I thought I’d do a write-up on the addons I use in World of Warcraft, and why I think they’re useful. Some of them communicate with each other, so they become more useful if more people use them.
Although there’s quite a few addons, my interface still looks largely “vanilla”, so I don’t need to relearn the game… 🙂
AuctioneerAdvanced (and Informant)
This addon can scan the auction house (which takes quite a while; about 5 minutes on Bloodscalp) and remembers a database of prices and other statistics that is displays in a nice tooltip if you mouse-over an item. It also tells you the vendor sell price (e.g. useful if you want to pick the quest rewards that sells for the most gold because they’re useless to you). Furthermore, it extends the auction house interface to sort the items by average price (compared to its scanned database), so you can see at a glance whether items can be snapped up cheap or are horribly overpriced. Also, it offers a nice interface for selling items there, which can sell multiple stacks and displays you the other sellers for said item, and price accordingly. Enchantrix is also part of the package and displays what constituents items can be disenchanted into.
The addon is currently only available as a preview version, but that is already very stable.
BigWigs (and LittleWigs)
BigWigs provides raid (and in LittleWigs’ case party) warnings for instance bosses. This included things like player proximity (e.g. Maiden or Curator), debuffs, sacrifies, etc.
If you want to reset its settings (maybe because you accidentally disabled some warnings), delete “World of Warcraft/WTF/Account/[account name]/SavedVariables/BigWigs.lua” and “World of Warcraft/WTF/Account/[account name]/[server name]/[player name]/BigWigs.lua”.
Cartographer (and Cartographer_Fishing/Herbalism/Mining)
Cartographer improves the built-in full-screen map. You can create and share (!) notes on it, create waypoints that show a little arrow with a direction you’re supposed to go in (helpful for disoriented people like me that don’t know where 10 o’clock is :)), it shows the position of other guildmates (that are also using Cartographer) in the world without being in a group and plenty of other things.
The Fishing/Herbalism/Mining bits extend Cartographer to automatically remember where you gathered resources nodes, which is very useful if you’re looking for a particular plant / metal / fish, or simply want to farm for materials.
ClosetGnome (and ClosetGnome_Mount)
With ClosetGnome you can create and swap between different sets of gear with a single mouse-click / keyboard button. For example, I have a normal “default” healing set, one with a focus on MP5 for boss fights, and another feral set (which I usually leave in the bank, though). This integrates nicely into FuBar (see later), but can also be used without it.
The ClosetGnome_Mount bit enables your gnome to switch sets based on mounting / unmounting, so you can equip your Riding Crop or Charm of Swift Flight.
FuBar
Now FuBar I really like. It’s not really an addon on its own, but a system which other addons can use (and quite a lot actually already support it without you being aware of it). Essentially, it creates a small panel or bar at the top of bottom of your screen, in which other information or plugins can be displayed. This really cleans up the sometimes overcrowded ring of addon buttons around the minimap… I’m going to list the FuBar bits that I’ve found useful, but there’s quite a few more:
BagFu — Displays the used and free slots for your bags and opens them all on a click
ExperienceFu — Shows you levelling statistics like “how long to level”, or how many more mobs at the current XP, etc.
GroupFu — Shows (and allows to change) the loot systems. Also takes care of rolling (simply click on it) and recording the results.
MailFu — A “You’ve got mail.” sorta thing. Also records your AH sales.
QuestsFu — An alternative quest tracker (which can track more than 5 quests at a time and also tracks how your party mates are progressing (e.g. “Fungi collected 8/15 Naga Scales.”))
TrackerFu — Displays your current tracking mode and allows you to change it.
TrainerFu — Tracks which skills you can learn now (or at the next level ding) and how much gold you oughta be saving up to pay for them. Also includes trade skills.
HealBot
HealBot is a reasonably easy to setup “grid click-to-cast” interface, mainly for healing and decursing. It tells you the current health status of everyone (as well as incoming heals from other people using it, so you know who’s already getting a big heal) in the party / raid, and includes reminders for missing buffs.
As an example, I’ve set it up to cast my Lifebloom macro (which activates the Lower City Prayerbook) on a left-click, Rejuvenation on a right-click, Shift+Mousebutton is my bigger heals, Alt+Mousebutton is decursing (poison and curse). I let it sort party members by max health, which means tanks are usually at the top and easier to find / heal.
It also displays who has aggro (so you can get preventive heals off on that squishy that just grabbed aggro from the tank), and who is / isn’t in range (so you can tell them to get their sorry ass over here).
A few version were quite buggy, an old stable version is 2.3.3.2, but I’ve also found 2.3.3.10 to be fine again, and from the changes done to .11 I suspect that that won’t cause any new problems either.
MobMap
MobMap displays the patrols / position / occurences of ALL (!) mobs in the game, as well as their drops and droprates, so it can answer questions like “What mob drops [this item] and where can I find this mob?” or “Where is the vendor that sells [enchaning recipe X]?”. It can displays the mob positions on the main map (default) or on the minimap as well. The addon also integrates with your Quest log and tries to extract mob and / or drop names from the quest description and thus allows you to look them up with a single click.
This addon consists of two parts (which you need to download separately): The addon itself and the database with all the information. These are updated independently from each other.
Omen
Threat meter. Know it, use it, love it. That said, as a healer on multi-mob encounters it’s a bit useless, but a new version for 2.4 will bring a few nice new modes that help in this regard. Watch this more closely than your dps-chart, please! 🙂
RatingBuster
Adds another mouse-over tooltip to gear that enables you to compare them to your currently worn gear more easily and see whether it’s an upgrade / downgrade / sidegrade. Also does nice things like converting Spirit to MP5 (for priests, druids), Int to crit% and many more.
If you use this and Informant (from Auctioneer) there is a bit of overlap in the displayed information. I simply configured them to remove duplicate information so the tooltips don’t grow huge. Fully configurable, but comes with sensible defaults.
SpellReminder
This displays timer bars for HoT, DoT, Buffs, Blessings etc, allowing you to easily determine on which mob / player you need to refresh. It’s a bit verbose out of the box (and by default has two groups of timers, one informative and one for the ones that are about to run out), but it is easily configured to your liking.
In my case, I’m only using it for my HoT-spells (Lifebloom, Rejuvenation, Regrowth) and CC abilities (Entangling Roots, Sleep). I’ve given each of these timer bars a different colour (e.g. green for LB, pink for Rejuvenation, red for CC) and can thus see very easily what needs to be refreshed. It also displays the amount of stacks and the mob / player name.
Violation
Modern SWStats / DamageMeters-like addon with FuBar-integration and low overhead. Also communicates with other players using this addon. It also offers a few interesting stats that few other addons do, like aggro duration, for example. All these stats can also be displayed in one (or more) nice little live-updated window with graphs and such. Again, watch Omen more closely than the dps chart! 🙂
