I am never going to be happy with my UI. I’ll give you a tour of it anyway. It’s a little rough around the edges. The UI you’re seeing is similar to that of a freshman university student moving in to his dorm for the first time. It’s going to look a bit messy but everything has a purpose.

Philosophy of realism

You’ll notice that there is a lot of stuff that goes on here. When I was downloading addons and shuffling them around, it was designed around a central concept. I wanted to build from the center of the screen outwards. There’s a lot of great addons out that do what I’m looking for.

But which ones make the cut?

There’s three questions I ask myself when I’m evaluating an addon for personal use.

1. Do I really need it?
2. Am I actually going to use and look at it?
3. Can it be toggled off visually if necessary?

I’ve gone through hundreds of addons over the years and it’s undergone quite an evolution. The idea of realism is to determine which addons I will use and which addons are nice but that I can survive without. Less memory consumption, the better.

Bench boss Matt

As a guild master and a raid leader, I have to have a lot of information in order to make the right choices. Most of these addons remain hidden. They’re not on my screen unless I toggle them on specifically.

Recount

Ever since I’ve started plugging data directly into World of Logs, I haven’t used this as much. But it still does a great job of showing at-a-glance type information. I make extensive use of Recount’s death meter to find out what killed a player. Don’t forget to get RecountGuessedAbsorbs for Priests or the RecountFailBot module.

oRA2

This is a must for every raid leader. Every player has to have it installed for it to function properly. It allows me to check player durability, resistances, and even search their bags for specific items (like Speed Potions or something). oRA also allows players to mass invite and automatically promote players. I set it to assign raid assists to all my lieutenants and CC players. When I activate it, it invites all raider ranked players or higher that are online.

Big Brother

Just like the name implies, it displays every buff and consumable your raid has. A buff check displays every raider in the group and whether they have the standard issue Fortitude, Spirit, Shadow Protection, Arcane Brilliance and Gift of the Wild. Flask check displays flasks or elixirs. The Paladin buff check shows which blessings your raiders have.

Headcount

Even though I don’t use a DKP system for loot, I still like the idea of having a loot tracking system. I use EQDKP as the website front end to track attendance and loot drops. HeadCount records the drops, who they were given to and who was present in the various raids. It then allows me to export all this information directly into EQDKP so it can be seen online.

EnsidiaFails

This is the successor to Failbot. All it does is echo into raid, officer, or whatever channel you like anytime a player fails something. It’s a great diagnostic raid addon and it does help keep players publically accountable. All it does is just list whether or not they take a hit from an ability they aren’t supposed to like fire walls in OS or flash freezes against Hodir.

Deadly Boss Mods

Standard issue requirement for every raider. Some opt for Big Wigs. But as long as you have one or the other, it will work.

Surgeon General

My personal healing assigning mod of choice. Quick button to scan the raid for healers and displays them in the configuration box. Then I can manually type in assignments next to them. It can handle multiple assignments by enabling extra phases. It can even store saved assignments for future raids. Has the ability to output results in raid chat or in a separate channel of your choice.

Communications

Many players overlook this. But how you set up and overlay your chat windows can be an asset. You’ll notice I have two chat windows flanking my raid frames. A straight black background with full opacity is used for visibility. Again, this revolves around my philosophy of centralized raid frames. Any raid warnings, events, or other important information can be seen quite easily as they’re all aligned and it minimizes any risk of losing players.

• Left window: Raid chat, general, trade, LFG, whispers
• Right window: Guild chat, officer chat,

Each channel has its own distinct color.

Raid: Orange
Guild: Green
Officer: Dark green
Healer: Aqua
LFG: Light green

The colorization of names and other features are powered by Prat.

Visuals

Okay, let’s get to the meat and potatoes of it. We’ve covered the raid leading addons. The healing side of things is a bit more intricate. It’s actually more like a UI that’s been duct taped and cobbled together from spare parts as opposed to something built entirely out of the box.

DHud

I like using HuDs. When I’m in the zone, all I need is my mana bar and their health bar. My eyes tend to stay centered on screen anyway. My buffs are the little icons on the right side. Those are triggered abilities (procs and what not).

VuhDo

My personal raid frames of choice as suggested by Ithato. I’ve adopted it since then.

Pitbull

For unit frames themselves, I’ve continued to rely on Pitbull. It’s used for my player frames, target frames, and focus frames. I’ll pull up a shot later with them all arrayed so you can see them better. Need to get rid of the buffs and such or place them somewhere else where it doesn’t clash.

Bartender 4 and Spartan UI

I like Spartan as it helps keep align certain things. Bartender 4 is used for keybindings. Spartan has not been updated recently. It’s being worked on last I’ve checked. I believe it’s still under beta.

ArkInventory

One of the mods recommended by Lilitharien here for bag organization.

Chinchilla

This is mini map addon. I’ll write about this sometime in the future. It lets me hide certain buttons and lets me reshape the map. I can turn it into a square, or a circle with a flat bottom and so forth. You’ll notice a yellow overlay in the middle of the map. That represents my casting radius.

Quartz

I do use Quartz on and off. I’ve found it to be more important on my Elemental Shaman right now instead of my Priest. I had it disabled for this particular attempt.

Xloot and XlootMonitor

Xloot replaces the default loot frames. It hasn’t been updated in a while but last I heard it was still being developed and updated for the latest version of WoW. XlootMonitor is that thing on the side. It displays a running tally of what’s been looted in real time.

CowTip

One of the tooltip addons I wrote about, I’ve grown rather fond of it since then.

Elkano’s Buff Bars

Left side. Shows buffs, debuffs, and weapon enchants.

Unit Frames

Alright, here’s the fun stuff. My HuD in the middle shows my health and mana and my targets health and mana. On the left side is my player frame. On the right side is my target. Below that is their target. Below my player frame is my focus target. Below that is the target of my focus. In fights involving multiple tank taunts, the focus frame is up on the boss. If the boss switches to a different target, I will know very quickly.

In any case, if you were looking for something really awesome and out of this world, I’m sorry to disappoint.

Action shots

(Note: Uh, if you’re wondering about why I’m on the leaderboard for deaths, I ran into some horde on the way in. Honest.)

These screenshots were taken at various periods over the past few weeks. Everything’s subject to modification and I’m never going to be truly finished with my setup. I do use other addons like Auctioneer and Postal but this post was focused primarily on the raiding and healing aspect of my UI.