What is this ridiculous UI?!?

Guides UI and Macro
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Guys, I am a fairly new player, and certainly not at a good PvP one… but holly cow WoW UI is ridiculously outdated. It’s mind blowing how nobody sees this and fix it… This is a 90s’ UI in 2020… unbelievable!!!

I tried to play Arenas… first of all I do not know who am I fighting with!!! what the…?? who is the enemy and who is friendly??? how is this possible to exist in a 2020 game? it’s ridiculous!!! How is it possible to require about 10 addons to even understand what is happening around you in arenas???.. and I am not kidding, you literary need 10 addons unless you want to be not only noob but also virtually blind??? Also… some of them don’t work together or are buggy, or don’t do what’s needed… it’s a total mess, I really did not believe this was possible in a 2020s game… guys, we are in a different century now, there’s a lot of technology for UIs!!!

And I am not kidding, here’s the list of addons I had to install to understand minimum things in Arenas:

  • Threat Plates - to know who is the God damn enemy!!! do not laugh, it’s true!!!
  • Shadowd Unit frames for party frames, player and target
  • Bartender for keybindings and action bars - so I could see my CDs and what I am using
  • Weak Auras for resources
  • Then, specific for Arenas, I installed Gladius for Arena Frames
  • OmniBar - for enemy CDs
  • OmniCC - for enemy CC
  • Arena Team Tracker for team CDs
  • BigDebuffs - for team CCs

OK, now counting, they are only 9 which are absolutely mandatory… but I can name at least other 5 that maybe are not mandatory but help you a lot with boosting your performance… like that one with the chick voice telling you what abilities the enemy used…
Needless to say, they don’t work the way I want, and I cannot configure them exactly as I want… Needless to say some are buggy and don’t work together, and reduce the PC performance… but it’s mind blowing how this is still in the game, almost 15 years after launch??? I don’t know, do WoW people know we are in the 21st century now?? What the…!!!

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I agree the standard UI isn’t impressive, but you’re vastly overexaggerating.

Half your list of 9 essential arena add-on’s isn’t remotely essential , or just presents information that one of the others (or the base game) already provides, in a slightly different format. The specific issues you mention also imply you probably never spend that much time going through the full list of available settings in the base-game, because many of them could be addressed there instead of with add-ons.
But that’s not to say i wouldn’t recommend using some of these add-ons.

Also, the game is a lot bigger than just arena’s. The UI does somewhere in between a mediocre to half-decent job, at providing a generic consistent non-overwhelming UI for playing wow.

As players get accustomed to the game, they’ll figure out what’s (in their mind) lacking or annoying, and they’ll change it. Chances are that you and 10 other people who started playing on the same day, all have a different idea on what that thing is.

The whole reason we have the add-on system in the first place, is because everyone’s desires are different and there is no one true perfect UI they could even work towards. Different content has different needs, and different players like different information in different forms at different times.

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Add-on’s aren’t some purely third party thing, like mods in many other games.

The add-on API is a very locked down and generally strict system, both to make sure add-ons can’t do anything that would degrade the experience for someone else, nor give someone an unfair/undesirable advantage. Just about every single thing us add-on authors are able to change, is because Blizzard explicitly opened up the information and events related to that thing to the add-on API.

In other words, when it comes to (for example) Unit Frames, Blizzard probably put more work into the related API than they did on building the default Unit Frames themselves, they know it will be modded by add-ons (like your SUF/Gladius), they want it to, the add-ons are an integral part of the UI.

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Which is sad, Blizzard is used to addons like players are, so they create content which is not possible to complete without addons which is even sadder.

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Sorry, but I completely disagree with almost everything you are saying. I am a casual player who played with the default UI, with no addons, to an above average level in PVP and PVE (1900 rating last season in 2v2, ahead of the curve etc.) and the default UI is completely sufficient.

First, how can you not know who you are fighting in arena? Since you are playing a warrior, I’m going to assume you don’t play with visible friendly nameplates. Therefore, you can EASILY identify who you are meant to be attacking based on:

  1. The enemies have RED NAMES.
  2. There is a clearly visible nameplate above the enemy player, showing class colour and health.
  3. When you target an enemy, there is a white outline around the nameplate, and you can see their unit frame (top left corner of your screen by default. You can move this wherever you want to see it better).
  4. The enemy team frames show up on the left hand side of the screen, showing their health, class and specialisation.

Additionally, regarding some of your other points:

  • You can change the settings for party frames to make your team’s frames very big (enable raid style party frames in options) and you can move these anywhere.
  • You don’t need weakauras for resources. They are visible just bellow your character (personal resource display). Alternatively, just drag your unit frame closer to the centre of your screen to see it better.
  • You can see your keybindings, they are on your action bar.
  • You can see CDs on your actionbar, just enable “show numbers for cooldowns”.

If any of this is just difficult to see, you can select a bigger UI scaling in the advanced options, making text bigger etc.

Now, I understand that OmniBar and Gladius are extremly useful for the things the default UI doesn’t show like DRs, enemy CDs, etc. but remember that until very recently, addons were not allowed at Arena tournaments, so pro players did not use these addons. Interesting, right?

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I can’t think of any content that requires add-ons really.

I do think they massively improve the quality of life in-game, and because of that we get used to them.

So when you log on from another computer (or after a reinstall), and all your add-ons are missing, then yea it will feel hard or impossible to complete things by comparison, but that’s just because of the disconnect between your performance expectations and how used you are to the UI. It takes some time, playing with a UI, to get used to it, whether it’s the default one or one you’ve customized / pieced together.

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You can do high level Mythic+, Mythic raids, Vision runs and really anything else that i can think off, just fine without any add-ons though.

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you are all playing the game a lot and speak from the perspective of good players who already understood… well, basically what’s going on on the map…
but I am telling you, a new player has 0 chance to understand anything …
I am watching AWC, but I can say, even now, if there were no commentator, I would have 0 understanding of what’s happening… and I bet for all new players is the same… Imagine learning 12 classes and specialties… all CDs for them and animations, plus keeping track of CDs. DRs, interrupts immensities… when you don’t even know what are those… that is unrealistic to request from a new player to learn fast enough not to get bored from not understanding anything from the game…
but, anyway, your answers surprise me a lot… defending this pathetic UI looking like in a late 90s game… I don’t know why you guys like to hurt yourselves with the painful process of learning it…

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I am still waiting for a UI that provides bigger clock & a in-built calendar

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click the clock

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Nooooooo I need a ui where it takes 1/4 of my screen and always show 24/7

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Again, I have to disagree with you here. I am a fairly new player; I hit max level for the first time a little over a year ago, and had no difficulties learning the game from the ground up. I think you’re overstating WoW’s learning curve. Of course, it isn’t an easy game but it’s nowhere near as difficult as you are making it out to be. Just to illustrate my point, one of my friends started playing WoW in July last year and in just a few months was raiding heroic and pushing high keys. Another literally started playing 2 weeks ago and is already progressing through heroic Ny’alotha. In all three cases, the UI was not an issue.

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I am not talking about PVE, that can be learned fast as DPS.
Tank and healer you have 0 chance with the built-in UI. As tank you need threat plates at least, as healer you need some sort of unit frames ui… then the key bindings and an other 5-6 addons

I am talking about PvP, arenas especially. I dont think your friends have high performance there after ‘only’ 1 year.

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The default ones are pretty solid these days.

FWIW addons have traditionally been barred from PVP tournaments so tournament level players run very few addons, if any.

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