dxe
Latest
Addon Spotlight Alternatives: Boss mods
Each week, WoW Insider's Mathew McCurley brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which 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. Did you know that there are multiple addons out there that can competently handle boss timers, cooldowns, and announcements? Did you know that not every one of those is named Deadly Boss Mods? By far the most popular, DBM has set the standard in terms of features and relative ease of use for a category of addons that has a high potential to overcomplicate things. Instead, the addon community has created niches and fanbases around its labors of love, creating the juggernaut boss mods that we have today. Deadly Boss Mods sits proudly in the Addon Kingdom with BigWigs and Deus Vox Encounters (DXE) as champions of letting you know that you're about to wipe the raid because you're standing in the wrong stuff.
The Light and How to Swing It: 3 essential addons for holy paladins
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. Holy paladins have come a long way from the days of five-minute Blessings and WhisperCast. There's a good kind of complexity that comes from being given choices, and there's the bad kind of complexity that comes from busy work. The developers are constantly streamlining the game and removing outdated mechanics, and I can't complain. Even though addons like PallyPower made our lives easier, the new Blessing system is so simple that we don't need any external help to handle it. Today's holy paladin has different addon needs from the healer of yesteryear. Three of the most important holy paladin addon concerns are unit frames, holy power management, and raid-specific alerts. In Dragon Soul, there are plenty of important things that we need to keep track of. Raid encounters are only going to get more and more complex and chaotic, and we need to be able to quickly get the information we need.
Addon Spotlight: 4.2 champions and troublemakers
Each week, WoW Insider brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which 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. Patch day for 4.2, Rage of the Firelands, has come and gone. The world, surprisingly, did not end -- well, end again, I guess, since the cataclysm and all. Patch 4.2 went surprisingly well, with only a few issues with a couple addons, highlighting the fact that the changes made to the WoW interface did not catch most addon authors off guard and many addons didn't even need an update to stay solid. So today, we're going to look at the champions and troublemakers from patch 4.2, Rage of the Firelands. Most addons stood the test of patch day, easily being integrated back into our UIs with the simple click of the "load out of date addons" button. We had a few troublemakers, but nothing that prevented the fall of raiding civilization like the patch 4.1 changes to scrolling combat text and damage parsers ... although there were a few snafus.
Addon Spotlight: Community Choice 2
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, the community's voice has been heard again, and addon suggestions are raining from the sky. Welcome to another exciting addition of Addon Spotlight! This week, we head back to the inbox to check out what the community thinks the WoW community at large should know about, if you already weren't aware of some of these excellent addons. We run the gamut today, from action bar and encounter mod replacements to helping you get you and your army of alts ready for the coming Cataclysm. Let's take a look at what your peers wanted you to see.
Shifting Perspectives: Tree 1, Arthas 0
Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, we save the world (of Warcraft). Originally this week's article was going to concern stomping Karazhan from top-to-bottom as a feral/resto druid, and then I got Big Bad Wolf for the opera event. Suffice it to say that the stomping took an abrupt U-turn, and I never got pictures or video of the other Kara fights that I've successfully solo'd on dozens of other occasions (though I grant they were all occasions that did not include humiliating wipes to an overgrown dog). If I weren't in the middle of a time crunch it probably would've been doable, but regrettably I will have to run a feature on how to make 1,000 gold soloing Karazhan on a later date. In the meantime, Alaron's managed to solo Big Bad Wolf successfully, but my main is in the somewhat sticky situation of not being a night elf. With the upcoming Icecrown raid buffs going all the way to 30% damage/healing/health/absorbs eventually, more and more raids are going to find their way to Arthas. Buffs aside, a lot of Arthas' difficulty lies in execution, and I started jotting down a few notes that I hope might be helpful to other druids likely to attempt the fight. We were fortunate to get both the 10- and 25-man version down, and I got astoundingly lucky on one 10-man attempt with back-to-back selections as a Harvest Soul target while I was running a video capture. I've seen a lot of comments online that caster druids aren't well-suited to dealing with this, and that's just not true at all.
