UI and Sound | Combat | Controls | Gear | Addons and Macros
Your UI is a very important part of WoW raiding. To be at your best, you need to be able to find a lot of important information quickly. Here are a few suggestions to make doing so easier.
Basic User Interface
Damage numbers can get in the way of important things.
It can be difficult to see the position of creatures and dangerous effects through damage numbers. It is recommended to turn them off in the Interface menu under Floating Combat Text. You can use a combat text add-on to show your numbers in a location that won’t obstruct your field of vision. Nameplates also obstruct your vision, but they are vital for quickly targeting the right thing.
The original location of your health and target health bars is too far out-of-the-way. This is important information, so it’s best to have this information close to the center of your field of vision in combat. Find out why this is important here.
Health bars being close to the middle make them easier to keep track of.
Some of the worst offenders in visual and audio noise come from boss mods. It is important to configure these. Turn everything off to begin with, and go through the list of warnings and timers and only turn on the useful ones. If it’s not useful to you and your role, turn it off. This will mean un-checking most of the check boxes in DBM.
Sound
In-game sound is important to use. Many play with the sound off, but it is highly recommended to configure it in such a way that you don’t hear the noise you don’t care about, but can still use certain audio cues for important events. Find out why it’s important to use visuals and sound effects together here.
There are four volume settings in the WoW sound options.
Master Volume – This controls everything. Adjust this as necessary, but leave it on.
Sound – There are many very important sound effects, and many that aren’t very useful. I recommend leaving this on and using other methods of filtering out the sounds you don’t care about.
Music – While WoW has a lot of great music, there is nothing important about it. If you wish, you can turn this off completely.
Ambience – This adds a great deal to the game’s atmosphere, but again, there is nothing important about it. You can turn this off if you wish.
First, the game’s sound is based on your character’s location by default. There are a lot of yells and various weapon swinging and spell flinging sound effects that exist that aren’t at all important. Using this script in-game, /console SET Sound_ListenerAtCharacter “0” , will set sound effects to be based on your camera’s location, which will naturally filter out many of those sounds, making them almost inaudible. Important things will remain at their normal volume, however.
Benefits of leaving game sounds on:
- Many dangerous boss abilities come with a yell. Hearing the yell can alert you to many things without obscuring your field of vision with a warning.
- Parried attacks make a very distinct “clunk”, making it useful for melee to know they need to move to get behind a target, especially when you can’t tell which way something is facing. The parry sound effect is audible even if sounds are set to your camera.
- Many abilities you may need to react to have distinct sounds in PvP. A Rogue using Stealth or Vanish, Hammer of Justice, Hex and many others are very obvious based on sound effects alone.
- Many of the “Spell Alerts” come with an appropriate sound, giving you a more obvious sign that a proc happened or an ability is ready for use.
- Add-ons, such as WeakAuras, can be set to trigger audio warnings for anything you want, and can be used to save valuable visual real estate.
UI and Sound | Combat | Controls | Gear | Addons and Macros
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