If you must call people who disagree with you "retards", then that is not helping your cause at all.
ElvUI is very often a kneejerk reaction from people who have no intention of asking the right questions.
Figuring out what someone really needs from a UI or specific addons is what we really should be doing, rather than a generic and ultimately unhelpful answer.
If we want to continue seeing new and innovative UI's and addons, then we need to move away from the easy solutions like ElvUI.
They have their place, but not as a "solution" to practically every problem someone has.
There is much you can do with Elv, more so because alot of us have little to no coding experience to make addons look / work as well.
Don't get me wrong I love seeing Birg's ui's those are a masterpeice in themselves.
Elv just makes things simple for me.
I'd move away from it if I could code/make my ui look good without it.
I'm not sure if this is the wrong place to ask, but I really like the look of your UIs and was wondering how you manage to play so well without your action bars/key binds showing and how you remember all your key binds for so many characters? Do you have any tips in order to achieve the same look as your UIs?
Classy. You have now rendered all your previous and future comments moot.
People who resort to childish insults don't have the intelligence to have a mature and sensible debate about a subject unfortunately.
On the contrary, I have zero coding experience and wouldn't know a LUA code if it hit me in the face, but I manage to create all kinds of UIs just from individual addons settings and customisation. My point is, if people were brave enough to not rely on ElvUI, they would find its actually not as difficult to use other addons as they think and no coding knowledge is needed, and a whole new world of UI design would open up to them.
Last edited by Snichy; 2014-03-25 at 09:28 AM.
Oh hey what I don't code either tho, I only use Stuf, Raven and WeakAuras to create my stuff (hidden things don't count). But I know what you mean, it's pretty overwhelming with all the features and options available.
It's not that different at all actually. The cooldowns are shown only when they are on cooldown, the global cooldown is shown through my castbar, and the keybindings get worked into your memory rather quickly. I also put similar abilities on the same keybind for every character (aoe on Q, s-Q, dots on 1, defensives on s-C, etc.)
As for the look I aim to only display the essential but still keep things informative and interesting. I would suggest you take a screenshot of your UI in combat and look at it to see if you find any imperfections or unnecessities. Or post it here and I can give my imput.
I can't code either, although a lot of people assume I can. Occasionally I've had to ask in these forums for some help with a custom WeakAuras trigger or two, but I always found everyone to be very helpful, for which I am very grateful. For me, Stuf and WeakAuras are the 2 addons that let you do whatever your imagination can think up.
Re: what Birg said about keybinds - I do exactly the same. You'd be amazed how many class abilities are totally analogous with abilities from other classes, or put another way, how few truly unique abilities there are. There is a partial separation of keybinds into the categories melee/ranged/healer, but that's about it.
It is indeed! I can imagine it's a hassle to import though.. And it only includes the animations, focus, cast, and 4 squares above the unitframes.
http://pastebin.com/fwrDvQgZ
I hate to "third" an observation, but I feel compelled to because I had this experience just this weekend. I decided I wanted to use my pre-order level boost on my warlock, but wanted to get her to 60 for the profession boosts. She was 49 and I hadn't played her in a long time and I kinda by habit just queued her up for a dungeon and switched to a browser window til the queue popped, forgetting that I hadn't checked the keybinds I had on that character. I remembered my general priority for warlock, but hadn't refreshed myself on which buttons were which abilities. When I got into the dungeon, it occurred to me that I hadn't checked, but every ability I wanted to cast I correctly deduced the correct keybind on the first trash pack, because I had put my DoT where I have it on my main, my main nuke, my filler, my ability with charges, etc.
tl;dr: You can "borrow" muscle memory across characters by having a consistent keybinding scheme across characters.
That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange aeons even death may die.
My ElvUI edit. Function over form.. Meaning, I'm not a huge nazi when it comes to exactly the right fonts/textures etc around in my ui. I try to match things ofcourse.. But don't really put too much effort into it.
Using ElvUI and along with Skullflower as a base. Mostly because I really enjoy the fact that I can change more or less everything in my ui using the command /elvui.
Along with ElvUI I use Skada as my damage meter, Weak Auras as my cooldown/trinket/debuff/buff tracker, and Bigwigs as my bossmod of choice.
I would like to know if I can get rid of the Skada backgrounds and borders though. I only want to see the actual Dps bars so to speak. No backgrounds, no borders, no buttons. Just the bars.. This should be possible. I'm not afraid of tinkering in the LUA files if someone could point me to the correct lines. Since I have more or less zero coding experience!
Last edited by mmocae31beb646; 2014-03-26 at 03:20 PM.
That's definitely a very good first step towards improving your UI and I can only recommend to do the same with video if you want to optimize it even further.
One thing that has really helped me improving my UI overtime is watching kill vids from my PoV (or wipes for that matter) again and again. Each time you spot an imperfection in your gameplay (whether its on the rotation, target or spell choice for healers, CDs etc.), pause the video and ask yourself "What could I change to my UI that would have made me take the right decision?".
Whether its removing useless info, moving an aura/icon/alert/unitframe towards the middle of the screen, changing the color of a bar/aura, creating a new aura, changing your raid frames layout etc. you'd be amazed how many nice UI features you can figure out by yourself this way.
MW Monk - Bilgamesh
Resto shaman - Hexxtra - UI on Wowinterface
Holy paladin - Kaytemoss - UI on Wowinterface
Awsome stuff Birg. Not sure if you said you would be willing to share or not, but is there any change you could upload your Stuf setup? Meaning the unitframes with buffs/debuffs and the cooldown tracking below them? That layout is beyond kickass and i wanna try so bad :P