WoW currently has an issue with balance; what the devs perceive as a decent challenge which will last the players a few weeks is often too much for lower performing players who, when they simply cannot do the content, justifiably complain. The content is then nerfed because obviously the devs intend for people to eventually complete the content and what the devs expected the average player to take weeks to nail down will be done in days or even hours. I’ve thought a lot about why this is and I believe this issue is actually caused more by the UI than end user skill (though obviously that is still a factor).
I’ve played this game for nearly a decade now and been a guy who both barely scrapes by in LFR and tops the meters in pug heroic raids and parses well on Warcraft Logs. The biggest jump in my performance didn’t come when I had more free time to practice due to working from home last year, though that obviously helped push me towards purple and orange parses. No, the biggest jump occurred when I really fine tuned ElvUI to suit my needs and started using WeakAuras to track resources, dots, and important cooldowns.
Pulling up an image of the default UI now it’s readily apparent what’s wrong, it doesn’t follow human behaviour. It is natural for us to look at the centre of the screen when playing a game. In WoW, all of the centre real estate other than your character itself and certain procs is completely unused. Further, the important information is scattered across the screen; spell cooldowns are at the bottom, player and enemy health and resources are in the top left, buffs and debuffs are in the top right. That’s 4 different areas your eyes need to bounce between to properly access your situation at any given time. Can this be done? Yes. But I’m of the opinion that skill in WoW should be more about executing your rotation and knowing when to use key abilities.
All this is to say, I hope Blizzard revamps the base UI in the next expansion as it would drastically improve the ability of the average player to deal more damage and avoid boss mechanics in the next expansion.
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Yes when i started WOW in BFA , i was like , wtf it’s impossible to tracks buffs up right on the screen , it’s not optimal , it’s just annoying
I want the option to move buffs where i want in the base game with no Addons
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In my experience, UI addons take it over the top to the point of creating screen vomit. Keep it simple IMO. I could be wrong, but most people know their classes’ rotations well enough that they don’t have to stare at their hotbar. I mean, this isn’t BC or LK where you’ve got a bunch of redundant abilities clogging up your hotbars.
If we’re just talking more control over UI aspects then yeah, that’d be great.
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It starts early. Damage spells learned as you level are left in the spellbook for you to look for later, while long cd utility spells go onto your main action bar. It’s almost as though they’re trying to train low information players not to use any of these.
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Yeah, as an affliction warlock, I can’t say I don’t spend most of my time just staring at my action bar during combat lol. What’s happening on the field, you ask? Who knows!
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This isn’t fair as you have the option to move it.
I think (haven’t seen them say it) that Blizz’s design goal is to just give you a basic canvas which you can modify with addons. If you don’t make addons you may not realize it but Blizz adds a bit of new functionality every patch for addon authors, that could be their way of giving players access to the tools to customize the UI.
More options for customization would be great, but if more stuff is just forced into the middle of my screen, that would be lame. All the pop-ups when I level up or when some NPC wants to chat gets cumbersome. Sometimes I can’t even open a tab of my spell book when the non-removable clutter happens. I play a very chill game and I like my screen clean and neat. But, I am all about options for the default UI as I run no mods. Also, a favorites button for UI settings would go a long way when I create a new toon.
This is my viewpoint as well. Outside of bartender, just to have more buttons up (yay Druids…), I run the basic UI.
Tried upgrading the UI to something fancy that I saw in a video guide once. DPS dropped because there was too much going on.
Basic UI works well enough. Not being able to track things because they’re in the corner of the screen, meaning you can’t glimpse that way once every so often is just a lack of situational awareness on the players end really.
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I’m horrible at figuring these out. I also don’t like the center of my screen cluttered up and would rather see the scenery. That said, I believe you do have a valid point. I do stare a lot at my hot buttons and forget to use potions and such. There’s probably a middle ground in there - I just know the more addons I use the slower everything loads. I don’t know if that’s slow internet speed or just the game.
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I haven’t used the Default UI since I discovered ELVUI and weakauras.
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Blizzard could do with adding a few pre set ui set ups just to give newer players an idea of different things they can do with their ui’s. Most people I’ve observed use one of about 3 different ui set ups with minor variation between them. Just use pre sets of these general set ups.
yes.
wow’s base UI is complete garbage.
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Yes, the base UI is quite dated, but they can’t change it (too much). Remember the gryphon fiasco?
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There is no motivation for them to improve it because modders have already done it for them.
I use Elvui but could see myself using a heavily modified base ui. The biggest problem is buffs. I mean for hunter how do you even track frenzy stacks and timers without a weakaura?
It’s not only the UI but the encounter and effects design.
Back to back mechanics and so many effects going off, friend and foe, you can’t tell what’s going on half the time. Like some of the pulls in Sanguine depths. Everything is red. Some effects are above the ground which makes them extremely hard to judge. The containers been used and every class pops there flashy CD at same time while your camera gets stuck against a wall.
The design guideline with effects is story based instead of interface based. Venthyr. Make it red, all red, friend and foe. Is it good? Is it bad? No idea. All you can tell from the interface is it’s Venthyr and will probably look good in a promotional screen shot.
And something else that really puts off new players is all the non intuitive one off gimmick mechanics. So often with new players it’s just “Make it as far as you can and well try and explain what just happened after we wipe.” For some people it takes a lot of convincing that we understand they’re going to do some really noob things for a while.
lol. “justifiably”
this is how the content is made difficult at the start, but doable my many others… nerfs over time.
in other words… the content will always be designed to be nerfed.
This wont happen. The “average” player is not looking to perform better. The games layout is for playing the game. icons are moved away from the center of attention to allow the player to see more of the world and assets than tracking buffs.
If they were to add anything, it would be some ui customization options, but sounds like wasted effort when mods do the work for them.