this if I wasn’t a raid leader. It helps me by allowing me to color my channels. After the third time of making a loot council comment in the healer’s channel instead of the raid leader’s channel I decided this would probably be a good idea.
oRA2 (again) – At first I thought this was an extent of Raid Buff Status, but Pilsner corrected me, telling me this was another facet of oRA2. It allows me to track others’ cooldowns (specifically battle rezzes) so I know who has what available when.

Unshown addons

Raid Buff Status – Pops up a little window where the default blizzard tooltip resides (it’s completely move-able however) that shows little icons and numbers. If you roll over one it will tell you what the icon stands for. It shows me who is missing what buff and if someone’s missing an elixer, along with options to click on so that I can /w them all and nag at them incessantly.
Bagnon – All my bags must be one window, period. I would be hard-pressed to play without this addon. I could do it, but I’d whine about it the whole time. If Blizzard were to integrate the bags into one window I would likely not use this (or any other bag addon) anymore.
Malygos CP – small, lightweight addon to help with the Malygos fight. It allows you to track your combo points, energy, and Engulf in Flames stacks in a central, easy-to-read location. I wish this was integrated into DBM instead of being separate.

Highlights:

I think my favorite thing about my interface is everything is in the default spot. I only switched to Pitbull after I became a raid leader and found that I needed more information at my fingertips than the default raid frames would give me. However, my raid frames were always placed over there. My action bars are un-modified, and my chat panel hasn’t moved.

If all my addons were to explode I’d be able to play without them. I might not do as much DPS until I got used to looking elsewhere for my buffs and debuffs. Managing my multiple sets of armor would also be a headache and a half, but I’d be able to do it.

Downlights:

I wish I had buttons similar to those I use for outfitter that I could assign to my specs. Right now I’m always hitting ‘n’ to check what spec I’m in just to make sure. Having that information tucked into a corner of my screen would be very handy.

Clutter. My interface is very cluttered. I think my raid frames still take up too much space, but I haven’t yet taken the time to go back into the PitBull interface to slim them down. (seriously, that interface is nuts)

And that’s pretty much it. I hope you enjoyed this glimpse through my eyes 🙂

2009: 05/11
CATEGORY: WoW General
TAGS: Addons
interface
raiding
6 comments

I Can Haz Action Bar Space?

And how do all the good little kitties and bears out there GET more action bar space?

MACROS! Yaaaay it’s macro time!

First a little preface. I like my default interface, I like it muchly. I like having my mount, my trinkets, my buffs, my food, my consummables, my tradeskills hanging out around my screen. I don’t like opening my spellbook. Ever. So needless to say I have a lot of buttons, and all of my action bars showing. I also like those little gryphons down at the bottom so I’m not interested in anything like Bartender. As far as HUD changes go I’ve confined myself to x-Pearl and MetaHUD.

My personal knowledge of macro creation is limited, and I’m very much a newbie, but I’ve found that it’s not that hard to write some simple macros that will make your life much easier.

In addition to IHML I have 4 macros that I use consistently on my druid. One is for items, Two are for skills, and one is just for fun.

Items:

I carry around with me two set of armor plus my pvp trinket. I use outfitter to quickly swap back and forth but since my trinkets are changing I need to swap them manually off of my action bars. This got obnoxious fast so for a long time I just settled with having all my useable trinkets hanging out together and taking up a grand total of 5 action bar spots.

This weekend, however, I constructed a devilishly simple macro to free up 3 additional action bar slots. Technically there are 2 macros (because I often have 2 useable trinkets) but they’re fundamentally the same:

Button 1

#showtooltip

/Use 13

Button 2

#showtooltip

/Use 14

I didn’t assign any image, just left it with the big red question mark. Now, I have those two on my action bar and the image defaults to whatever item I have equipped in those trinket slots! Simple simple simple, and invaluable if you carry around more than one set of gear.

-Special thanks to Kal from Think Tank for explaining the true use of the ‘#showtooltip’ expression!

Skills:

This macro is a bit more complicated. Ever since I learned Cat Form I’ve had Cower and Growl taking up spots on my action bar. During the big macro spree over the weekend I decided it would be much more effecient to have my aggro-controlling skills all in one place. I’d previously had bear aggro skills grouped together and kitty-ish skills (like prowl and sprint and cower) grouped together.

So I set out to make a macro that, when clicked, would cast growl if I was in bear form and cower if I was in cat form. Here’s what I came up with:

#showtooltip

/cast [stance:1] Growl(); [stance:3] Cower(Rank 5)

My Next macro was pretty much just like the previous, but to be used for Powershifting. You might be asking yourself why you would ever need to powershift ever again after the changes in 3.0, but I’m going to tell you, it’s awesome for getting out of snares. After thinking I could just click my bear button twice to get out of Lady Vasj’s root and then getting owned in the face by lag (hit while in between forms) I’m convinced this mechanic is still necessary.

So, instead of having two /cast !whateverform buttons on my action bar, I wrote the following macro so that I would only need one.

#showtooltip

/cast [stance:1] !Dire Bear Form(); [stance:3] !Cat Form

Simple as that! The tooltip for this displays as the mage’s Arcane Explosion, instead of a related kitty or bear icon, but I’m perfectly ok with that.

Fun!

I’d known that this macro existed for a while, but I had yet to try it out. I didn’t write this, but damn if it isn’t the most fun that I’ve had as a druid since I discovered I could use the summoning stone in flight form.

/Cancelform
/Use Snowball
/Cast Swift Flight Form

Now, if you don’t have Swift Flight Form, like moi /cry, then the last line would read ‘/Cast Flight Form’. But they’re pretty much the same.

What’s this for? You ask. Why, mid-air druid snowball combat of course!

After pelting another druid with snowballs while we flew our slow feathery butts out to Ramparts and having a good old time of it I’ve come to one conclusion.

I’m going to need a LOT more snowballs.

The conclusion I guess is this: before Tiger’s great macro-creation spree these skills and items were taking up 9 action bar slots. After the macro spree they now take up 4. That’s 5 WHOLE SLOTS freed up! That’s not counting the snowball macro of course, but I’m sure I can find a home for him.

Trinket Use + Skill Macros -> From BBB

http://thebigbearbutt.com/2008/11/22/creating-a-dps-trinket-macro/