Corryn, Wek + Mrs. Wek, Ron, Keith, James, and I all froze to death for the midnight Burning Crusade launch at the Richfield Best Buy. It got to a blistering 1 degree F in line.
Shortly after we got home and posted our complimentary maps of Azeroth on the wall, my super awesome paladin with his super awesome blues from BRD has conquered the dark portal along with everyone else!
Over the winter I’ve finally taken the plunge to overthrow the Blizzard interface entirely in favor of community addons. Before this site existed I mused about how neat some addons could get if some good project organization were to occur. This seems to have come true as the valuable and well made addons are organized very well, most using a nice code repository, like SVN. What this means for the enthusiast is that addons authored in such a way are presented in a fashion where they can be aggregated automatically whenever a new release has been prepared– no waiting for the author to upload the package somewhere. Let’s face it, most programmers aren’t the best publishers and in a world where it’s usually one or two people working on an addon it’s a pretty Good Thing to have such technology at one’s disposal.
Cue my personal mix of Addons:
Hit the photo above to get at the fullsize image along with a gallery with other images.
If the above looks interesting to you, here’s my interface roll call with descriptions, starting with the highest-impacting addons and counting down:
- X-Perl (and its additional stuff) Makes up the ‘frame’ mod to replace the widgets that draw my portrait, name, health, and mana.
- Besides visual improvements, X-Perl does its best to guess how much health enemies have to a number and its accuracy improves over time. When your targets are damaged, WoW reports a percentage to the client instead of an exact HP count, and this avoids that obfuscation.
- Highly configurable display of buffs/debuffs on yourself and your party.
- Ability to display your target’s target, and your target’s target’s target, if you’re so inclined. This produces the ability to more visually assist by clicking through your party.
- Bartender3 is the ‘bar’ mod. It allows me to put the action bars all over the place, at any size or configuration, and map hotkeys to them at will. It integrates well with FuBar (mentioned shortly) and some other mods I use for inventory, etc.
- I can’t express how awesome this mod is. It’s the vertical bar near the middle in my screenshot, though you can configure it in any shape you want. Autobar is an automatically populating action bar that fills itself with consumables and anything else I’d like. The reason this is so awesome is because over time you’ll pick up random potions, you’ll upgrade your skill in First Aid, you’ll cook different things, and if you intend to use all of these to the best of your ability you’ll want them on an action bar. I don’t think I’ve ever properly kept up with my inventory in such a way, so this addon is terrific. It categorizes your stuff and pops-up intelligently, too; e.g. if you hover over your bandages, it will pop-up all styles of bandages in your inventory, leaving the most powerful as the resident icon on the Autobar. With recent UI changes and mod improvements this has gotten a little tricky to figure out without some serious tinkering, but it’s worth every minute of your time. Trust me.
- FuBar is my Titan Panel-like addon which is the info bar at the top of my screen. It’s quickly becoming the standard due to its improvements over Titan. Too numerous to list here, it’s ‘child’ mods are plentiful and useful.
- SCT scrolls useful text near your player. Good to have in both PvP and PvE.
- Along the lines of SCT, NECB is invaluable when you’d like to know when to use your stuns/casting countermeasures, and it includes some other helpful ways to monitor and DOT effects.
- CT_Core includes a couple of things, not to mention one of my most important tools that lets you move the default tooltip display location.
- CT_Mapmod includes some great features like map notes which you can send to other CT_Mapmod users.
- CT_Mailmod is a must for the AH junkie. You can mass-mail to other players, and mass-open your inbox.
- Atlas is what it sounds like it is. It includes flight point and instance maps. Worth its weight in khorium!
- After awhile I wanted to drop the hard-to-read fonts and just soak up any text as fast as possible. ClearFont is a slightly complex-to-setup but lovely font override modification. You can set anything to a TrueType font of your choice; the creator includes a few packs as example. I use one of those packs and love it. It also includes some message window mods that supplement the next addon, too.
- Along the lines of ClearFont, Prat is an addon that hacks apart and reassembles the message windows. Numerous options let you resize text to ridiculous sizes, remove and condense unneeded information, add timestamps, color code your friends enemies, create hotkeys to chat directly to guild/party/channel/et al, set up intelligent mousewheel navigation of the scrollback buffer, and a lot more. Prat and ClearFont combine together to make a really streamlined system.
- Unfortunately the built-in quest manager blizzard gives you last about an hour before you’re wishing for something better. Fortunately enough the UI welcomes modification.
Be sure you get all of the MonkeyQuest components, listed above.
- One* aggregates your bags and does a really great job at it. Also has a FuBar plugin. Also integrates intelligently with Bartender3. OneBank is also neat because it remembers what your bank looked like last time you were there so you can check up on what’s in it without being there.
- JIM’s cooldown pulse is great if you [like myself] periodically get tunnelvisioned into a fight. When an action cooldown expires, it pulses and makes a noise at the location of your choice to remind you that you can recast.
- In many areas in raid and non-raid you need to manage agro. You can do this precisely by managing the threat level a mob has for you. Much more theory behind why this mod is great is included in its documentation.
2 comments so far
For each addon I’ve given you a link to what I’ve found to be the most reliable place to start looking for downloads. Sadly with the handful of separate mod sites you’re liable to end up in a stale location, so good luck!
January 17th, 2007 at 4:24 am
Oddly enough, though I sit right next to you when we’re playing this damn game, I appreciate this rundown of the mods. I still have yet to learn what all runs what and need to do some tweaking.
January 22nd, 2007 at 11:42 pm
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