Addon Spotlight: Management addons

Addon Spotlight focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same. This week, holy crap! There's a bear.

Have I got awesome news for you, dear Addon Spotlight readers. Today, I've enlisted the help of a good friend of mine to come and discuss some miscellaneous management addons that are designed to take all that information and parse it into something useful. I would like to introduce everyone to Mongor the bear accountant. Mongor is a bear that is also an accountant, and he's my good friend. It's time to get your life managed.

Managing your money

Mongor the bear accountant is only concerned with protecting your assets, much like bears protect their young cubs or their caves when they hibernate for the winter. Mongor recommends using Auditor, a great little addon that can help you monitor, parse and assess your gold intake from creature kills, quest completions, auction house sales and more.

The first step to making money is knowing where money comes from, and as any auctioneer or bear accountant would agree, an addon like Auditor is a good first step. Analyzing what is selling and bringing in the most gold is a great way to watch the market for peaks and valleys in prices. Mongor the bear accountant also recommends Auditor because it calculates daily totals from all income sources and even has LibDataBroker support.

Auditor takes money tracking to a whole different level by tracking repair money, mail money, training money for skills and professions, and even money spent on the flight masters. Auditor's tagline, even stated in the description, should just be "just get it and see." You'll thank yourself, as well as your new bear accountant, Mongor.

Download Auditor at [Curse] or [WoWInterface].

Managing your life

Analyst is another awesome addon that tracks stuff that you do and things that you collect. While Analyst also tracks money/gold earned from various sources, Mongor the bear accountant also recommends using Analyst for other assets, including what you've looted from mobs, how many emblems you've earned per session, how much you've gathered over the course of the day and even more. Mongor, being a bear, must keep a detailed list of assets like emblems and guild bank deposits and withdrawals for tax purposes. How much honey has Mongor collected? Mongor loves honey almost as much as he loves derivative percentage gains.

LDB support is native, the interface is simple, and the tracking is awesome for people wanting to parse through all their gathering data. Mongor and I both recommend Analyst, and think it would make an excellent addition to any user interface. Also, Mongor recommends keeping all of this information, because he is an accountant and also a bear.

Download Analyst at [Curse] or [WoWInterface].

Managing your trade skills

Mongor the bear accountant has informed me that I need to address a very significant part of the World of Warcraft workforce. Tradeskillers have long emailed me, asking for an alternative to Advanced Trade Skill Window (ATSW), the reigning trade skill window replacement addon. To me, it still is the champion. Mongor the bear accountant enjoys the use of Panda, because of his affinity to things named after types of bears, but Advanced Trade Skill Window is still the most comprehensive trade skill interface replacement there is.

ATSW is one of those addons I do like to remind people of every couple of months because of the feature set. The production queue alone is worth downloading and working with a new set of trade skill options. Even the simple fact that the addon knows that you must create sub-components before the final product helps immensely. I still love Advanced Trade Skill Window, and so should you.

Download Advanced Trade Skill Window at [Curse] or [WoWInterface].

Let's do an Addon Spotlight mailbag. We haven't done one of those in a while! Also, I think Mongor, my accountant that is also a bear, has decided to go hibernate for a while. Thank you for your help, Mongor!

Thanks for the email, ElCiego. I think you're already on the right path for making things bigger and brighter on your screen for the near-sightedness. Bartender or Dominos are great for scaling action bar sizes, and Button Facade is a great choice to get rid of clutter. I would also recommend making the chat box and fonts bigger, and potentially using Fontain, allowing you to choose larger, crisper fonts that would be easier to see. Finally, I'd recommend trying Stuf Unit Frames. Stuf can create some awesome, very simple and binary-colored unit frames that can be easily distinguishable, so that you can rely less on numbers and more on bar size for health pools.

You're a damn trooper, ElCiego, to play with a condition like that. The World of Warcraft user interface is excellent for just this reason -- you can tailor the UI to accommodate even the most inconvenient hurdles.

Thanks for the email, Alex. Recount and Skada both pull the same data from the same data feed that WoW provides damage and healing addons for parsing and usage. Technically, the information both addons receive is the same, but the time at which each addon begins to record the data is different. This is why you see different numbers for both Skada and Recount -- they interpret the data they receive in different ways. As for which is better, that's a personal choice. Usually, in my experience, the two numbers that each spit out aren't all that different, so it has never really been a huge deal. Skada comes equipped out of the box with healing and absorption meters, excellent tools for discipline priests and other healers that prevent damage rather than healing it directly. Recount requires an additional module to do that. Recount also has extensive charts and graphs mapping out DPS in very specific ways. Some players love this information. Others don't seem to care. Suffice to say, each DPS/healing meter out there is competent and well worth using.

One more thing

Before I let you all go for the week, I have one request. Addons are going to be enabled really soon in the beta, as promised by Blizzard. I would love to begin spotlighting some beta addons as soon as they are ready to roll to give the addon lovers out there something to whet their whistle as we see what awaits us in Cataclysm. If you've got anything in the pipe, email me at mat@wow.com and let's let the world know your ideas in the oven.

Thanks for the emails, all, and I'll see you next week

Addons are what we do on Addon Spotlight. If you're new to mods, Addons 101 will walk you through the basics; see what other players are doing at Reader UI of the Week. If there's a mod you think Addon Spotlight should take a look at, email mat@wow.com.