Optimizing your UI for raiding

With the current state of raiding, 25 mans especially, people are experiencing large scale FPS.. 'destruction', on a lot of raid fights. This is not something you can overcome with massive amounts of hardware power (although it does help) but something which can only be helped by proper interface management. To help combat this while Blizzard tries to address it with their ever increasing number of skill changes and tweaks, I decided to compile this short guide, to help you minimize any problems you may be experiencing.

1. Make sure you're running WoW64bit
You can easily check this, when you have WoW open, open your Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and check your Wow process, it should be called "Wow-64.exe". If you don't have the 64 bit enabled, then open the launcher options (either your WoW launcher or Battle.net) and tell it to launch in 64 bit.

2. Lowering your graphics settings for power/performance
Now, this depends a lot on the hardware you're running, but I'm not going to tell you exactly what graphics settings are acceptable, you'll have to make your own judgement on that, however the highest memory using settings are what we need to target for this specific type of lag. So try turning down Shadow Quality (I recommend Fair/Good but try them all) and View Distance (doesn't have much effect on raids, but certain fights can cause problems).

3. Reducing your UI usage
Besides the obvious, of turning off unnecessary addons, there are a few other things you can do. Download the addon Addon Usage and once you're in game type '/addonusage', tick the box for 'Monitor CPU usage', and then head into an LFR preferably, or just any kind of PvE group content. If you can manage it, keep the '/addonusage' window up during this (Make sure you click the 'CPU' header) and keep an eye on mods that jump to the top, but seem unnecessary in a raid. Some examples include: Atlas, Recount, Skada, Auctioneer, TradeSkillMaster and many addons which talk to other guild members, you can try turning these off while raiding. If you have a lot of 'in-town' addons that you'd like to remove, I recommend you download Addon Control Panel which you can use to create 'sets' of addons which you can disable or enable in bulk.

3.1 Skada, Recount & the Combat Log
One additional thing you can do to reduce UI usage, is to remove or reduce your Combat Log. If you don't care about it and never use it, simply remove it (you can always recreate it later). If you use it regularly, then you may see some benefit in fiddling with the 'Filters' settings to reduce the amount of spam coming through. What also helps (one of the best things you can do if you have large initial FPS drops) is turning off Recount, or switching to Skada and turning off any tracking you don't use. If you like having access to Recount though and don't feel like turning anything off with Skada, don't worry too much as the difference between the two addons at base is around 20% in favour of Skada, with that difference almost entirely disappearing as you start to collect more data for them.


Hopefully this guide helps to reduce some of the lag you experience in raids, although bear in mind that you cannot remove it altogether. Blizzard has acknowledged a problem with their current system and is working to fix it, you see this with the AoE heals target cap additions and some other tweaks they've made recently to reduce the amount of calculations your client has to do in every day raiding. The ultimate fix for this should be coming with Warlords of Draenor in the form of the stat squish, so we'll see in the coming months how that works.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me or post here, or any further helpful hints and tips to add!