Custom User Interfaces

While playing World of Warcraft, I've never been much of a fan of having too many addons. Many of my guildies refuse to even do dailies without their seven gazillion addons installed. Addons for healing, addons for DPS, addons to show you where to walk, and when to walk there... and addons that tell you pretty much every single thing that's happening all the time.

The addons I have used myself on the other hand, have all mainly been for one of these two purposes;

• Remove goldspam, begging, unwanted guild charter spam while using the Auction House, whispers from low levels looking for a boost through some instance, people copy+pasting the same thing over and over and over in /trade, duelspam... and just general spam spam spam.
  
• Make the UI look good

Because let's face it... as much as I love to play the game as it is, with only a few macros as additions to my gameplay, the default UI in World of Warcraft just looks like crap! In the past I have tried quite a few UIs myself. Some I've made, some I've downloaded. And sometimes, like now, I've downloaded or imitated somebody else's UI, and modified it to suit my own needs.

I've never been a fan of having too much info on my screen. I see my guildies running around with open combat logs, SCT with names of the healers and all abilities visible, latency, gold amount, bagspace, memory usage, framerates, durability, raid frames, party frames, grid and healbot, targets and pets and targets of targets of all of the above, Omen and Recount, cooldown trackers, DoT trackers, HoT trackers, and trackers of all the abilities of every single raid member as well... HuDs and 4 action bars..... meh. You get the picture. They're lucky if they can even spot their own bleeding character on-screen!!

So me, I'm a fan of minimalistic UIs. I don't need to know what everbody else is doing. I don't need to track everybody's cooldowns. I don't give a damn how hard my abilities hit or who heals me when they do. I have a combat log for this. And if we're trying to figure out new encounters, I'm probably using Recount to record what's happening, then I go over the info... AFTER the fight is over. I don't need to have it all in my face. I want space, freedom, and the game itself in front of me. Not page upon page of spam.

This time I found an UI called TukUI.

I've modified it slightly to fit my needs and my resolution. I did not use all of the included addons. And I added some of my own choosing as well. Though I'm generally against addons that modify the gaming experience, I find that I can't really live without the wonderful bag addon ArkInventory. Nor the priceless WiM to handle my whispers in an instant messenger style.

Anyway, here's my finished UI, or at least how it looked when I was more or less out of combat in Arathi Basin. There's not much more info on-screen when I'm fighting, just the normal damage- and healing numbers, plus Blizzard's Floating Combat Text. (Yes, I use the built-in one... )