A few days ago, a co-worker who usually works remotely visited the company location. While she was here, she told me she had created a Druid and downloaded Vuhdo, and she wondered if I could help her set it up. Well, life caught the two of us, and we weren't able to get together with her laptop before she had to make the journey home. So, lest she think I forgot my promise, this page is dedicated to her.
When you first install Vuhdo and enter the game, you will find a whole bunch of little boxes just below your character icon, if you are using the default Blizzard UI. (If you are not, I have no idea where they will appear, but they will appear all stacked up and very messy-looking.) There will also be a little icon looking something like a female Draenai up on your minimap. And you may be thinking, "What on earth is this? What do I do with all this stuff?"
Vuhdo, like Grid, is very customizable, which is one of its strengths. This means, of course, that it does take a little effort to get it the way you might want it to be. I do not claim to be an expert on everything Vuhdo, but I can show you what I have done with mine, which works for me. If you want more extensive information, the Vuhdo page on Curse has links at the bottom of the page to various video tutorials, wikis, etc.
First of all, open up the configuration display by clicking on the Draenai icon, and we'll start with the first thing you see there. If you notice at the bottom, there are several tabs, labeled "General", "Spells", "Buffs", and so forth. Also, on the right side of the display, there are buttons leading to different sections in each category.
Let's start by cleaning things up a bit. Click on the tab at the bottom marked "Move". You will see something like this:
You can now drag the individual elements around the screen and separate them so you can see them. You can also get rid of the ones you don't want. In my case, I immediately kill everything except the basic raid groups and pets. For things like "Private Tanks", first click the minus sign at "Remove", then click the red "X" to the left. Yay! It's gone! If you just want to remove Group 8 from the raid frames, just click the minus at "Remove". (If nobody is in the group, the group will be hidden, but if your raid group has people sitting in group 8 who are not in the raid, it can get kind of confusing if it is displayed.)
So now you're left with something like this:
Much less messy. If there are no Pets, the panel stays there, looking blank, so I tend to move it to the side if I'm not playing a pet class and if I am not in a group. I prefer that to having to go tell Vuhdo I want a new Pet panel created.
Now that we've cleaned up the confusion a bit, let's get back to the rest of the configuration. Here is what you see if you open up my Vuhdo:
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| Updated to Mist-friendly version. Notice there are buttons for Pet Battle and such. I didn't test that one out. |
I don't like private tanks, etc., so I uncheck those. (Besides, I got rid of their display, anyway!) To be honest, there is a lot I don't know very well about all this, but this setup works for me. (I might add that, for some reason, and I do not know how to change this, when I enter a 5-man group, the tank always ends up in the "Pet" group. No idea why. If I'm in a raid, and someone specifies their role as "Tank", as well, they end up in the "Pet" group. Our guild runs don't do this as a matter of course, so on the odd days when a tank feels the need to specify their role, I whisper them and ask them to please undo it, so they won't be stuck in my "Pet" group. That works, trust me.)
Continuing on, let's click the next button down on the right and see what we see.
I want to know if people are within my range for a heal, and since Rejuvenation is one I cast a lot and is indicative of my healing range, that is the one I use.
I want to know if other people are trying to heal my targets and for about how much, so I can see if my efforts would be largely wasted. This wouldn't be terribly useful in a 5-man. However, in a 5-man, it is still useful to see about how much your own heal will heal your target, so you can know if you need to start spamming Nourish, or if you can go back to popping on a Rejuvenation and letting it tick.
Tank Mode aggro simplifies the aggro indicator to only show those who are really, steadily being targeted by mobs. Every so often, a mob or a boss may flick his aggro to a player and then flick back. I don't care to see this, so I keep Tank Mode on.
I'm not going to show you what I have on AoE advice, because I did absolutely nothing to that screen. I'm not even sure what it means.
I wouldn't even need to show you Misc, except for one thing:
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| Updated view! Looks like you can set it to hide the default UI raid frames here. |
If you choose to use Clique, instead of the on-board clicking spell capability of Vuhdo, this is where you tell the program. See the "Clique" button? Click it, and your console ui will reload, with the "Spells" tab at the bottom missing. I ran Vuhdo using Clique for some time, since I had Clique already configured, until one patch, when Clique didn't update in a timely fashion. At that time, I turned on the "Spells" tab, configured my Vuhdo settings to match my Clique ones and never went back.
Of the next three buttons on the right, I only use one: Indicators.
This one is extremely handy. This is where you tell Vuhdo to do fancy things to give you information. I don't make use of it nearly as much as I could, you can see. I like to have the dot tell me if a target is Swiftmendable because, in a raid, someone could be Swiftmendable because he has a HoT on him from some other Resto Druid, rather than my own HoT. (Well, not at the moment, as I am the only Resto Druid in the raid right now. But in the past, we've run with as many as three trees.) I prefer to have my bars be class colors, instead of colored according to their health level, and that is set at the Health Bar setting. (Why do I need the program to tell me if they are at high, medium, or low health? I can see that myself . . .) I also like to see the mana bars of the healers (but don't really care about the energy bars of the rogues, etc.), so I set manabars to "manabars only". In addition, because I'm a fairly simple sort of person, I prefer my backgrounds solid. Just personal preference.
Wow, we've finally made it through the "General" tab! I'm going to save "Spells" for last, because, really, it is very much personal preference, so all I can do is tell you what works for me, which may or may not work for another person. "Buffs" is easy: I've done nothing to it. So we'll skip it. But we do need to take a look at "Debuffs".
First, you'll see I'm only interested in those I can remove. I don't care if they are non-harmful. (If they're not hurting someone, why should I waste my time trying to remove it?) I could probably tweak this one a bit, but I haven't had to do so.
This screen is where you not only set your defaults, but can enter the names of debuffs you want shown, which for some reason are not in your database. Make sure you know the name of the debuff, including appropriate capital letters, then set the options you want for it, and voila! Next time, it will show up on Vuhdo, and you will not be wondering exactly why that rogue is losing health so quickly . . .
I like my debuff icons at the top right of each player's box, and here is where that setting is made.
On to Panels! This is where you set most of your display settings related to Vuhdo.
I'm not exactly sure what all this means, but it works for me. This also means that for every group in which I am located, I am at the top. Makes it simple to find myself for healing.
At last! The easiest screen to understand in Vuhdo! Here is where you change the size of the squares for each player, as well as the spacing between them. You can drag the configuration screen out of the way so you can see the boxes change size as soon as you make a change. This is totally personal preference, which may change according to the size of the computer screen you are using. I prefer my boxes to be relatively small, but not so small that all the numbers I have counting down and all the indicators I have showing up stomp on each other. It may take a bit of trial and error to figure out what works best for you.
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| Updated view! Can set bar colors to class colors here. Kind of redundant, but oh well. |
If you want your bar texture to look like polished wood, knock yourself out. I'm usually too busy looking at numbers to want a bunch of extra information for my brain to process. You can also set the height of mana bars here.
I don't show Headers, so I will skip that button.
I haven't tried showing Targets, either. As a healer, I have been more interested in the target of the boss than the targets of the players.
My Tooltips settings are default.
But I do change something in the "Text" screen:
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| Updated view! New options in the "Bar Text" section. The Shadow check is just preference. |
Because of the way I have my HoTs displayed, which we will examine in the next screen, I find it much nicer to have my text set higher in the box than is default. I don't need the text to tell me the class, as I have my boxes class colors, so all I really care about is the player name and whether or not they are afk, dead, d/c'd, etc. (It's nice to know who owns each pet, too.) You can change the size of the text and stuff here, too.
This configuration is very similar to what I used to use in Grid. I keep Slot 2 empty because, of course, that's where my debuffs will be going. (Remember?) Choosing Text on the left means that as my HoTs tick down and get close to expiring, a number will display. (I think it starts at 10 seconds, which means that some spells start ticking right away.) This way, when Lifebloom hits about 2 seconds, for instance, I know it's time to cast a Nourish or Regrowth (if Omen of Clarity has proc'd), to refresh the stack and maintain Mastery activation.
I do not use HoT Bars, as I already have everything set up on the HoT Icons page, and I left the Misc bar settings at default.
OK, back to the bottom tabs . . . "Colors". I don't think I touched these. As they are largely cosmetic, you can mess with them as you want, as long as it makes things simpler for you to understand.
"Tools". This is another one I didn't touch. Obviously, Vuhdo has a lot more capability than I actually use.
Now, for informational and "gee whiz" purposes only, I'll show you how I have my "Spells" tab set up.
I tend to configure all my healing characters similarly so I don't have to totally change my way of thinking when I switch. For instance, my insta-cast HoT for my Druid and my Priest are both left-click. My right click spell is the "I'm going to be casting this direct heal all the time because the mana is low and won't bankrupt me" spell. It makes sense to me, which is what counts. Other healers will group their spells differently.
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| An update to this guide! Remove Corruption used to be my right mouse spell, but the game has changed that to Nature's Cure. |
I do have times when I want to be able to just target someone and not heal them, so I put that on shift-middle button.
My mouse does have 5 buttons, but I limit my settings to three buttons. For one thing, I might end up having to use a different mouse at one time or another, such as when I had to burrow my husband's laptop while traveling, and I don't want to have to reprogram my brain with each new mouse. For another, I'm not sure exactly which button is 4 and which is 5. (Yes, I'm a blonde . . .) Besides, I have Autorun set to one of my buttons, and it could be a disaster if I tried to heal someone and ended up facepulling a boss.
No, I really don't use buttons 4 and 5; I just haven't cleared them out. Simple enough to do.
I didn't have anything set to Alt until we found that putting Thorns on the tanks in Alysrazor made a big difference. Imagine my surprise when I logged in to Mists to not see Thorns in my Spellbook . . . Ironbark might be a good one to bind there, instead.
The only other thing in the "Spells" tab to which I have made alterations is "Smart Cast".
There are times when you want to be able to target someone who is dead and NOT cast a Battle Rez. One day, when I had to use my husband's laptop, I found to my utmost chagrin, I was casting a BR when I didn't want to do so. I had forgotten to unclick this setting when I had set up Vuhdo on his machine. Bad situation. On the other hand, I don't care if I am out of combat and auto-rez someone by targeting them. That's kind of handy.
Well, that's about all I know. Good luck and happy Druid leveling!
