I wrote the following for guildmates who were asking about my UI, so it's written as a guide for people who don't know much about addons - or at least these addons.

Starting from the top left, here's a list of my addons:
FuBar creates a customizable bar on the top or bottom of your frame that allows you to display pertinent information with smaller modular addons.
- FactionsFu displays your current watched faction.
- ExperienceFu displays your EXP and when hovered shows a detailed list of how far you are from the next level and how many mobs you'd need to grind to get there.
- TopScoreFu displays your highest hits and crits with either healing or damage (in this case I use it to display healing).
- GuildFu displays the Guild tab in a simpler way.
- DurabilityFu displays the percent of durability remaining on your gear, and when hovered shows how much repairing will cost you.
- MoneyFu displays your current gold count, and when hovered shows how much gold you've accumulated today and over all your characters.
- WinterGraspTimerFu displays the remaining time until WG, and when hovered shows details about the current battle.
- DualSpecFu displays your current spec, and allows for quick respeccing.
- SkillsPlusFu displays details about all your skills over all your characters.
Elkano's BuffBars is in the top right corner under FuBar, and it basically lists my buffs and debuffs with a set of bars rather than square icons along the top.

From the bottom left, here are my addons:
Prat is a chat mod that allows you to add timestamps, remove the arrows, use the middle mouse scroll wheel to scroll up and down, and rename various chat rooms (like Trade, General, Guild, etc.).
LunarSphere is basically a simplified action bar with very specific needs. Every button is completely customizable, and the following four buttons are what I did with it:
- The top left circle switches from my main spec to off-spec and back based on left or right click.
- The bottom left circle uses my mana regen abilities based on left or right click.
- The large middle circle displays my remaining Symbols of Kings, and on left click chooses a random epic ground mount and on right click chooses a random flying mount.
- The top right circle uses regular water on left click and manna strudel on right click.
- The bottom right circle uses a mana potion on left click and health potion on right click.
Dominoes is a completely customizable full action bar. You can re-skin, resize, and move these bars to fit any way you'd want them. In this case, I have them set up on either side of my minimap.
Pitbull is a very customizable unit frame addon that takes a lot of time and patience to set up. I don't recommend this if you want a quick unit frame replacement. I also like X-Perl Unit Frames quite a bit, but couldn't use it for what I wanted in this UI.
SexyMap is a minimap addon that completely modifies your minimap. You can change the shape from a circle to a square to a diamond to a rounded corner. You can also choose what buttons you want to display on it always or on hover, and it allows you to modify the skin however you'd like.
VuhDo is a HealBot-like addon that is incredibly customizable. You can set any mouse click to various spells, display any buff or debuff you want on it, and have it manage your own buffs if you'd like. You can also keybind taunts and bubbles if you're a tank or any class that could find use for that.
Omen is a great threat-meter.
Recount is a great damage/healing meter.
PallyPower sits on the right side of my screen, and should only be used by Paladins. It basically makes assigning blessings much easier.

I also have a lot of addons you don't see:
_NPCScan constantly looks for rare creatures and notifies you when one is found.
_VirtualPlates makes enemy name plates more customizable in that you can set a maximum or minimum size for them.
Altoholic keeps track of everything you have on all your characters (bags, banks, emblems, achievements, mounts, pets, professions, etc.). This is one of the best addons ever made if you have a lot of alts.
Atlas displays maps of every dungeon in the game, and if used in conjunction with...
Atlasloot, it can tell you what drops off each boss. Atlasloot also displays mats for any crafted item, lists all the tiered gear, etc.
Auctioneer lets you play the auction house.
Baggins lets you customize your bags into virtually organized bags. I hate it set up to group equipment together, quest items together, etc.
ButtonFacade changes the skin of your action bars. In my case, I use Serenity: Square. This addon is modular, so you'd need to also download specific ButtonFacade skins to add to your collection.
GearScore is that infamous gear rating addon.
Inline Aura displays cooldowns on your action bar buttons.
MarkBar ReadyCheck is an addon I sort of made that combines a mark bar with a ready check announcer (hence all the "ReadyCheck: Everyone is ready" you see when Moos and I use /readycheck).
MikScrollingBattleText customizes the scrolling battle text, and allows you to change the font, direction, and location of the text.
OmniCC is another cooldown addon that strictly displays the time remaining until you can use an ability again on an action bar button.
OPie is an incredibly awesome addon that will display a customized menu on your mouse for quick actions. It's hard to explain what it does, but I essentially have it set up so that my mouse button 4 opens a menu on my mouse arrow for which aura I want to switch to.
Quartz 3 displays enemy cast bars, your cast bar, and all sorts of information. This one is kind of complicated, so only use it if you want to customize more of your UI.
SunnArt is an addon that lets you display skins in your UI (in my case, I use it to create that textured backdrop behind my bottom and top bars.
Tidy Plates lets you customize enemy nameplates, and with various modular addons, you can have the textures change, as well.
TinyTip customizes your tooltip.

so are gamers like us

I'm not at all surprised at how intense your UI is but damn man...just...wow. That's a lot. I think my laptop would kill itself if I tried to run even half of that in the background!

I might look up lunarsphere...though I'd have to retrain myself to use it.

Yeah, LunarSphere is great for small 2 or 3-option buttons. It also has some other fancy features like auto-selling gray items and auto-repairing equipment.

Nothing special really.

Hehe. Is that xperl I see?


So. I'm doing some regemming. I'm really appreciating my armor pen gems...my armor pen is at 47%, crit at about 40%, and ap at 4602 ish before raid buffs. However, I have discovered that I can trade 7% armor pen for 4% haste rating, which would allow me to be in blood presence instead of unholy presence, which I'm in right now for the 15% attack speed increase without getting completely irritated at my slow hit speed. ...so do you think its worth it? Currently I'm pulling about 4500dps on the shiny heroic dummies without raid buffs when I'm in blood presence, and usually between 5k-6k in ICC when in unholy presence and with raid buffs. But when I'm practicing without raid buffs on a dummy in unholy, my dps drops to a pretty solid 4k.

Would the trade off be worth it?

I usually don't use Unholy presence because I blow through my runes waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too soon, so I can't really comment on that. Our raiding DK uses Blood presence, stacks nothing but Strength gems, and does about 7000 or 8000 DPS in ICC10. He's at 28.15% Armor Pen, 5770 Attack Power, and 36.38% Crit. I honestly don't know enough about the value of Armor Penetration, but I always assumed stacking Strength was the way to go for plate-wearing melee DPS.

I ended up trading 80 pts in armor pen for 60 pts in haste...and on the practice dummies it seems to have worked perfectly. We were supposed to have an ICC continuation last night...but it got canceled. I was going to try it out there, but I guess I'll have to wait until next week.

PS Its children's week.

Whaaat. A UI comparison?

Config mode, to see raid frames:


Normal mode.


I use Prat for chatbox, Macaroon for action bars (unfilled in cat form, so some are empty), Satrina Buff Frames for buffs, Squeenix for Minimap, Quest Guru for quest tracker, Pitbull for unit frames. That... 2nd map is usually not there, I use it for BG's. I also use SL Data Text and Fortress for displaying the information above action bars. I don't know why I have a Gatherer icon near minimap, need to remove that. I have 20 other add-ons that aren't shown here, like Recount, Omen, Clique, Lightheaded, Engraved, Gnomish Yellow Pages, etc. I like mine more than Devlins because it allows me to see more of the environment and less (ugly) black bars (And no stuff like unnecessary portraits/pictures). My unit frames autohide when I don't need them (Not in combat, full health, etc), I use click-casting for healing, Pitbull for raid frames (It's supposedly not as effective as Vudho or Grid, but it has all I need so far - status indicators, buff that tracks removable debuffs and applicable buffs, meter to track total health and health missing, and all without obstructing my view of what's happening. Very easy to use. I have every single ability on both my Mage and my Druid hotkeyed, or, in the case of things like portals or armors, bound to Opie.

Oh, and my party frames are in the same location as my raid frames (one or the other), and have more information than raid frames, like the party members' target (when DPSing, to match tank's target) and mana. Again, no portraits, though. And I use the Calibri font (comes with the addon Fontain) for nearly everything on my GUI.

I'm actually rather proud of my GUI, so feel free to PM me if you need GUI help or want to know something about that. It's the one facet of WoW where I consider myself to be significantly above average. And... I'm out of this thread for a bit, probably.

Cataclysm friends and family alpha started. Woohoo! Not long before closed beta starts.

That close? Can't wait.

Does anyone else have a feeling that Dornaa (the draenei orphan) is the cause of the Cataclysm? Elements battling...she's a strong shammy...wants to have dragons for friends...

idk just speculation. I enjoy speculating about it.

I just did Twin Valkyr fight on my death knight and it's one of the more fun boss fights I've ever done, Blizzard really nailed it.

Yeah, aside from the fact that you don't have to move from room to room, I did enjoy TotC.

Haha...TotC + my guild = bad experiences. Funny stories...its not that we're bad at it...its just that whenever we go in something sets us off. Once it was a bad pugged tank and two douche bag hunters. But the next time we went in we had a guildy freak out because she couldn't find her lance...ya...wtf? Ironically, her daughter did the same thing the following time we went in...and...oh man. I'm okay with never going in again.

Haha sounds like a blast!

Anyone do the Sindragosa fight yet that might have pointers about the last phase? We get there easily, and then just get raped by the enrage timer or our own fail.

We haven't tried. We ran into the room and activated...then somehow ended it...lol my guild hasn't read up on it.

We just 7 manned the last boss in Naxx because we're awesome like that XD

Are you thinking of Sapphiron from Naxx or Sindragosa from ICC?

Well I meant last night we 7 manned Sapp and Kel-something (whatever his name is)...

...but last week in ICC we decided to run into the room on the other side of the dragon you heal. We activated some sort of gauntlet (it looks like) but after we moved out of the room it ended. So I don't know *what* we did.

Oh, okay, yeah. You get past the gauntlet, face 2 large dragons, then fight Sindragosa as soon as the second dragon is killed.