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Blood Pact: Useful addons for raiding warlocks
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill does actually have 100some addon folder things in her Addon Control Panel profile. Laugh all you want; her UI is spacious and pretty to play on. I've been asked several times from either new warlocks or old warlocks who came back to the game about what addons are out there to help a PvE warlock. Recently, it's been through Twitter, which isn't exactly the best place to explain how to get the most out of your UI. Gear is one important preparation for raiding, and I've set you up with most of those considerations. Knowing your class and spec is another, and I promise, I'll get to that. But a good buff to your spellcasting techniques is a well-done user interface, so let's talk about that.
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.
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.
The Queue: Crazy delicious gets my vote
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.Today's edition of The Queue is somewhat short, as there weren't a ton of questions in the last edition. I think everyone was too busy boggling at the video I linked. Whoops! Also, here is a random poll.%Poll-32820%Allen Ibrahim asked..."Seeing as Blizzard has been implementing popular addons into the actual game, when do you think we'll see DBM or even Omen in-game? Do you think they will just save them for the next-gen MMO instead?"
The Queue: Guest introduction
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.On the last edition of The Queue, I requested that readers write me an intro for this thing, and I would pick my favorite of the bunch to use to introduce the column. So here we go, an intro from Teregwynn:"Each end every day, except those days when he doesn't, Alex Ziebart takes time out of his busy schedule to sift through your annoying, and often repetitive, questions to find those worthy of answers. Once selected, he conjures answers for these questions which baffle the minds of mere mortals, endowing them with a level of insight which they could not, but for having read earlier editions of this very column, have ever imagined."Search asked..."I have recently started on getting Loremaster and find it quite frustrating that I don't know how many quests I have accomplished in each area. Is there any way to see how much I have already done in an area and how much left still to do? Maybe some sort of clever addon that has eluded my search."
