Vanguard

A from-scratch UI suite for WoW Forever (the 12.1 engine with vanilla content). One addon, one theme, one options window, instead of a dozen addons that each look and behave differently.

Vanguard is written from scratch. It contains no code, art or fonts from other UI addons. It bundles three small shared libraries, unmodified: LibStub, CallbackHandler-1.0 and LibSharedMedia-

Highlights

Look and layout

• Slate & Brass theme: flat slate panels, a brass accent (or arcane, jade, orchid, copper), pixel-perfect borders, smooth bars, bundled Fira Sans Condensed. Vanguard stays square: one sharp border style everywhere.
• Theme variants, including a High contrast variant, and a Color assist switch that shows friendly, neutral and hostile as blue, yellow and vermilion.
• Faction look: Alliance characters get crossed swords and Cinzel headings; Horde characters get crossed axes and Metamorphous.
• Centered layout anchored to the bottom center, so it keeps its shape at any UI scale. Everything is movable with /vg unlock.
• One text size slider for all of Vanguard's text, chat and tooltips.

Unit frames and combat

• Player, target, target of target, focus, party and boss frames; hunter pet happiness; threat readout on your target.
• Raid frames built for healers (5 and 10 sit over the player frame, 25 and 40 stack to the left of the character), click casting set up without typing a spell, and raid tools (ready check, pull timer, role check, raid target icons) for leaders and assistants.
• Swing timer (a row per hand, plus Auto Shot), nameplates with class, reaction and threat colors, your debuffs and crowd control, buffs and debuffs that replace the game's buff frame.
• Optional Vanguard meter and fight history (off until you turn them on), roll tracker, main tank frames, group threat panel, officer loot tools.
• Cooldown gaps and Cooldown Manager glow (both off by default) add to the game's own Cooldown Manager and never replace it.
• Boss mod docks: two spots for boss mods' timer bars.

Action bars, minimap and chat

• Action bars with range and power tint, restyled pet, stance, extra and vehicle buttons.
• Info strip under the minimap (durability, free bag slots, gold, time, fps and latency), minimap drawer that gathers other addons' round buttons, and a broker strip for LibDataBroker feeds.
• Chat extras (clickable links, a Copy button), chat watch (phrases that ring a sound and show a toast), and a group board (/vg lfg) that reads the group-finding lines posted in chat, since Forever has no Dungeon Finder.
• /way waypoints that use the game's own navigation arrow.

Quests

• Vanguard's own quest dialog, quest tracker and quest log.
• Quest guidance from the client's own data only (a New mark for quests new in Forever, never a community database).
• Quest automation, each part off until you switch it on (hold Shift to skip it).

Bags, gear and town

• Bags, other characters' items in tooltips, gear upgrade comparisons, vendor memory ("Sold by ..."), auto repair and sell grays.
• Craft queue, mail tools, spell rank notices, trainer Train all, Keep stocked, instance prep card, and a talent planner on the game's own talents window.

Auction house

• Lists and Posting tabs added to the game's auction window, with Deals, Upgrades, price alerts, disenchant values, a sales ledger and crafting costs on recipes.

Game windows

• The game's own windows keep their layout and buttons and get Vanguard's flat, opaque panel. Each group has its own switch.
• Windows can be dragged, and Esc closes the /vg options window.
• AFK screen, and an options window split into pages (Game windows, Combat tools and more) that you open with /vg or the Vanguard button on the game menu.

Profiles and setup

• Profiles with presets (Healer, Damage, Tank), shareable profile strings, and a backup before any preset is applied.
• Situations: different layouts for raids, PvP, instances or resting, applied out of combat.
• First-run setup: a four-step wizard that offers layouts (including "Keep my current layout", which moves nothing).
• Settings guard: Forever's beta has been reported to lose addon settings between sessions, so Vanguard stamps and backs up your settings at logout and tells you if they were lost.
• What's new window after each update.
• It notices other addons that do a job one of its modules also does, so you can avoid doubling up.

Safe by design

Nothing protected is touched in combat, secret values are never read, and Vanguard avoids tainting the game's frames. Errors are caught and shown on the addons button (/vg errors) instead of breaking your UI.

For addon authors

A Skin API (Vanguard.API.v1) lets other addons use Vanguard's styling and share auction prices, vendor prices and disenchant values.

Commands

/vg or /vanguard opens the options. Useful ones: /vg unlock (move things), /vg status, /vg export and /vg import, /vg errors, /vg lfg, /vg quests, /vg meter on, /vg craft, /way.

Support

Report a problem with /vg report and the feedback form at vanguardui.com.

Notes

Vanguard is for WoW Forever. Copyright Clifton Taylor, all rights reserved.