Beautiful and Updated UIs for every class! (Weak Auras 2.18)
UPDATE
Hi guys, it's been a while! For the past 3 weeks I've been collaborating with creators of the community in order to make a massive project, Naowh's UI! I'm very excited to announce that as of September 13th, our project has been released. This was a massive project in the making with much more attention to detail than this 2020 project.
I won't be supporting the old weak auras as they're far too outdated. However, good news is that I've already finished all weak auras for the new project, with an updated look and functionality!
You can check it out by clicking here!
Introduction
Hi guys, my name is Lunminas, I'm a discipline priest main from the guild <Fade>. I've had 4 years of experience in Wrath of the Lich King here on Warmane coupled with a decent ammount of time on retail. Since the start of playing WoW, I always loved to fully customize my UI, but was unfortunately not capable and dedicated enough to make something well-done.
What is this about?
This year I was able to experience retail with my friends and I've come to realize that there's loads of customization there, since it's highly supported and they have a large dedicated community. I was very passionate about the limits (or lack thereof) of customization in User Interfaces, more particularly Weak Auras, which, on retail, is very very powerful.
Ever since then, I looked back on my very basic UI for WotLK and wondered if there'd ever be a day where I could play on Warmane using a well-designed, complex and working UI. This was unfortunately not possible due to our version of Weak Auras, which was still dated to 3.3.5a content back in the day.
Then, classic released, and the people that worked on retail weak auras got to work for the classic version, and added pretty much a lot of the functionality to be compatible with that port of the game. Because of that, I assume it was a lot easier to bring the current weak auras build to WotLK, and, when searching on github one day, I found a repository from a guy named "Bunny67", which contained a new version for our build! It obviously isn't 100% functional, but the stuff you can do with it is actually insane, and I'll soon show you!
What is your objective?
My aim is to build PVE UIs from scratch in Weak Auras for all the classes in Wrath of the Lich King, prioritizing the ones that I own and know first, obviously. With this new build of Weak Auras, I'm pretty confident I can make something that will make your WotLK experience at least a little bit more fun and updated. If this gets a good ammount of attention maybe I might influence some other people to do the same, and perhaps suggest on stuff I should change as well!
As for why I'm making this, well, it's a hobby. This takes a lot of time and effort, some UIs take 3 hours to make, maintaing all of them is also very tricky. One faulty aura and I have to change the pastebin, the links, fix the version, etc. So please, enjoy!
Why should I bother? it's just an UI
For the majority of the playerbase, that is, in fact, true. Some people that play the game for a long time also don't need UIs to play their class correctly and efficiently. However, the assumption that UIs don't help you get better is absolutely false and I'll explain why.
Besides the fact that pretty much the vast majority of high-end raiders and mythic-plus players on retail use UIs for their class, the availability and compact nature of Weak Auras UIs have proven to be detrimental for end-game players. It helps to maintain focus on the important details of your class such as rotations, cooldowns, defensives, and it's overall great for when you need to check whatever your class can offer without having to waste time looking for abilities in your hotbars.
To put it simply, UIs help you to focus and be efficient. If you're losing DPS because you're not doing 100% uptime of your cooldowns, then there's an issue with efficiency. That can be solved by either being very experienced at the class and remembering the cooldown of all your abilities, or simply having an aura that tracks that for you. In a raid environment, you do not have the luxury of only caring about your class and your responsabilities to maintain DPS, there's a ton of details to keep track on, which you can easily lose yourself in.
So UIs fix that, an intricate yet simple solution to maintain simplicity and availability of class-specific responsabilities. If this isn't enough for you, please, take a look at some of the projects I've already done and am constantly updating.
How can I get it?
Well firstly you'll have to download this build of Weak Auras, which is an off-build of retail WA (presumably, I'm not 100% sure). Although this is great and all, The guy that made the repository isn't "official", but he has worked on several other projects for Wrath specifically so I'm confident he's not doing anything shady with the addon. With that said, please understand that, although I'm 99.9% sure there's absolutely nothing wrong, there's still a small chance that he could've changed the code for some malicious purpose. I've done some digging myself but I'm unfortunately not that great with lua nor WoW's API to fully comprehend what he has changed, there's also kilometers of lines of codes there, so a thorough investigation would take some time and effort.
If you fully understand the situation and is still confident that there's no foul play like I think as well, then please, access his repository through this link. Download the latest version, put it in your addons folder and boot up the game. Once you're logged in, type "/wa" and this window should pop-up:
When you're there, click on the last option "Import", then copy the text inside the pastebin that I'll link. it should look like this:
From here, click on "Import Group", and you're done! The group has been succesfully imported to your Loaded Weak Auras. There's a couple of things that you might do depending on your taste. The most relevant one is the size of the UI, if you want to change that, click on the group, then on the "group" tab, use the "Group Scale" slider. This should only be used for the Main group of every UI I post, since all the other groups inherit this characteristic from the main group, meaning: If you want to change the scale of ALL groups, change it from the Main Rotation one!
WARNING
Currently, the vast majority of my auras check for name of spells, meaning if you're playing with a non-english version of WotLK, some auras won't work.
Adittionally, if you want to resize or move the UI, that can be done by selecting the main group of the UI and changing it's location. Resizing is done by going to that same main group, clicking on the group tab, then changing the group scale. Also, in order to make the UI visible out of combat, go to every single group, click on the "Load" tab, then deselect the "In combat" option.
Lastly, I update all my auras constantly due to bugs or auras doing things they are not suppose to do. When updating your UI, please remember to delete all the other groups from previous versions as Weak Auras changes the name of an aura if there's already another aura with the same name. This can break the groups, making only the main one show up.
My Projects
I'll dedicate this part for all of the UIs I'm making, this post will be updated everytime I do something new so make sure to stick around if you want an UI for your class. If you have a request, feel free to reply on this post, so I can focus on some UIs first!
IMPORTANT
All of the example images are clickable links just like the first one, if you want to have a better look, click on it for a GIF!
Click on 'check' to be redirected to the Warmane Forum page!
- Paladin
- Rogue
- Warrior
- Hunter
- Druid
- Boomkin - Check
- Bear Tank - Check (My friend's Project)
- Mage
- Priest
- Death Knight
- Warlock
Project completion
(13/11/2020) - Marksman Hunter - DONE
(14/11/2020) - Fury Warrior - DONE
(15/11/2020) - Retribution Paladin - DONE
(15/11/2020) - Combat Rogue - DONE
(19/11/2020) - Fire Mage - DONE
(19/11/2020) - Balance Druid - DONE
(20/11/2020) - Shadow Priest - DONE
(25/11/2020) - Holy Priest - DONE
(25/11/2020) - Discipline Priest - DONE
(15/12/2020) - Blood Death Knight - DONE
(16/12/2020) - Frost Death Knight - DONE
(16/12/2020) - Unholy Death Knight - DONE
(17/02/2021) - Demonology Warlock - DONE
(21/02/2021) - Affliction Warlock - DONE
(21/02/2021) - Destruction Warlock - DONE
(??/??/????) - Auxiliary group for Internal Cooldowns - TODO
