wow-add-on-guide
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Addon Spotlight: RankWatch
Author Gronzig emailed us a note about this new addon of his called RankWatch, which serves a simple purpose: it alerts you if anyone is using downranked spells. I'm sure we've all seen the player who forgets to train, put on their bars, or update their macros with new ranks of important spells. Heck, I was using rank two of Binding Heal well into Naxxramas, since I had it bound directly to a key with Dominos. If anyone in your party or raid uses a rank lower than the maximum for their level, RankWatch will tell then about it in a whisper. The only exception is for Life Tap, which warlocks will often use rank one of to proc effects without taking much of a health hit. Back in the day, healers would commonly downrank heals as a mana-saving measure (if I recall correctly, Heal rank four was a staple in classic raiding), but this strategy is long-gone (since patch 3.0.2), because downranked spells now cost the same amount mana as top-rank spells (or more). Configuration options include turing off the auto-whisper and ignoring certain players, which are both vital for a potentially-annoying mod like this. Overall RankWatch looks like a useful little tool, if only so I no longer have to worry about checking up on myself. Download RankWach at Curse
AddOn Spotlight: Altoholic
AddOn Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your AddOns folder, we'll cover it here. This week we're delving into the world of alts. If you're like me, you've probably got your 10 character slots on your main server filled out with supplemental characters to help your main. I've got my enchanter/scribe warlock who is only level 65 in order to learn Northrend recipes. I've got my death knight alchemist sitting at 70 for titanium and gem transmutes as well as the occasional flasks and elixirs. After a while, it gets difficult to keep track of what you do and don't have on each character. Sometimes you want to help outfit your alts with better gear only to log them in and find out they've already got a set. What you need is Altoholic.
AddOn Spotlight: Advanced Trade Skill Window
AddOn Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your AddOns folder, we'll cover it here. For anyone that has tried leveling up a profession, you know that it can be a bit of a grind. This can be especially true with things like engineering or jewelcrafting that have little parts that you have to make in order to make the actual items. Even leatherworking has the ability to upgrade leather from one grade to a better grade and still make something out of it. All of this can be confusing, especially with the categories that Blizzard has setup in the normal trade window. Advanced Trade Skill Window can help out with that problem.
AddOn Spotlight: ThatJustHappened
AddOn Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your AddOns folder, we'll cover it here.For those of you who have ever tried to macro together a message with a skill, you know that it can sometimes be awkward. The skill might still be on cooldown and the macro sends the message anyways. Other times, you decide mid-cast to change your mind, but the message already went off. If you're raiding, this can cause a lot of problems as the macro might announce you're putting up your shield wall, but you really didn't. Some class or role specific addons exist out there for helping out with this purpose, but the free form ones are few and far between.
Addon Spotlight: Addon Control Panel
Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here.Have you ever decided to try out a bunch of new addons in order to reorganize your interface? Or, have you ever walked up to the auction house and had forgotten to re-enable Auctioneer after a raid? Or even worse, have you forgotten to setup Peggle before running Trial of the Champion so you could do something during all of the boring introductions (at least before they sped it up)? If you have faced any of these situations then you know how annoying it can be to log out, swap addons and log back in. Thankfully, there is another way.
Reader UI of the Week: Twigleaf's healer UI
Reader UI of the Week is back! Each week WoW.com will bring you a fresh look at reader submitted UIs. Have a screenshot of your UI you want to submit? Send your screenshots, along with info on what mods you're using, to readerui@gmail.com. Let it never be said that I don't listen. After last week's sparse screenshot, many of you said you wanted to see a UI in real action, and especially a healer UI. I got a number of good submissions, but Twigleaf's (of Unity on Velen) stood out from the pack by being both very functional and very pretty. Everything has a place, the screen is information-packed, and nothing is ugly. If this was my UI, I would move the center scrolling combat text up a bit, since I like to keep the very center of my screen clear to watch for things. But hey, it's not my UI. Let's see what Twigleaf has to say about it.
Addon Spotlight: XLoot and friends
Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here. Today I'm going to focus on an addon that is almost purely cosmetic. XLoot is one of those addons that people will see on screenshots and ask "ooh, what is that?" Essentially, it makes your loot frames much prettier, and somewhat more informative. You can see the default configuration in the screenshot. It's extremely configurable, though; anything from background and border colors to whether the loot frame snaps to your cursor can be set with a simple "/xloot options." Personally, I like my XLoot to not snap to my cursor, since I use auto-loot and the movement is distracting. I also like to lighten it up a bit; glossy black isn't a great fit for my UI. But everyone should be able to find a look that fits.
Reader UI of the Week: Metzerott
Reader UI of the Week is back! Each week WoW.com will bring you a fresh look at reader submitted UIs. Have a screenshot of your UI you want to submit? Send your screenshots, along with info on what mods you're using, to readerui@gmail.com. This interface, by Metzerott, is one of the more unusual I've seen. With 90% of the submissions I get featuring rectangular unit frames towards the bottom, a large bottom panel studded with action buttons, and a customized mini-map moved to the middle of the bottom, it's nice to see something a little different. Well, it still hits the last point, but two out of three ain't bad. More importantly to me, it's very minimal. It covers less of the screen than any interface I've seen recently, including the default UI. I'm going to guess that the left unit frame is the player, the right is the target, and the small user frame to the upper-left of the target frame is target-of-target.
Addon Spotlight: Essential addons for raid leaders
Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here. A reader wrote in a few days ago with the question "What add ons would you consider helpful/essential for a new raid leader?", and as a raid leader myself, I thought it was such a good question that I'm devoting this Addon Spotlight to it. Deadly Boss Mods Boss mods are very helpful for all raiders, of course, but particularly crucial for raid leaders, who need to call out when raiders need to do things. If you're not familiar with boss mods, they basically aim to tell you any information about boss abilities that you might need to know during a fight. For instance, on XT-002, boss mods will tell you if anyone has a bomb debuff, when XT is about to throw a Tantrum, how long the heart has left, and so on.
