I’ve been looking for a new WoW UI compilation for awhile now and figured what better time to change my UI than a week before the new patch hits the live realms. Hmm… maybe that wasn’t the wisest of ideas. After combing through the various UI compilations and suites on WoWInterface, I settled on the Onslaught UI.

Flame Keeper Molsan in Dalaran

AddOns

It contains many of the same addons I’ve been running, including ArkInventory and FuBar. It did not contain Auctioneer, but I manually added the current preview version of Auctioneer, which supports the importing of their database file from auctioneerdb.com.

I love the creative way it uses FuBar to organize addon information along the bottom right-hand side of the screen. I can add all the additional FuBar-related addons I want, and it bunches the icons and/or text down in the corner.

Molsan Standing in the Empty Dalaran Bank

The Onslaught UI comes with Dominos for managing action bars. I’ve been using Bartender for almost two years now, but I don’t see much of a difference between them for my basic needs. I also appreciate how the buffs and buff timers are organized. I had been allocating almost the entire right-hand side of my UI for buffs, but Onslaught pushes them all the way up to the top of the screen, displaying them horizontally.

Performance

I did not change any of the video settings that Onslaught had configured. My in-game experience and performance did not suffer, even though Onslaught set the video effects to “Good.” I had been running with the video effects set to “Fair,” with an 18-22 frame rate in Dalaran, and a 40-55 frame rate out in the world. I was pleased to see that my fps stayed around this range after the installation of Onslaught.

Themis Rides Through Dragonblight

I had been having frames-per-second (fps) and general lag problems with World of Warcraft ever since I installed Wrath of the Lich King. After tweaking Windows XP and adjusting the video effects, I was able to triple my fps and started enjoying the game the way it was meant to be played. Typically out in Azeroth, I consistently averaged about 19 fps. In Dalaran, I hovered somewhere around 3-5 fps. After performing all of these steps, I was able to pull 58 fps in Azeroth, and an astounding (at least for me anyway) 19 fps in Dalaran!

My gaming machine is a Dell laptop, running Windows XP with very few applications on it other than WoW. If you use your computer for things other than gaming, you may want to skip some of the post’s suggested changes. If you make changes to your computer based on this post or the post over at Guide2Games, please do so at your own risk. What worked for me may or may not work for you.