Anatomy of a Tank’s UI
May 5th, 2008 Posted in Uncategorized 
My UI, I’m led to believe, is somewhat unusual in the amount of information it presents, at least for a non-healer, however I could be said to be something of an information junkie. I like to know just how many healers are still alive, who has aggro and should have, who has aggro when they shouldn’t, and that’s just in terms of what’s happening to other people.
I’ve never seen raid frames like mine anywhere else; I guess that’s because they’re too big and spread out for healers, and DPS don’t generally care too much about seeing who has aggro and who is dead. Each of the frames light up red when the raid member attracts too much attention from a mob and starts taking damage. Simultaneously on the other side, my Main Tank windows are similarly unusual, in that they present the information vertically rather than horizontally. Again unusual, but I’ll be honest and say that they’re arranged like this simply for symmetry for the raid frames on the left. Learning to read them takes a bit longer than a standard MT frame, but once you get used to them, they’re fine.
Action bars are Bongos 3 – the left hand one has four pages of actions on it – so it has different actions for each stance, and a fourth set when Alt is held down, predominantly for shouts. There’s not much to say about these, except that there are several additional bars which are either invisible or invisible until mouseover. These hold things like trade skills, mount-up keybindings and the like. There’s no point cluttering the UI with these as they’re not used most of the time. A nice feature of Bongos 3 is buff tracking – applied buffs cause the icon to light up green, making it more obvious when your target isn’t buffed or debuffed correctly.
Of course, Omen Threat Meter sits in pride of place on the right, and mirroring it for size on the right is Prat, my chat mod of choice, again sized so the screen remains as symmetrical as possible. Perfection is a terrible curse.
What remains is a HUD, in this case MetaHUD, which tells me in an in-your-face way how much damage I’m taking, and it’s surreounded by Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text, giving an idea of the rate at which damage and healing are coming in. To the right is Chronometer, which is a fantastic way of timing buffs and debuffs and allowing you to re-apply them at a sensible time, and Big Wigs, which shows what abilities a boss is likely to use in the near future.
Finally, and invisible in this screenshot, is FuBar, with assorted plugins tracking money, reputation, friends online and so on. It appears on mouseover, much like some of my other less-ued action bars.
So that’s my UI, unusual in itself. If you’d like to give it a go, or just play with some of my settings, you can find it here.
