More Bars Than You

I check my blog stats from time to time, because I like the fuzzy, reaffirming feeling that others are reading the things I say. One topic seems to be fairly common:

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No joke, I get one of these roughly every day.  Yes, it seems Bad Kitty has a naughty and unintuitive interface for the uninitiated. It took me a little fumbling to figure it out too, as is the case with most add-ons, but maybe I can spare a few of you that troubling pain. It’s time for:

Bad Kitty Move Configuration Naughty Tutorial J!

flashy background!

Let us begin. If you’re unfamiliar with Bad Kitty, I already discussed it a little while back.

TL;DR Version: Bad Kitty is an Add-On for WoW that tracks assorted buffs, debuffs and cooldowns related to feral druiding. It does so with indicators and bars that are highly customizable. Feral druids like this because they have a lot to watch (especially kat durid) in the way timey things.

The very basic start: Opening Bad Kitty’s control panel. Type:

/bk

That is all. You’ll get a dialog box with options. For many of you, this is where you’ll go “oh, that’s all I needed, thanks!” and run off to leave me talking to myself. Do enjoy. Glad to be of service.

For the rest of you, who’s eyes are glazing over at the sight of boxes and dongles, fear not, for we shall break it down a bit more. I am, however, going to insert the odd page break here, since this could get a bit image intensive. I like to keep my front page and RSS feed light-weight. It’s my prerogative. Don’t judge me!

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You back? Gratz. Now in the safety of single-page land, let’s have a look at our options.

When you first press “/bk”, you’re going to be looking at an options page.  On the left bar are your tabs for the different pages, which we’ll look at individually.  You’ll see something like this.

Okay, you probably don’t have my same add-ons, admittedly.  That would be weird.  Like you’re stalking me.  But, er… anyham, to the right of it will be the first, general options page, as portrayed in Diagram 1.

General Options

And here’s what all of those fancy bits mean, according to our snazzy number-coded keys:

1 – BadKitty shows information in two forms: bars and indicators.  Here you can set which you’d like to use for your Cat and Bear forms.  If you only wanted bars and only during your Cat Form, you could check “Cat Bars” and uncheck the other three.

2 - Lock Frames - This answers the question of “how do I move the bars?”  When unchecked, all of your bars and indicators will appear on the screen and can be dragged around.  When they are where you would like them, you recheck the box and they will hide and begin to function normally.  As it says in the parenthesis, you can also type “/bk lock” in your chat box, and it will toggle the lock mode on and off.  This can be handy if you just need to quickly nudge the box over and don’t want to bother with going through the options.  Everyone will need to learn this option, as you can’t rightly just leave all of your bars in the middle of your screen.

3 – Hidden Out of Combat – While checked, the bars and indicators will disappear entirely when you aren’t fighting to free up the screen.  I like them always on, so I leave it unchecked.

4 – Bar Frame OoC Warning - OoC is Omen of Clarity, the Resto talent.  With this checked, an Omen of Clarity icon will appear behind your bars whenever it procs.  It’s actually sort of annoying, but that’s the key.  You want to notice it.  I don’t use it, because I have other add-ons that give the warning instead.

5 – Bars Scale with Cooldown Length – This alters how the bars size.  Some people prefer bars where 1 second is the same for every bar.  Others like the full length of the bar to equal the full length of the cooldown or buff duration.  It’s a matter of taste.  I like it checked, because I find short duration abilities difficult to track without the scaling.

6 – Colorblind Mode – Colorblind friendliness!  I actually am colorblind, but I get by without.  No “colorblind mode” has ever corrected for the fact that I can’t tell a new flightpath from a quest.  But, there you are.  I’m not even sure what it changes.

7 – Show Berserk Duration – Most bars show either the duration of an effect or the cooldown left on that effect.  Berserk is unique in that you can watch both, if you choose.  When checked, Berserk’s bar will say “Berserk is UP” while Berserking and show the buff duration, then switch to a normal cooldown meter when the buff is up.

8 – Bar Text Color – I think this is a tad out of place here, but there you go.  Self-explanatory: The color of the text on the bar displays.  The default text color on the bars is yellow, but I like good ol’ white.

9 – Center Frames - Remember that annoying place all of your bars used to be when you first installed BK?  Now you can put them back there with a single click!  Cause yourself mental anguish all over again, with perfect symmetry!

10 – These are all sorts of sliders to adjust the sizes and appearance of your bars and indicators.  One worth noting is the “Warning Threshold”.  Typically, indicators appear when a cooldown is up or a buff/debuff is not on the you/the target.  By setting a number here, you can have the indicators appear early with a countdown warning before the effect will need your attention again.  3 isn’t a bad number, since it gives you two GCDs to work the effect into your assault.

11 – Bar Background Colors – This one is a bit misleading to a lot of people.  What it basically does is change the background color of your bars briefly when the game sends you a feedback message such as “Not Behind Target”.  So, when you go to Mangle a target you can’t reach, the background will change red.  It won’t change until you attempt and fail the attack, so it isn’t constantly watching to make sure you are in position.  If you attempt to Shred someone from the front, it will turn yellow in reaction to the “Not Behind Target” error.  If you Mangle someone from the front, it will not turn yellow, because there’s no error for trying to do that.  Got it?  Handy information if you know what you’re looking at, huh?

Bar Look and Feel

You’ve actually survived the worst of it.  It gets easy from here.  Diagram 2!

Only two major regions of interest.  Region A decides the color of the bars on each effect.  I actually like the default colors, so that’s what you’re looking at.  Region B lets you set the texture of the bars.  That’s just the snazzy paint-job look of them, and aside from making them easy or hard on the eyes, they don’t have any major effect.  Go wild!

Bar Layout

And this answers another one of the more common questions: how to organize your bars and indicators.  Diagram 3!

It’s not immediately obvious how to use this, though there are instructions up top.  Still, we’ll break it down, yes no?

Region A is the order.  When you press an up arrow, that ability swaps places with the one above it and ascends the list.  Down arrow swaps with the one below it and lowers it.  You can’t just press one up arrow rapidly to keep going up, or you’ll just have the same two swapping places back and forth really fast.

Region B is a sort of threshold.  It decides what bars you actually want to display.  Whatever ability it is next to will be the last in the list.  In Diagram 3, Instant Nature (which, if you’re confused, is the duration of the instant-cast effect granted by Predatory Strikes) is selected.  So, I don’t have bars for Mangle, Rake, Rip, FF, Berserk or Shred Count.  For the purposes of information overload, you probably won’t want every bar showing.  My offensive abilities aren’t on bars because I track them via warning indicator instead.  Which brings us to:

Warning Layout

Looks kind of familiar, huh?  Region A works exactly like the Bar Layout options from Diagram 3.  Region B is new and shiny, though.  Warning Indicators, if you haven’t gathered, are just icons.  They don’t have to be in a straight row, and BK gives you the option of ordering them in a few ways.  You’ll see that I actually do like them in a straight, vertical row, because I’m boring.

Please Turn In Your Copy Books To Your Teacher or Head of Class

I hope you found this lesson informative and useful.  It’ll be on the final exam.  I’ll be available after class to answer questions in the comments.