UI and Macros

The key to achieving synergy with your character is to NOT USE THE STANDARD WOW UI!!! Now some naysayers may say that the standard WoW UI is fine and that you have plenty of control over the display. But no matter how many times you show/hide the Right Action Bar 2 to me, I will still fail to be impressed.

The standard WoW UI leads to frustration. Frustration leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

True power comes from embracing the wonderfulness of addons. Let me start by introducing you to two of my little friends, XPerl Unit Frames and Dominos. These buddies of mine have taken the frustration out of trying to look in twenty different places for information that had been stuck on a multitude of space-wasting screen elements.

XPerl Unit Frames

XPerl Unit Frames is full of awesome. I've used this mod for ages and feel lost without it. It takes the frames for all units in the game (e.g. your character, party, pet, target, focus, raid, etc) and lets you customise them. And when I say customise I mean customise! You can move them all over the place, resize them, change the colours, change the portraits, etc.

Want to show a pin-sized hot-pink frame for your character in the bottom right corner of your screen? XPerl lets you do it!
Want to expand the frame for your pet so it fills half of the screen? XPerl lets you do it!
(note, it has no validations for user stupidity)

I heartily recommend this mod. You'll never bother looking in the top left corner of your screen again

Get XPerl Unit Frames

Dominos

If XPerl Unit Frames is full of awesome, then Dominos is overflowing with it. The awesomeness spills over the sides and floods your entire screen. I only discovered this mod a few months ago, but when I did, it was a revelation! Suddenly I could move my action bars, resize them, add/remove buttons and more! I didn't know what I was missing out on.

Dominos gives you a lot of flexibility in customising your action bars. You can do all the things I described above, plus assign certain action bars to stances/shapeshift forms/stealth, assign control sets to action bars (e.g. hold down CTRL to display a different set of bars), and hide bars that you never use (e.g. bag bar).

There are other variations of this mod, like BarTender, but I've had nothing to complain about with Dominos.

Get Dominos

More mods to come!

Screenshot: An uber UI

Are you confused by the multitude of skill and spells available to your character? Are you inherently lazy? Have you always dreamed of having an "I WIN" button (

Broken I.W.I.N. Button

Well, macros will help you out with the first two problems. Macros are a simplified programming language in WoW. You can use macros to cast a sequence of spells, use different skills with different key combinations, select random mounts to ride, etc...

To access your macros in WoW, simply type, '/macro' in your chat window. You can also hit the Escape key and select 'Macros' from your main menu.

There are a lot of online resources about macros out there, e.g. http://wowmacros.com/. Google away! So I thought I'd just highlight two of the really useful ones that I use. You can adapt these to use with your spells and skills for instant uberness. Win friends and influence people!

Example 1 — Modifier keys

/cast [nomodifier] Curse of Agony; [modifier:shift] Curse of Exhaustion; [modifier:alt] Curse of Tongues;

This is one of my most commonly used macros. When I press the key that this macro is assigned to, it casts Curse of Agony. If I hold down shift with the assigned key, it casts Curse of Exhaustion, and if I hold down altwith the assigned key, it casts Curse of Tongues.

Example 2 — Castsequence

/castsequence reset=combat/target/shift Curse of Agony, Corruption, Siphon Life, Immolate, Drain Life;

This is as close as I can get to an "I WIN" button for my warlock. When I repeatedly press the key that this macro is assigned to, it will cast every single spell listed in the sequence. The sequence will reset when I change target, leave combat or press shift.