So, let’s talk addons. The most important thing that comes to mind right now is keeping track of one’s energy and combo points because of how crucial they are to DPS. Now, I don’t know about you, but the default UI isn’t exactly friendly in terms of achieving that. Your energy is below your health bar on the top left corner of the screen. Combo points appear as tiny dots on your target’s bar. You can also enable floating combat text to notify you about them. I personally find it a little difficult to keep track of what’s going on when your eyes are alternating between the middle of the screen (where the fight is) and the top left corner. Here’s what I do to address it.
The way I have it set up is that the left side arcs have my health and energy while the right side arcs contain my target’s information. This is also where dots appear to designate how many combo points I have on the target. It’s as simple as that. What I like about all this is that it centers my vision. I’m only looking at the middle of the screen to keep track of everything. I know when I can hit Mutilate or Sinister Strike, when to hit finishers and how much health I have left. What’s even better is that you don’t lose raid awareness. You can see where the boss is, what he’s doing and what your position is relative to him. Raid warnings are also easy to notice.
I think I have one more addon to write about that’s more or less rogue-related then it gets generic from there. How about you? How do you keep track of your energy and combo points?
by Stonedrake, on August 18 2010 @ 9:03 am
I use a combination of IceHUD and PowerAuras.
IceHUD has that nice numeric (or dot based) display right there in the middle of your screen. Incedentally, this same display works great for Lacerate stacks for bears and Maelstrom Weapon stacks for enhance shammies. My energy shows up as a separate HUD bar.
Lately, however, I’ve been moving that stuff out of IceHUD (leaving it just for tracking my health, and the mob’s health/mana). I’m using PowerAuras alongside the IceHUD display with a set of auras suggested by the enhancement shammy column at wow.com. There’s an aura that looks like a circle divided into five segments. As my combo points, lacerates or maelstrom weapon applications stack, the circle’s segments fill up. When it hit’s 5 stacks it starts spinning. The arrival of segments and the spinning of the completed circle are just enough of a change in my peripheral vision to allow me to track what’s going on (and that it’s time to unleash hell).
by zeroinitiate, on August 22 2010 @ 2:30 pm
I actually forgot to add a screenshot of my current UI to this post. I use IceHUD and Elkano’s Buffbars to track everything. I had PowerAuras before but the configuration threw me off a bit. I’ve yet to see that spinning thing though. That sounds awesome.