World of Warcraft allows all of us an unprecedented ability to modify our user interface to meet our needs. Each week WoW Insider will bring you a fresh and detailed look at reader submitted UIs. Have a screenshot of your UI you want to submit? Send it, along with your character name and server, to readerui@gmail.com.
Draxyl from the Turalyon U.S. server submits to us his Warlock UI. It's actually very reminiscent of the UI that I had for quite some time until I upgraded my graphics card and started using a lot of alpha-blending (transparency). He uses Fubar across the top with several key pieces of information and quick to reach options, and then has the bottom of the screen filled with status indicators, chat, and action buttons.
I think it's a common theme amongst most UI enthusiasts to focus the information in one or two places. This has several benefits, from limiting eye movement when trying to pickup information, to allowing more space to see what's going on in the rest of the environment.
A user interface is an ever-evolving work of art. You can use it one way for a long time and then suddenly find one simple addon that lets you change everything and make it much better. Especially with all the problems that show up every patch, I've begun to look at my interface as a constant work in progress. As such, I'm usually in a constant state of getting rid of old addons, enjoying the ones I use now, and looking for new ones that might help me even more in the future. Every choice of what to put in or what to take out is a conscious decision about what will help make my game play smoother, more successful, and more visually interesting.
As hunters, there are a number of needs that we have which other classes don't have - and special hunter addons are there to help in many of those cases, while in other situations, one of the more generalized addons might fit our needs best.
Today I'll cover three of the most glaring interface problems for hunters and show you how I deal with them at the moment. In the comments section, feel free to share your own different interface issues, as well as your own solutions, for the benefit of our readers. Keep in mind that a user interface is an extremely subjective thing, and one solution may not work for everyone. Nonetheless, often times just sharing your idea will inspire someone else to vary it a little and make their own thing out of it, which is even better.
Tonight many people are going to rush into raiding. It's going to be a fun time for many – perhaps you're going to explore the Sunwell Plateau for the first time, or perhaps you'll no longer be stuck at 5/6 and 3/4. Rage Winterchill awaits you and he's a big push over. He goes boom pretty easily.
The common component amongst all of us raiders, whether we're in Kara or pushing onto Sunwell, is that we need addons to make our life easier. There are several necessary ones: Deadly Boss Mods, Omen, ora2, Recount, DrDamage, etc... If you don't have these tonight, things can get markedly more complicated and difficult. The big problem with getting these addons is that they can be dreadfully hard to get a hold of. Most sites are bogged down to the point they're not working.
So let me make this easier for you. I've provided mirrors of several key updated patch 2.4 mods that I'll be using tonight to raid. Feel free to grab them from the links I've listed after the break. They'll only be up on these links for the next 24 hours or so – after that I'll replace the links with the addon's main site. The traffic should have subsided by then.
Once again, we find ourselves anxiously waiting for the World of Warcraftservers to come back up. However, today stands out as the best (and worst) variety of Tuesday downtime. Today we see the release of patch 2.4 and, for your addons, it is a day of reckoning. The majority of you are familiar with new content patches and the havoc they wreak on addons, but for those of you new to this; many of your addons could very well be broken.
There are a number of philosophies on how one should approach this. Some would suggest disabling your addons and waiting a few days until the storm subsides. Some have even said you should clear out your Addons folder, or your WTF folder. Clearing out the Addons folder gets rid of the addons, while deleting your WTF folder will clear all player and character settings. I personally go this route when I find that most of my addons are acting "buggy" or weird, or when I want to start with a clean slate.
I recently wrote an article on how you can automate the updating process, which I would recommend you take a look at, the servers are down anyway! Alright, really I would recommend reading through the comments of that post, as some of your fellow readers have some great advice and insight you may find helpful. Also, the folks over at WoWInterface contacted me in regards to their own addon updater, which looks promising as well. They have been busy testing it and have released a Windows version as well as a Mac/Linux version, both of which merit a look in my opinion. WoW Interface also released their Patch 2.4 Survival Guide, which I profiled recently. All this just screams that you've got options, so keep reading!
Welcome back, my friends, today we are going to inspect Quartz, a cast-bar addon. Let me start this off by noting that this addon not only changes the default cast bars, but also adds some great features for those of you who want more feedback from the World of Warcraft client.
If you check out any of the major addon sites, you will more than likely find an older version, one that still functions, so it might suit your needs. If you want the most recent version, the WoW Ace Files site has the continuously updated version.
To open the configuration window for Quartz, use the following slash command:
/quartz
This will open up the options interface, where you can change the cast bars to your liking. One feature I found nice was the Merge Tradeskill option, which will take multiple casts of the same tradeskill and puts them into one cast bar, with a countdown timer. I like to know how much time I have to run and grab a beer when creating what seems like a thousand bandages.
One of the things I really don't like about World of Warcraft, or any other MMORPG, is the waiting that is involved in getting a group together. This can be a real problem in raid environments, where it often times can take half an hour or more just to get the group set. I've been a raid leader before, so I know that they are busy and there isn't much they can do about the time we all just sit there on vent chatting with each other.
One of things that I've recently came across to help ease the wait is a little in-game game of bricks, a.k.a. breakout. Breakout is the game that I used to play back in elementary and middle school on the old Macs* where you'd bounce a ball around, breaking (you guessed it) bricks. The ball is bounced off a small platform that you move with your mouse. Pretty simple, and mindlessly entertaining.
Lately I've been enjoying a version of this game called WoWonid, which is an Ace2 addon I found via my addon updating with the WoWAceUpdater. It's a good enough implementation of the game (and quite impressive when you consider that it's done in LUA and built using an interface that's designed for game addons). The controls are simple enough, and just like the old Mac controls: move the mouse left or right to move the platform, bounce the ball, pwn.
WoW Insider fan Morduk sent in a tip about an add-on that may tickle many of you. Align is a little gem for User Interface control freaks. What this add-on actually does is lay down a grid overlay on your UI, allowing you to align (hence, the name!) your add-ons and other UI elements into an orderly array.
I have to admit that at first I was skeptical about the value of such a thing, but I have seen the light. This program has a minimal memory footprint, is simple to use and makes my sometimes-cluttered UI look so, well, dress-right-dress. Being an old Army sergeant, I can immediately appreciate the control I have over my add-on placement. Many of you eyeball your UI into what looks like order, but Align can be the decisive element in your battle for a centered Totemus sphere.
Activating and deactivating the grid is controlled by one easy command:
/align
To change the size of the grid squares, simply put in a value. An example would be "/align 64". These values round to the next multiple of 32 and stop at 256. A lower value produces larger grid squares, while a larger value creates smaller squares.
For players using add-ons that change the action bars or allow one to move the minimap, Align may just be the thing you've been looking for. One feature that I think would come in handy would be the option to snap UI elements to the grid, which would just tickle my controlling nature. Give this one a run around the block and let me know what your thoughts are!
Every week, Brian Karasek and David Bowers bring you help, tips and advice for the leveling Hunter in Scattered Shots. For those veterans looking for high end Hunter goodness, BRK is back on active duty.
You probably know by now that Big Red Kitty refers to himself as "we" in all his articles. For the longest time I thought this was just him being silly, but with his return to WoW Insider after a long hiatus, he explained that this is actually a kind of philosophical statement as to the oneness of hunter and pet.
You needn't worry that we (being Brian and I) will start trying to mimic him, but he really does have a good point. When a hunter reaches level 10 and gains his or her first pet, your pet becomes an extension of yourself, and an incredible source of power. The game suddenly gets very easy, and enemies start dying very fast. In effect, with a pet at your side, you become your own tank-damage-healing group all by yourself, able to finesse the control over your character and pet alike to achieve all sorts of neat stuff.
We've written about Totemus before here on WoW Insider-- even though it does a lot more than just time your totems as a Shaman, that's mainly what I used it for. Not only did it provide me with a visual representation of what my current totem situation was like, it also gave me a heads up whenever my totems were failing, reminding me to put them down again. But of course since that's mostly what I used it for, I may not have a need for it after patch 2.4-- along with the other UI changes, Blizzard is going to be putting a totem timer into the default UI.
It's not the first time they've "stolen" addon functionality, and it definitely won't be the last. And while a few reports are coming in from the PTR, it remains to be seen whether this change will actually replace more complicated addons (my guess is no, considering how simple Blizzard's timer looks).
But expect more of this in the patches to come-- everyone heard that Blizzard wants to implement a threatmeter into the default UI, and a "DamageMeters" type of tool would likely be appropriate for the default UI as well. Blizzard has always had the luxury of a great and hardworking addon community, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them start taking advantage of that luxury more often.
Recently members of my guild have been using a tool called Faster Ping to achieve better ping rates in game. My guild is a West Coast based guild, and attracts a lot of people from Hawaii and Australia, so they naturally have higher ping rates than those of us in the States. Faster Ping seems to be working wonders for them. It is not so much of an addon as it is a tool for Windows (though lots of people mistakingly call it an addon).
My first reaction to this was what thinking this sounded like something out of the mouth of Cliff Clavin. I mean, how can a piece of software impact something that is mainly due to physical limits? Well, after thinking about it for a bit, and reading up on what the tool does, it can.
WARNING! This paragraph will be the only one that contains technical content! Faster Ping works by removing the acknowledgement delay from TCP packets. This delay happens inside the kernel's TCP stack, and is a necessity for a lot of functions that go on inside a TCP stack. The other modification Faster Ping does is to remove delay in sending small packets (think anything less than a dozen or so bytes). These changes, at least theoretically, should not impact system stability if the Windows kernel has proper TCP/IP stack implementation. Okay, end technical content.
I always love hearing tips I've never heard about something I use all the time, and Nibuca at Mystic Chicanery posted exactly that. Auctioneer apparently has a listening module called AskPrice (enabled by typing "/auctioneer askprice on" when the addon is loaded up) which will allow other players to use a trigger (? is the default, as in "? [Wolfrunner Shoes]") to find out your Auctioneer's price via whisper. And you can set it to listen in guild chat as well, so as a guild officer or leader, you could easily and quickly answer all those "what's this worth again" questions.
I'm not sure how exactly it gets around the no-spam requirements on sending so many messages at once (although spamming is "allowed" in some whispers and chats), but if this is something that pops up in guild chat or among your friends really often (and there is someone online enough to be around whenever this question is asked), this is handy little tip for something that you probably already have installed. Very nice.
We love quests, but they can be excessively frustrating sometimes. Usually they annoy you most when they make you wander all over, back and forth, without seeming to accomplish things efficiently. The fastest levelers will tell you to try to "stack quests," or do all the quests in a small area first, then gradually move around the map to other areas. But often the best way to do this isn't clear -- you may not even know exactly which area a quest is asking you to go to.
Addons to the rescue! First, there was LightHeaded: an in-game database of comments from Wowhead.com that could help you when you get confused. Now, there's QuestHelper: an in-game guide which can tell you which direction to go, what to do, and what order to do everything in, all before you even get confused in the first place. QuestHelper isn't always right -- you still have to use your own brain, for sure -- but using this addon you'll be much less likely to make silly mistakes in your questing that slow you down and waste your time.
Raiding is notorious for the number of addons necessary. Just off the top of my head there's ora2, Omen, Deadly Boss Mobs, Recount, and WoW Web Stats logging. If you're like me you're an addon addict to boot and probably have dozens, if not nearly a hundred, other addons to make life easy.
But in all honesty, are these addons really necessary for raiding? There's some interesting arguments both ways.
One of the most convincing that I've heard is that if Blizzard really wanted you to use things like Omen, they would have built a threat meter into the game itself. That does make sense in a lot of ways. The rebuttal to this argument is that Blizzard provided a huge Addon API for programmers to make things like Omen.
Last week on AddOn Spotlight, we discussed the damage meter (and more!) mod Recount -- and there was some commenting suggesting we should cover the Ace family of addons, so here you are. Ace isn't a specific addon, but instead a code library on which addons are built -- and you can get countless different mods in Ace format.
Ace was created because many different mods have to use the same types of basic functions. With ordinary mods, these basic functions would be written and included with each addon. With Ace, this basic functionality is packaged into a single library that all Ace mods use. What this means to non-programmers is that Ace mods use fewer system resources, because they all use a the standard Ace code, which is loaded once for all of the Ace mods you have. If you're using non-Ace mods, these basic functions are loaded seperately for each addon you have -- and the more addons you have, the more this adds up. (On the flip side of this, if you only use one Ace addon, you don't gain any benefits, but if you use all Ace addons, a little efficiency improvement in each can result in a big difference.) For the programmers in the audience, Ace means you can write your addon quickly, because you have immediate access to basic Ace functionality (you don't have to reinvent the wheel -- you only have to write code for what you want to do).
Want to get started with Ace? Read on for a list of some of the best Ace addons out there.
In WoW social situations, combat and non-combat pets alike usually just take up space looking pretty. Hunter and warlock pets have many actions they can perform to help fight an enemy, of course, and for a normal gamer there's no reason they would need to do anything more. But sometimes, as a roleplayer, if you pat your pet wolf on the head, you might expect it to look up at you with those adorable puppy eyes; or if someone else pats its head, you might expect it to bite their hand off. However, with the emote system as it is, we can only type out custom emotes with our own character's name at the beginning of the sentence, never the pet's.
There's a way around this problem, which is actually quite obvious once you think of it, yet roleplayers rarely use it, so far as I have seen. If you write the possessive apostrophe-S as the first part of your character's custom emote, you can make your pet seem to do something on its own: "Isabeau 's pet wolf growls and bares his teeth." It takes a little bit more typing, and it leaves a space between your characters name and the apostrophe-S (since that's built into the emote system), but effectively it lets you roleplay two entities at the same time. Hunters and warlocks can use the PetEmote addon to help make this a little more streamlined.
Our reader Ellyndia, for instance, roleplayed a very introverted character that normally would not introduce herself to others, but using such custom emotes, she could have her Jubling walk up and interact with people first to get conversations going. Pets can reflect what your character is thinking but not saying out loud (by hissing or purring perhaps), or they can do anything that such pets in real life might do. Special non-combat pets such as the Children's Week kids, the interactive Animatronics, or even the magical Mojo, could all be especially fun to animate a little now and then. Certainly this technique would become very annoying if overused, but in moderation it can add a extra spice of humor, entertainment and even a touch of realism into the game.
Tonight many people are going to rush into raiding. It's going to be a fun time for many – perhaps you're going to explore the 
Once again, we find ourselves anxiously waiting for the 
One of the things I really don't like about World of Warcraft, or any other MMORPG, is the waiting that is involved in getting a group together. This can be a real problem in 
Recently members of my guild have been using a tool called 
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