WoW UI: What information do you need?

Last week I reactivated my WoW account again, joined another guild (with some ‘old’ friends) and did an Ulduar raid again this weekend.

I had not played WoW for about 2 months, so that gives me a somewhat ‘fresh’ look on things again. Unfortunately, my addons have also become ‘outdated’ and after upgrading to the latest versions I have found that they’re not working quite like I would have expected. This has resulted in the need to ‘redesign’ my UI (again).

I’ve been reading a couple of interesting posts on NoStockUI and other blogs and after dabbling a bit with some stuff I decided I need a clear look what I think my requirements/questions/issues (in random order) regarding this new UI setup are.

1. Hybrid (Heal/DPS) look should be similar
   Since my two main characters are both hybrid classes (Priest, Shaman) that heal and dps, I would like the UI to be similar in both roles. This means that I don’t need to switch my UI around when I need to offheal at a certain moment when needed. It also brings ‘down’ the learning time needed to adjust to the new UI if I can use the ’same’ UI for both healing and dps’ing.
2. Try to maximize viewing area
   Too many things on the UI means that I won’t be able to enjoy all the scenery and perhaps miss important things of the fights, so I want a few things on the UI or be able to easy (un)hide items when needed. (i.e. I don’t need recount permanently on my screen)
3. Have needed information available
   When I’m healing, I need information on the whole raid (i.e. grid setup with health info, debuffs, etc) otherwise I won’t be able to determine who I need to heal/cleanse/shield. When I DPS I need to know when to purge that boneshield of mobs, etc. When does my water shield run down, reapply DoTs, etc.
4. What to do with mouse / key usage?
   I’m used to [WASD] moving, mouse viewpoint moving/turning and click casting and [~123456] for casting, but I know some people play differently. I would like not to have to learn all new key combo hotkeys for different things and I’m a casual player, so I don’t know how ‘far’ I need to go with optimizing keyboard/mouse usage.
5. What to do with the combatlog?
   I never really had the combat log permanently open in a seperate chat log, but I know some people do.  Should I bother with this or is that too “high-end” raiding for me? Also, if I have scrolling combat log addons running, is there a seperate need to have the combat log chat open all the time?
6. How do I keep enough performance (to play comfortably)?
   I run at a 1600×1050 resolution and remember that when I ran 25man instances with my previous guild I had come to a low fps rate which basicly meant I didn’t like healing anymore with 25mans, due to the low fps I was getting (10man wasn’t an issue). I’m not sure exactly what is the major factor in the performance drop, because I remember (from before 3.1) that I was able to get ‘enough’ fps on 25man runs to heal comfortably. Is it just solved by running without (certain) addons or am I looking at an upgrade for my current pc?

There are probably other issues that will popup along the way, but that’s it for now.

I will have plenty of time to try things after this week, due to my holiday starting on August 1st.