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The User Interface (U.I.) in World
of Warcraft is often touted as the pinnacle of modern MMO gaming interfaces.
Without a single addition you may find the game to be entirely user
friendly and work towards your goal of melting faces while drinking
ale and shouting loudly over voice chat. If you're a casual player or
a raider you may want a little bit more from the interface. That's what
MMOs are all about anyway, the continued advancement and perfection
of your character. That or you know socializing and playing with other
people but you can do that later!


As for a Mage there isn't a lot of Mage specific U.I. functions. Mages
only have about 3 things to worry about that U.I. mods can improve.
Sheep, Improved Scorch, and Missile Barrage. These things can be manually
timed or watched for, but there are a few U.I. mod options to kind of
help. There are also a lot of general mods that can help make your U.I.
sparkle in the sunlight (err I mean be shiny and glittery, your U.I.
is totally not a vampire).



Scroll down to see the big hitting Mage mods.



General Mods



These are mods that every class can use, but are still good for the
Mage.


Bartender3



Bartender is the mod I recommend for organizing your action bars. The
reason that as a Mage you need the bars is because you have A LOT of
spells. You have mana gems, portals, crafting, lots of attack spells,
lots of situational spells, and just a lot of things for action bars.
Bartender3 lets you move your bars around, make new ones, and lets you
have a very complicated set of keys for using your abilities.



I recommend having your rotation bound to the keys you use most. Like
1-2-3-4 or something along those lines. You can then use a combination
of SHIFT, ALT, and CTRL to make a lot of cool buttons. For instance
I have Living Bomb set to T while I have Remove Curse on Shift-T. These
abilities are also sprawled across my desktop so I can watch cooldowns
or utilize the mouse to click them if I need be.



A lot of the functionality is kind of built into the client now, but
the amount of customization is limitless. I highly recommend having
all of your portals on a bar with Dalaran and Ironforge/Orgrimmar as
big buttons and the rest as smaller icons. Put your rotation as big
buttons so you can watch cooldowns and have all of your buffs on their
own section. Then put your AoE abilities elsewhere and then put all
of the "trash" like ST spells that you're not spec'd for elsewhere.
Never know when you'll need them.



Bartender3 will grey out things that you're out of range for or don't
have the mana. So if you're out of mana and need that one spell cast
you can easily find something that you have the mana for. Overall this
is an excellent mod for every class, but Mages can get a lot out of
it.



X-Perl Unit Frames



There isn't a single Mage specific thing to X-Perl other than it shows
your debuffs bigger than others. This is important for things like Improved
Scorch or watching your snares. It also has excellent raid bars and
lot of helpful U.I. settings for raiding.



Omen



No class should be without Omen or an equivalent threat meter. The game
might have threat built in, but it's good to know what your threat is
on some enemies. You might not easily pull aggro off of a boss but a
Mage can pull aggro off of adds easily. It's great when soloing with
the Water Elemental too if you want the Water Elemental to tank a little
bit.



Recount


You need to test your rotation and glyphs and there is no better DPS
meter in my opinion than Recount. If you only enable it to go to the
target dummies then that's fine, but it's also good to see how your
damage stacks up to the rest of the raid.



Mage Specific Mods



These are more specialized Mage mods.



Quartz



This mods usefulness changes depending on what your spec is and if you're
sheeping things, but that won't change how amazing this mod is. This
is basically a casting bar replacement. It replaces your generic casting
bar with a timer (showing how many seconds you really take to cast)
and will show a timer on the targeted unit with how long your buffs
or debuffs are lasting. With Improved Scorch this is critical because
you need to know when the 30 seconds are up. You can use it to see when
Sheep is ending. In some boss fights there are debuffs that take down
your casting speed and with this you'll immediately know what's up.



This is one of the better mods to have for a caster and I highly recommend
it. You shouldn't need to even adjust it. It works right out of the
box for most people.



Decursive



Mages only come with Remove Curse but Curses are not that rare. With
Decursive it becomes easy as baking a frozen pie to decurse your entire
raid. Just click one of the buttons that have a curse on them and you're
good to go. In the rare instance that someone is aggressive to the raid
(through mind control) it'll give you the option to sheep them!



Mage Fever



This little known mod will pop up a box whenever one of your abilities
like Missile Barrage come up. It's pretty handy, but not very popular.
Scrolling Combat Text did a good job of alerting you when Missile Barrage/Brain
Freeze/etc. came up but it hasn't been updated lately.



Other Mods



There are other mods out there that are helpful like DoTimer, but they
are more work to set-up and use than just keeping the time running in
your head. Mages are gifted with the fact there isn't a lot going on
that they have to watch so there isn't a lot of things to manage.



To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our World of Warcraft Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

About The Author

Get in the bush with David "Xerin" Piner as he leverages his spectacular insanity to ask the serious questions such as is Master Yi and Illidan the same person? What's for dinner? What are ways to elevate your gaming experience? David's column, Respawn, is updated near daily with some of the coolest things you'll read online, while David tackles ways to improve the game experience across the board with various hype guides to cool games.

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