Getting By With The Stock UI

I love addons. I absolutely love them. UI customization is one of the biggest factors in keeping me stuck to WoW over all the other shiny MMOs that pop up. Something about being able to change anything that ever slightly annoys me is just satisfying. Don't like where the map is? No problem. Unhappy with how buffs are displayed? It can be fixed. Bejeweled addict? There's an add-on for that too.

I've been spending much of my time lately in beta, and in order to test things, addons are disabled. How can a healer survive in a world with naught but the stock ui? I know, I'm being over dramatic. There's a handful of individuals that prefer the stock ui, but for the majority of us, it simply isn't an option. But, when left with no other choice, there are a few things we can do to get by.




Weaknesses of the stock UI (In WOTLK)
To understand the changes in the beta, and why players wanted them, I want to look at the UI in current content, and see why people hate it so much. What is it lacking that we find so necessary?

There's a few key components that it's lacking:

1: Easily visible Buffs
2: Easily visible Debuffs
These two sort of go together. The current default UI makes you pick between showing either buffs, or debuffs. What this means, is you can either show your hots/beacon/etc, or, you can see that devastating magical debuff that needs to be cleansed. Also, if you choose buffs, it shows ALL buffs on your target, not just the ones you cast, so you need to be aware of where your stuff is in the list.


The Workaround: To survive this little flaw, you have to make a choice: Buffs, or debuffs. Now, this depends on your class, and on who else is in the raid. If you're a paladin, you don't have much to worry about in terms of buffs, other than beacon and ss, so you can choose debuffs with only small repercussions. If you're a druid, with a large amount of hots to watch, you'll want to choose buffs, and communicate to the raid that you need help knowing when to cleanse. Maybe there's someone else that can cover cleanses, or you can have someone calling names over vent. Good communication can overcome this.

3. Other Healer's Heals
This is something I think a large amount of healers ignore, and they really shouldn't. Most raid frames include something called LibHealComm. What this does, is causes each healers individual raid frames to display the heals cast by the other healers with the mod. This allows you to see where they are putting their heals, and adjust your own accordingly. It prevents over healing, and can prevent a death because 3 healers were on the same person.

The Workaround: To fix this, good healing assignments do wonders. If everyone knows where they're supposed to watch, then they shouldn't be overlapping until their own targets are cleared.

4. Your targets HP after the heal lands
While this isn't necessary, it's incredibly helpful. The default ui has no way to show you where your heal will put the targets health after it lands. Add in that it doesn't show what their total hp is, and you could end up using a smaller heal, only to find out the target has a larger health pool than anticipated.

The Workaround:  Getting around this takes some brainpower. Ask your raid leader to use the main tank flag on tanks, and pull that group out separately. This should avoid any surprisingly deep health pools. The other thing you can do, since mana really isn't an issue in Wrath, is overestimate. Use a larger heal than you think you need if you're worried.

5. Dealing with targeting, and speed
Clicking on the raid frame of your heal target, then pressing your heal is inefficient. It is slow, and you have to deselect the enemy, which as a paladin, seriously hurts your mana return. Because click bindings are unwieldy without addons, we need something else to heal our target without targeting them, which leads me to

The Workaround: Mouseover macros. These are extremely easy to use, and many healers already use them as their method of choice. Creating them is very simple. Copy this code:

#showtooltip Holy Light
/cast [target=mouseover,help] Holy Light; [help] Holy Light; Holy Light

Just replace the blue text with your spell of choice, and you're done! What this macro will do, is first look at where your mouse cursor is. If it is over a friendly players body, nameplate, or unitframe, it will cast the spell on that person. You don't need to be targetting them. however, if you're not hovering over anyone, it will cast it on your target if it's friendly, or you if it's unfriendly, or if you have no target. Becoming faster really is that easy, and if you're stuck using the stock ui, mouseovers are priceless.

While the stock ui is not ideal, it's not impossible either. By just communicating, using some simple macros, and putting a little brain power behind your heals, you can survive that raid you got stuck healing from your friends house without your mods. Tomorrow, I want to go over changes to the stock ui in beta, and how it doesn't suck anymore.

/bubblehearth