Addon Spotlight: Reviewing readers' secret addons
A couple of weeks back, I asked, in a discussion topic, for readers to submit their secret addons. I wasn't after addons everyone had heard of, like DBM, Recount, or Bartender, nor indeed addons that most people would have heard of, such as Adibags or TellMeWhen. I was after obscure little addons, maybe addons that didn't do a great deal, but were a huge help, and which their users wouldn't be without. And you wonderful people gave me plenty to be going along with!
Side note, though, many of you mentioned that you actually wrote addons yourselves, and that's something I'd absolutely love to do -- feature readers' addons. No matter if they're not on Curse or similar, drop me a line on olivia@wowinsider.com and we'll sort something out. Let's get started!
OneClickEnchantScroll
Oh my. OCES, as we'll call it from now on, was one addon that immediately caught my eye. It is one of those addons that really does exactly what it says on the tin. I've wanted a way to do this forever, and it's really only a minor efficiency gain, as all it removes is a single click. But man, it's great to remove that one click!
What OCES does is to make it so that your enchanting pane has an additional button added to it, that simply says "Scroll (17)" where 17 is the number of scrolls you have in your bag. Instead of opening your bag, selecting the appropriate enchant from your profession window, and then clicking the Vellum in your bag, you just click the "Scroll" button, and OCES will automatically put the enchant you have selected onto a Vellum. It won't do two at once, or anything like that, but man it's great. I love this addon. It's worth noting that it isn't guaranteed to work with UI replacements, but the Tukui/ElvUI Skins package from tukui.org integrates it seamlessly into Tukui and ElvUI.
Multishot
When I first saw this addon's title, I immediately assumed it was something to do with hunters, and almost skipped over it. Not that there's anything wrong with hunters, of course, just that I was really looking more for general interest addons than class-specific ones. But it's not, Multishot is a screenshotter. There have been other addons that did what Multishot does, and maybe there still are, but Multishot was suggested, is regularly updated, and does a great job.
It will screenshot your own level-ups, guild level-ups, achievements and guild achievements, reputation level-ups, challenge mode medals, battleground and arena wins, as well as any rare or elite mob kills. With all this, it's easy to fill up your hard drive with screenshots, especially if you are an active player, but it's OK, because Multishot has an in-game configuration menu that allows you to switch elements of it on and off. So if you only want it to screenshot battleground wins, then leave only that box checked.
It will also do what it refers to as Timeline Mode, that will take a screenshot at a user-determined interval, so every 20 minutes, for example, creating a timeline of your WoW life. It also allows you to set a capture delay, so if you want it to go faster or wait a tad longer before grabbing automatic shots you can tell it to. There's also the option to auto-hide the UI, add /played, show the character window, or add a watermark. This addon really does do everything you could ask for as far as screenshots go!
Drop The Cheapest Thing
Yet another great little addon that is a huge quality of life gain. Say you're out and about farming things, and you're running out of bag space. This happens to me a lot, in old dungeon runs, when I'm out herbing, and I've just messed up and miscalculated my bag space. Or I get a little obsessive, and get the notion in my head that I have to land up on round number stacks of a certain herb or ore. My brain is awful to me sometimes!
But what happens is that I run out of bag space. Then, I rapidly search around in my bag, looking for the one cheapest and easiest to replace thing to drop. Often, it's junk I've accidentally picked up, but sometimes it's not. And that's where Drop The Cheapest Thing comes in. It will show up, firstly, with the default setup, with the cheapest junk you own. You can see this to the right, where I had some Twill Pants in my bag. I have ElvUI set up to auto-vendor junk, which Drop The Cheapest Thing can also do, so I don't often have much junk lying around.
But it's OK, because with a bit of setup, via the in-game interface menu, you can tell Drop The Cheapest Thing exactly what to consider for dropping and what not to. I told it to always consider items up to and including a green quality, then went through my trade goods ensuring that it didn't do things like vendoring my gems, enchanting materials and so on, and then it came up with the list that you see to the left. And say, for example, that I really had a strong sentimental attachment to the Empty Polyformic Acid Vial, for whatever reason, all I have to do is CTRL+rightclick to add it to the ignore list. Sometimes you really want to hang on to an acid vial. The ignore list is easily modified direct from your bags with drag-and-drop, no need to painfully type in each individual item.
It requires you to shift+leftclick to drop the cheapest item, so it's definitely hard to do it by accident, but it's worth noting that it's not reversible. If you drop an item, it's gone forever, and so far I haven't been able to make it bring up a confirmation dialog, but that may just be because I'm not deleting anything of high enough quality or value to make it do so. Of course, you can get things back through item restoration on battle.net, but that's a bit of a hassle in itself! Nonetheless, this addon is just a fantastic little addition for any farmer, collector, transmog runner, you name it. Gone are the days of clicking and dragging. I'm keeping it.
ILvLr
This is the last addon on the list for today, and that definitely doesn't mean there won't be more readers' addon reviews, there were so many great recommendations, and if you have a little-known addon you'd like us to take a look at, let us know in the comments.
ILvLr is a simple addon that I've considered using in the past, but never really got round to installing. And I really don't know why not, I'm a bit annoyed with myself to be honest! What it does is best explained with a picture, so here's one of those.
As you can see, it adds item levels to your character pane, easily visible, and also adds in an E and a G to indicate, if possible, whether your items are enchanted and gemmed. It also color-codes your gear to indicate just what exactly is holding you back the most, what your worst item level items are. Red is the worst, so in the right-hand set, my poor baby priest has an ilvl 470 PvP main-hand and a 476 off-hand. White is mid-range, and then green indicates that items are of good quality.
This is where we get to the reason why I've put two gear sets up as an image, because the left-hand one is my baby priest's PvE gear set, and the right-hand one is her PvP gear set. Yes, I've been busy with the shamans, OK? But look at the quality levels. In the PvP set, items are considered a generally lower quality according to iLvLr than in the PvE set. Not that it matters, of course, it's just interesting. The overall iLvL of the PvP set is 2 higher, so maybe that has something to do with it? Either way, it's a great addon to add an easy spot-check to your gear. Thanks again for all the recommendations! Keep them coming!
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 olivia@wowinsider.com.
