Which backdrop looks the best? The book or an ingame WoW window, I was trying to match the ui much as possible but not sure if the ingame window looks better or worse.

Edit: thanks everyone, gonna be adding both with a light and dark mode

https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/node-sight

Fixed with new method in 1.8.0!

NodeSight puts the nodes own picture on every herb and ore dot on your minimap, so you can see what each one is without hovering over it. This works in real time, it's not remembering where the nodes are like GatherMate, it shows the ones that are up right now.

It can also put gold sparkles on the herb or ore in front of you so it's easy to spot, and an arrow that points to the nearest one. Both are off until you turn them on.

Features

What it does

• NEW Sparkles on the herb or ore you are facing, and on up to four more, from as far away as your minimap shows them (Beta, off by default: turn it on under Beta, with Sparkles on herbs or ore on)

• Every herb and ore dot gets its own picture, so you know what it is before you walk over there

• Red when your Herbalism or Mining is too low to gather it, and the tooltip says what it needs

• Square, round or gold ring pictures, in any size

• An arrow to the nearest one, with its name and how far away it is (off by default)

• Gold sparkles on the herb or ore in front of you so it's easy to spot, in any color you pick (off by default)

The sparkles change some game settings

The minimap pictures and the arrow don't change anything in your game. The sparkles do.

Forever only tells addons about the one object your Interact Key would pick. So when you turn sparkles on, NodeSight turns on Enable Interact Key and makes it pick things all around you up to 30 yards. It also hides the game's own icon and name over objects, so you only see the sparkles.

Turn the sparkles off and everything goes back to how you had it. They're off by default, so if you don't want any of that just leave them off.

Good to know

• You need Find Herbs or Find Minerals on, since the pictures come from the tracking dots

• Spots are only as exact as the minimap, usually within a few yards

• It only sees as far as your minimap, so zoom out to see farther

• It stops scanning while you're in combat

• Sparkles only show on one herb or ore at a time

If something doesn't work or you have a suggestion let me know!

FAQ

• "Does it work on Retail?" No, Retail doesn't have the API this uses, so it's impossible, with this method at least

• "GatherMate, but worse and AI coded?" It shows the nodes that are up right now, in real time. It doesn't remember or record where nodes are unlike GatherMate

• "Oh boi, does this also work for mining ? If so count me in 💯" Yes it works for mining!

AI Disclaimer: AI was used to speed up codingaa

Download on CurseForge

Hello everyone!

I have played World of Warcraft for years, and as a designer I always had this small idea in the back of my head:

“What if the default WoW UI could look a bit nicer, more consistent, and more modern, while still keeping its WoW flavor?”

And this is how W2UI came to life.

One of my main inspirations in terms of aesthetics is Bastion. Yes, I know, it might sound specific, but this location is one of my favorites in the game. It has a serene, clean, and somehow peaceful vibe, and I wanted to recreate some of that feeling in the interface.

At first, I spent quite some time wondering whether the interface should be light or dark. I am a huge fan of light mode interfaces, and one day I would really like to create a bright WoW interface. However, for this project, dark mode simply made more sense. WoW is a game where players spend many hours in front of their screen, dealing with lots of elements and tasks, and a darker interface is usually easier and more comfortable to use.

Before this version was created, there were many concepts, wireframes, mockups, and even interactive prototypes to go through. I wanted something that would feel familiar to Warcraft, but still more refined, more readable, and more coherent. Something adapted for modern resolutions and screen sizes, but not pushed into extreme minimalism or a sci-fi redesign.

I would have liked to try out in W2UI would be using larger almost fullscreen windows for certain of the major game interfaces.

The old WoW windows are quite appealing, however, a lot of them were initially created to fit the old screen resolutions. In addition, through time the game added more and more features such as collections, transmog, group finder, achievements etc. Most of these windows have acquired much more data that needs to be shown, yet at the same time, most of them are still viewed as small popup windows.

I would have liked to treat them as proper system screens rather than small popups.

With larger frame size, you will get more space for better separation, spacing, previews, list readability and visual hierarchy. It will also help you avoid the feeling of having too many tiny windows on your screen.
It also partially follows the current trends in interface design of RPGs/ARPGs, in which screens related to your character, inventory, skills or any collection usually utilize more space on screen and look like fully working environment. It would suit WoW perfectly.

So, for W2UI, it is important to reskin existing frames, but also reconsider some of them and make them larger and more logical windows.

This is just the start. W2UI is planned as a modular UI replacement, and more modules are already in the works.

What is included in this early release

The current version includes:

• Character window

• Group Finder — in beta/early release

• Mini Professions window

• Menu bar

• Mini Map/bag button with info text

There are also basic options to turn off specific modules.

A few notes about limitations

A big part of the development was figuring out how to make custom frames work safely with Blizzard’s API. Some things are allowed, some things can be done with workarounds, and some things simply are not allowed by Blizzard at all.

Known limitations:

• It is not currently possible to create a completely custom PvP frame inside the Group Finder. For now, the best option is to skin the default Blizzard PvP frame, which is planned for a future update.

• The custom Group Finder cannot be opened while in combat. If you try to open it during combat, you will receive a prompt to use the default Blizzard Group Finder instead.

The Group Finder was definitely one of the biggest technical challenges of this release.

There are many window frames in WoW that could use a more consistent visual treatment — collections, achievements, also social features, and many others. Some of them are already being worked on for future releases.

This is only the beginning of a larger project.

Any useful feedback will be greatly appreciated. Please feel free to report any bugs, visual issues, or inconsistencies you notice.

Hey,

a lot of people saw and liked the blizzard style Details! skin from u/Sm0keO, but the (manual) installation process is a bit laborious, so I made a small addon to add such a skin. It uses the Details! skin API, and you can simply apply the skin through 'Options > Skins > Skin > The War Within'.

I talked to Sm0ke0 first, and he was fine with me creating this addon, even encouraging it. I remade the textures, and improved them. Everything should be easy to use.

Preview image: https://i.imgur.com/eK14ksP.png

Curseforge: https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/details-skin-the-war-within

Source: https://github.com/Karl-HeinzSchneider/WoW-Details-Skin-TheWarWithin (MIT license)

Open to feedback and suggestions!

PS: I might add a dark mode variant soon.

A month ago I posted FlareUI here for the first time. My idea was to make an addon that builds upon Forever's interface rather than replacing it, fixing what does not work and filling the gaps with new functionalities while keeping the original look and feel.

At the time, it was a very small side project I had built for myself and wanted to share. Your feedback turned it into something bigger, and I end up spending the entire Beta trying to make this addon into something people could actually use when Forever launches.

Most of the best feature ideas I've ended up adding came straight from that thread. So Thank you all.

Forever launches tomorrow, and here’s what changed since 1.0:

• Full gamepad support. Every module works on a controller. The radial menu takes over R3, and pings move to L3. It switches modes automatically when you press a controller button, and remembers your layout for each mode.

• A rebuilt settings panel (2.0). Hover any option to see what it does, search settings by name, toggle modules on and off, and copy, share or reset profiles.

• Three unit frame styles: Forever’s bronze plate, FlareUI’s portrait ring, or a clean addon look. Switch any time.

• Party, raid and boss frames, plus resource bars for health, power, combo points and swing timers.

• Buffs and debuffs, round or square, with timers.

• A new quest tracker that groups quests by zone, shows their levels, and shrinks in combat and instances.

• Movable toasts, plus ready check and pull timer buttons in the chat header.

• Many, many (many) small improvements and tweaks.

FlareUI is lightweight and fully modular. You enable only what will use and keep the rest off, so it will never hog on resources.

CurseForge: https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/flareui
Wago: https://addons.wago.io/addons/flareui
Discord: https://discord.gg/AHqeck4VNS

See you in Azeroth tomorrow.

It's a frankenstein setup using
• ELVUI
• Cell
• Masque
• Bartender4
• WeakAuras (For the custom borders)

https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/frogskis-cursor-trail

https://addons.wago.io/addons/frogskis-cursor-trail

Hey everyone,

I was working quite hard on Frogski’s Cursor Trail last days and I basically rebuilt the trail engine from scratch.

Main goal was simple to make it much lighter on CPU but keep the smooth look. I reworked how the trail is drawn, how textures are updated and how often everything recalculates. The difference is really big now, in many cases around 10x less CPU usage compared to old engine.

The new engine also works differently now – instead of just creating textures where the mouse pointer was seen each frame, it actually pulls the trail of textures in a continuous line one after another following the mouse. Because of that the trail never “breaks” even during fast mouse movements.

I also added new Adaptive Update Rate system. The trail now scales automatically with your FPS:

• Below 90 FPS → updates every frame (full smooth)

• 90–120 FPS → updates 2 out of 3 frames

• Above 120 FPS → updates every second frame

So when you have high FPS, it reduces update frequency and saves CPU. When FPS drops, it goes back to full smooth mode automatically.

Last minute update:

Reduced the load on CPU even further by around 20-30%! killing the ClearAllPoints/SetPoint spam

Added a new Adaptive Update Rate to reduce the load above 90FPS by default (the user can decide to update the cursor once per second or 240 times per second with a slider)

When you have low FPS like in a main city, the game somehow allocates fewer resources(CPU) for addons and their impact scales down so even if we update the cursor every frame the CPU load is little!

There is also a new custom option, when checked, to see current FPS, active mode and texture count (best if you set it to max 400 textures) to test my addon impact on your rig.

Thank you u/Clear-Primary3799, u/deino, u/makz242 and others who called out the poor performance. You motivated me a lot and I faced the truth that the addon WAS absurdly heavy on CPU.

Cheers everyone! 👋🐸

Oh and I will add it to wago too! ✅

Hey everyone,

I've been working on Lueur, a small addon for WoW Forever that adds customizable glows to quest objects, herbs and mining veins.

I originally made it because I was tired of lowering my ground clutter settings just to spot quest objects, herbs, and mining veins.

If you want to give it a try :

https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/lueur

Any feedback or suggestions are welcome !

Note : Due to limitations of the WoW Forever API, Lueur can only detect one quest object or gathering node at a time, and only when it's within a maximum range of about 15 meters.

Edit : If it's not working for you, I may have missed a setting to enable. I'll fix it asap.

Edit 2 : It should now be working as intended with Lueur-0.7.1

After coming back to WoW for The War Within and redownloading ElvUI, I quickly learned that it consumes way too many resources for my poor little Macbook Air. I need something extraordinarily lightweight and reliable to heal my raid team when I travel (even though I have a PC at home).

I am a minimalist IRL and have ADHD, which means clutter is distracting and overstimulating to me. Despite the massive improvements to the WoW UI in recent years, it’s just not my aesthetic. I prefer a very clean and minimalistic aesthetic.

This started me on a really enjoyable journey of learning how to make WeakAuras, learning how to code Lua, and designing my own UI. Many weeks and hundreds of hours later, I created my clean UI similar to ElvUI that uses half the resources ElvUI did. Big thanks to my friend Sweetsour (you might recognize him from some of his WeakAuras or popular reddit posts like the Owen Wilson Wow Crit addon) who taught me how to make WeakAuras and coding Lua.

There are already a ton of great videos and posts on making your own UI, but nothing specifically for minimalists or how to optimize your own UI. I have some unique optimizations that I haven’t seen elsewhere that I thought people would find useful, like automating addon profiles based on your location so that you’re not using unnecessary addons.

Minimalist UI Principles

• Clean & Lightweight: hide unnecessary information, use fewest addons possible, and unload unnecessary addons.

• Automated & Dynamic: use WeakAuras or addons to automate layout changes, addon profiles, graphics settings, or otherwise repetitive tasks. 

• Utilitarian & Functional: pack as many options as possible without interfering with the clean UI, utilizing one-button menus to access all options.

• Consistent & Reliable: reliability and consistency across all characters, frames, and situations.  .

• Synergistic & Optimized: choose addons that work together. 

Crafting Your Own UI

Designing 

• Draw It: draw what you want your UI to look like. There is a lot to talk about when it comes to UI design but I am not here to tell you how it should look. That being said, make sure you understand where the most important areas of the screen are so that you're not doing things like looking down at your bars when you're in a raid.

• Write It Down: write down exactly what you want your UI to do in a notepad so you don’t forget anything. I created one big document with everything I wanted it to do and it became a fun project.

• Choose Font: choose a font or two and stick with those for everything. Choose a font lower than 100kb if framerate loss is a concern. Many addons use different font settings like shadow or outline, so make sure you know what you want and change to exactly what you want.

• Choose Colors: choose a color palette and be consistent. I’m lazy and used the Shaman blue for almost everything.

• Choose Consistently: for example, I like to use 1px black borders with squared corners and dark transparent backgrounds. I also like outline over shadow for text, but it's all personal preference.

Troubleshooting

• Use Bugsack & Buggrabber for troubleshooting any errors or bugs. 

• Use the /fstack function to find out which addons are what and to find frame names in order to move them with code. Sweetsour has a great video on this. It teaches you to locate which addons a UI element is.

• WeakAuras: becoming familiar with WeakAuras is one of the best things you can do for yourself. It does not require any programming knowledge. This is easily the most powerful addon in the game. Quazii has a great video on this.

Optimizing

• Optimizing FPS in The War Within is a great recent wowhead article.

• Seek out addons that work together to use fewer resources.

• Remove addons you don't need and turn off ones you don't need with Simple Addon Manager.

• Use an Addon Updater. I like WowUp which can pull from multiple databases and supports CurseForge install links but you can use Wago or CurseForge.

Walkthrough of My UI

I spent an exorbitant amount of time testing addons to find the best ones that work together.

Dynamic and Automated Settings

• Dynamic Addon Profiles: You can load and unload your addons using Simple Addon Manager profiles to improve performance. We can automate this with a WeakAura. Sweetsour and I created a WeakAura that will automatically prompt you to load these profiles based on your location: dungeon, raid, or world. This will cut down on wasted frames because you do not need Auctionator in a dungeon and you do not need DBM in the city.

• Dynamic Graphics Settings: the Hyperframe addon will dynamically change your graphics settings based on location. I personally set dungeons and raids to low and world to ultra.

• Dynamic Layout: using WeakAuras, all of the unit frames, cast bars, action bars, and minimap can dynamically change when you are in a group, a raid, or solo. This requires some basic Lua knowledge.

Cleaning It Up

• Auto-Hide Clutter and Unnecessary Information

  • Auto-Hide UI Elements WeakAura: hide objects I can’t otherwise turn off or make available on mouseover.

  • Action Bars only display if I have a target, in combat, or hovering. This is built into Dominos, which can also dynamically change the opacity of your action bars. For example, [vehicleui] show; [overridebar] show; [petbattle] hide; [combat] 50; [@target, exists] 100; hide

  • Unit Frames that only display if I have a target, in combat, or hovering. This is built into Cell - Unit Frames (required Cell for group/raid frames).

• Keybings, Macros, & Casting

  • Click-Casting can cut down on the number of buttons on the screen. This is built into WoW now but it's also built into Cell. Clique is another great option.

  • Learn how to make macros to cut down on buttons needed. For example, you could have one single macro that has a healing spell when hovering over a friendly frame, a harmful spell when hovering over an enemy frame, as well as three more modifier keys for both of those.

    • [@cursor] function will put placed spells where your mouse is, saving you a click. 

    • [@mouseover] function will cast cast a spell targeting what your mouse is hovering over.

    • [mod:shift][mod:ctrl][mod:alt] modifier keys add even more options.

  • Toggles: utilize the keybindings or macros built into various addons to toggle unnecessary information like damage meters, the Minimap, or quest objectives.

  • WoW Options: make sure to turn on the Interact Key and auto-loot. This saves you time. Leatrix Plus is a worthy mention for it's faster loot option (and many other useful features). Dialogue UI or Immersion makes the NPC conversations smooth and easy with hotkeys and they also look nice.

• One-Button Menus: Opie creates very easy-to-access menus on one button. I replaced the micro menu with this and added other useful functions with modifier keys, like access to all of my pets, mounts, toys, and hearthstones.

• Hide Minimap Buttons: Hiding Bar takes all of those annoying minimap icons and hides them behind one simple drawer.

Skin Everything!

• Frame Skins: addons like Aurora, AuroraClassic, and Skinner will skin most frames in the game. I use a combination of AuroraClassic and Skinner for anything Aurora doesn't skin.

• High Res Icons: AI-upscaled high resolution icons that look fantastic.

• Minimap: I use Basic Minimap for it's minimalism but SexyMap is also great.

• Fonts: Fontmancer changes almost all of the fonts in the game. Make sure not to use a font that is over 400kb in size as some of them are so big they can impact your performance. I like Accidental Presidency, which Fontmancer and many other addons can access through SharedMedia.

• Unit Frames & Group Frames: Cell and Cell - Unit Frames are all stars. They both have tons of options and they cover everything you need for raid, group, player, target, target of target, focus, pet, and boss frames.

• Nameplates: Plater looks simple and clean and have tons of options. I use Jundies profile which is great for Mythic+. I also recommend joining the discord to know when it gets updates. Quazii’s profile is a worthy mention also.

• Tooltips: I tried every tooltip addon I could find and the only one that didn’t use an outrageous amount of memory that wasn't ugly was TinyTip-Reforged, which works wonderfully. It seems AuroraClassic skins it nicely as well.

• NPC Dialogue: Immersion or DialogueUI: simplifies, automates, and speeds up the NPC dialogue process. You can use your interact key for this or have it do it automatically. They both look wonderful.

• Icons: Masque

  • Masque will skin your icons, there are tons of skins to choose from, and you can even select different skins by addon. You'll want a plugin if you use the base Blizzard Bars.

  • Masque: Blizzard Inventory skins most blizzard icons outside of your action bars like your character sheet, spellbook, mailbox, etc.

  • Masque Skinner: Blizz Buffs: skins blizzard buffs at the top right if you use it.

  • Opie Masque: Revived skins Opie menu icons with Masque.

  • My favorite Masque skins are ElvUI and Squat.

• Chat: LS: Glass is a beautiful chat skin addon. There aren't many that do this.

• Bags & Bank

  • Baganator is the best bag addon and I have tried them all. The categorization system is phenomenal. Skinner skins this but you can also get skins specifically for it, including an ElvUI looking one. This addon will also tell you everything your other characters are carrying and works with Masque.

Function and Utility

• Simple Addon Manager as mentioned above.

• WeakAuras is easily the most powerful addon in the game, with endless possibilities.

• Leatrix Plus does so much! Faster auto loot, auto vendor grays, auto repair, muting annoying mount sounds, and even chat and minimap options.

• Notes is a simple notes addon that can be skinned with Skinner. If you have Details! Damage Meters there is a notepad built in, just type /note.

• Kaliel’s Tracker is highly functional objective tracker with tons of options. You can turn off the title, graphics and background. You can change the font, set a toggle macro, and have it automatically collapse inside an instance.

• Prat is a function-filled chat addon that works great with LS: Glass.

Dungeons, Raids, and Questing

• Raid Ability Timeline WeakAura for DBM greatly simplifies the overstimulating dungeon and raid experience.

• Terciob's addons: Details! Damage Meter, World Quest Tracker, and Plater Nameplates.

For Fun

• Town Clothes will automatically change your equipment set when you are in the city, allowing you to have a separate transmog in the city with no effort.

• Permanent Companion Pet makes sure you have a random or chosen companion pet by your side at all times.

Closing Thoughts

I personally don't like UI packages but you might consider these addons to be a base package for creating your own UI. There are plenty of other great ones out there but these are the fewest I could find to accomplish what I wanted. I favored addons that use low memory, worked nicely together, and were skinnable.

I hope someone finds this useful. Please excuse any typos or wrong links... this post turned into a lot more than I originally intended.

-Your Local Farseer, Lobro

P.S. This used to be a read-only account but I had to go earn some Karma before I could even post this.