Addon Spotlight: Reputation Addons

With Mists of Pandaria, reputation has gone from being something you need a tabard for, to something that's really quite a big deal. Currently, with patch 5.0.5, the only way to spend your valor points is to grind out reputations with the various Mists of Pandaria factions. Disregarding my personal stance on this, it seemed logical, after two consecutive weeks of Pet Battle addons, to move into a category of addon that actually helps you do something useful for your characters!

Not that pet battles aren't useful, of course, they're just not directly contributing to your character in the same way as reputation grinding. And they're hopelessly addictive, unlike doing daily quests and other reputation grinds.

So, let's get started. I actually think the default interface for reputation monitoring is quite good from Blizzard, as it's a feature that's existed for a really long while, I suppose they've had the time to get it working well. But there are always ways you can improve on it!

RepCalc Reputation Bars

Download RepCalc from Curseforge.

RepCalc is a very simple little addon indeed. It allows you to track your reputation with various factions with a toggle-able floating window that remains permanently on your screen. You download the addon, and type /repcalc into your chat, and that brings up this window, which shows the reputations you're already underway with, allowing you to track them in-game. The R and the H show you your current reputation level, the R meaning revered, and the H meaning honored.

My complaint with RepCalc is that it doesn't seem to show other reputations, ones which you're lower level with, for example, this character is friendly with the Shado-Pan, close to honored, but that doesn't show up. Additionally, for the completists among us, who want to get that exalted bar to 999/999, it doesn't show exalted reputations either. It could well be something I'm doing wrong, so if you use RepCalc and are able to use it for all levels of reputation, then please do let me know in the comments!

Once you have this screen up, click the checkboxes for the reputations you want to track, and RepCalc will generate a window with some green bars for you, that, like all good things, advance ever right-wards as your reputation increases. RepCalc can only track 10 reputations at once, but frankly, if you're working on more than ten, you probably need more help than an addon can give you. Erm, I mean, you're a very dedicated WoW player. Sorry about that. In summary, it's a simple little addon that provides an ever-present visual representation of your reputation progress, but that's about it!


Sexy Reputation

Download Sexy Reputation from WoWAce.

While I'm not sure that reputation can be sexy any more than cooldowns or maps, this is another addon that serves a very similar purpose to RepCalc.

Sexy Reputation works with various broker panel addons, such as Titan Panel or Chocolate Bar. The bar in the screenshot is Titan Panel, but Chocolate Bar does exactly the same thing, namely providing a very customizable panel to display just exactly what you want at the top, bottom or side of your screen. Other data broker addons are available!

Anyhow, both these bar addons have plugins available for them, and Sexy Reputation is one of those plugins. For clarity, it won't work without a broker addon into which it can be plugged. It is not a standalone addon. What SexyReputation does is basically to take the Blizzard reputation interface and turn it into a mouseover-friendly panel that pops up, showing as much or as little information as you want it to. Just like the standard UI pane, you can show and hide reputations, but Sexy Reputation also lets you completely conceal ones you aren't tracking from your pane, rather than having them sitting there collapsed in expansion category. Mocking you with their un-filled bars.

You'll also notice the percentages, which indicate your total progress on that faction on the screenshot, and will indicate a percentage progress for both your current session, that is to say the time since your last login, and for the current day. All this can be toggled on and off as you see fit. It's a great little addon, if you're not averse to broker panels!


Factionizer

Download Factionizer from Curseforge.

You might have noticed a pattern by now with these columns, being that I have a habit of leaving the addon I'm most impressed with 'til last, and today's column is no exception. When I put a shout-out on Twitter for reputation addons, Factionizer was the most popular by a long shot.

Now, importantly, Factionizer lives on Curseforge. Curseforge is part of Curse. But, for some reason, the latest version of Factionizer is not downloadable from its Curse page. So, hit the links above, go to Curseforge, and download the latest update from the Files page. Curse client users will also need to do this, as the client downloads the 4.3 version, which, while fabulous, doesn't work in Mists. Got that? OK, let's continue.

Apologies for the giant image, people, but it's necessary to give you a fighting chance to understand just how brilliant this addon is!

OK, so what are we looking at here? On the left, we have a small portion of Blizzard's standard reputation window. It's got a few additional elements that you can just about see, including handy numerical values, to show you just how many dailies you haven't been doing on that particular character. But the right-hand pane is where it gets really exciting. I've clicked onto the elusive Golden Lotus in this example, bringing up the window on the right.

At the top of the right-hand window, you should hpoefully be able to clearly see the Golden Lotus faction description, along with useful information like what you need to do to bump yourself up to the next level of faction reputation, your current reputation, the amount you need to get to Exalted, and the reputation value of any items you may have in your bag or your bank, that you could turn in to get more reputation. You've also got the standard check-boxes below that, and then it starts to get interesting.

The list below that is a list of quests. In order to save you another gargantuan screenshot, I've included the tooltip you get from mouseing over an individual quest, but in doing so I've rather hidden the basic quest list! If you go to the bottom, you can see the Hard as a Rock quest. The bracketed number shows its level requirement, in this case 90. The number before that number is the amount of time you'd need to do that quest to progress to the next reputation level, in this case, Friendly. Moving further to the right, you can see the title of the quest, and the amount of reputation it rewards.

This section is also where item reputation is listed, so, looking at the smaller screenshot to the left, you can see that I am wholly lacking in the plant parts and lucky ears I need in order to increase my standing with the Cenarion Circle. You can also see that this shows a D for dungeon runs, a Q for quests, and there's also an I for pure item hand-in reputation gains that require no quest.

Mouseing over any of these lines gives more information as displayed in the tooltip of the giant screengrab above, giving you more information on whatever your pointer is poking.

I have to say, I'm kind of blown away by this addon. I have made no bones about the fact that I am really not a fan of reputation grinds, in any shape or form, but somehow when it's broken down into numerical values like this it becomes slightly less daunting. Once I know I can do one quest 11 times to increase my reputation to friendly, doing so seems less of a chore than randomly doing quests without really being that aware of what I need to achieve to accomplish my goal.

The only thing I'd absolutely love to see added is a way to sort the quests/items/etc by reputation gained so I can see the most lucrative ones at the top, and the addition of some co-ordinates or location information for quest-givers, although another addon would provide this without issue it'd be great to get this on Factionizer too.

As ever, if you have any other recommendations, we always welcome them, pop in a comment or send me an email!

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.