Raid Grid and Addons

There are three components that when combined make you a good player:

• Encounter knowledge.
• Class expertise.
• Raid awareness.

When you know the bosses and raids you classify that as Encounter knowledge, this is a crucial aspect and you won't have a good time (and others won't have it either) if you miss this; lacking this can cause a wipe or your death (and your subsequent removal from the raid group).

Knowing how your class works, what skills do the most damage/healing and when to use them is considered Class expertise. This is basically how much you can make out of your gear and it's the main reason why "gear score doesn't matter". If you know your class from hundreds of battles you will be a step ahead of those that ask what gems they should be using and think that's enough to know how to dps/heal with a class.

Lastly but not less important is the Raid awareness. This is what will make you a true player, being aware of what's going on around you and adjusting your actions accordingly. Whereas knowing bosses and your class will greatly put you ahead of others, noticing the small things happening during the boss fight could be the difference between scoring a kill or wiping.

How to be aware

Unfortunately the blizzard UI doesn't help much and makes raid vision kind of awkward, you will need to use a few addons to be aware of what's goin on. I recommend using each one of these as combined they will provide you with the best possible experience while raiding, regardless of your role. I will give a brief explanation followed by more in depth information afterwards.

Important: Go to Options>Interface>Names and uncheck everything, this will remove all names. Then go to Status Text and uncheck everything. Do the same with the Buffs and Debuffs section. I will explain later on.

• Xperl: This addon comes with many options and its primary function is to make your party/raid layouts more friendly and clear. If you heard about Xperl before you were probably told it has a lot of options that make it hard to use; this is not true, if you take 3 min to play around with the options (by checking and unchecking stuff) you will notice it is very user-friendly and effective, definitely worth to use.
• Bartender: This is an action bar UI that will allow you to move your bars around. If you play a class like Hunter or Mage you most likely realized you run out of buttons in the vicinity, thus making it harder to notice when something is ready to use; Bartender fixes this and also makes the management of your hotkeys an easy task. Ever since I started using Bartender my awareness improved considerably.
• Class Timer: This is best used by classes that rely on timers, be it Combat rogue, Fire mage, Warlock. Although it may not be that important for raid awareness, the less effort you invest in tracking your timers the more you can focus on other things.

 Here is a simple screenshot of my UI using Xperl and Bartender together, from a shaman point of view:

My screen resolution is high and I had to cut the screenshot a little, either way you can see the party members and each of their targets, the tank is selecting one of the enemy NPC while the druid is currently selecting the tank. You can also see the hunter has resurrection sickness. A little below my character model you can see my buffs (Devotion Aura, Stamina, Spirit, etc); right under the buffs my name and my health/mana bars, with their respective percentages. Percentages are important to see, to know when to use certain skills that give you an exact % of mana or health, like for example Thunderstorm or Evocation.

Around my health bars you can see my icons, those are all the skills I'm concerned about when I'm in combat, other skills like Weapon enchant, Far sight, Ancestral Spirit, etc. are shown in a separate bar that I configured to be invisible while I'm in combat, giving me a little more vision.

You might wonder why I chose this particular setup and the reason is simple. As some of you might know men have a focused eyesight, we focus on something and everything around it looks a little blurry (this makes men successful hunters); on the contrary women have a greater vision spectrum thus they can see things as a whole more clearly with less blur (this helps them multitask); this is gender related and you can't do anything about it. By having the important "data" near the center of the screen you will be more aware of buffs/debuffs/health/mana. Even if you are not a guy I suggest you use this setup.

If you want to see my whole screen and get a better view of the full UI copy/paste this link: http://i63.tinypic.com/s3lohf.jpg


Configuring Xperl:

Xperl has lots of options, here's a quick recap on how to set it for a new user. Click on the pearl icon located somewhere along the border of your minimap:

• On the upper All tab uncheck Pet, Party pets, Raid pets, Raid helper, Raid monitor, Raid Admin. Click the Reload UI icon below to apply changes.
• On the upper Raid tab, uncheck Raid buffs and Check Raid debuffs. Uncheck castable/curable so you can see all debuffs in your raid frame regardless of being dispel-able or not.
• On the upper Party tab, Uncheck Show Party in Raid and Party buffs. Check Party Debuffs and Wrap Buffs if not checked. Uncheck Big buffs and adjust the debuff size you're comfortable with. Check Cast bar.
• On the upper Focus tab, Check Enable buffs and uncheck Enable debuffs. If you put a boss on focus this will show when it gains a certain buff like Lich King's Soul Reaper. If you prefer to put a teammate on focus you can switch, Check Enable debuffs and uncheck Enable buffs. Check Cast bar too.
• On the upper Target tab, Check Cast bar.
• On the upper Player tab, Uncheck Player portrait and the other options that are useless at level 80 like Player level, Player class, etc. Most options here are self explanatory and you can play around them and find the setup you like the most. Check Cast bar and uncheck Original Cast bar, check Cast Time and Inside options; Pre-cast indicator may be important if you have high latency, if you don't you can uncheck it.
• You can only move your frame and the party/raid frames while the Xperl options menu is open so drag the menu out of your way so you can move around your frames comfortably.

That should be all. I know this seems like a pain but it's really not, you will only have to do it once as it saves for all your characters.

Remember I previously told you to remove a few options from the WoW interface? That's because when you click on anyone in your raid frame, regardless of the group, you will easily tell where that player is since its nameplate will stand out among models and graphics, this is very important and will allow you to locate others just a click away; this is one of the reasons I don't use mouse-over macros, to get used to clicking on others.

As you can see by the image, names are disabled and only the player I have selected has its name visible. Since I'm clicking from my raid frame I know its name and health, and thanks to the green select circle I can also tell its position as it stands out among others. Try this out and you'll realize raising your raid awareness is a pretty fun skill to develop.



If you pile up your frames like this you will have a very good view of everyone's doing. You can see those in combat, also a dead druid, some of them have Exhaustion debuff and one guy has an orange color around his bar, which means he's being affected by a disease (in this case blood plague), other dispel-able debuffs are also shown and you can quickly do a dispel just by clicking on them from your raid frame. Classes are also shown by color. Additional statuses shown are Afk (gray health bar) and Offline (Faded out bar).

In fact, once your encounter knowledge reaches a certain point you won't need to look at anything, aside from your raid frames. As for Bartender, the action bars positioning is on your own taste, but I recommend you to pile them up in a similar fashion as mine so you can have everything within your sight.

Remember raid awareness is the last skill you will develop, focus on knowing encounters and your class first, and when you feel comfortable enough you can start working on that awareness. Players that do Arena Pvp very often will have an innate higher raid awareness, since you need to pay close attention to your partner and your foes all at the same time if you ever want to climb up the ladder. Thanks for reading and happy raiding!