My You Eye

Originally, I was going to do this post using an awesome interactive SVG that you could zoom in on, and you could mouse-over any UI element to see a tooltip of what it was, why it was there, and a link to download it.

Except that, despite being a seven year old standard, IE still doesn't support it.  Instead they'd rather support their proprietary WPF format, which is almost the same thing.  I hate Microsoft so very much at times.

For the love of all that's good and fuzzy, please stop using IE.  You're making the web developers cry.

Anyway, enough politics.  Here's my UI in all its needlessly complicated glory; note that if you see a little   WowAce icon, it means that addon can be updated with the WowAce Updater (which, rather depressingly, requires Internet Explorer to install unless you want to be tricksy, but... no, not going off on a tangent!)  On to the UI!

Or you can view a 960 x 600 version (192 kB) or 1920 x 1200 version (967 kB).

1. This is my Outfitter bar.  It lists various outfits that I can switch between by clicking on the appropriate icon.  Shown on the bar at the moment are two primary sets: "Birthday suit" and Normal.  The remaining icons are for "accessory sets" which simply change certain slots and don't define a complete set.  These are my fishing, grinding, max-dps, fire festival, parachute and raiding sets.

2. This is the quest tracker provided by QuestsFu, which is part of   FuBar 3.0.  I hate this quest.  So very much.  It takes hours upon hours to complete, and you get a stupid rejuvenation potion for your trouble.  Why do I even bother with that thing?

3. This is a neat addon called   Nudge.  Basically, if I'm out of range it's red, if I'm in range it's blue and if I'm in melee range it's green.  I've made it exceedingly wide so that I can always catch the colour in my peripheral vision.

4. These are my item cooldowns, provided by   Cooldown Timers 2.  These bars aren't in this spot any more; they're over by #5; I just haven't taken a new screenshot since then.

5. This is   Elkano's BuffBars.  What's cool about this is that, although you can't see it here, you can filter different buffs/debuffs into different groups.  Each group can then either be free-floating, or anchored to another group.  Above the list of buffs is a (presently) empty Paladin block that shows up all the various Paladin auras, blessings and seals.

   Let this be a lesson in always making sure you make changes in the right profile, or your hunter will end up with a Paladin-centric buff display.  Oh well.

6. Again, this is Cooldown Timers 2, this time showing my ability cooldowns.  Of course, the main point of this is to show how long until your traps are ready (which you can't see here since I didn't drop one.)

7. This message is generated by   TopScore Fu.  The addon keeps track of your highest damage (and/or healing) records with individual abilities and overall, with and without crits.  But it also does something way cooler: it can be configured to take a screenshot when you get a new record.

   Why is this so awesome?  Because you'll end up with a massive collection of screenshots documenting your character's progress in the game.  It's awesome to be able to go back years and reminisce.

8. Here be   Quartz.  The main bar is the cast bar (with the red area denoting what my current latency to the server is,) the red "blip" above that is my GCD timer, and the white bar above that is my autoshot timer.

   And before anyone mentions it, yes the cast bar was pasted in from another screenshot, since you'd be surprised how hard it is to get all of this crap on-screen at once...

9. This is Kharthus' Hunter Timers [1].  This shows the duration of things.  The real draw card for this is that it shows you how long you have left on your traps before they disappear, and how long until a trap's effect wears off.

10. My primary unit frames are taken care of with   PitBull.  The middle two are fairly obvious: myself and my target.  To the left is my pet and my pet's target, above that is my focus and my focus' target and to the right is my target's target and target's target's target.  Above and to the right, which isn't visible in this shot, is the unit under my mouse cursor, and their target.

    What is this excessive of which you speak?

11. My party and raid frames are done with   Grid.  I used to have larger frames until I realised that I didn't really need them.  In this particular case, I've got Grid along with Grid Mana Bars.  The little red dot in the upper-left corner of K's frame denotes that he has aggro.  Since he has a rage bar, this is a good thing.

12. The experience bar (or in this case, reputation bar) is courtesy of Trinity XP (part of Trinity Bars 2.)

13. The bottom area of the screen is carved out and given a little sprucing up thanks to Sunn Art.  Specifically, I'm using the Tribal texture (which is part of the base Sunn Art package, although there are a number of additional art packs.)  I love this texture because of the gilded golden border at the top which is just right for fitting my XP/reputation bar into it.

14. As far as I'm aware, all of the various chat modifications I have are done by   Chatter.  Except for blacking out the names: that's done in an image editor.  :P

15. Mah pet bar, thanks to Trinity Bars 2.

16. Mah main action bar, again thanks to Trinity Bars 2.  This is more complex than it first appears.  If you look carefully at the letters on the buttons, you'll see they read:

    1, 2, 3, 4, R, F, V, C, X, Z, -, =

    Now, imagine you've got your fingers resting on the normal WASD movement keys.  Ignoring the last two, look at where those keys are: they're the keys that wrap around the movement keys.  This means I can hit any action on that bar (except for food and drink) without moving my left hand.

    But there's more: there's a second, separate set of actions bound to those keys plus the Ctrl modifier.  If you count the pet bar (which is bound to Ctrl+Shift+[1..Z]) I can hit any one of 30 actions without moving my hand at all.

    What's more, most of those actions are themselves macros that have different behaviours.  For example, 2 is a macro that fires Serpent Sting normally, or Scorpid Sting if I hold down Alt.  F doubles as both regular Arcane Shot and my pull-shot.  I think the only one that isn't a macro of some kind is Multishot, and that's only because I've never needed Tranquilizing Shot, nor do I have any macro slots left...

    And people wonder how I run circles around them while smacking them with instant shots and stings while micromanaging my pet...

17. This here be   FuBar 3.0.  The modules (all of which are, as far as I know, available on the WowAce Updater) you can see, from left to right, are:

    • MoneyDetailFu — tracks where my money is coming from and where it's going.
    • MoneyFu — tracks how much money I have on each and all of my toons.
    • Omen — surely you know what this is, right?
    • Grid — just another way to access Grid's configuration.
    • Cooldown Timers 2 — one of the few ways to access CDT's configuration.
    • Visual Themes — ditto.
    • Skinner — as above.
    • ToFu — actually redundant with Quartz, shows how long left on a flight.  A.k.a. the "can I make a coffee in time" timer.
    • LocationFu — GPS for WoW.
    • DurabilityFu — now you have no excuse to turn up with damaged gear.  Well, except for the "I'm a dipstick" one.
    • AmmoFu — can haz boolets?
    • SpeedFu — surprisingly, this actually has a legitimate use: working out if your flying mount is level or not!
    • GarbageFu — firstly, it shows a list of all vendor trash in my bags when moused over, as well as their individual and total value.  But that's not the best part: if I Shift+Click on the icon, it will drop the contents of the least valuable inventory slot.  This way, you can minimise your losses when you run out of bag space.
    • SunnArt — see #13.
    • FishingBuddyFu — honestly don't use this much, since typing /fb is faster, and the rest of Fishing Buddy is mostly automatic.
    • DPS — don't really use this either since I have #26...
    • TopScoreFu — see #7.
    • QuestFu — see #2.
    • BagFu — tells me how many slots I have left before I have to drop my partial stack of Malfunctioning Basilisk Livers.  The horror!
    • RestFu — shows rested XP on my army of alts.
    • ExperienceFu — good for estimating how long until I level on an alt.  Also used for figuring out how long the elves around the mana-forge have been studiously not dropping those bloody plans.  Stingy bastards...
    • Elkano's BuffBars — configuration for #5.
    • ClearFont2 — basically does a bunch of font substitution jiggery-pokery to make text in-game nicer to read.
    • ClockFu — lets me know how long ago I was supposed to have gone to bed.  Bad Its!

18. A miscellaneous bank of buttons controlled by Trinity Bars 2.  Mostly contains food, random quest items, macros, etc.  The lower nine buttons are bound the numeric pad.

19. Mah minimap.  It was repositioned and resized using simpleMinimap.

20. The mini menu bar, again from Trinity Bars 2.

21. What a surprise: more Trinity Bars 2!  This set of three columns map to my Logitech G15's G keys.  The original, blue-backlit one, not the "I'm going to have to kill someone for this" crappy orange version.  Specifically, each column is a different mode's worth of G keys.  The actual binding itself and stylish red border showing the active mode are done using Its' G15 Binder.

    Modes 1 and 2 contains various things that doesn't actually get used all that often and mode 2 is the one I'm generally in.  Specifically, since G13-G18 can be reached with my pinky finger without having to move my left hand too much, it tends to contain the most oft-used things.  Most notable are my "God Mode" macro on G13, bandages on G16, my Zapthrottle Mote Extractor on G17 and my I Has Macro Lol macro on G18.

22. It's another Trinity Bars 2 button!  This is my "panic" button; it's bound to numpad 0, which is nice and big, and very easy to hit with my right thumb.

23. This is in two parts.  The upper row of buttons are my "quick" buttons.  Various things that I need quick access to, but don't want to hit by mistake.  From left to right, they are my mount macro, my pet control macro (combining Mend Pet, Call Pet and Revive Pet,) my gadget macro, my über trap macro and my powerup macro.

    The bottom row is basically the "stance" bar from Trinity Bars 2 that depends on my class.  For my hunter it's aspects, for a paladin it's auras and for a druid it's forms.  It's not actually bound to anything for Its, but for non-pet classes, this bar takes over the Ctrl+Shift+[1..Z] bindings.

24. Amazingly, these two buttons aren't from Trinity Bars 2!  In fact, it's TrinketMenu.  If I mouse over the buttons, I can switch out trinkets with the left and right mouse buttons.  The buttons are also bound to Shift+5 and Ctrl+5, which activates the trinket in that slot.

25. Well, that didn't last long: it's back to Trinity!  The left one is a pop-up bar; mouse over the hammer, and a vertical bar of professions shows up.  Saves a hell of a lot of space, that's for sure.  Other uses include Paladin seals, or Shammy totems.  The bag button, unsurprisingly, opens my bags.

26. Here's   Recount.  Look at those numbers.  Beautiful, aren't they?

27.   Omen.  If you don't have this, and you ever group with other people, you should hang your head in shame.

And now for the other things you can't see.

•   ArkInventory: this thing is a God-send.  Here's a screenie so you know what I'm yammering on about:

  

  Basically, it pools all your storage into a single bag.  You then create a bunch of groups.  To each group you assign one or more categories or rules.  AI (ArkInventory, not Artificial Intelligence) will then sort your items into those groups for you.

  Take that screenshot for example.  I can find anything in my bags very quickly because things are always grouped together logically.

  That said, AI is not for the faint of heart.  It's incredibly time consuming to configure, and has a bad habit of not only getting confused about where a particular item is supposed to go (sometimes requiring you to either hand-edit or nuke your configuration to fix it.)  It's also one of the AddOns that can reportedly cause the "block too big" memory errors that will bring WoW to a screaming (followed by flaming and violently exploding) halt.  Usually six seconds after you start a boss fight in an instance.

  I've found that using /reloadui after each boss mitigates that.

  So yes, it's finicky, and makes WoW somewhat unstable, but that just gives you an idea of how unbelievably useful it is.

• Beast Training: basically an improved beast training window that looks less like a trainer's list of skills and more like a talent window.

• Bookworm: records any book (or plaque) that you read, and where you read it.  You can then go back and read them later on.  Gotta read 'em all!

•   Cartographer: replaces the standard WoW map.  Among other things, it allows you to scale it, move it, show unexplored areas, add notes, make it transparent, and more.  When combined with   Cartographer_Data,   Cartographer_Herbalism and   Cartographer_Mining, it'll give you map locations for pretty much every herb and mineral node in the game.  Just like Gatherer, except without the annoying "having to find everything" step.

  However, also combine this with   Routes, and you can build up optimised mining/herbing routes for farming runs.

• Clique: I'm still adjusting to using this, but I use it on my healery-type characters.  It lets me, for example, Shift+Click on someone to cast a full heal, Ctrl+Click to cast a HoT, or Ctrl+Right Click to dispell.  Pretty damn nifty.  That said, I do think I prefer mouse-over healing more (ie: set up your healing spells to cast at your mouse over target) since it allows me to not only heal people via unit frames, but I can also just point at them in the game world to heal them.

• DoubleWide: because the normal cramped quest log is not fun.

• EquipCompare: when you mouse over something that's equippable, it shows the tooltip for what you currently have equipped next to it.

• ExpressMail: shift-click on a mail to loot an attached item.  Damn I love this thing.  Tekkub rules.

•   GemHelper: used on Por; lets you filter your gem list based on colour, stats, quality, etc.

•   GemList: one of those interactive "whisper me to search for gems" dealies.  That said, it doesn't look like it's maintained any more, so you might want to try   CraftList2.

•   I Has Macro Lol: basically, this addon rewrites a particular macro slot depending on where you are.  This is hugely useful for daily quests.  By dragging the IHML macro to an action button (M2G18 in my case,) I can push that to take readings in the Spirit Fields, drop bombs in Skettis, phase shift in BEM, or plant the banner on IoQD.

• Its' Happy Snaps: this basically takes a screenshot every 10% of a level, or when you ding a new level.  I wrote it so that I'd have a more complete history of my alts levelling up.  It's not published anywhere, but let me know if you're interested and I'll toss it up somewhere.

• LightHeaded: basically, it's Wowhead's quest database, but accessible in-game.  Useful when you're on one of those quests with really vague and obtuse instructions.  Or, you know, ones where the directions are just outright wrong.

•   MobHealth: because knowledge is power.  Or something.

• OPie: this is a new addition to my UI.  Basically, I have it set up like so: I push a key combination, and a ring of actions shows up around my cursor.  I flick my mouse towards the action I want, let go of the key binding, and OPie executes that action.  As an example, I used to use the numpad for switching aspects which was a bad idea because it requires me to remove my hand from the mouse to do it.  Now, I have them arranged in a ring bound to Ctrl+E, so I don't need to move my hands.  I'm still getting used to it, but it's very promising at this point.

•   PallyPower: obviously not visible in the screenshot for obvious reasons, this lets you track and manage Pally blessings.  Por would have gone mad if not for this.

• Pawn: see my post on Pawn for more info.

• PetEmote: because pets is peoples too.  Note that you'll probably want to re-write most of the emotes, since they're apparently translated into English and as a result, most of them sound... wrong.

•   RatingBuster: summarises the difference between the item you're looking at and what you've got equipped.

•   Skinner: no, not the principal.  It's what gives windows in WoW that nifty black gradient look.

• TourGuide: I have four 70s, two per faction.  I've done, basically, every soloable quest in the game.  Repeatedly.  Levelling up is honestly nothing more than a chore for me because I've done it all before.  TourGuide is fantastic because it boils levelling up down to a list of "go here, do this" instructions that you can follow while more or less unconscious.  'Tis brillig.

•   VisualHeal: a little bar that shows incoming heals on you and whoever you're casting a heal on; also shows what their estimated health will be when the heal completes.

•   VisualThemes: makes stuff in WoW go whoosh.  Is pretty.

Well, that's most of them.  Yes, I said "most" as in "there are more."  But that should cover all the ones that are actually useful to other people.

---

1. I realise that it's actually called "Kharthus's Hunter Timers," but I refuse to type such blatantly awful grammar.  Oh damnit!

Because Thinking is Hard

On the off chance that you haven't noticed, the Interwebs are ablaze at the moment, with the release of several new features to Wowhead.  OK, so maybe "ablaze" isn't the right word.  Perhaps "smouldering."  Possibly even "smoking a bit, but not an actual fire hazard per-se."

Anyway.

The feature that most people are yammering on about are item scales.  If you don't know what they are, these are basically a scoring system for gear.  You assign relative scores to various attributes and bonus effects, and Wowhead will then compute relative scores for different bits of gear.  For example, let's say I'm a very narrow-minded fire mage who earnestly believes that every point of +spell damage is worth 10 +intellect, and that's all there is to gearing.

Here's what the Wowhead scale would look like:

And here's a snippet of how it would score some items:

As you can see, this is pretty useful for getting a rough idea of how valuable a piece of gear is.   You'll also notice that since I did this search on "Armor" in general, it's not limited to stuff Mages can actually wear.  The scales can be used in conjunction with the existing filters, so you could easily search on gear usable by Mages that drops in heroic-mode instances and is epic, or whatever you want.

However, item scales aren't new; they've been around for ages.  The first (at least, that I know of) was AEP or Agility Equivalence Points.  It was designed for rogues to give them a simple way to rate gear.  There have been a few other point systems dreamed up over the years (TankPoints is one notable exception in that, as far as I know, it actually does some theorycrafting on the fly for you as opposed to simply summing attributes.)

But what's really got me excited is how well the new Wowhead scales work with an old addon I've been using for ages: Pawn.

This addon basically does exactly the same thing that Wowhead now does: you tell it the relative worth of different attributes and bonus effects, and it will compute a score for each piece of gear you look at.  The great thing is that instead of having to fire up a browser to check an item's score, Pawn will insert the score into the item's tooltip.

The big problem with scales is coming up with them in the first place.  Take mages as an example.  How much is crit worth relative to spell damage?  Relative to intellect?  Relative to strength?  [1]

However, the fine, fine human beings at Wowhead have done most of the work for us by coming up with default scales for every class and spec.  That's not to say they're perfect; but they do give us a starting point.  What's more, now that this exists in the main stream, it's likely we'll see people posting "optimised" item scales that we can use.

Let's say you've found an item scale that you like.  Like, say, our fire mage scale above.  You'd rather like to be able to use that in-game.  Well, OK; maybe not you personally, but work with me here.  This is long enough without trying to do something actually useful.

First of all, grab Pawn and install it.

Once you've done that, you can bring up the Pawn configuration by typing /pawn.  There's also a button on your character sheet if you'd rather use that.  You'll get an initial "go read the documentation," message, but we can ignore that for now.  Click on the "Options" tab down the bottom.

A few notes on these options.

• Show item levels will show an item's level in its tooltip.  This isn't the "required level;" an item's level determines how much of each stat it gets.  For example, weapons that drop off heroic end-bosses are ilvl 105, whilst gear from those same bosses are ilvl 110; Tier 4 is ilvl 120, except for stuff that drops off Prince Malchezaar which is ilvl 125.  That said, the item level is not the be-all and end-all.

• Show item IDs will tell you an item's unique identifier.  For instance, my [Surestrike Goggles v2.0] have an itemid of 32474.  Fun fact: look at the URL for Wowhead's page on that item; the last part of the URL is the itemid itself.  This means you can always get an itemid from an item's tooltip in-game, and then directly enter the Wowhead URL for that item!

• Show inventory icons displays the icon for an item above its tooltip in some cases.  Personally, I prefer it off, but turn it on and see if you like it.

• Add a blank line before values does exactly what it says: it adds some padding into the tooltip.

• Align values to the right edge of tooltip also does what it says; with this turned off, the scores are right next to the scale's name; this makes them a little harder to find when you're scanning a tooltip, so I prefer to have this checked.

• Show (*) on unrecognized stats relates to things that Pawn doesn't know how to score (for example: the minor run speed increase on some meta gems.)  If it finds something it doesn't understand, it puts "(*)" next to the score.  I turn the warning text off because I'm well aware of what it means by now.

• Digits of precision is useful if you have a lot of really close scores.  Personally, I leave this at 1 and try to engineer my scales so that scores aren't so close together that I need to increase the precision.

• Calculate unenchanted values will display an item's score as if it wasn't enchanted.  This is important because when you get a new drop it's not going to be enchanted, is it?  This levels the playing field a bit.

• Calculate enchanted values will display an item's score including its enchant.  This is important because when you get a new drop it's not going to be enchanted, is it?  This lets you know if the new drop is already better than what you have even before enchanting.

• Normalize values can be useful if your scores are all 6+ digits; your scores will generally drop to very small numbers with this.  It doesn't change how they're computed, however; it's just visual.

The rest you can leave or fiddle with, but they're the important ones.  So, with that done, let's look at porting a scale from Wowhead to Pawn, shall we?  Click on the "Scales" tab.  You should see the default Pawn scale; uncheck the "Show this scale in tooltips" box down the bottom to hide it.  Now, click on the "New empty" button, set "Fire Mage" as the name and hit enter.

Now, let's get to work.  The big list on the left contains all the things Pawn knows about.  When you click on one, a description shows up on the right, along with a box for entering its value.  First of all, we'll click on Intellect, and set it to "1."

Next, scroll down the list to the "Spell stats" section, and select "Spell damage."  Set that to "10."

That's it; we're done!  Because we're a Fire Mage (not really,) change the colour to a nice firey orange and click "Close."  Now, let's see if it's working...

Cool, huh?  Note that it's not the same score as Wowhead gives us, however.  This is because Wowhead and Pawn use different normalisation techniques for the scores.  If you go back to the options screen and check "Normalize values," this will get the two close, but they still won't match.

So if they don't match, why is this useful?  Well, imagine you're in an instance and some inconsiderate bastard starts looting corpses while you're still busy DPSing your little heart out.  The item pops up and... ooh, that might be useful.  But is it better than what you've got?  Hmm, not as much spell damage, but it does have a bit more crit...

In situations like these, you can look at the scores in the tooltip to give you a quick indication of whether a piece of gear is worth further investigation or not.  Combined with an addon that shows comparison tooltips, it can save you a lot of time better spent causing things to violently explode.

Now, there are a few more caveats: Wowhead's system will automatically fill gem slots with whatever gems give it the best result (maybe; it's not documented anywhere, but that's what it looks like it does.)  Pawn doesn't do that; instead, it allows you to assign a score to different coloured sockets.  So what to do?

The trick here is to look up the gems you're likely to put in those slots.  Count up its stats, and work out what the gem's score would be.  It's important that you don't just look at Wowhead's score for the gem, since this won't be directly compatible with your Pawn scales.  It's not that hard, though.  Take [Runed Living Ruby] as an example.  We said that each point of spell damage was worth "10" in our scale, so the gem itself is worth "90."  Assuming you intend to put those into your red gem slots, plug in "90" as the value for red gem slots.

Meta gems are a complete pain in the rear end, but since you're not likely to ever upgrade to a piece of stylish scalp-protector without one (at least, not until WotLK,) once you're in gear that has them, you can probably just ignore the meta gem value (or give them some silly high value like 1000.)

There's another trick that might be of interest to the hunters out there.  You all know how weapon speed is basically the deciding factor in ranged weapons, right?  Well, Pawn supports a nifty little trick that Wowhead doesn't.

First of all, you need to decide which direction you want to go with weapon speed.  Head down to the "Special weapon stats" section, and select "Ranged: speed".  If you're BM, enter a big negative number (which will give higher scores to faster weapons;) otherwise enter a positive number (which will favour slower weapons.)  This part will also sort of work with Wowhead.  [2]

What you do then is scroll right down to the bottom and select "Speed baseline" and enter your ideal weapon speed.  In my case, I set "Ranged: speed" to -500, and "Speed baseline" to 2.5.  This means that weapons faster than 2.5 will gain points, and weapons slower than 2.5 will lose points.  Nifty, eh?

One last final tip before I go: you might not be happy with the scores.  Specifically, if you don't normalise, you can end up with big scores like 3890, and if you do normalise you end up with tiny scores like 1.57.  If you want something in the middle, you can divide all the attribute values by a power of 10.  So instead of using "68" as a score, use "6.8" or ".68".  Just remember to do this to all of your values.

And that's really all there is to using Pawn.  I would recommend that you use as many scales as you have roles.  For instance, Druids should have a "Tank" scale, a "Kitteh DPS" scale, a "HPS" scale and a "HPM" scale.  This will let you quickly decide if any particular piece of gear is an upgrade for one of your gear sets or not.

Does this mean you can rely entirely on Wowhead and Pawn for gear choices?  Don't talk crazy like that.  Things like this aren't a substitute for experience (or at least, really complex theorycrafting,) but they do help you make quick "ballpark" guesstimates.

P.S.  If you didn't get the joke in the comic, that's because you're pronouncing "pawn" and "porn" wrong.  No, the British pronunciation was in use first, ergo it wins.

---

[1]  Yeah, OK, that last one was a trick question.  :D

[2]  "Sort of" because Wowhead seems to have hiccups with negative scores.

Image of tasty looking tempura prawns © Swamibu, the not-real-at-all girl who is actually really wearing a bikini under those black bars © myvirtuallady, and the pawn that I spent like 10 minutes cutting out is © Jud McCranie.