WAR UI Guide

[Browncoat-WHA]

The WAR UI Revealed

The Warhammer UI is one of the best we've seen in quite some time. Taking elements from UI systems that do work while adding a bit of uniqueness and convenience, WAR's default UI is clean, organized, and most of all, easy to use. Here, we break down all the UI elements in detail and help you get oriented with your window into the world of WAR! Grab a meal - it's going to be a long one!

Screw The Detail - Just Get Me Started

Can't bear to read our walls of text? The quick version of the UI Guide is as follows:


(Click thumbnail for full-size version)

-Experience bars (for both normal ranks and for renown) are located at the top
-Your status, and that of your party, is on the left, including hp and ap. When in a warband, this display is replaced with a warband listing, for up to 24 individuals.
-Navigation and trackers are located on the right and upper right. The minimap shows where you are, and red circles indicate destinations for quests. You can use the plus or minus symbol to the right of the minimap to zoom in and out. Trackers show you progress on both Public Quests and normal Quests, and when in a Public Quest, a bar to the right of the minimap shows your Influence for the area which allows you to claim that areas PQ rewards from a Rally Master NPC.
-You can queue to a scenario from anywhere by clicking the Warhammer Online symbol near the minimap and choosing one to join.
-Chat is located in the lower left, and has both a chat tab for yakking away and a combat tab for logging details of your fights.
-Action bars are located at the bottom. Each button on the action bar is hotkeyed, by default 1-9 and CTRL+1-CTRL+9 are at your disposal. You can change this in the UI Editor.
-Other combat elements include a cast bar for displaying channeled actions or those requiring a "cast" or "use" time, tactics bar to show your tactics loadout and switch tactics out of combat, and a morale bar for tracking current morale and currently available morale abilities.
-WAR's UI editor allows you to scale, move, or hide all of these elements. To access the layout editor, press Escape to bring up the WAR menu, followed by Customize UI. Click on the Layout Editor button, then Start Editing, and you can move all the elements around.

Let's Take it From the Top...



The Experience and Renown bars are located in the upper left hand corner of the screen. Your experience bar traverses the length of the screen and fills yellow as you gain experience. When the bar is full, you gain a rank.

You'll notice there is an outline around part of the experience bar. That is the amount of experience that will be considered Rested Experience. You gain Rested Experience when you log off in a camp or city. While you are Rested, you gain double experience for things such as kills and actions, but not for quests.

Below the experience bar is your shorter Renown bar. This bar fills purple, and when it is completely full, you gain a Renown rank. Renown experience is gained by RvR actions, such as killing other players, taking objectives, and capturing keeps.

Mousing over either of these bars shows the experience acquired and total needed to gain the next rank.



Your Status is located in the upper left hand corner. It shows you a portrait of lovely self, along with your character name, rank, and whether or not you are flagged for RvR (indicated by a WAR symbol in the upper left hand corner). Your hit points and action points are depicted by green and yellow bars, respectively.

Your Target is located next to your status. It shows your current target, their rank, and a rough estimate of comparison to them with a color. Effortless (colored grey) means you greatly outrank your target. Trivial (colored green) means you slightly outrank your target. Equal (colored white) means you are on even ground with your target. Challenging (colored yellow) means your target slightly outranks you. And Dangerous (colored purple) means your target greatly outranks you.

Underneath your target is a Secondary Target, also known as the Defensive Target. When relevant, your last selected friendly target will be your secondary target. Secondary targets are important for spells which have an effect due to an action taken against the your target (such as spells which damage your target and heal your secondary target for a certain amount based on that).

All of these windows have icons with timers underneath to depict buffs, debuffs, and other effects, which can be moused over to see what they are.




You'll notice I highlighted the "Open Party" Icon below your status. When clicked, this icon opens a separate window which shows the parties looking for members in the area, with the name of the party leader, how many members they have and the maximum they can have, how long it will roughly take to get to them, and what they are doing, whether that is PvE, PQ, or RvR. Mousing over their names also gives you the exact group and rank makeup of the currently selected party. All you have to do to join them is click the Join button.

[Browncoat-WHA]

The Minimap located in the upper right hand corner, has many different elements which we've shown in the picture at the top. We'll touch on each one, linking pictures where relevant.

• Zone Control depicts the current status of the zone's victory point balance. As you participate in PvE and RvR, your realm gains victory points. Order's bar (blue) fills from left to right and Destruction's bar (red) fills from right to left. When one of the factions reaches its zone control pin on the bar (depicted by small triangles), it locks the zone down and gives control of it to the realm that reached it.
• Scenarios can be joined from anywhere by clicking on the red WAR icon in the upper left part of the minimap. All you have to do is click the button and choose to join a scenario by clicking the Yes button. Then you can join the area's scenario solo or in a group if you have one. Each scenario is explained briefly before you join the queue.
• The Map Filter, which is the square button right below the scenario button, allows you to filter the icons shown on the main minimap. You have many choices, from Travel to Merchants to Career Trainers and more.
• A simple click of the World Map will lead you to a full-size map of the zone you are in, along with a legend depicting important waypoints and quest destinations. You can also see your quests at a glance and see how much of the zone map you have revealed thorugh travel and discovery.
• There are several levels of Zoom for the main minimap, which are controlled by clicking the plus (zoom in) or minus (zoom out) buttons on the slider.
• When you are in a Public Quest, an additional bar divided into three levels will appear on the right. This bar shows your level of Influence in the area. When the bar goes past one of the ticks, you qualify for a PQ reward from the area's local Rally Master, usually located in a PvE camp.
• The Minimap itself obviously shows your current location, but also shows which map icons you have chosen to display. Red circles, also depicted on the World Map, show an area where you need to look or do something to complete a quest. Mousing over these circles will tell you which quest that is.

The final element at the top of the screen is the Menu Bar. This bar gives you quick access to many management menus for the game. These can also be accessed directly via hotkeys. Like the minimap, we'll go over each button from left to right:

• Abilities (press V) are your bread and butter. Here you can see everything you've learned. The window is divided into several tabs. Skills shows all the skills you've learned throughout your career, each including which mastery path and type of skill it is. Tactics shows your learned tactics, used to loadout sets of stat bonuses depending on your play session. Morale shows learned morale abilities used to turn the tide of combat. General shows your miscellaneous skills and passive abilities, but also allows you to access your trade skills as well. You also can see that there are Category Sorters on the right side that change with each tab you select. This allows you to filter your displayed skills by a certain type or function, like buffs, damaging skills, and the like.
• Your Backpack (press B) is your inventory of items, which you can view either by icons or by a list by clicking the appropriate tab. You can also click the third gold tab to access Quest items that may need to be used.
• The Character (press P) window is a depiction of your avatar in the WAR world, complete with equipped gear which can be moused over or dragged off and on. You can also view stats or other numbered items on your character by looking underneath the character portrait.
• The Tome of Knowledge (press K) is your character's comprehensive listing of encountered lore, characters, quests, and achievements. It's also a stat-tracker for certain items. You can navigate the tome by clicking in the folded corners to navigate, in the tabs on the left for different sections, or in the Tome itself by clicking links.
• The Main Menu (press ESC) allows you to access logistical features of the game, from logging out or exiting, to providing feedback on your experience, to filing an appeal for you or your guild
• To Customize the UI (press U), you can go into this menu and choose general options allowing you to change things such as the number of action bars. You can also use the layout editor
• The Guilds (press G) menu allows you to access the guild menu if you are a member of a guild, allowing you to see the membership, history, events, and other items in the guild system
• Lastly, the Help menu (press H) gives you an in-game knowledge base of common topics along with other documentation to provide assistance during your experience.

[Browncoat-WHA]

Middle of the Road...
---



The Party Members window is located to the middle left of the UI. A party holds up to 6 members. Each party member is depicted similar to your status, with a portrait, rank, name, and hp/ap. The party member with the green crown icon is designated the party leader, and can do logistics with the party such as kick or approve invitations to the party or join the group to a scenario queue. The party leader can also decide to convert the party to a warband by right-clicking on a portrait in the party members window. and choosing the Convert to Warband option.



This is a great seque into the Warband Groups display. When you are in a warband, your party members window disappears, replaced by a group display as shown above. Each member of the warband is shown with percentage for their hp along with a background green bar, and their ap in yellow. You can target any member of the warband by clicking on them. Warbands have up to 24 members, 6 to a group in 4 groups. Warbands, if they choose to, can also appear in the Open Party list, allowing a warband to be filled easily from the current zone's population.



To the left of the minimap, whenever you wander into such an area, you'll be treated to a display of the Public Quest Tracker. This shows the name of the Public Quest, the current stage of the quest, and the progression towards the goal, whether that is killing a certain number of mobs, defending allied NPC's, or collecting or triggering certain items. In some cases, as you can see above, you can see that some Public Quests have tasks for both sides in a competition of teamwork and resources. Public Quests have been seen to have as few as 3 stages and as many as 7, so those in the area will get to experience many different kinds of public quests during the course of their career.



WAR's Quest Tracker is located on the right middle of the screen. You can have quite a few quests on your tracker at one time, although if you have more than the number that can be displayed the rest are acquired but hidden. Mousing over quest text in the quest tracker allows you to see at a glance what is needed to be done to accomplish the quest. The Tome of Knowledge is your container for quests as well, so if you want to rearrange which quests are visible, read more quest detail, or check on how many quests you have, click on any quest in the tracker and you will be taken to that section in the Tome.

[Browncoat-WHA]

Bottom's Up!
---



The Chat Window is your communications tool and log for the world of WAR. There is a standard chat window with an entry bar at the bottom for entering slash commands and chat text. The window itself is divided into two tabs - Chat and Combat. The Chat window shows all the dialogue people are typing in the current zone as well as any global channels they are a member of. The Combat tab tracks all your actions in a fight, from damage or healing done, to ability triggering, to damage mitigation. As you can see, even Mythic isn't afraid to express themselves sometimes.

In addition to all this, in the upper left hand corner of the chat window is a set of faces with an eye. When clicked, this brings up the Social menu (press O), allowing you to manage friends lists, scenarios, or parties.



The core of what you do in combat, Action Bars are located at the bottom of the screen. By going to the Customize UI option (press U) you can choose how many action bars to display, up to 4 stacked. Pre-hotkeyed action bars include 1 - 9, CTRL+1 - CTRL+9, and ALT+1 - ALT+9, and more. You can keybind new actions from the Main Menu. If you mouse over a skill set in an Action Bar, it tells you what it does.

Above this you can see the Tactics Bar. Here you can see your currently authorized and purchased tactics. The number on the left shows which loadout this is. If you prefer another set of tactics for the situation, you need only rearrange them out of combat by clicking the number and choosing another from the presets.

Skills in both the Action and Tactics bars are dragged from the Abilities window to be set.



The Morale Bar has battle-turning abilities that can be used as each level of the bar below fills. The morale bar starts empty with no visible icons. As each level is increased morale-wise, the icon lights up and becomes available for you.

Some other, miscellaneous things to mention in this part of the UI:

• A Cast Bar for channeled spells and actions.
• A Career Resources icon for relevant careers. This is the place for Witch Elf blood lust, Warrior Priest Righteous Fury, and Shaman Waaagh for Gork or Mork, which can be observed to maximize effectiveness
• A Granted Abilities window for when you receive temporary usable buffs such as a Runepriest's runes or a Zealot's Harbingers

There is so much more to the UI than what's been explained here, hard as it may seem. We encourage you to take advantage of all the features the WAR UI has to offer, and discover even more stuff than we've covered in this exhaustive (and exhausting) guide.

[Not2Savage]

This sounds great!
I cant wait for preview.

[Nimec]

I'm not seeing any thumbnails to click. Maybe I am missing something?

[Browncoat-WHA]

Haha - more like I was missing something.

The guide should be a lot more vibrant now

[Nimec]

Much better!

Great guide, I tip my hat good sir.

[Anxst]

Very nice guide! Thanks for the hard work, Browncoat!

My only question is....does the little group of faces (left hand side of the screen, just above the chat/combat windows) do anything? I saw it in a screenshot today, and realized I'd never even looked at the damned thing in the beta.

I wonder if it defaults to off, so I never had it on...

[Browncoat-WHA]

Originally Posted by Anxst

Very nice guide! Thanks for the hard work, Browncoat!

My only question is....does the little group of faces (left hand side of the screen, just above the chat/combat windows) do anything? I saw it in a screenshot today, and realized I'd never even looked at the damned thing in the beta.

I wonder if it defaults to off, so I never had it on...

Why yes it does:

In addition to all this, in the upper left hand corner of the chat window is a set of faces with an eye. When clicked, this brings up the Social menu (press O), allowing you to manage friends lists, scenarios, or parties.

Social context menu. It used to bring up the main search window, but no more. Hm.

Much better!

Great guide, I tip my hat good sir.

Thanks for pointing it out. I thought that was odd.

[d4nthraxxx]

Where's the Area Influence bar to the right of the minimap? There should be one if you've done a PQ...

Great write-up! I hope this helps a lot of people who will be playing WAR for the first time in the Preview Weekend.

[WHa]

Originally Posted by d4nthraxxx

Where's the Area Influence bar to the right of the minimap? There should be one if you've done a PQ...

Great write-up! I hope this helps a lot of people who will be playing WAR for the first time in the Preview Weekend.

Its not in the this pic of the mini map, but goes on the right side of the mini map going form top to bottom.

[prxprt]

Just me or are you unable to rotate the skills bars and have them on the side like WoW

[Isorion]

Is it possible to move the items?

I've always disliked having player and opponent portraits at the top... it's much easier to keep an eye on them when they are at the bottom.

Edit: Great guide! Thanks a lot.

[slvrfang]

1. Sometimes I get a small blue square at the corner of the HP bar on my status box. What does it mean?

2. Is there an indicator that tells me if I'm in or out of combat?