So in my first installment of this section, I'll be talking about Satrina's buff frames. This powerful addon will help your dps/hps/tank ability immensely because it will allow you to track as many buffs/debuffs as you like in the way and the position that you want to. The best thing about this mod is that you can actively track YOUR PERSONAL debuffs and have them on timers for your display.

Take the debuffs of Frost Fever and Blood Plague for example. What happens when you have 5 dks in the raid? Could you actively track your specific debuffs on the boss to know when they fell off or not? I know that I couldn't and it became a distraction that resulted in lower dps for me. Want to be like me and get this mean sucker to boost your performance?

First, download this addon here: Satrina's Buff Frames

Now, lets set this thing up. The biggest thing that drives people away from SBF is the extremely difficult setup for it. There's a lot of options and little instruction. I'm going to show you how to set up your buffs into ones that you can actively track in this explanation.

DO NOT SKIP THIS NEXT STEP.

Now that you have SBF installed, you'll want to go to a training dummy or a mob and do your rotation making sure that all of your trinkets proc or you manually proc the trinkets and that all of your talented procs do as well. Once these procs happen, you'll want to write down the exact name of the proc so that you can track it later. SBF also doesn't come preloaded with all the names of procs so it'll fill its database with the names as well of your procs and buffs.

Open SBF by typing (/sbf) when you press "enter" to talk in chat. You'll notice that after you typed that in, it gave you a root command tree. To open the window to do the modifying, you'll need to type in (/sbf options).



Make sure that for whatever reason you're on the "general" tab.

Now, the initial window is pretty extensive and a little intimidating. One thing that you'll note by the following screen shot is that I have spent a considerable amount of time mapping all of my buffs to their corresponding locations. Be prepared to do this as well if you want the best performance out of your mod. Some key things to note moving from bottom left to bottom right:



- On the bottom left is my debuffs. You can put these anywhere on your screen, I just have them in an extremely noticeable place because I'm a tank and I have to watch for a variety of debuffs in order to perform my next action, i.e. taunt or call for taunt. What you do with it is completely up to you.

- On the left, on top of those are my procs from items or talents. They seem clustered but most of them don't proc at the same time since SBF doesn't switch buff positions on talent swaps. Therefor, I'll have Blood Spec procs on top of Frost ones and etc.

- Nestled around my character's name frame, I have all of my castable buffs, I.E. Horn Of Winter, Dancing Rune Weapon, etc.

- On top and below my target frame, I have their buffs and debuffs respectively. I don't use the one that is built in with [aguf] because with SBF, I can limit how much screen estate that I want the buffs or debuffs to use by limiting the amount shown.

- Underneath those frames, I have two long lines. These are for my two diseases and the bars are for the length of time that they have left. They show at full on set up, but they deplete as time goes by. This is by far the best utility of this mod if you're a class that has to have buffs on a target for others to be stronger i.e. DK, Spriest, etc. I'll touch briefly on how to configure those later in this post.

- Finally, off to the right, I have all of my buffs. These get a substantially longer chain of possible buffs because of the fact that you'll never usually have more than 8 or 16 debuffs on you that you need to track as oppose to the 40 or 50 buffs you might have.

NOW! To finally dig in. First thing's first, you'll need to creat a new buff/debuff window. Look at the bottom right of the options menu and click on the "New Frame" button. As soon as you do this, a line of icons will drop in front of you. This is the window that you'll be using to create your watched items and will be given a name (SBF and a number suffix). We'll rename this in a second.



Next, you will want to assign where your desired buff will appear and who for. Drop down the menu to select your target of the buff or debuff you're going to be showing. For me, I needed to Assign my talent proc, Blood Barrier. Therefor, my target will be me, the player.



Now, you'll want to make sure that your target window matches the unit that you want to select. I.E. For me, I made SBF 22. That guy needs to be attached to the player frame. To find your buff column, you can select it from the drop down window located at the top.



Next, you'll want to rename your buff to identify it later. You just simply type the name into the editable column on the top left. Once you're finished, hit enter for it to save correctly.





Now, as far as the checked options in the middle of the screen, you'll need to assign the checks to what you want this frame to be used for. For me, I'm going to select that its a buff and check that box.



Now, as far as the bottom two boxes, you'll need to identify the properties of your buff window. Do you want it to only show you one thing with no exceptions or do you want it show you all things with few exceptions?

Let me get into this a little further. Lets say that you'd just like to initially set up all of your buffs or debuffs. You'd want to select the blacklist so that it'll show you all of the incoming debuffs. You can always make exceptions later so that if say you don't want it to always show you the ICC dodge debuff, you can do that as well.

For me however, I want SBF to only show me specifically one buff. Therefor, I'll be choosing the "whitelist" option.



Now that everything for this page is set up, we can move to the next tab.

Select the tab, "Layout"

Next, there's more options that you can delve into. For me, I set all my buffs to show always. You can change this by the drop down menu in the top left.



Under that window is the ability to change how it cascades or sorts. You can change that by dropping down the window.



Next is your ability to put in exactly how many you want this particular window to show. Like I mentioned above, you can put as many as you feel like having in this box. For me though, I only want it to track Blood Barrier so I'll be typing in "1".



Next is the slider in the top middle. For me, I had my buffs per column as one but if you move that slider around it'll change the width and height of your buffs.

You can also change the way that your buffs grow. If you'd like them to stack on top of each other or drop below themselves, choose this guy left or right.

As far as the anchor point goes, this one is completely up to you and your UI. I typically have mine on the left and grow right, but in the case of my debuff frame, I have it to the left and naturally, I want the anchor point to be on the right so that they grow left. Experiment with it and see what suits you.

My options frame ended up looking like this:



Now that we're finished with tab, we can move to the next. Click the "apply" button on that options page.

Select the "Icons" tab at the top.

On this page, you can select a variety of options including the fade amount that you want the icons and etc to be. There are a couple of biggy items though that you'l lwant to pay attention to.

The first is the checkbox in the middle top. I personally select no tool tips for all of my procs because they're in the middle of my screen and I don't want any more crap clouding it.

Under that is the "disable right click this frame" box which I do also because I don't want to accidentally click off a buff trying to select a mob in front of me. (this can also be achieved by selecting the "click through" box under the general options tab).

The rest of the options are completely up to you for personal preference for appearance.



That set of stuff is done.

The next five tabs I just left alone. However I'll briefly touch on their importance.

The "Timers" tab will allow you to set if you want to see a timer on that particular buff or not. The application of this for me was when I set up my diseases bars. Since I already had a visible bar showing the length of time on them, I didn't need a numbered countdown also. For all of your buffs that you don't have visibly attached bars next to, I would recommend leaving that box checked.

The "Counts" tab is going to show you numbered counts on your buffs for stacks and allow you to fiddle with it. If for example you don't care about the counts of buffs, you can deselect that checkbox. I haven't had to use it yet though.

The "bars" tab is super important for the kind of buffs that you want to track with a visible bar. For me on my dk, I use it to track my diseases. On my priest, I use bars to track VT, SW:P and DP. I highly suggest using these for buffs you need to have up on a target for your stuff to hit harder or whatever.

Here is what it would look like if I had selected the "show buff bars" checkbox:



The "names" tab will allow you to place names of your buffs on top of the icon or just the name if you've eliminated the icon entirely and just have a list of names together.

The "expiry" tab will allow you to set the icon or name to flash before it fades and the designated time you want it to flash and etc. It usually fades in and out before it expires anyway so I just leave it alone.



Now, as for the "filters" tab, I usually leave it alone until after I've set my spell tab up, therefor we'll be going back to this in a second.

Select the "spells" tab.

You'll notice that on the left, you'll have a rather extensive database of known spells and procs to choose from. It's a good thing that you loaded its database with your procs right? If you didn't, you'll have to close SBF and go do the dirty homework mentioned at the top. Now, just scroll through the buffs that are in its database and find the one that you're looking for. I selected Blood Barrier.

Notice that on the right is two checkboxes. If you're attempting to find the debuffs cast by you, select the "debuffs" checkbox instead of the "buffs" one.





Now, you'll also notice that I have some of the checkboxes checked. I have "show this buff" checked and "cast by me" checked as well. The benefit of the cast by me thing is that it'll only show up when its cast by me and me alone. This is especially effective for the numerous debuffs casted on a target by the same classes like I was discussing earlier.

This is my final window for this tab:



Now that that's done, you can flip back over to the "filters" tab. Now in the filters list, I have
"n=blade barrier&my". This is a filter you can set up on any buff or debuff. If you set up a specific proc or buff to be listed and cast by you as well, it should be in this list as well.

That's it! You're done. Now you'll have to set up new frames for each and every singular buff that you want to explicitly watch. Is it going to be as much of a pain in the ass? Nope! Now if you want to set up another proc to watch that performs the same as your original, just follow the following steps:

Open SBF by typing in (/sbf options). On the "general" tab, you'll want to select the "new frame" button.

Once that new frame is up, pull down the item name in the "copy from" drop down menu in the top right.

Rename your new buff to something different and press enter.

Now that you have a working mimic of your original window, you can just go to the "spells" tab and select your spell you want to track instead of the original.

And now you have two watched buffs set up!

Now to exhibit what SBF looks like outside of the configurable window, all nice and clean:



And to show you what my Blood Barrier proc looks like as well, all configured:
(its the one that looks like a glaive)



Cheers!

(My album of screenshots for my own records) http://img638.imageshack.us/g/wowscrnshot012010172703.jpg/

wall of text!