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AddOn Spotlight: Visual Heal
In a recent addon-updating frenzy, I ran across a new addition to my regular stable of toys: Visual Heal. Visual Heal is, obviously, a UI mod for healers -- so the rest of you can just go on about your regular schedule. What us healer-folk are going to be discussing will probably bore you to tears. Because, really, when you consider the mana efficiency of Greater Heal rank 4 over Greater Heal rank 7, my healing per mana increases by 5.9%, which allows me to.......okay, now that we've run them off, we can talk. Just you and me, healer to healer. Visual Heal isn't what I'd call a must-have addon, but it does provide useful visual cues that I've found found helpful on more than one occasion. With Visual Heal installed, whenever you cast a heal, an additional health bar comes up near your cast bar showing your target's current health and your target's estimated health after the heal has been cast. As you can see in the image above, the green bar under my cast bar is Visual Heal. The green section is my current health -- full -- and the red portion is the amount the heal I'm casting will land for. (Color-coded red because it's all overhealing.) For me, it means instead of looking back and forth from my cast bar to my target's health, all I have to keep an eye on is Visual Heal, which is nice, since I've yet to be able to train my eyes to watch both bars at once.While it's a nice toy to have in single-healer situations, it starts to shine in larger groups. If multiple healers in a group all have Visual Heal installed, the Visual Heal bar will show not only your heals on a target, but others' heals -- allowing for, potentially, much better cooperation on your healing team.If you're interested in giving it a try, you can download Visual Heal from the WoW Ace Wiki, just scroll down to the bottom of their downloads page to pick up the latest version.
Xbox 360 HD DVD offers expanded; Heroes free with purchase at Best Buy starting Sunday
Cheapy D's army of frugal Fannies bring word that this week's Best Buy flyer (beginning Oct. 21) reveals Heroes on HD DVD is free with the purchase of an Xbox 360 HD DVD player. So, if we're grasping this properly, if you purchase the Xbox 360's HD DVD player from Best Buy you'll get King Kong (still bundled in), Heroes, and five free HD DVDs. The five free movies offer has also now been expanded to Europe. If the Xbox 360 HD DVD unit ends up being true, this ridiculous HD DVD vs. Blu-ray format war might actually be heating up rather than ending. All we know is that the consumers who wait for this mess to end are the ones who'll "win."Read: Get Heroes HD DVD free with player purchase.Read: Xbox announces free movies with HD DVD player.Read: Free HD DVD offer extended, new movies too.
A sneak peek at AuctioneerAdvanced
Whenever I ask people what the best way to make money in game is, chances are the word "Auctioneer" will be somewhere in the reply. Recently we received a head's up from Tagor that this fabulous addon is getting a revamp, but it isn't available to download just yet. They call it AuctioneerAdvanced, and soon it will be available to organize all your auctioning needs.They've added a ton of new features to this already powerful tool, the chief amongst them being a smart scan ability that will enable you to walk away from the Auction House when you are in the middle of a scan. No longer will we have to stand for 20 minutes at a time doing nothing but letting the addon do its thing, only to have it cancelled in the middle and have to start all over. You can now pause and resume Auctioneer, to run to the mailbox, buy reagents, have a dance contest on the AH bridge, whatever. Also of note is the retooling of the memory usage on this mod. Evidently it will no longer take up a huge chunk of your memory as it goes, which is definitely good news. I'm also pretty excited about the incremental scanning feature that will scan items even when I am not standing in the AH. I dunno about you, but spending that half an hour once a week standing around like a dope in the AH was really cramping my style.Currently AuctioneerAdvanced is available as a preview only, and if this doesn't strike you as odd, it should. I can't for the life of me remember when an addon received demo time like this. If you are interested in demoing the mod, it can be downloaded here. In any case, it looks like this mod will definitely be worth the wait.[thanks Tagor!]
Let's play Name That AddOn
You've seen a great PvP video or a funny screenshot and think to yourself: what AddOn did they use? First, I recommend doing a quick check of all the AddOn articles we've done here at WoW Insider. If you don't find it there, head over to this new thread on the WoW European forums.Players describe or post screenshot links of AddOns they are trying to identify. Then other players name it and post links on where to find it. There are many individual threads asking about UIs and AddOns in the official Interface forums, but this one thread puts those questions and answers in one spot.The thread has just started, but it's an excellent resource for those of us without the time to spend a couple of hours browsing WoW Interface.A note for our non-European readers: you can't post on the European forums without a European WoW account. So it's read only for you.
Xbox 360 HD DVD getting Euro price cut
According to eFluxMedia, Microsoft announced a price drop on their HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360 in the European market. It will drop from €200 to €180 -- which if you want to do the conversion would be around $244, the HD DVD drive retails in the States for $179.According to reports last month, Blu-ray has been outselling HD DVD formatted discs in the States 2-to-1 in the first half of the '07. Manfred Gerdes, chief of Sony Germany, said to eFluxMedia that PS3 sales have totalled 2 million there, double the number of stand-alone Blu-ray movie players. The bundle of Blu-ray with PS3 is said to have helped create this widening HD DVD vs. Blu-ray gap. At least movie buffs get something out of the deal -- now about those games.[Via X3F]
Addon Spotlight: Possessions
I should warn you in advance before we get too far into this review that Possessions has been known to be very addictive, meaning that once you use it, you may not be able to play the game without it. One particular hunter who is very near and dear to me started acting like a drug addict who had just gotten her fix when I showed her this add-on. For people who have multiple characters on the same server and especially characters devoted exclusively to storage, this add-on may send tingles of pleasure through your body that you have not previously experienced in an online game. Once you install Possessions the first time, you should immediately login to each of your characters and open all your bags in your inventory and in your bank. Once Possessions has scanned all the information into it's database initially, all updating is then done on-the-fly. This is where the sheer beauty of Possessions begins to shine. Let's suppose you're playing on your warlock who is an engineer, and someone in your guild is looking for silk cloth which would be stored in the bank of your tailor. You can either type "/poss" by itself to bring up a dialog box (and type "silk cloth" in the search field) or type "/poss silk cloth" right in the chat window. Possessions will give you a search engine style report of all the items you have that have "silk cloth" in the name. You can even "link" these results back into chat by shift-clicking the item icons in the search results. Mousing over these icons will give you the usual in-game description of the item, but at the bottom of the tooltip it will also tell you how many you have, and where the items are located on what character. There are other options in the search dialog you can explore that accomplish a variety of other filtering tasks and that allow you to search a specific character or a specific location, but that's for you to play with later. Packrats of Azeroth, download Possessions today! I should note that I've hot-linked a much larger screenshot of the Professions search window to the tooltip thumbnail above. Click it to behold the true beauty of Possessions!
The Creamy GUI Center: Mirage UI
Each week Matthew Porter contributes The Creamy GUI Center, a column aimed at helping you enhance your WoW experience by offering an in depth guide to addons, macros and other tools we use to play WoW, along with commentary on issues that affect how we all play. Welcome back readers! This week marks the end of my look at compilation addons. I hope this series has been interesting and helpful. It was neat seeing an evolution if you will as we looked at oldies but goodies CTMod and Cosmos to newer compilations like MazzleUI. This week I wrap everything up with a look at the Mirage UI compilation (formally called Insomniax Recompilation) Originally Insomniax Recompilation was a collection of addons that the author liked and felt best represented their type, with a few small tweaking here and there for compatibility. Now the Mirage UI has grown and evolved as the author uses presets to form a nice layout using the included addons, much like the MazzleUI compilation I reviewed last week. How does this compare? Read on to find out.
Addon Spotlight: Prat (and PitBull_Prat)
The basic chat interface in WoW is pretty limited. It's easy to miss what's happening in the chat window while fighting, for example, and there are many other ways in which the chat windows are not very user-friendly. Prat helps solve a lot of these usability problems, and since it's modular, you can turn its features on or off easily. New functions are being added over time, too. Here are a few of the things it can do: Enable mouse scrolling in the chat window. Abbreviate the channel names (from [Guild] to [G], or just the green color, for example) Add keybindings for various chat channels. Add a slash command (or keybinding) to whisper to your current target. Add timestamps to the frame (so that you know when someone sent a message). Color player names according to their class, and add their level beside their names. Toggle the chat buttons on or off, or move them about. Turn on chat logging. Move the chat input box (the Editbox) to a different location. Copy text from the chat frame. Shorten existing commands to your own personal alias comands. (eg: "/say "Get ready, I'm pulling now!" could be shortened to "/pull". This is like a macro, except that it is executed with your own shortened command instead of a button to click on, which is handy for things you say or do often, while out of combat.) As for that problem many of us have, where, in the thick of battle, someone will say something like, "WAIT! DON'T PULL!" or "Help me! I'm being attacked!" and you miss it because you were looking at the fight, not at the chat window: a recently developed addon, blandly named "PitBull_Prat", helps solve this problem by working in conjunction with PitBull and Prat together, by adding the text of what you and others say to a colored speech bubble right next to that player's unit frame in your interface (as you can see in the screenshot above). Since you're more likely to be looking at your friends' health bars to keep aware of how the battle is going, hopefully this will help you to see what their saying in time to help them too. Click here to download Prat and PitBull_Prat from files.wowace.com, and remember, PitBull_Prat will only work if you have both PitBull and Prat installed.
Addon Spotlight: Lightheaded (and DoubleWide)
Quests are a pain sometimes. You may already know that database sites like wowhead.com can help, since players reliably contribute their wisdom about the best way to solve quests there. The comments these players left have helped me many times when I knew that a certain series of quests might be hard and wanted to make a plan for it before logging in.But after I've already started playing, I typically don't like to bother with external programs and websites. To illustrate, consider the following hypothetical situation: you're in the middle of a quest you thought would be simple and those Disgusting Whosamawidgets simply refuse to drop the required Sticky Yellow Fluid. You've been wandering around for an hour killing (and getting killed by) these horrid creatures, and you feel stopping to open up your web browser and check Wowhead would only add to your frustration. Finally you call out in desperate all-caps leetspeak on the general channel, only to be thoroughly ignored! Then finally one wise and tender-hearted player informs you that were actually supposed to be killing the Grotesque Whosamawidgets just next door, not the Disgusting ones. You thank her, of course, but in your gut you're still feeling dumb and regretting having wasted so much time and energy.It's enough to make you feel lightheaded indeed! Thankfully that's where Cladhaire comes to the rescue with his addon designed to bring those helpful sorts of people and their comments on Wowhead right into the game for you. Lightheaded (the addon) opens up just to the right of your questlog and shows whatever wowhead's commenters have to say about the quest you click on. It only loads that portion of the quest comment database your quest is in, too. This helps to save on memory usage, save on trips to a website, and also save on massive frustration all in one lovely addon.And... on a related note, consider using DoubleWide (shown above, working with Lightheaded) to make the questlog into two panels instead of one. This makes quests and quest lists so much easier to read, Blizzard really should incorporate it into the standard interface.
Building a better DamageMeter
WyldKard sent us this great piece he wrote over at mendax.org about building a better damage meter. DamageMeters is a pretty standard addon by this point, and considering that even Blizzard has started to include damage and healing figures in some battlegrounds now, players have generally agreed that tracking your healing or damage output is a fairly good way to determine your skill as a player.Except that it really isn't. Wyld lays out a few reasons why, the most obvious being that one player outputting tons of damage doesn't mean your group actually succeeds. As a resto Shaman, I often get the short end of the stick on damage meters-- I do both healing and damage, so I never end up at the top of either list. Also, Earth Shield still isn't listed correctly even in the latest version of DamageMeters-- all of that healing, which I'm clearly responsible for, gets listed as the warrior's.That's more of a bug fix, though (DM just has to get its numbers straight), and Wyld has bigger ideas in mind for damage meters.
Addon Spotlight: Aloft
The addon known as Aloft solves many of the problems I've had with nameplates in World of Warcraft. Nameplates, or names and health bars floating above the heads of all characters within a few yards, were great at first for letting me see at a glance the status of a battle, but they quickly got too confusing and frustrating to be useful anymore. (Some people may have never known they could turn nameplates on -- by default they are toggled on and off with the "V" key.) The main problem I experienced with the default nameplates was that they kept jumping about as characters moved in a tight space, and there just wasn't room for all the entities' names and healthbars floating above their heads. Some nameplates inevitably got pushed off to the side, far away from the characters they were supposed to represent only to bounce up to the top or the right or the middle unpredictably as the character ran along. Furthermore, the default nameplates are largely the same and it was difficult to tell which ones belonged to whom.Aloft, though, lets you modify the nameplates and their presentation of the information you need. You can, for example, make the nameplates relatively small to fit more nicely together in crowds, and then assign different health bar colors to various types of characters, from hostile, neutral, or friendly NPCs -- to players (friendly or hostile) of different classes -- or even to distinctions as fine as pets within your group or not if you want. You can set up all sorts of textual information too, such as name, health or guild affiliation, and make everything appear just as you want it so that it means the most to you at a glance. You can even make the nameplates of friends who are being attacked appear in a special warning color for as long as they are under attack, or add combat text to health bars just like that which normally appears scrolling up above characters' heads or over their portrait on the unit frame.Aloft is the addon that makes nameplates actually usable for me, and I highly recommend giving it a try if you have any interest in nameplates at all. You can get it at Curse, or download the frequently updated version directly from wowace.com
Addon Spotlight: SuperInspect
Nowadays you can inspect someone's items from a full 30 yards away, but back in the day, you had to be within 10 yards in order to do it. And if someone moved out of that range while you were inspecting them, then the window showing all their items would go away. I got fed up trying to catch up to people all the time when I wanted to inspect them, so as soon as I realized that an addon could help with this, I adopted it and never went back. SuperInspect has truly been the super hero addon of player inspection because not only does it preserve the inspecting window no matter how far away your target gets, it also gives you a good view of the target's graphical model, whether a player or an NPC. This feature lets you rotate or zoom in on the target model to your heart's content. Just love the look of that monster or enemy player in front of you but can't get close enough without getting attacked? Just use SuperInspect and zoom in!There are several more features which make SuperInspect feel fleshed out and useful, such as colored borders for displayed items that indicate their quality, and total item bonuses added up from all your target's gear. It can also save the various characters you've looked at in each session so that you can look them up later. Mainly, though, SuperInspect just looks good, with a movable, scalable window, and even a pretty background behind each character that adds that certain flair that all good addons should have.
Addon Spotlight: Fubar
Fubar is one of those addons that I didn't know I needed until I tried it out. It lets you display information in a bar at the top and/or bottom of the screen -- all the numbers and meters that you want to always have handy, without having to click on anything or hover your mouse for tooltips. Fubar itself provides a framework for the Fubar modules (downloaded seperately) to display this information for you -- anything from your durability to your current experience (with rest) to the time of day (both in your time zone and on your server). I personally find one of its most useful features to be that it can show you how many of your guild mates and friends are online at any given moment, then let you hover your mouse over the number to see a tooltip list, with clickable names for whispers or invitations, just like a regular IM program. To be honest, I actually tried out its competitor, Titan Panel, long before I had heard of Fubar, and then switched to Fubar because it feels more flexible and lighter on my system. Fubar is made with Ace, which usually helps addons feel smoother somehow; the difference between Fubar and Titan is what made me go looking for other Ace addons. Also, the other thing I love about it... is that it's called "Fubar!" and most of its companion module addons end in "fu", as in "QuestsFu" and "MoneyFu!" I just love my addons with a extra helping of humor sauce.
Breakfast Topic: Desert island mod
A few days ago, 1up was asking readers about their "desert island game". You know the scenario, you've probably done this with friends before. It's usually books or CD's or movies, but 1up's article got me to thinking. Let's say you're stuck in a desert island, you have a gaming laptop powerful enough to play WoW well, and have rigged up solar power and wireless internet. Unfortunately, for the sake of our conversation, your internet and power only work to get your laptop playing WoW, no other outside communication, and you inexplicably forget to ask your guildies to send a rescue plane to your island. Oh, and your account is free. Hmm, come to think of it, why would anyone WANT to leave this situation?? Great weather, we'll pretend there's ample food, and all the WoW you can handle! It's like a little gamer's paradise there, just hanging out, getting tanned, swimming with little Nemos in the nearby offshore coral reef, finding new and interesting ways to cook fish in coconut milk. Wait, where was I? Oh yeah, so you're on this island, with your WoW laptop and all that goodness, but you can only bring 1 addon/mod with you (no compilations). What would your addon/mod be, and why?
Will Blizzard's spam-stopper really work?
In response to Blizzard's upcoming spam prevention in 2.10, there has been tons of speculation by forum-goers at whether or not the methods being implemented will really work or not. According to Drysc, a Blizzard CM:
