WoW Addons: Part 2

 

So yesterday we took a look at the new improvements to the core UI in World of Warcraft from patch 3.3. I realise there's a whole heap of things I didn't mention and screenshots I didn't use for example the new quest log panel which now has move of the look of Bayi's Extended QuestLog had when I used to use that. Also there's quest colouring for difficulty ranges (this option is turned off by default - you can find it in the interface options menu).

Let's have a look today at some nice little addons to make our lives in WoW much easier. Now addon configuration can be a complete pain in the proverbials, especially if you are in the habit of getting a bit carried away. My advice is first go and get the Curse Client then think long and hard about which aspects of the UI you'd like to improve.

In the true parent style of "do what I say not what I do" (hell I need the practice with the first one on it's way) after the jump we'll leap into installing addons with reckless abandon.

One of my major issues yesterday was the unit frames, this is mainly due to what I'm used to and I would recommend any new player steer away from installing a unit frames addon until they are certain they want to get rid of the traditional World of Warcraft UI. Why? Because it takes a long, long time to get set up nicely. As can be seen from the next screenshot, mine has never been set up nicely and given my level of patience with these things - probably never will. Another parental word of wisdom there :P

 

So the screen we are seeing here is the Pitbull3 configuration screen in raid mode. Yeah I know the concept of screen real-estate is not something that has ever bothered me much. Across the top we can see 4 frames for player, player target, target's target and target's target's target. Why? Well in a group fight it's handy to see who is having their head pulled off at the time. There are also solo and party setup screens. The party screen has nice frames for party targets and pets (and even pet targets if anyone actually cares what they are doing).

"Wah my brain!" - it's ok, lets leave that be now. Once you're done, you should have some nice tidy frames in solo mode that look like  this next picture. Conveniently combining cast bar, hp bar, mana bar, XP bar etc etc etc all neatly together not scattered around the screen in random crap places.

Lets move on to the next sore point: Bags! I believe yesterday's post on the subject went "moan moan complain whine" and quite rightly too. Once you start getting bigger bags and 7 bank slots everything will suddenly become an incredible mess. I have always sworn by Bagnon for merging all bags into one frame. Bagnon has a lot of other very useful features like searching and so on but to be honest I never ever use them - I just want to get rid of all those bag frames. Bagnon does this nicely for inventory and bank slots.

 The last of my Must Have's is Auctioneer, because I'm lazy. That's right, pure lazy. A lot of people have gotten themselve very excited, enthusiastic, obsessed and eventually (like me) bored to tears with Warcraft econmics. I'm not an economist or a stock trader (otherwise I'd be playing EVE) I just want to sell whatever random rubbish I pickup out there in Azeroth at something akin to current market prices - and I'm more than happy to let someone else worry about what they are. To this end Auctioneer is your best friend. It's appraiser panel will give you a nice estimate on what price you should be selling for and will also list all other current listings of this item. Also if you scan the Auction House regularly enough and get a good database of prices, it will tell you whether that [zomg epix] you are about to buyout for 1500g is above or below market price and by what percentage.

And uploading that last image has just reminded me of a new addition to the Warcraft tooltip frame in the auction house. We now seem to have an equipment comparison frame which also informs you of your dps change and stat changes - rather handy if not completely informative. Now if only that worked in bags and on drop frames as well.

I have three or four small addons left to add here and I will let you get on with your day. The first has to be Recount which is a very nice and (I'm told by people I trust more than myself) quite acurate damage meter.

To be fair it's so much more than a damage meter, it will give you everyone's dps, HoT uptime, damage received, heals received and probably what they had for breakfast. So why would a noob druid cow be installing this so early on - well I like to keep my eyes on my dps so I know I'm doing ok with my spell rotations. Also, later on when I start healing around some instances - I'd like to know how I'm doing, how much overheal I'm throwing about and how much time I'm wasting keeping the hunter alive (I have a hunter, I'm allowed to say that).

On which note, we'll add HoTCandy

Ahhh, no not that one, Romm seems to have gotten into my uploader again... HoTCandy, despite it's name which could imply Blood Elf Cheerleaders is actually a set of unit frames for monitoring HoT decay times. It works straight out of the bag and configures itself for which ever character class you are using. Neat.

The last two addons I'm adding for now are Decursive which is a nifty addon for instancing which let's you as a decurser/curer/dispeller keep an eye on who's been afflicted by what. It also provides a sweet little set of micro-unit frames which are clickable to cure (rather than rumaging through your entire Raid UI to find the poor sod).

Secondly I'm adding Gatherer which will record herb and mineral node information not only from your own gathering exploits but also those of your guild-mates. These nodes are viewable by little icons on the world map.

Well, I'm off to see how Romm's fishing is going - if we have to eat roast [Tangled Fishing Line] for one more night I may go potty.