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Reader UI of the Week: Papalegba of Skullcrusher

Sean Forsgren
Updated ·7 min read

After last week's Reader UI, there was a low, guttural rumbling for Shaman UI's, something I am happy to provide. My own shammy dinged 50 this week and I'm finding it more and more difficult to manage the multitude of spells, totems and abilities in my UI.

Allow me to present Papalegba, proud Troll Shaman of the Skullcrusher server. His UI has got to be one of the most unique I've seen, bearing only a passing resemblance to the default user interface. His approach is circular in nature, providing a different type of utility, one that "square-minded" players might struggle to grasp. If you've used Necrosis or Totemus, this might be right up your alley, so join us after the break for Papalegba's addons, description and biography.

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With a spherical interface, complete with a circular HUD, this addon is sure to please many. Let's get to it, shall we?

"I've never seen a UI quite like mine, with the circles and lots of transparencies; I've seen a lot of UI compilations and they mostly seem to use atlas/fubar, have an ugly big blacked-out area at the bottom of the screen, or just be too square for my taste. I'm more of a round person, so when I found Trinity Bars i fell in love.


For an even cleaner UI you can easily get Trinity to hide the main bars and only show them in combat or on mouseover (like I do with my totem bar). I like to see the numbers on the bars though, so I keep them visible.

Here's my addon list with a brief description of each (total used addon memory is around 30MB):

  • Altoholic - Keep track of your alts skills, posessions, money, rested state etc etc.

  • AnkhCooldownTimer - I only use it for restocking ankhs automatically.

  • ArcHUD2 - My preferred HUD.

  • Buffet - Food/water/HP/MP macros.

  • Butsu - Nicer loot frames.

  • Cartographer - Better maps.

  • Chatter - For a nicer looking chat log. Also has hovering tooltips for itemlinks.

  • Chinchilla - Very configurable minimap.

  • Clique - Click-casting made simple.

  • DrDamage - Breaks down the damage coefficients and such for your spells.

  • Eloquence - Speak like a troll!

  • FishingBuddy - doubleclick casting and easy switching to fishing outfit.

  • HealBot - I never could heal worth a damn without it.

  • Historian - All the useless statistics about your toon you'll ever need.

  • HoloFriends - Friendslist that lets you share friends across alts.

  • InFlight - Tells how long taxi flights will take.

  • ItemPriceTooltip - Prints vendor price in item tooltips.

  • LightHeaded - Quest comments from wowhead.

  • LootAlert - Nicely formatted loot messages.

  • LynStats - Small, unobtrusive fps and latency meter.

  • MikScrollingBattleText - My preferred SBT mod.

  • MobHealth - Remembers mob health and displays in tooltip and HUD.

  • NoxInformationBar - highly customizable xp and information bar.

  • nQuestLog - The best questlog ever.

  • Opium - Kill On Sight mod (I meet a lot of gankers, campers and griefers... Mostly gnomes...)

  • ParanoiaRevived - Alerts when a member of the opposing faction is near.

  • QuestHelper - Easymode questing plus quest route optimization.

  • RatingBuster - Compare stats on gear easily.

  • SharedMedia - To share some fonts, graphics and sounds.

  • Skillet - Replacement tradeskill window, will buy reagents for items in queue.

  • teksLoot - Much nicer looking group loot frame.

  • TrinityBars2 - Amazingly configurable action bars.

  • Vendor - Helps you sell your loot on AH to a reasonable price.


Since I'm still leveling I don't use any raid addons.

The font I'm using is called Tork and is a free download.

Any feedback, suggestions for improvements, alternative addons or just general expressions of admiration is greatly appreciated :)"


Papalegba also answered a few questions about himself and his UI, here are his answers:

Who are you?

  • I'm a 38-year old IT worker from Sweden who's been playing WoW casually for the last year and a half. My first use of an addon was for coordinates about a year ago, and from there on it snowballed :) I played the first 6-7 months as alliance (on Outland, and mainly addon-free. Then I rolled horde and have never looked back! )

How do you use your UI?

  • (Solo, 5-man/Heroics/Raiding/PvP, all of the above) I use my UI for solo, group and 5-man instances, for all my toons (all 18!) and for both PVE and PVP. Since I play casually and I am an altoholic, I don't have a 70, which means no Heroics and no Raiding yet. I do have a troll shaman and an undead warlock both on 66 though, so there might be some raiding-related UI changes soon.

How did your UI evolve into what it is now?

  • As you can see from the screenshots, I think that WoW is a beautiful game and I want to see as much as possible of it, hence all the transparencies and mouse-overs. I also really don't like all the square UI:s that are out there and therefore I tend to choose addons that have round or transparent elements.

  • I feel that some of the standard Blizzard UI elements - mainly the action bars and the quest log - are nigh on unusable, so those were the first to go. I started out with Doublewide for the questlog and Trinity for the action bars. I like round things, so I decided to use the "circle plus one" feature of Trinity to get the distinctive look of the UI. Also, I wanted a HUD instead of having to look up in the left corner all the time, so I added ArcHUD. With that, I decided I needed scrolling battle text, so I added Parrot, which I loved. However, that broke in 2.4 (even though it's fixed now), so I moved to MikScrollingBattleText instead and have grown quite fond of that. From there on it was a case of trying out new cool addons, checking www.wowinterface.com almost daily and reading your own Addon Spotlight to get tips. One of the major moments for me was when I decided to ditch DoubleWide for nQuestLog together with Lightheaded and Questhelper. Not only does nQuestLog look really nice compared to DoubleWide, with the other two it is easy-mode questing done right. Never spend time hunting for that quest mob or wonder where to go next again!

  • The final touch, and what inspired me to submit my UI to Reader UI of the Week, was when I found this nice font, Tork, and replaced the standard fonts with that. I think it's just gorgeous!

  • The UI is - of course - a work in progress, and at the moment I am trying out ShardAce as a replacement for the venerable Necrosis for my lock.


Why do you choose to use specific addons over others?

  • At first I didn't much care about which addons I used, if it did what I wanted I'd use it. But over time my addon memory grew quite a bit so I've started to look for smaller, more lightweight replacements. I'm a Unix guy, so I'm really into addons that does one thing and does that great, just like the Unix system tools ;)

  • I mostly use Ace addons and the Ace updater to keep them updated, but there are some exceptions mainly because I haven't found an Ace replacement for them.


Thank you for profiling my UI. For the Horde!"

That's it, folks! Quite a bit of information, but an absolutely gorgeous UI. Papalegba also shared a screenshot of his Warlock UI, which is as spartan as they come. I can only assume there are action bars (er.. spheres) hidden there, waiting for a mouse-over.

Papalegba uploaded his UI over at WoWInterface, so if you want to try his way of doing things, head on over to pick up his Round UI. Personally, I think this couldn't come at a better time, as I just finished filling up my actionbars on my shaman. Good luck with your UI, folks! Thanks again, for your UI, Papalegba!