‘Mazing Mod Monday: Or lack thereof?

Not everyone is into mods. Some people have lower-end systems that make loading up 50 add-ons a pain and a half. Other people are purists and feel that more mods will lead to unnecessary errors, etc. So the question is – how can you make the most out of default UI and how can you make it work for you?

You’re probably going to need to see all the action bars offered by default (5 bars) just to be able to keybind and macro everything in our expansive spell books, no matter which class you are.

Macros

Macros are probably the easiest way to make life easier by combining buttons, mouseover healing, and other clever tricks that most people who don’t know how to write macros use mods to set up.

For healing macros that use mouseover, I would suggest checking out this post I did a while ago. Before I picked up Clique, all my heals were keybound and mouseover. It wasn’t until 3.0 came out that I realized I just had too many things to keep track of and it was causing me more stress than enjoyment to heal (okay, not that bad but you know what I mean).

Now, we can also save space by merging our single and group buffs into one button! I did this for Fort, DS, and Shadow Protection. Instead of taking 6 buttons, they took up 3 buttons. Left-click on a target would give them a single buff. Right-click would group buff. It was pretty nifty. :) I preferred to show the icon for the group buff so I could also keep track of how many candles I had left without opening my bags.

#showtooltip Prayer of Fortitude
/cast [button:1] Power Word: Fortitude; [button:2] Prayer of Fortitude

And replace spell names as necessary. “Button:1″ is left click, “button:2″ is right click. You can use all sorts of modifiers to string 3-4 abilities together if you really wanted to.

Just remember – Right Action Bar is the right action bar on the outside. Right Action Bar2 is the right action bar on the inside. You’ll know what I mean when you see both of them in action.

Keybindings

The default UI is extremely customizable in terms of keybindings. The main menu now even sports its own keybinds button. To get access to all the binds available, hit ESC, Keybinds. About halfway through that panel, you get to all the action bars. This is where you can set primary and secondary binds (I don’t really use the secondary binds – a keyboard only has so many keys…).

Most of us don’t use the F-keys to target party members anymore (I’ll admit I used to before I started using add-ons and healed instances while I was leveling) and you especially won’t need them if you use mouseover macros. Feel free to bind them to something else! Visually speaking, the most logical bar to bind the F keys to would be the bottom left action bar, right above the main bar.

Here are some buttons you can bind:

` (next to 1)
F1-F9 (I put the most commonly used spells from 1-5 and F1-F5)
Q, E for trinkets (A, D are now strafe left & right – no keyboard turning for me)
B is now to open all bags
Z (default is to take out or sheath your weapon… loluseless)
X (default is to make your character sit, no it doesn’t help your mana regen, get up)

That’s already ~15 extra buttons. Add some modifiers to a macro and the possibilities are endless! I know plenty of people who use shift+V, ctrl+Z, lots of crazy stuff.

Addon-like Behavior

We all know the devs like to take great ideas from addons and then implement them into the game itself (threat meter, scrolling combat text, etc.). Just go into the main menu and hit the Interface menu. From there, you can see all types of things you can enable. Anyone remember the days of vanilla WoW when your loot window ONLY opened on top of your party frame?! Well, now it can open at your mouse pointer!

A couple of things you can enable from the default interface:

Threat Meter
Floating Combat Text (with more options now!)
Open loot window at pointer
Hide party frames in a raid
Smart Casting (if you have no target, helpful spell will cast on you by default)
Self Casting (alt + spell will cast spell on yourself)
Enable status text on all unit frames (health & power percentage/absolute values)
Auto Looting (you can set right-click to loot all and shift+click to choose or vice versa)
Keybind /focus and /clearfocus (target someone, hit the key, and that target is now your focus)

Skinning your UI by modifying Blizzard files

You can actually replace a lot of the game files with custom art and fonts to give it a custom UI look without addons. You just have to rename each custom file with the corresponding file’s name. For example – fonts. There are 4 default fonts in the game. Instead of installing an addon that manipulates your fonts, you can just copy a font you like into the folder and rename it with the default font’s file name. Examples:

FRIZQT__.ttf  – This is the main UI font.
ARIALN.ttf – This is the font used for numbers (e.g. the amount of gold you have).
skurri.ttf  – This is the font used for large numbers (e.g. Blizzard floating combat text numbers)
MORPHEUS.ttf – This is that really hard to read font used in your mail, quest log, etc.

So if you want to change some or all of these, just name your custom font files accordingly.

You can also implement custom nameplates (that stuff that pops up when you hit V, shift+V, or control+V) by doing the same thing. Head on over to Vranx’s UI for some custom art files to paste into your folders to change the way the nameplates look if you don’t want to install something like Aloft.

Well, there you have it! How to tweak the default UI settings! I’m sure there are more tricks out there that I haven’t mentioned but… I use addons. ;) You can’t expect me to know them all.