Personalizing your UI for maximum appeal and ease-of-use can go a long way toward making your play comfortable and dexterous.
By their nature, personalization tips I share here won't necessarily reflect what's best for you.
Built-in Options
Before downloading any Addons or writing macros, here are some particularly useful Interface Options to adjust:
* Mouse Sensitivity changes how quickly your mouse moves around the 2d interface. It should be easy to move all the way
across the screen without being hypersensitive. Mouse Look Speed changes how quickly your character rotates when holding down
the right mouse button to steer. Since I also play a Hunter, I set this so it's easy to do a 360 turn without twirling around
three extra times. I also set Camera Following Style to 'Never' to stop the camera from doing strange things on its own.
Sliding Max Camera Distance to 'High' allows farther zoom out.
* A good way to reduce screen clutter is to turn off Player Names. If you leave one or both of the suboptions checked, that
information will still show up when selecting a player. I prefer to leave Buff Durations off, since mousing over them works
to check time left. And don't install a buff mod that takes up 1/5 the screen showing the names of every active buff.
* Useful clutter to add includes Floating Combat Text. Seeing numbers scroll on top of your character when taking damage is a great alert when you're watching everything but your own health bar. (Or use the mod Scrolling Combat Text which lets you also see how hard your heals are hitting.) Turn on Show Target of Target and Show Enemy Cast Bar for more situational awareness.
* I find it very useful to set up my mouse's scroll button to Toggle Autorun when clicked (in Key Bindings). This lets me
move around with just the mouse. If you do any PvP healing, bind some key to Show Friendly Nameplates.
* Keybindings in general will increase the speed of your spellcasting. Bind your most frequently used spells to the easiest
keys to hit around the movement keys. If you want to get extreme, use Shift (or alt or ctrl) versions and create macros to
make some keys cast a different spell depending on whether a friend or foe is targeted. More on this in the Macros section of
this guide below.
Interface Addons
Standard options are meant to make the game playable, but Blizzard gave players access to a very rich programming interface
to allow much deeper customization. Addons are really just glorified macros with thousands of lines of text instruction
instead of a few lines. Legitimate Addons are just a Folder with a bunch of text (and maybe image) files that you place here:
( D:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns )
• and the WoW program itself reads in to handle how it likes. In other words, you never 'run' Addon files yourself. If a
supposed Addon comes as a .EXE file, don't run it because it could literally do anything to your computer...including
stealing your WoW password (or worse). Having to open a .ZIP file and just copying the folder to your Interface\Addons folder
is the standard way of installing Addons. Start or restart WoW and click the AddOns button on the character selection screen.
Here, make sure the mods you want running are checked and not showing any problems. If there dependency errors, mouse over
the affected mods to find out what other mods must be present. Then search Addon websites or Google to download and install
them.
Action Bar Mods
• Twelve buttons not enough for all your class abilities? You can either open up 1-3 more bars in the built-in options or
replace the whole bottom bar with something like Bongos, TrinityBars, or Bartender. I prefer Bongos. Other Bar Mods tend to
have more options, but Bongos may have all you need.
• Serenity is a sort of Priest shortcut bar. It has one big, clickable circle surrounded by quite a few little circles. You can customize what left or right clicking the circles do and adjust some informational text in the big circle. It's also useful for tracking water/potions/reagents remaining.
Inventory & Gear Mods
• Bagnon is by far the best inventory Addon in my estimation. Install it and create a macro for the command "/bgn bags". Now one icon on your action bars will let you see what's in all your bags. "/bgn bank" keeps track of what's in your bank, if you've viewed the bank after installing it. Play around with the item type buttons along the top because they make finding
all the herbs in your inventory, all the vendor junk, etc. quite easy.
• Itemrack is likewise the best equipment set Addon I've used. Beyond setting up normal gearsets, you can do things like define Riding Crop as a set by itself and set it to the "Mount" set on the Events tab to automatically ride at full speed and switch back to whatever you were wearing before when you dismount.
Unit Frame Mods
• 'Unit Frame' refers to those little windows showing player/mob health (and other information) that you can click on to target
those 'units.' Healers especially want to be very comfortable with their unit frames because we watch them and switch targets
frequently. Popular examples are Archaeologist, X-Perl, Perl Classic, CT_RaidAssist, AG Unit Frames, Grid, and PerfectRaid.
Some only do party frames, others only raid, and some both. Most allow the option of 'health deficit' bars where the bars
grow bigger as players approach death. This is probably the type of AddOn most worth your time to personally try a variety
and find what works for you.
• For now I prefer a very stripped down version of X-Perl. If you try it, turn off 'Fading Bars' on the Global tab or be very grumpy next time you heal a party. X-Perl includes a frame for your Focus target. I set a keybind for 'Focus Target' to my '~' key to do things like track a CC assignment or watch a boss' cast bar.
Tracking AddOns
• MendWatch and Prayer of Mending Tracker are two newer mods designed to help you know what your Prayer of Mending is up to. Has it run out of charges? Is it wastefully sitting on the Mage way in the back? Now you'll know.
• Chronometer or TTSpellTimer watch pretty much any other spell with an effect time and they works for all classes. Especially vital for Shadow PvE.
Raiding AddOns
• Deadly Boss Mods, BigWigs, CT_RABossMods all read boss emotes and track time between special events to give you a heads up during scripted fights. It may not be necessary to run one of these yourself if someone else is broadcasting announcements.
• KLHThreatMeter watches all threat producing actions by raid members and displays a graph of estimated total threat. Useful for Shadow Priests running Vampiric Embrace. This mod's accuracy grows as more raid members have it installed.
• SW_Stats is the most detailed healing and damage meter. It can show who healed a particular player of the course of a raid and for how much. Or it can break down the amount of damage or healing you've been doing by spell, which may help you adjust talents optimally. Accuracy also grows with installs.
Other AddOns
• There are about a zillion other AddOns to try out. CT_MailMod which lets you send many stacks of items through the mail at the same time is the one I can't live without. Tooltip Wrangler Continued lets you set tooltips to any spot on the screen. Take some time and cook up the perfect UI for yourself.
