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.
In previous weeks we've looked at Lightheaded, which helps you understand how to do your quests, and Fubar, which can present all sorts of information concisely. Today's addon is a Fubar plugin that can work with Lightheaded to show you everything you need to know about your quests without having to click a lot of buttons or obscure your screen with your entire quest log.
QuestsFu presents you with a handy quest list in two ways. First of all, you can hover over its space on your Fubar and it'll give you a collapsable list of all the quests you're working on in a tooltip. In addition, you can have QuestsFu put up its own little quest tracker to replace Blizzard's standard tracker. The advantage to either of these color-coded quest lists is that you can just click on any of the quests themselves to open up a little window with all the quest information in it (pictured on the right). This is great for when you're in the middle of a quest and you don't want to stop moving, but you still forgot where exactly you were supposed to go or what the quest rewards are.
If you have Lightheaded installed too, then you can arrange an additional Lightheaded comments popup on the other side of your screen, and get hints about your quest without opening the big old quest log.
There are other quest managers out there, but this is my favorite because it feels so light weight, looks so attractive, works together with other addons so nicely, and also has such nice features, above and beyond what I've already mentioned:
Edit the questlog on the fly, adding or removing quests with ease.
Display quest levels, difficulty, zones, and objectives clearly.
Put objective info into monster and item tooltips
Show the quest level before you accept the quest
Show other party members' completion of quest objectives (if they have the addon too)
Optionally (I have this turned off) notify party members in /p chat when you complete a quest.
The basic chat interface in WoW is pretty limited. It's easy to miss what's happening in the chat window while fighting, for example, and there are many other ways in which the chat windows are not very user-friendly. Prat helps solve a lot of these usability problems, and since it's modular, you can turn its features on or off easily. New functions are being added over time, too. Here are a few of the things it can do:
Enable mouse scrolling in the chat window.
Abbreviate the channel names (from [Guild] to [G], or just the green color, for example)
Add keybindings for various chat channels.
Add a slash command (or keybinding) to whisper to your current target.
Add timestamps to the frame (so that you know when someone sent a message).
Color player names according to their class, and add their level beside their names.
Toggle the chat buttons on or off, or move them about.
Turn on chat logging.
Move the chat input box (the Editbox) to a different location.
Copy text from the chat frame.
Shorten existing commands to your own personal alias comands. (eg: "/say "Get ready, I'm pulling now!" could be shortened to "/pull". This is like a macro, except that it is executed with your own shortened command instead of a button to click on, which is handy for things you say or do often, while out of combat.)
As for that problem many of us have, where, in the thick of battle, someone will say something like, "WAIT! DON'T PULL!" or "Help me! I'm being attacked!" and you miss it because you were looking at the fight, not at the chat window: a recently developed addon, blandly named "PitBull_Prat", helps solve this problem by working in conjunction with PitBull and Prat together, by adding the text of what you and others say to a colored speech bubble right next to that player's unit frame in your interface (as you can see in the screenshot above). Since you're more likely to be looking at your friends' health bars to keep aware of how the battle is going, hopefully this will help you to see what their saying in time to help them too. Click here to download Prat and PitBull_Prat from files.wowace.com, and remember, PitBull_Prat will only work if you have both PitBull and Prat installed.
I've been putting off writing about this addon, mainly because it's one of the greatest addons out there, so it's hard to do it justice -- what doesn't PitBull do?
Well it won't win the game for you by itself, and its name doesn't really describe anything about it, but other than that it does pretty much anything and everything you could expect from a unit-frames replacement and then some. You can, of course, personalize your unit frames to your heart's content, more than any other unit frames mod I've seen, and that in itself is worth the download. On top of that, though, you get a ton of other features, all of which can be enabled for functionality or disabled for performance, whichever you like. Here are a few of my favorites:
Nowadays you can inspect someone's items from a full 30 yards away, but back in the day, you had to be within 10 yards in order to do it. And if someone moved out of that range while you were inspecting them, then the window showing all their items would go away.
I got fed up trying to catch up to people all the time when I wanted to inspect them, so as soon as I realized that an addon could help with this, I adopted it and never went back. SuperInspect has truly been the super hero addon of player inspection because not only does it preserve the inspecting window no matter how far away your target gets, it also gives you a good view of the target's graphical model, whether a player or an NPC. This feature lets you rotate or zoom in on the target model to your heart's content. Just love the look of that monster or enemy player in front of you but can't get close enough without getting attacked? Just use SuperInspect and zoom in!
There are several more features which make SuperInspect feel fleshed out and useful, such as colored borders for displayed items that indicate their quality, and total item bonuses added up from all your target's gear. It can also save the various characters you've looked at in each session so that you can look them up later. Mainly, though, SuperInspect just looks good, with a movable, scalable window, and even a pretty background behind each character that adds that certain flair that all good addons should have.
Here's something I've been looking for for a long time! It's not an addon itself, but it does make the management and upkeep of your addons a lot simpler.
Cairnehoof of Dethecus (US) sent this in to Mike, who kindly sent it my way:
I read your article on wowinsider (big fan btw) about the addon issue in the upcoming patch. I have come across an great application for windows that updates your addons from all the popular sites. Maybe you could share it on the site. I know many people would love it. It's alot better than the one offered on ui.worldofwar.net because it not just download from one site. It is maintained on sourceforge.net and does not contain any malicious code. (I scanned with 3 different anti-virus programs and a anti-spyware one) heres the link if you want to take a look: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wuu
So, armed with that information, I set off to explore WUU.
"www. Buy cheapest WoW gold pwns4hire. We live to serve your every need! com And we certainly don't ruin the game for everyone else who just wants to play without cheating."
Ah, gold spam. It's a bigger problem now than ever, and getting bigger every day. I feel like I get an average of one spam whisper per ten minutes when I play my level 70s, and about a mail a day or so. No, it doesn't really cost me anything, but it sure is annoying. Blizzard are allegedly working on some improvements to the situation for 2.1; one rumor says that trial accounts will no longer be able to whisper people who don't have them friended. I don't buy that, since Blizz have said several times that they want trial accounts to convey the full social nature of WoW, but we'll see.
At any rate, there's something you can do about the problem now: SpamSentry. It's a mod that automatically catches and hides spam whispers and emails, and provides a two-click solution for reporting them to GMs (which you should definitely do so they can catch the buggers). It almost makes getting spammed enjoyable, since it's so easy to report and hopefully hinder their foul goals. It plugs in to FuBar and Titan, which is always convenient, and in general is a pleasure to use. Recommended to all who get spammed (but isn't that everyone?).
We all probably know SCT, or Scrolling Combat Text, the mod that puts incoming damage, buffs, etc. above your character's head, or down the side, or whatever. It's the AddOn that Blizzard ripped off borrowed for their built-in Floating Combat Text, and it's a true classic of the AddOn world.
But what if you wanted to display your own damage, the damage you dish out, above your head? SCT - Damage (or SCTd) is the ticket there. It requires SCT, and can show all the damage you do, including names of special skills, resist information, coloration by spell school, DOT ticks, and so forth, right in the middle of the screen over your character's head where you can see it. It's very nice for ranged damage, since your target may be inconveniently located for the built-in damage display.
It's a good mod, and I love it. I only wish it would show heals I do as well as damage I do -- I know SCT can show my heals, but it would work better for my setup if SCTd could do it too. New in the latest version of SCTd, by the way, is an oft-requested feature: the ability to show damage above your targets' name plates. It's still in beta, so to speak -- it's buggy and has some limitations -- but if you want it, there it is.
When I compared EngBags and Advanced Bags Plus a while back, a commenter named Purity commended TBag to me in the comments. Well, Purity, I'm glad you did, because ever since I installed TBag, I haven't looked back. It's now one of my all-time favorite WoW mods, right next to ClearFont and TheoryCraft. Its features include:
Customizable sorted inventory frame
Customizable sorted bank frame
Text-based searching of all your characters' banks and inventories
Includes the bag bar in the inventory window, so you can easily swap bags without having to figure out how to restore the default bag bar that you nuked weeks ago because it takes up way too much space and you hardly ever use it
Really, what more could you want in an inventory mod? It's compact, it sorts very well, it seems stable. Go get it!
As I've discussed before, my main is a priest. So when the 2.0.10 patch notes came out...nah, just kidding, I've whined enough about this patch. I'm not going to talk about that now. Anyway, my priest is currently specced 14/40/7, in a strange holy DPS/healing hybrid, which works fine for farming as well as for healing Black Morass and Shadow Labyrinth and such. However, I'm anxious to start raiding, and to do that I really want a straight healing build (probably 21/40/0). Healing builds are great for healing, but I do still need some way to farm primals for my cloth transmutes -- what's the answer to this conundrum?
Roll a Hunter. And thus my BM Hunter was born; he's currently level 50. This character has been a blast to level, as I've always heard Hunters are (previously, I hadn't gotten one past 30ish). One thing that took some getting used to, though, is the range limitations, and one thing that helped a lot with getting used to that is the mod Nudge (see? I was getting there). It's pretty simple; it provides a frame that changes colors based on whether your targeted mob is in melee range, your dead zone, ranged range, or out of range (i.e. 0-5 yd, 5-8 yd, 8-40 yd, >40 yd). It didn't take long before I was able to just watch Nudge out of the corner of my eye to figure out whether I was close enough to shoot or not. And yes, I could just look at my action bars, but Nudge is a lot more obvious and a lot easier to read at a glance. Green for melee, yellow for dead zone, blue for ranged, red for out of range. Of course, now when I see a red stoplight, I have a strange urge to edge closer to it until it turns blue...but I'm sure that's unrelated.
The frame only appears when you've got a hostile mob targeted, you can move and resize it however you want, the text and colors are customizable, it takes into account Hawk Eye if you have it (at least I think it does), and altogether it feels like a well-made little bit of frill that's handy for any hunter. By the way, if you're not a hunter and are looking for something that'll simply tell you when you're in range of some given spell (40 yards for heals, perhaps?), Fudge is what you want.
Non-Priests (or Priests that don't heal), you might just want to skip over this one. MendWatch is an AddOn that...well, the author explains it best: MendWatch attempts to track the priest spell Prayer of Mending. A timer bar shows the current target of the Prayer of Mending spell with a countdown of how long the spell will last. When the target gets hit the amount the Prayer of Mending healed for will be shown and the bar will slowly fade away. If the Prayer of Mending jumps to a new target a new timer bar will be shown for the new target.
This AddOn fixes my one complaint about Prayer of Mending: it can be a bit hard to track who it's on or whether you even have one out there at all, when the battle starts getting thick. Just like Cloak of Shadows brings a Rogue vs. caster duel from "imba" to "insane," MendWatch brings PoM from "awesome" to "incredible."
If you're still reading but not familiar with Prayer of Mending, here's the spell's description: 390 mana, instant cast, 40 yard range Places a spell on the target that heals them for 800 the next time they take damage. When the heal occurs, Prayer of Mending jumps to a raid member within 20 yards. Jumps up to 5 times and lasts 30 sec after each jump. This spell can only be placed on one target at a time.
This is a big one, and one I've been waiting for for quite some time (about six months, I'd say). I don't usually bother even looking into compilations of mods, since I've found I can always put together a more satisfying solution myself, but MazzleUI may well prove to be the exception. Here's how Mazzlefizz, the author, describes it:
MazzleUI is a comprehensive, customized user interface for the World of Warcraft that attempts to be clean, symmetrical, provides lots of information, use minimal space and be highly efficient.
Sounds great, right? However, for most of MazzleUI's life, it's been in closed beta. MazzleUI 1.0 was just released today -- I saw the news when I woke up, and haven't done anything but install and play with it since. I'm just taking a break to tell you all about it, and then I'm sure I'll be diving right back in
This one is nice and simple. You know those combat ratings that Blizz introduced in 2.0.1? Crit rating, hit rating, etc.? What RatingBuster does is translate those into percentages. This is harder than you may think, because the relationship between rating and percentage varies according to your level as well as the type of rating. RatingBuster does the math for you and makes your tooltips look like what you see in the screenshot. Specifically, it inserts the little percentages in parentheses by the spellcrit and spellhit ratings.
TOTEMS! Yes, I'm the quintessential WoW Switcher. Vlambaard is sitting on a shelf, gathering dust, decked out in Judgement gear with his Herald of Woe. In his place, Wyahld has leveled like a madman, busting out totems and frostshocks all over the place.
In my eternal quest for better living in the World (of Warcraft), I came across Totemus, a UI mod for shaman in the spirit of Necrosis. As you can see in the illustration above, Totemus is essentially a big round button, with some little round buttons surrounding it.
Let's break it down, so you can see how it'll be of use to you.
It's pretty darn configurable, so I'll just reference my installation, and let you rock your own from there.
Once again, we find ourselves anxiously waiting for the World of Warcraft servers 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. 
In previous weeks we've looked at 
Nowadays you can inspect someone's items from a full 30 yards away, but back in the day, you had to be within 10 yards in order to do it. And if someone moved out of that range while you were inspecting them, then the window showing all their items would go away. 
TOTEMS! Yes, I'm the quintessential WoW Switcher. Vlambaard is sitting on a shelf, gathering dust, decked out in Judgement gear with his Herald of Woe. In his place, Wyahld has leveled like a madman, busting out totems and frostshocks all over the place.
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