Mods visible in this screenshot: Satrina Buff Frames, Pitbull4, IceHUD, Bartender, Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text, SLDataText, and HudMap.
Hmm, I’m not sure why the XP announcements are doubled. Will have to fix that. Also in that screenshot, you can see Forbearance on me, and note that I was grouped with an excellent paladin tank from my own server. This made up for the horrible Special DK who’d tanked the previous run. No tank talents in his spec, only a few pieces of tanking gear, which explained why I was having trouble keeping him alive. To cap it, he announced in all caps that I was fail because he’d healed more than I had. Then he linked Recount healing meters. NB: I’m a disc priest. Recount fails with discipline, which is why I use Skada. Dumped the group, got randomed into this one, and stayed with them for three instance runs. The DK in the second group called me “an amazing healer”. From fail to amazing in five minutes!
It wasn’t me. It was a tank who knew what he was doing, making my job easier.
But anyway. On to the main stream of this morning’s symposium, which is Pitbull 4.
For the last few months my unit frames have been a custom Pitbull Layout plus IceHUD for pretty bars and combo points. Specifically, I’m using Pitbull4 plus Pitbull4 AuraBar. Here’s my review of that setup.
Pitbull4 configuration is much better than Pitbull3’s. As in, I took one look at Pitbull3 and decided I’d rather write code for oUF than deal with that mess. Pitbull4 is nicer. It is completely possible, even easy, to make a standard bar-based unit frame layout with Pitbull4. You can even skip the bars altogether if you like. Once you figure out its internal logic, the slightly wacky mode of thinking of its authors, you’ll be able to make standard unit frame layouts quickly. It’s a completely solid mod and I recommend it if you want to try custom layouts but don’t want to learn Lua.
I use the aura bar module for HoT tracking. Druid hots, priest hot/shield/weakened soul: all get a little bar falling on the right side of the unit frame. The aura bars are awesome, but they change the size of the health bar when shown. As in, the health bar is full length with no hots; I cast a full set on the tank and the health bar shrinks. This makes it unreliable as a visual cue: you can no longer rely on noticing that somebody’s bar is shorter than somebody else’s. The alternative is to make the aura bars always visible, which is even worse. (Imagine your druid seeing an always-empty bar where the Power Word: Shield you’ll never cast would be shown.) If there were a way to attach them to another bar, or to a sub-region of the unit frame, I could work around this. But they are bars, and to Pitbull bars are things that slice up the unit frame itself. They are either horizontal in the center, vertical on the left, or vertical on the right.
The aura bars force me to move the name display to below & outside the unit frame, so that it isn’t truncated and it isn’t overlapping or obscuring other text on the unit frame when all hots are up. Therefore the name is not actually part of the frame, and hovering over it/clicking it will do nothing.
The module approach is nice. You can turn off features you don’t want and be confident they’re not sucking up CPU anyway. It also makes for some useful object-oriented design: you can implement a new indicator type, and it’ll show up with the other other indicators and be laid out nicely with them.
The highlight color is distracting & over-emphatic. It looks like a debuff. I chose white, but it’s a strong yellow. Buzzuh?
If there is a way to make a bar with a completely transparent background, I haven’t yet been able to discover it.
The raid configuration options are very nice. I like being able to have different frames shown in 10-person raids, and shrink down to more compact frames in larger raids. I like that I can choose any row or column length I want, without being constrained to group size. (A 3 x 4 grid is a very nice healing layout for 10-person raids.) I dislike that there’s no convenient way to choose a group-centric layout if you want one— it’s possible but more work than it’s worth. This means that holes in the raid roster are always shown at the end, and you need to check the Blizzard raid frame for the real group if you need to know.
You can’t share layouts. There’s no export feature, and the per-module arrangement of layout data in the config file means that picking out a specific single unit layout is agonizing work. So you share your config in a lump, or not at all. I discovered this to my dismay when I attempted to fold in a new RealUI layout for player & target frames. I spent 20 minutes fishing through visual diffs to figure out what had changed in RealUI. It was bad enough that I simply abandoned that part of RealUI, and now use my own layout entirely.
Buff filter editing is difficult to discover (it’s in a surprising place) and confusing. I was eventually able to figure it out well enough to make a custom highlight filter for Blood Queen vampire bite victims. This is sort of the theme of Pitbull: most of what you want is eventually possible. You will end up with something idiosyncratic and unsharable, but tuned for you.
Final verdict: When I feel energetic and have a day free for uninterrupted hacking, I’m going back to an oUF layout hand-tuned for my own purposes. I’ll have to implement my own version of the aura bars, but that shouldn’t be too painful. The end result will be prettier, in my view, and more perfectly laid out. But that’s the tradeoff. Total control requires that I do the work.
