Hello friends this is growl, if there's one thing that gets asked more than anything else it's ui questions, what add-on displays all the spells in the middle of your screen like that, how do you track your teammates interrupts, is your tank stagger tracker part of the party frame, how do you get your talents in the top left of your screen, should i have french toast or waffles for breakfast, the answers to well most of these ui related questions is almost always weak auras.
Before you start trying to make your auras stronger let me explain first, weak auras is an add-on that allows you extreme ui customization to display things exactly where when and how you want to see them, weak auras can do nearly anything aside from playing the game for you.
You can track anything that blizzard makes available such as seeing when spells are cast
how much mana you have, what talents you're running or how long until your next big cooldown, the possibilities are really endless.
Even if you're a minimalist and prefer not to use many add-ons, weakauras is an amazing toolkit to customize your ui exactly how you like it, the add-on can be a bit overwhelming to people not familiar with it so i want to teach you exactly how you can start using weakauras to improve your ui experience.
First you need to get the add-on installed which you can get from whatever add-on client you use or directly if you want through the curseforge or github, once it's installed you can open the in-game menu with slash wa already it might be a bit overwhelming with tons of different options and templates, don't worry we aren't doing any custom coding or advanced stuff in this video this is a complete beginner's guide to making the add-on work for you.
You can see on the left my add-on has many many different things listed, each individual modification is also known as a weak aura not to be confused with the add-on itself i have many different weak auras installed from different raid tiers and many different characters,
your screen is going to look a lot more empty than this and that's totally okay, the first thing you need to learn is how to import a weak aura this is pretty basic but we have to start somewhere.
You can import a weak order either directly in game if linked by somebody else or is a string copy pasted from a website, now that you have the add-on you can see links like this which when clicked will open a small menu that allows you to download and import the aura.
You can create the same link yourself if you shift left-click one of yours in your menu, keep in mind there are some restrictions to where you can post these links so if you can't see a link that someone else is sending you make sure to join up in a party with them and use the party chat, if you're using a text string instead from a website simply click new aura in the top left then import in the bottom right paste the text here and press done and it will give you the same small box that allows you to download the weak aura.
Now my new aura is installed whenever i enter stealth on my druid i now have a small prowl icon that appears on my screen, this makes it easier to track when i'm in and out of stealth because sometimes it's hard to see and events and dungeons can take you out of stealth occasionally, this is an example of an extremely basic weak aura and they can get much more complicated than this, i just wanted to get you started on your journey.
Not all weak auras will be exactly how you want them right away though this video isn't going to be about creating your own custom weak auras but you want to have the ability to make small modifications and troubleshoot it if it isn't working, what do you do if you import it and isn't working when you open your weak auras menu all auras will be grouped in two categories: loaded and not loaded.
When someone asks me for help with one of these the first question i always ask is it loaded this specifically means is the weak aura showing up under the loaded category, if not then it means there's a specific load condition that is stopping it from appearing, let's take a look at our problem weak or again it isn't loaded and let's figure out why.
Click the aura and then navigate to the load tab there are a lot of options in these menus and if you want to get good at customizing that's okay but that's not for the scope of this video for our purposes i'm just going to teach you the important ones, in the load menu you can see all the various conditions that can be used you can make things only show up in combat or when you're in a five-man group or when you're on a specific character.
You can see here for some reason player class death knight is selected once we change that to druid the weak aura is now loaded and when we enter stealth it shows up, if the weak aura is loaded but still not showing correctly there may be a problem with the internal code you can attempt to troubleshoot this but i'm not going to talk too much about changing the inner workings of individual weak auras in this video.
I will however show you how to make some small changes to the appearance in the same menu click the display tab, here you can easily change the size of the aura and where it's positioned on the screen, you can make it bigger or add text and change the font size.
We're getting to the limit of what i want to cover in this beginner video but last i want to show you how to change the spell trigger very often you have a weak aura that you like and you want a similar one but can't find one that quite matches, let's say i wanted the same weak aura but instead it tracks when i have heart of the wild active so i know when to do big damage just navigate to the trigger tab of that weak aura and look for the ability name or id
right here it's listed as prowl and i can just erase it and type heart of the wild instead.
Now i have a tracker for this cooldown too, make sure you're naming things well because it can get quite messy if you're doing this often also be sure to scroll down in this trigger window more advanced weak auras may have multiple triggers and you may need to make this change more than once alright so you know how to import an aura but where do you even find them do you need to subscribe to some golden tier patreon to get them not at all there's a huge public repository of weakauras available on wago.io.
Simply visit the site and type in what you're looking for in the search box at the top, let's look for a weak order to track iron fur, wago is great because it includes picture previews of many of the auras, what they look like.
For something popular like this you can find many different options to choose from, once you get familiar with the whole thing you'll find one that you think might be good import it in game and try it out for a minute maybe you don't like it or it doesn't fit delete it look for a new one maybe change the size a little bit, this process of identifying something you need to see in your ui and then finding the appropriate weak aura and making it fit is critical for high-end pve content.
Lastly i want to show off my own weak auras page since i get asked often about what i use, i've compiled all of my weak auras from various characters onto my profile on waggo.io, you can find the link if you head over to my discord in the nightbot channel in the description of this video or any of my ui videos, i've done my best to name everything as accurately as possible so that it's easy to find at the time of creating this video it is a bit messy because we're transitioning between expansions but most of the time it should be in a pretty clean state, you can also find my voodoo profiles uploaded here as well.
I'll make a video going over my ui for shadowlands when the game is released but we can glance through real quick at some of the common ones that i get asked a lot about anything that starts with ui growl reach is my main spell cooldown package that's located in the middle of my screen it was developed by reach but he no longer works on these so i stuck my name on it and keep it updated anything that says frames is likely a voodoo import and should be tagged as voodoo as well gcd.
Mouse circle is the circle around my mouse that tracks my global cooldown that one gets asked about often. Everything on here should be pretty self-explanatory. A fair amount of streamers or video makers do what I do with their profile as well.
If you see something on someone else's ui that you like just look for a weakauras profile link and sift through it until you find it.
That should be enough to get you started, if you have any questions about using weak auras
feel free to leave them in the comments and hopefully myself or someone smarter than me can help you, thanks for watching if you found the video helpful i'd appreciate it if you gave it a like and subscribe to my channel, i'll be releasing helpful video guides and commentaries throughout shadowlands, happy keying!
