Reader UI of the Week: A tanking UI with a flair for scale

Each week, WoW Insider and Mathew McCurley bring you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which spotlights the latest user interface addons. Have a screenshot of your own UI that you'd like to submit? Send your screenshots along with info on what mods you're using to readerui@wowinsider.com, and follow Mathew on Twitter.

Welcome to another installment of Reader UI of the Week, WoW Insider's showcase for your awesome interfaces, customizations, and works of UI art. Sometimes we even learn a thing or two about how to assemble a working user interface from the charred remains of one poor soul's cooking disaster. Anyway, this week's user interface surrounds a subject close to home for me -- tanking. Warrior tanking, to be precise.

Arothand's user interface boasts a clean layout that lets the addons themselves do the contrasting rather than a black background or border system, with an emphasis on keybinds and prioritizing buttons based on size. Let's jump right in and see if we can offer some tips and tricks, as well as praise, for this solid tanking setup.

Arothand's UI -- tanking UI, warrior UI, addons that work

Let's hear from Arothand before we get too crazy:

Thanks for the email and submission, Arothand. Tanking UIs are an interesting breed because of the odd addon usage and potentially quirky behavior of most tanks. I speak from experience, obviously. Sometimes it's hard to explain why certain things are in certain places for me, especially buttons that I like to actually click versus pressing a button for, but it totally makes sense to me.

Tiny party frames

One of the odd characteristics of a tanking UI is the size of the tank's party frames. In most tanking UIs that I have come across (mine included), the need for a large, spacious party interface is just not really needed for a tank. Tanks are some of the most coordinated players on the field -- maybe not in terms of coordinated personalities, but they have the have some sort of rotation or balance with another tank and work off of each other. The Ultraxion encounter in Dragon Soul is a perfect example of this type of coordination, where tanks do their best to bounce between Hour of Twilight casts and their own Fading Light cooldowns.

Selecting another party or raid member, however, is usually not something that comes up. For warriors, it is particularly interesting because we have an ability that charges toward an ally, protecting them. It's called Intervene, and it's going away in Mists of Pandaria, so don't get too attached. One would think that this ability would require a large array for a group or raid, but it turns out an ability like Intervene is better suited for a mouse over macro. I can put my cursor over the person I want to charge to, press a button, and I'm there.

What is interesting is less the fact that we as tanks have smaller raid frames but more about the fact that there is an entire role of players who are, right now, using that raid frame in drastically different ways. There is an entire world out there that I have just shielding my eyes from, the slavery of the bars that go up and down. I am only a slave to my shield.

Scaling buttons are pretty cool

While I didn't consider this aspect of the UI to be the coolest piece of the puzzle in the beginning, the scaling action bars quickly became kind of an obsession while writing this piece. By having the most important buttons and buttons with the most important cooldowns on larger action buttons, there is a great focus on them. Secondary abilities and survival stuff is on the second bar, scaled down smaller than the main bar, with its own keybindings.

The look just rocks for me. Not only can you fit more secondary cooldowns and abilities on the top bar, the main bar is really a showcase of your class abilities and style. When I see those large icons for Shield Slam, Heroic Strike, Revenge, and Thunderclap, I yell Warrior! at the top of my lungs. I like the idea of a main bar and a secondary bar, and Arothand's setup really drives that point home. Good show.

A few quirks

There are only a few pieces of Arothand's UI that I question, again, mainly from personal experience. The first issue I immediately saw was the numbers and text underneath the main action bars, part of an LibDataBroker addon. While there is nothing wrong with the text and visuals in the static screenshot, I can't help but wonder what happens when there is little to no contrast between the text and the background. I would imagine that those specific pieces of information would be difficult to see; however, none of it really has any combat or action-oriented purpose, so it's really not even needed when things get hectic.

I'm a big believer in contrast, as evidenced from last week's (or the week before) Reader UI. Because of the whole "sometimes bad eyes" thing, interface elements that don't pop out get lost relatively easily. Hopefully the contrast on the bottom parts of the UI aren't that distracting for Arothand.

The other nitpicky piece was that the player and target frames were in a weird, off-center position on the UI. This leads me to believe one of two things. The first is that those frames could be in that position because something that we cannot see pops up to the right in the empty space, making the positioning purely to accommodate other UI effects. The second explanation is that it's just off center, and my brain is telling me to fix it fix it fix it fix it oh my god it's off center. Either way, it would annoy me and not necessarily you, so take that with a grain of salt.

Other than that, I love the setup, Arothand. The scaling button sizes, as well as the complex raid cooldown tracking, make this UI solid, traditional, and functional -- all good things to be, in my humble opinion.

%Gallery-19902%

Interested in getting the most out of your user interface? Come back once a week for more examples of reader UIs. For more details on individual addons, check out Addon Spotlight, or visit Addons 101 for help getting started.