I spent some time this weekend on the Alpha specifically playing around with the new UI and nameplate features. My goal was to try to replicate the current functionality of my retail UI as closely as possible using the available Blizzard UI tools. For reference, my retail UI is primarily built using ElvUI, Plater, and assorted WeakAuras. On average I would say I was able to replicate about 80% of my current functionality, but maybe only 40% of my current aesthetics. Below are my key pain points / suggestions for improvements:
UI Elements
- Add an option to remove portraits from player and target frames. The floating heads (even if you change them to a class icon) are unnecessary visual clutter, and frankly, kind of ugly. Looking at popular UI builds, many players favour streamlined frames, and it would be good if this could be an option on the base UI.
- Add the ability to scale individual elements of a UI group separately, such as being able to scale the font without having to scale the overall group. This functionality already exists for some things (e.g. buffs on nameplates) but not others. It can be frustrating when certain text is too small to be easily read, but cannot be scaled to a readable level without having the attached grouping scaled to take up a third of your screen.
- The cooldown manager and buff tracker is a significant improvement over the current live version. However, it is currently missing several key buffs - I’m not sure this is because they’ve just not been implemented or because there is no intention to add them in future. If it’s the latter, I would suggest instead that all buffs/debuffs for a class/spec are added by default, or alternatively allow for a function where players can manually add buffs of their choosing. It would also be fantastic if players had the option to add including itemisation buffs, like tier set procs or trinket stacks. There are definitely a lot of trinkets out there that are almost unusable without a means to easily track their effects.
- The tracker prioritises showing duration of a buff over other information that can be just as if not more important to understand, such as stack count. As an example, as a Protection Warrior one of my most important tracked buffs is Ignore Pain. The current buff tracker shows me the duration of my current Ignore Pain well, but while it shows the stack count/percentage of the buff’s max threshold, it’s in small, non-scaleable font and is hard to see. Understanding the actual value of my Ignore Pain and hence my effective health pool is more meaningful data to me than highlighting the duration. Likewise, being able to properly see the stack count would be a significant improvement. It would be good if the tracker could be customised to allow for different information to be highlighted depending on what is more important for a particular buff, rather than assuming duration is the only valuable metric.
- Related to the above, the tracker only shows as bars, which is sometimes not the best way to display the pertinent information, and takes up more space than necessary if all I really need to see is something like a stack count. It would be great to have some alternate display options, such as a simple square or circle that fills up/down.
Nameplates and Frames
- The nameplates by default attempt to display every debuff on an enemy target, including debuffs from other players. While this is relevant in some cases (e.g. the current CC on target function is a great addition), it’s a lot of visual noise and irrelevant to my personal gameplay. If one of the goals of recent changes is to reduce mental overhead for new players, it’s visually confusing and antithetical to this goal to include debuffs from other players. Additionally, many of the debuffs players apply to mobs are passive/non-interactive, and do not need to be actively tracked. At the very least there should be a toggle that allows me to show only my own debuffs on the target, though the most preferable solution would be to allow players an advanced whitelist/blacklist option. Allowing players to whitelist/blacklist reduces in-combat mental load and allows us to focus on what’s most important.
- Absorbs and shield effects show very poorly on raid and player frames. A shield of 10% max health appears exactly the same visually (the thin white line) as a shield of 40% max health. This makes it difficult for a player (or their healer) to make accurate assessments at a glance. Raid frames in general lack the degree of customisation required, particularly for healers.
- Allow for nameplate colouring for different mobs. One of the most useful things about my plates on retail as a tank is that they are differently coloured for mobs I currently have aggro on vs. mobs I don’t. While the proposed Blizzard UI does have a flash/highlight option, it’s nowhere near as clear as bars being entirely different colours, especially when one is pulling a large group. DPS players also regularly colour code for casters vs. other mobs. Even if full colour customisation is not possible, having preset modes such as default, tank, DPS, etc. would be an improvement.
- Target cast bars and target of target frames are oddly placed and not editable. They take up way more space than they need to due to how they are anchored to the target frame, and cannot be scaled or moved independently. More broadly speaking, there is currently a lot of inconsistency as to what is customisable and what is simply moveable in edit mode. I’m hoping this is simply because this functionality hasn’t been implemented for all elements yet, but if not, I would suggest that being able to move and scale every element of the UI in edit mode should be the minimum goal.
In general, I would encourage design for choice wherever possible. Most of my pain points came from places where I felt I previously had a choice as to how to show information, and now I don’t. Different players can have vastly different UI needs, and ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions where the game decides what I should and shouldn’t want to see are not ideal. While I would also argue that functionality is the first priority, the value of aesthetic options should not be undersold. Players have been honing their UIs for over 20 years, and being able to design a UI in a way that is visually appealing is an important avenue for player expression in much the same way that character design and transmog choices are. If the Blizzard UI is unable to replicate the aesthetic options currently available to players through their existing add-ons, I’d strongly reiterate that cosmetic/‘skinning’ add-ons should be allowed to remain, even if functionality becomes exclusively Blizzard’s domain.