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AddOn Spotlight: Skada
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, we do some mad-deeps. Before I start my first Addon Spotlight, I wanted to quickly give a primer on my Addon/UI preferences and the way I hope to spotlight and review addons here at WoW.com. World of Warcraft is over five years old now, and in such a short period of time a ragtag bunch of Addon coders and modders fashioned thousands of addons, making the game playable. Over five years the addon environment has evolved so greatly that now, in addition to discussing form and function, we can judge addons from an aesthetic approach. Addons that allow for greater customization and tailored appearances are now the norm. I strive to help players find not only the most useful and functional addons but also the most aesthetically pleasing of the bunch. I hope everyone reading will appreciate the mix of form, function and aesthetics, creating a better UI for everyone. My first Addon Spotlight is a great example of what I love about a good addon. Skada is a DPS meter following in the footsteps of Recount, the current ubiquitous DPS meter and bragging device currently in WoW. Recount, however, always gave me memory problems and felt sluggish. And, as a personal pet peeve, I never liked the bugle. We'll get to the bugle later. Recount does the job, however, and most of us never look back. So why switch to Skada?
Addon Spotlight: Vuhdo
We've received many tips about Vuhdo and it was only a matter of time before it would be featured here. Vuhdo is one of the most popular raid healing addons available. It offers enough features and customization options to keep even the pickiest of UI enthusiasts happy. At the same time, if your entire UI is fried and the raid is about to start, Vuhdo works great out of the box. What's so great about it? I thought you'd never ask. Let me show you.
AddOn Spotlight: EveryQuest
In patch 3.3 we gained the ability to view what quests we had completed. This ability was given to us through a backend API call that returned a list of completed quest IDs. While the normal user wouldn't be able to do anything with this data, addon authors rejoiced as they now had a mechanism to find out exactly what quests you had, and thus hadn't, completed yet. There are a few addons now that let you see exactly what quests you have left to do on your way to Loremaster, and in this AddOn Spotlight we'll take a look at my personal favorite, EveryQuest. EveryQuest is a well integrated addon that existed prior to patch 3.3, where it would track all the quests you did since you installed EveryQuest. However now the functionality has been extended and serves as my preferred method in advancing my questing achievements.
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.
WoW Add-ons panel at Dragon*Con 2009
While at Dragon*Con this weekend, I was able to attend a World of Warcraft add-ons panel hosted by Cameron Knight, commonly known as ckknight, the developer of such add-ons as Cartographer, Pitbull, Chinchilla, and FuBar. As a day job, he is currently the Lead Developer for both Curseforge and WoWAce.com as well as working as an add-on developer liaison with Blizzard to make sure the major add-on developers get access to the Cataclysm beta. The questions during the session ranged from how to write add-ons, add-on recommendations for newcomers, and even funny bug reports and anecdotes. After the break is the summarized version of the panel.
The Daily Quest: Best in slot
We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Wildstorm has hired a new artist to create #20 in the World of Warcraft comic book series. BlizzPlanet has the low down, along with a sample image. No Stock UI takes a look at the Taeo UI Compilation. Skeleton Jack is back, and this time covering the 10 Best in Slot Death Knight Bracers. 4Healz shows how you can Use Recount to its Full Potential. Rolling Hots studies the Resto Druid Gems in Patch 3.2. Click here to submit a link to TDQ
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.
Curse releases premium add-on download client
Curse has released a premium version of their add-on client. The service they are offering goes for $30 a year on their annual plan, or $5/month if you choose to pay like that. There are some features of the premium client worth looking at if you're interested in spending the money.The premium client offers one-click updating of all your add-ons, which is a very nice feature for those of us that have a few hundred of them floating around. When I tried this earlier today the updating went smoothly and without any problems.Another feature of the premium service is that you're not subjected to all the ads on the Curse website while you're logged into your account. This is good if you're still going to the site often, but I'm not sure how often you'll go to their site if you're using their add-on downloader client.
A Lawyer's take on the new UI policy
The intertubes are abuzz with the new UI policy enacted by Blizzard a couple weeks ago. Not being able to charge for add-ons or solicit donations has caused quite a stir amongst some folks. Certain add-on authors are even going as far as to boycott their projects until Blizzard changes their policy.ZAM networks, who runs the WoW information site Allakhazam, got a chance to sit down and talk with Connie Mableson, a lawyer specializing in Intellectual Property Law and Computer and Internet Law. You can read the full interview over at their site.One of the highlights of the interview is that Connie thinks Blizzard will begin monetizing the UI. "Based on all the changes Blizzard is making, I believe the Blizzard business model is to "Monetize" UI Mods/add-ons by developing them in house and offering them for sale to players "Now I don't necessarily agree with the end analysis, but her arguments are compelling and make sense. It will be interesting in another year or so to see where this UI policy change lands us. We'll have to wait and see!
Essential Addons for Wrath of the Lich King
Wrath of the Lich King brings with it a host of new and exciting features. Even with all these new features you'll want the latest addons as you level your way through Northrend. We've compiled a listing of key Wrath of the Lich King addons. We'll update this post as much as is warranted. Feel free to leave a comment if you notice a download link isn't working. But at the same time, please do not post any download links of your own – we'll have to delete it as we want to ensure all the addons we link are virus free and safe for everyone. If you need help installing an addon, check out our handy how-to guide. The essential addon list after the break.
Preparing for Wrath Day 4: Addons for leveling
While many of us have an army of alts, it's probably been a while since we've leveled our mains. Our mains are the special character for us. The main is the character that we agonize over every stat and piece of gear. With that kind of dedication and interest, we want to be sure that leveling our main goes as smooth as possible. Even if you don't take care of your main to that extent, getting out into the world and leveling again can be somewhat of a transition.One of the best ways to help with this transition is to make sure that you have all the necessary addons already configured properly before Wrath of the Lich King goes live this Thursday. While there are hundreds that you can choose from, only a few are going to really help you level quickly and like a pro.Continue reading on after the break for a quick and efficient list of addons that are going to help you level.
