How-to: WoW 4.0 Blizzard Raid Frames

[Shadowwolf]

Quick how-to on configuring Blizzard's Raid Frames from 4.0. As usual, if there are any questions, post and I shall answer.

First, you need to be in a Raid to verify and easily see the adjustments you are making. While most all of the configuration can be done out of a raid, you wont know what anything looks like till you are in one.

Adjusting the Frame Settings

First, open your Interface Options.

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Under the Game Options tab, select "Raid Frames".

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The majority of the options here are pretty self explanatory and the tooltip descriptions detail it a little more if they seem confusing. Because of that, Im just going to touch quickly on the more common ones.

The "Raid Frame Height" and "Raid Frame Width" will allow you to scale the size of the boxes for each person. This setting doesnt adjust the size of the group of boxes or the total width of the frames from left to right, this is strictly for the individual name boxes.

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If you want to see the mana/rage/focus/energy bars for each person in the raid, you will want to check "Display Power Bars". Unfortunately this wont show you the value in numeric value for the power amount, just a visual representation.

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You can also choose to display the raid tanks in a separate column from the rest of the raid by selecting "Display Main Tank and Main Assist". This will allow you to also see the tank's target and the target of target. This only moves those raid members who have been marked as "Main Tank" by the Raid Leader or Assistant, not those who select "Tank" as a role.

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Here you can see what the Target and ToT frames under each tank look like. The "Red" arrow is that tanks target, the box under it shown by the "Yellow" arrow is the target of that target (ToT). Unfortunately at this time there is no way to turn this option off. If you show tanks as a separate column, the Target and ToT are enabled with it.

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Adjusting the Frame Screen Real Estate

To adjust the position, how much of the screen your frames take up such as well as how tall the columns are or how many columns there are from left to right, you need to be in a raid. Once in a raid, click on the small yellow arrow on the Raid tab that appears on the upper left of the screen edge.

To make adjustments to positioning and size of the raid groups, click on the "UnLock" button. You'll then see 2 small gray tabs appear around the raid boxes.

• The tab at the top is for moving the position of the frame group.
• The tab at the bottom is for sizing the column length of the frame group. How tall each column is will determine how wide your frame group is. At the moment there is no separate tab to adjust the width. The shorter you make the columns, the more columns you will have in the raid. Its important to remember that there are still some 40 raids in the game for PvP and that the maximum amount of people per raid is still 40, so you can quickly become blinded by raid boxes if you make your columns too short.

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When finished making adjustments, you can click the "Lock" button to lock everything in place.

There is also an additional feature with the frames for hiding groups and roles you dont want to see. The top portion of the Raid tab consists of buttons with 3 role icons across the top, as well as buttons under those with numbers. Clicking these buttons will toggle the display of people in those groups. Clicking the healer button will toggle the display of all healers in the raid, regardless of which group they are in, clicking the button that corresponds to the group number of a specific group will toggle the display of that group.

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There is also a "Hide" button on the tab. This will toggle the display of the entire raid frame but not the Raid Tab.

If you want to hide all of it, including the tab itself, you will need to either use a custom Unit Mod Addon, most have a custom version of raid frames and will automatically hide the Blizzard ones, or will have an option to toggle the Blizzard frames display. If you dont have an addon that does this, the following macro will hide EVERYTHING, including the Raid Tab.

Code Select Expand

/run CompactRaidFrameManager:UnregisterAllEvents() CompactRaidFrameManager:Hide() CompactRaidFrameContainer:UnregisterAllEvents() CompactRaidFrameContainer:Hide()

You will have to run this macro each time you log on to make it hide everything for you, its not a permanent setting. If you run this macro and then decide you want to see everything again, you'll need to relog that character.

[Shadowwolf]

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[Shadowwolf]

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[Shadowwolf]

Seems to be a new addon available now to adjust the raid frame sizes even more

http://www.wowace.com/addons/sbrf/

[Shadowwolf]

For those of you using the default UI who want the blocks to highlight on debuffs, there is an addon that will do that here:

http://www.wowace.com/addons/simpleraidframeoverlays/

Im not sure if Blizz plans to add that function into the default UI, but I tried this last night and it works really well. The only small issue is you need to config the filters some as it will highlight on every little debuff if you dont tell it to only highlight what you can dispell. It was making bars red for "Tricked or Treated" =P. Other than that its handy to have.