| Enhancing Your World of Warcraft Experience Fun with UIs |
 World of Warcraft has millions of subscribers. Everywhere you turn, you have a good chance of running into a fellow player. While the game is enjoyable enough on its own, I've been playing around with UI modifications of one sort or another to simply up my enjoyment of the game, as well as clear some of the healer related clutter all over my screen. Sometimes its nice to see the screen, not just health bars, you know?
I'm not going to go over the actual coding process of the add ons and such that are used here because quite frankly, I'm a programming moron. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to enhance your UI without knowing anything about programming. First off, we'll go over the resources that you can use to help with constructing the perfect UI for your needs. A few add on sites I will be referring to throughout this article include (you can find all add ons mentioned on this article at these sites): http://www.curse-gaming.com/en/wow/addons.html http://ui.worldofwar.net/ www.nurfedui.net www.ctmod.net http://www.discordmods.com/ Now, onto the fun stuff. As a healer, my main problem is viewable landscape. This also comes into play for anyone that needs multiple ranks of spells, or cast bars upon cast bars, etc etc. Unless the add on otherwise notes, all you need to do to install these mods is extract them to the /World of Warcraft/Interface/Add ons folder. One big add on that has helped with this is CT Viewport (http://www.ctmod.net/downloads.ct?a=download&m=CT_Viewport). This compressed your viewable screen area, while retraining the aspect ratio of the screen. Overall it helps to increase your viewable area and gives you tons of room to play with for your action bars and unit frames. I have my viewport put to the bottom of the screen.  The base UI I use for all of these set ups is Nurfed UI Beta (http://www.nurfedui.net/download.php?file=nurfeduibeta.zip).  This UI contains a ton of useful add ons, as well as a strong base to work from. It's rather easy to pick up and adjust to your specific desires. A few extras they offer include Nurfed HUD, which puts a health/mana display of both yourself and your targets in the middle of your screen, so you don't have to take your eyes off the action. They also offer an altered version of the combat log, which can help streamline the information being processed. Another big thing I was trying to get at was decreasing my zone in and zone out lag. Because of the way certain mods function, having a ton of add ons can push your load times up and up and up, until you're sitting at a loading screen for 3 minutes and trying to throw your computer out the window. Ntmsysfixloadingtime cuts down on the amount of time taken to load from zone to zone. It's quite possibly the best add on I've ever come across. If you raid, at all, you are going to need the big daddy of raid add ons. Blizzard's ingame raid interface is sorely lacking, so it is a matter of necessity than option to get CT Raidassist (http://www.ctmod.net/downloads.ct?a=download&m=CT_RaidAssist) This is a highly customizable raid add on, although its base function is simply to show you the status of the raid through its group windows. There are many many other features of this add on, far too many to go on about here.  For PVP, add ons can help give you an edge against a troublesome class, or just help process the on screen information. A few add ons I've found useful in the pvp arena include:  Scrolling combat text shows the damage you are taking, as well as heals you are receiving, and certain procs and combat events right above your head. This allows you to keep your eyes on the action, instead of looking for an out of the way combat window. Spell Alert, as well as other add ons that provide similar functionality, help with learning what casting animations go with which spells, and can aid highly in interrupting or locking down a spell line. Telo's Self Cast allows you to never take off your original target to heal yourself. This is especially great in the case of druids, so that I don't lose combo points if I have to come out of cat to heal myself. How I hate losing combo points. Some general functionality mods that aren't included in Nurfed UI, but that I wish to point out, include: eCastingbar is a adjustable, configurable spell bar. I just don't like the look of the original cast bar, nor Nurfed's. So, eCastingbar fulfills the need for a really nice looking, and easily adjustable, cast bar. MoveAnything. The name says it all. This is an add on used to move absolutely anything on your screen. It helps when you want to set up complex arrangements, and just need to not have to worry about shoving stuff out of the way, and where you want it. If you want to take your UI to the next level, you'll want to take a look at Discord mods. These are NOT for the faint of heart, as this set of mods can take a long time to get used to. However, you can make absolutely beautiful UI's with this, or even just DL ones that are available on the site. However, it can take awhile to get the Discord UI's adjusted to your own set up. Big or small, add ons can greatly enhance your World of Warcraft experience. Whether you check out the mods I wrote about here, or checked out the sites for more, I wish you luck!
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