Free Candy For Everyone

A long time ago I wrote a post on the addons I was using in World of Warcraft. Well, it’s coming close to two years since I wrote that post and I’ve made some changes to my addon packs. A friend who has been playing WoW for a long time is finally ready to try to sully his pristine interface with some of these things and wanted some tips on what to try so I thought I’d update my online list as well.

First we’ll start with the things that haven’t changed.

Auctioneer
I still use this. If you want to play the auction house game and make sure you buy low, sell high, you need to know the standard market prices on your server. This lovely tool does all the remembering for you. Scan the AH every day and build up a database of prices for everything, then whenever you mouse over anything it tells you how many times you’ve seen it at auction and what it goes for. It’s really amazing how much prices differ from server to server and this addon ensures you don’t have to keep track of that. This has become even more useful to mean now that I regularly play characters on two very different servers.

Autoprofit
Adds a button to every vendor to autosell all trash items. Yes! Makes life so easy! The main difference is that I’ve switched to using and Ace version of this addon. What’s Ace? Well, it’s a set of libraries that share memory and are optimized and blah blah blah. The main thing I care about is that there’s a handy-dandy updater application you can download and install. Then you just open it up, tell it to look for updates and install them. I don’t have to worry about keeping any of my Ace addons up to date anymore. A word of caution however, it installs the newest of new versions which is sometimes a beta and buggy. But it’s worth the convenience, in my mind.

Scrolling Combat Text
I love seeing details on everything that is damaging me or my enemies. I love seeing who healed me or how much I overhealed someone else. This one is great. Note that there are two addons, SCT and SCTD (d is for damage). Get them both for the most options! Note that I stopped using Cosmos which came with too much crap I didn’t want. I just download this one straight from the source.

CTMod
A collection of simple addons, I use it for the parts that let me see health percentages next to my party’s health bars and let me see all buffs and debuffs on party members. I don’t really raid so RaidAssist doesn’t get much use and I disable most of the bar mods. But for the few pieces I use, it is essential.

Ok, now for the new!

FuBar
This replaces TitanPanel. I basically switched because I wanted to be able to use the AceUpdater, no other reason. It puts a bar at the top and/or bottom of your screen for quick information. Time to level, gold, bag space, clock, current coordinates, anything you want really! It’s actually a framework for addons so you can find all sorts of plugins for FuBar if you search around. I actually just installed this directly from the AceUpdater, as with all the Ace addons. I installed the updater first, then checked off everything that sounded interesting and let it do the heavy lifting.

Bagnon
This replaces AllInOneInventory which broke and went kabloom. One window to see everything in your bags, one window for everything in your bank. I don’t love this addon - the windows don’t interact properly with normal WoW windows, so trade skill and character pages happily come up right on top of these. I just haven’t found something that is simple and works any better. Happy to take suggestions! But I definitely recommend an addon of this type, no more searching to find WHICH bag some item is in.

Fizzwidget’s ReagentCost
Using data from Auctioneer, this adds the market cost of the materials to craft something to all your tradeskill windows. Crafting is mostly a money losing proposition. With this addon you can at least make sure that when you’re leveling up a skill you’re making the most cost efficient items (ie the ones that sell for the closest to their crafting cost). I like the Fizzwidget addons in general and am currently also testing out Adspace which adds a tooltip to recipes that lists all the vendors that sell it. Since I like to make my money by buying patterns and selling them at auction, I hope people don’t install this one. LOL. Just kidding! Kinda.

These next addons are really not required, but they add info that can be fun or helpful.

LightHeaded
The ultimate lazy person’s tool! If you’re like me and have started up at least 30 alts over various points, you don’t care about reading the quest text on something you’ve done so many times. You just want to find the coordinates and get things done. Well this addon embeds Wowhead comments directly into the game. No more alt-tabbing out to read up on what to do for a quest or what the coordinates are! Just see it right there! And if you have a waypoint addon installed (like Cartographer) you can just click on any coordinates and an arrow will lead you there. Yes, I know I’m lazy. But this stuff helps keep the borings at bay when you’re on you gazillionth character.

Recount
This is an uber-damage meter. Not only can you see who in the group is doing the most damage, you can see what skills everyone is using to do the damage. Charts, graphs, pretty colors, what more could you ask for? I found it because I was looking for an Ace damage meter and this one far exceeded my expectations.

Omen
A threat meter, this is nice for grouping but everyone needs to be running it. Let’s you see how much aggro you are drawing and if you’re in danger of pulling a mob of your tank. Gives you a nice indication when you should back off the DPS (or the heals!).

Cartographer
A map addon, this does a lot. It reveals the whole map in a zone so you can always find things - no more waiting to discover areas to see what everything looks like. It gives you zone maps when you’re inside and instance and shows you where all the bosses are. Even cooler, you can click on those bosses and it will show you what loot they drop! That part is super cool.

Ok, that’s all for now. I love me some addons.

Some of my college friends recently started playing World of Warcraft and I keep mentioning that I use all these really awesome UI mods that make the game experience better. Well they really wanted me to stop taunting them with non-information and just tell them which darn mods they are already! If you just want to poke around at random mods, go to WorldofWar.net, that’s the place. Anyway, I thought other people might be curious about what I use, so here goes.

I am actually pretty ridiculous about my mod management. I think the easiest thing for most people to do is just download one of the big packages out there and use it. I like to pick and choose a bit more than that. But here’s where to start.

Cosmos
Cosmos is a pretty comprehensive package. It comes in a couple of flavors. You’ll probably want the Release version. For detailed info on Cosmos, there’s a wowwiki page here. There’s a list of all the included addons in Cosmos on another wiki page here.

If you want to go piecemeal, here are the most important pieces (IMO) out of the Cosmos package:

• AllInOneInventory - This one makes it so you get one giant UI for all your bags. No more searching for which bag you put that one particular thing in, it just don’t matter no more!
• EquipCompare - Get comparison to your gear whenever you mouse over something anywhere, not just at a vendor
• QuestLogLevelPatch - You want this one! It adds the quest level number to the quest log. Doesn’t seem that this is available as an independent download, but there are other quest enhancement addons you can find if you don’t want all of Cosmos.
• ScrollingCombatText - Gives you much better info about combat hits, misses, parries, reputation gains, etc floating above your targets head in combat.

I have several other Cosmos mods turned on, but those are the really essential ones.

CTMod
There’s another decent package, a bit smaller but contains some good bits, called CTMod. This also has mods to simplify bag management, to see quest levels, and very importantly, to see coordinates on the overland map. This is really useful because tips on sites like thottbot frequently refer to the coordinates of a target. Here’s how you see them. Just check things out at their website, I use:

• CTMasterMod - needed for the rest to work
• CTPartyBuffs - Let’s you see buff/debuff icons next to your parties icons on the left so you can see when they need a cure poison or another Mark of the Wild, for example
• CTUnitFrames - Let’s you put percents on or next to health/mana bars. When I’m healing this is great, I have it put the % next to all party members’ health bars so I can say “When they get below 70% I’ll heal” instead of trying to go by bar color or something

Titan Panel
Adds a little title bar to the top (and/or bottom) of your screen with easy access to lots of great stats like number of available bag slots, amount of money (mouse over to see how much gold you’ve earned/spent this session), experience info (estimated time to level!), etc. This is also a package - Titan Panel itself is a framework for mods to report data. It comes with all those I’ve mentioned but you can also download other Titan Panel mods to plugin if you want. Oh, and it has a clock in the upper right so you can see the time at a glance. That’s kinda important! And you can set the offset from server time, useful if your server isn’t in your current timezone.

Auctioneer
So good. Super good. Let’s you scan all the items at the auction house and logs their prices. Do it enough times and you can build up a good database of market prices. When you go to sell it suggests a prices for you that’s probably actually in line with what the price should be. Invaluable in making money (see my guide if you want more tips on making money). I’d go with the “complete” download which includes some tooltip enhancements which are useful. It also has Enchantrix, which is great if you are an enchanter, otherwise totally worthless. So feel free to delete that one if you are not an enchanter - it tells you what something will disenchant into and gives the value of the disenchanted items using the auctioneer data. Very cool.

AutoProfit
Can’t live without it! Adds a button to the upper right of all vendors that let’s you sell ALL gray items. One click to get rid of all that vendor trash. You can also configure it to sell/not-sell particular items. I didn’t bother, it’s really useful as-is.

There are other addons that help you figure out how much your goods actually cost to craft so you can see if you should just auction off the components (probably should most of the time! ReagentCost, which needs Auctioneer or something like it), addons that are even beyond me that let you totally change the look of the UI (DiscordUnitFrames is crazy), and so many I haven’t even tried. I advise getting the standalone mods I mentioned and trying one of the packages for a start. Let me know if anyone has any feedback or other suggestions!