Interface advice

One of the most valuable things a WOW raider can do is to have a good interface.  A great player will cap out at mediocre output with the default interface, and no matter your skill level a properly built interface will make a huge difference in how you play.  This is a basic bit of information about how I did my interface for those who I am going to be raiding with in the upcoming expansion.

The way I did it is not the only way.  Lots of these decisions take into account things like my hand size, alternate specs, and how I have been playing for many years.  I have had my stun on Q for 15 years and it isn't going to change now, no matter what else happens.  Still, the principles are useful to anyone, and in any case seeing how other people build an interface can give you good ideas.

This is my party setup.  The basic principle is that every piece of important information has to be available without looking all over the screen.  If your character bar is in the top left, you won't notice when you take a lot of damage.  If you do, you won't be looking at your feet to see if you are standing in fire.  You also want your important cooldowns visible without having to look at the bottom of your screen.  Here is my setup:

My character health bar is in a prominent spot.  Above my health bar at 1.  I have all of my defensive cooldowns.  If I see my health bar is low, I don't have to look all over the screen - I have my defensives right there.  I have my debuffs shown below it at 2., so it is super obvious to me if I get a particular boss debuff, and it is right beside my health bar so I can check my full status all at once.  The big icon near the 1.  is the remaining duration on Divine Shield.

At 3. are my reminder icons.  These tell me if I am lacking an aura or my rune buff.  As soon as I put those buffs on, the reminder icon vanishes.  This way I am always reminded before a pull to get those buffs up, and I don't have to put that on my memory.

4.  is my target.  It it set up to have a *huge* cast bar so if my target is casting the entire bar is taken up with the cast.  I want to be completely sure that I don't miss casts.  Also I put wings, my interrupt, and my stun right beside the enemy frame here.  If a cast is happening, I can see, without moving my eyes at all, exactly which options I have to stop it.

5.  is my rotation helper.  I use Hekili because it is excellent for ret and prot paladins.  This lets me focus on dodging goo without staring much at my abilities and cooldowns.  Right below it is my holy power display.  I recommend everyone get some kind of rotation display, but each class needs to hunt down the best solution for them.  Just make sure you aren't staring at the bottom left of the screen and standing in fire because you can't see your character while figuring out your rotation.

6. and 7. are my focus and target of target displays.  I want to have those just in case, though honestly I don't look at them much.

8. is the most important part of the interface, so pay close attention here - the damage meter.  Notice on the bottom how Redcape has done all the damage and other people haven't.  This is just how it is.

Okay, so now we have what the bits are.  Now how do we make them this way?

The health bar for me, my target, target of target, and focus are all created via Shadowed Unit Frames.  I use the default raid and party frames though, as I find they do what I want.  SUF lets you easily set up different arrangements for each frame, which is great.  For example, I think it is crucial to have the cast bar for your target be extremely obvious.

The extra icons at 1. and 3. are made via Weakauras.  You can find tons of weakauras at https://wago.io/weakauras so if you have a specific thing you want a icon for, hunt there.  I have weakauras to show me the duration of all of my defensives, important buffs, and cooldowns right next to where the button is.  Weakauras also provides the holy power display below my Hekili bar at 5.

The buttons surrounding my character frame and target frame are made via Bartender.  This gives you extra bars you can rearrange, so I put bars on the screen near the frames and made the bars click through.  This way they don't interfere with anything, but I can easily put buttons right next to the raid frames that they are associated with.

In raids my group frames shifts.  This can be done in Interface - Raid Profiles in the default interface.  In 5 person content I want all party members right beside me, in raids I need it set further away.

Now that we have the appearance out of the way, I should talk a bit about buttons.  Personally I like using my mouse for all movement and my left hand for all spellcasts.  This works great for prot and ret, but wouldn't work for healing.  (This is part of the reason I don't heal...)

My setup is that I have my basic 12 buttons mapped to 123456qwerty.  The bar above it is mapped to shift-123456qwerty.  The bar above that is mapped to ctrl-123456, and then to custom buttons.  This allows me to easily use 24 keybinds, and have another 12 awkward ones.  I don't want to ever mouse click an ability in a fight, because that leads to death.

My mouse has 7 buttons on it.  I have them mapped to back up, strafe left, strafe right, move forward, autorun, mark target as skull, and mount up.  This way I never have to slowly keyboard turn, I can just mouse turn and strafe.  There isn't much reason to ever use the turn buttons, as mouse turning plus strafing is all you ever really want to do.  I want to be able to move and turn at full speed with the mouse while hitting abilities at maximum speed.

If you have any other questions or comments (feel free to criticize my interface if you think there are things I could improve) please comment away.