World of Warcraft: Dragonflight (opens in new tab) is scheduled for release on November 28, 2022 and will bring an overhaul to the nearly 18-year-old user interface.
WoW’s UI may have looked pretty good when the MMO first launched in 2004, but it’s become a bit of an eyesore in recent years. This can of course be easily remedied with the use of WoW add-ons (opens in new tab) but these need to be updated often and they can add significant load times as well as a drop in performance if you’re not careful.
With the introduction of the new – and much more customizable – user interface in Dragonflight, you may not need as many add-ons to get the look you want. And since most of the updates are now in the Dragonflight beta, it seemed like a good idea to find out what it can do.
Go with the times
You will notice that the user interface changes the moment you log in to Dragonflight. Everything looks much cleaner and more compact than in the past. Perhaps one of the most obvious differences is the player’s health bar: it’s moved from the top-left corner to its new home just to the right of your character. This has become the preferred position of players over the years, as you can keep an eye on your health without having to keep an eye on your character during frenetic battles. But until now you needed an add-on to move it. The size of the health bar has also increased, which is much better than the little patch of green we’re used to seeing with the standard UI.
The default Dragonflight UI now shows two stacked action bars, instead of running them side by side across the bottom of the screen. The “bar art” has also been updated and other options such as bags, quest log, character sheet are housed in a much more subtle group in the lower right corner.
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You can move pretty much anything you can see using the edit mode in the main menu. Some of the individual elements also have additional options to resize, or the ability to access additional menu options directly from the editing window. You can switch between different elements, such as raid and party frames, to adjust their placement, and there’s even a grid so you can make sure everything lines up. Once you’re done moving everything around and have it to your liking, you can save the layout as a profile that can be applied to all characters or just your current one.
That’s not all, though: there’s also quite a bit of customization that isn’t immediately obvious. For example, you can consolidate your suitcases into one big container and set a modifier key so you can cast spells on mouseover instead of having to target them directly. You can also make adjustments to the way battles work. Hold Cast lets you cast the same spell over and over at the touch of a button instead of tapping the same key repeatedly, and the Action Combat option automatically targets enemies in front of you. Pretty neat, huh?
It’s all right
So now that we have an idea of what the Dragonflight UI can do, I decided to see how close I could get to my current Shadowlands setup. The results are actually pretty close, as you can see in the comparison below.
The most obvious difference between the two is the player’s health bar. In the Shadowlands version, I’m using ElvUI – that’s also what gives me the Titan Panel style bar at the top. In the third screenshot, I’ve added the Weakauras and Plater add-ons to the Dragonflight UI.
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In terms of looks, the new UI is pretty sleek, but there are still plenty of add-ons that work behind the scenes or are accepted as part of a good setup. To name the most obvious, Deadly Boss Mods, Weakauras, or a damage meter probably won’t be replaced anytime soon, and if you really like the customization ElvUI offers, there’s nothing telling you to get rid of that.
Your add-on usage will, of course, depend on how you spend your time in Azeroth – if you regularly raid or run mythic plus dungeons then you’ll probably be using a lot more than someone collecting mounts. Still, I don’t think we’ll be moving away from add-ons anytime soon, but Dragonflight’s major UI update certainly gives us more options for customization than we’ve ever had before.
Dragonflight feels like a great time to take stock of the add-ons you’re using and remove the ones that really aren’t pulling their weight. Even taking one or two off will give more breathing room to the ones you rely on — not to mention it’s better for your overall load times. If you don’t think add-ons have much of an impact on that, try disabling them before logging into the game and see how much faster you load. You might be surprised.
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