Addon Spotlight: Tidy Plates
by Mathew McCurley 
Jul 15th 2010 at 4:00PM
Addon Spotlight truly is fueled by users just like you, considering how many emails I get about Tidy Plates. "Why haven't you talked about Tidy Plates yet? It's absolutely amazing." There's a reason I haven't talked about this particular mod before, and I'll get to that explanation, but for now know that I am happy to introduce Tidy Plates to those who don't know of its existence and reintroduce the 'plates to the already faithful.
What is Tidy Plates?
Have you ever pressed the V button while playing World of Warcraft? Heck, remember pressing and holding Alt during Warcraft III? What would appear were health bars above your enemy's and your units, easily allowing you to survey the battlefield for units harmed or on the verge of death. World of Warcraft continued the trend of their health bars above creature's heads with "nameplates," a name and a health bar floating happily above mobs, enemies, creatures and other assorted objects.
Fast-forward to the time of addons, when everything is malleable, Lua flows like wine in ancient Greece and the world is good. Tidy Plates took the nameplate API and turned it into something magical, creating a customizable and theme-able nameplate experience.
Why I didn't talk about Tiny Plates sooner
Tidy Plates and I had a bad first date. The reasons are still up in the air, to be honest. Was it me? Was it Tidy Plates? Who knows. When Tidy Plates showed up at my door wearing what appeared to be a beautiful dress, she turned out to be sluggish and unresponsive, sadly pushing the metaphor of my first dates too far into the realm of reality.
Finally, the mystery was solved. The version of Tidy Plates I had originally downloaded was having problems with other addons that were conveniently still on, despite needing to have been disabled a long while back. Still, the taste of dirty plates lingered in my mouth, until the constant reader email about Tidy Plates urged me to reevaluate.
Reevaluate I did, friends and readers. Tidy Plates is customizable, clean and fairly straightforward. In addition, the entire addon is theme-able, creating the possibility for some of the best functionality in the game from an addon (which I will get to in a minute).
I started compiling a little list of whys for my currently in progress mini-series Addons 101, and I think that might be a cool concept to move over into Addon Spotlight. Why would I want this addon? Here's a little list of reasons you would want to replace your nameplates with something more robust:
- Nameplates are underutilized by the Blizzard UI, only giving the player a health bar, elite or non-elite status, and a name.
- You want more robust information in front of you and above your enemy, as opposed to having to look at a unit frame.
- You want to have a customizable nameplate that matches the look and feel of your user interface.
Threat Plates über alles
Threat Plates is one of those modifications that does one thing simply that changes your life. As a tank, you have enough to worry about. Group threat doesn't have to be one of them. What one, simple thing amongst all of the awesome things that Threat Plates does truly sets it apart? If set in tank mode, Tidy Plates shows the threat you have on a mob relative to the size and transparency of its nameplate. You can set it up however you wish. Here's the example.
You have a pack of ghouls to tank. You begin to hammer on them with your AoE threat abilities, and because you have the highest threat, the bars dwindle to a smaller size. As the jerky mage in your group begins to grab aggro on one of the ghouls, he creeps up on the threat meters. That ghoul's nameplate begins to get larger and red. Now you know to tab over to that particular ghoul and get some extra threat. It's brilliant, it works and it changed my life. Here's a video showing it all off!
Threat Plates is even more customizable than its addon parent Tidy Plates. You can customize all the transparencies and scales depending on your own preferences and even use an inverted DPS mode that shows when you're gaining too fast on the threat meter by changing the color of the nameplate. Finally, the addon sports low CPU usage and really saves a lot of space, if that's your thing.
So there it is. Tidy Plates and its happy companion, Threat Plates. Now you can stop with the emails -- I covered it. For the comments, if you're already a Tidy Plates evangelist, speak up! I want to see some awesome configurations with the nameplates. It's always been one area of the UI that I never really cared about until Tidy Plates actually started working for me.
Download Tidy Plates at [Curse] or [WoWInterface].
Download Threat Plates at [Curse] or [WoWInterface].
Speaking of emails, how about a quick reader email from the ol' Addon Mailbag?
Thanks for the email, Abe. I'm glad people are enjoying Addons 101; I've been getting some great feedback on it. As for whether addons are necessary, in light of the default UI doing its own thing, I have a short, simple answer to that. Addons were not allowed in WoW by accident. The interface was designed to be a malleable, changeable and improved-upon piece of the World of Warcraft experience.Dear Addon Mat,
I am reading and very much enjoying your Addons 101 series. Even though I am already an addon aficionado, I do like going back and reading over this stuff, to remember why I am using this stuff in the first place. My question, though, is something for you: how many addons do you really think are necessary? A lot of people feel like the default UI is good enough.
Thanks for the columns and recommendations,
Abe
The game has been designed with addons in mind since the beginning, and Blizzard constantly changes its encounter designs to cope with addons. Talk to any vanilla WoW player and ask about the old Decursive, how the original Naxxramas was built around players' effectively using the addon.
Blizzard also gives addons feeds of data and information now straight from the source, meaning addons like DPS meters and other types of addons that parse game information do so with the explicit sanction of Blizzard. Your DPS is not measured in the game -- the addon does the work. And for everyone who rails against DPS meters, it is still one of the better ways to tune encounters effectively and to monitor a player's ability to press the right buttons in the right order.
Addons are here to stay, and many of them are essential to the WoW experience. Just ask any healer in beta right now who has been healing with the default user interface. It's not fun.
See you guys next week!
Addons are what we do on Addon Spotlight. We did broker addons? Again!? Mat, what is wrong with you? Two broker Addon Spotlights? I never said I wasn't crazy! And remember, Addon Spotlight is fueled by viewers like you, so if you have a mod you think we should take a look at, email mat@wow.com. Filed under: Add-Ons, AddOn Spotlight
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
krusty_burger Jul 15th 2010 4:07PM
"..she turned out to be sluggish and unresponsive, sadly pushing the metaphor of my first dates too far into the realm of reality."
that's how most of my dates end up.
(cutaia) Jul 15th 2010 4:08PM
/comfort
Iirdan Jul 15th 2010 4:49PM
They end up that way? Mine typically start out in that pattern and quickly descend down a bottle of Jack.
Rakah Jul 15th 2010 6:50PM
For an alternative to tidy plates take a look at aloft.
bughunter Jul 16th 2010 12:44AM
Most of my dates were like that too, until I upgraded my video adapter to one that could handle MPEG-4 and DIVX video.
Wait... what?
Unain Jul 15th 2010 4:08PM
Can't live without Tidy Plates with Threat Plates as a warrior tank :).
CaryEverett Jul 15th 2010 5:28PM
Preach it sister!
MrJackSauce Jul 15th 2010 5:29PM
Same here! I don't NEED it (just like any addon, it is useful but the normal UI is honestly fine), but it's awesome! I don't ever look at Omen anymore :D.
Threat-Plates also has a small "widget" in the form of a blue bar that hovers slightly above the health bar. It shows your relevant threat to your off-tank, is very useful as it can see who are set as tanks and then not worry about your threat on the mobs that are on your off-tank.
Jorges Jul 15th 2010 6:09PM
As a feral DPS/Tank all I can say is: Threat Plates was a godsend. It can be the difference between good threat distribution and an excellent one. And these days, with DPS doing ridiculous amounts of damage and still not knowing how to control their aggro, tanks have to use all the tools they can.
Install it, use it, love it.
Sleutel Jul 15th 2010 6:38PM
I only picked TPTP up a couple of months ago, and from the first fight, I was amazed how I ever lived without it.
One small nitpick about the article:
Threat values that determine nameplate colors, size, and alpha are all based on comparisons to the threat of the leading person. So if you are tanking and someone is creeping up on you, that plate will be, say, green, right up to the second that the person pulls aggro, at which point it will turn red. So they're great for seeing (a) what you have aggro on, (b) what you don't have aggro on, and (c) what you're close to having aggro on but haven't actually peeled yet, but they can't show you (d) what you currently have aggro on but are about to lose.
AFAIK, anyway. If there's a way to do option d, someone please let me know.
Oteo Jul 15th 2010 9:17PM
Sleutel: I'm going off a memory and it's been a while since I set it up, but with TPTP there are a few settings you can play with to display how much threat you have compared to others on the top of the bar. I use the setting "Tug of War": if I'm tanking and have great threat on a target, there will be a "rope" from the middle of the bar to the right side (on the top). If the DPS start to pull aggro, the rope gradually gets tugged to the middle (it gets smaller). If I lose aggro, the rope will turn blue, and grow to the other side depending on how much threat the DPS has generated.
The title image and first image in the article seem to be using this setting.
lownwolf Jul 15th 2010 4:09PM
been using threat plates for a long time and absolutely love it. I would almost say it's mandatory for any tank, and super helpful for anyone else.
Like the article says, it'll change your life.
It's amazing that threat plates/tidy plates sets itself up almost automatically. And the first time you log in with a character that tanks, it'll ask you if you want to turn on threat plates or just leave tidy plates as the default!
Jesse Felt Jul 15th 2010 4:11PM
I love threat plates! For my healer I use cael simply for the smexy look, but on my bear I just cannot tank comfortably without threat plates.
Qot Jul 15th 2010 4:57PM
I actually like Threat Plates (the DPS incarnation) for my healer. A lot of times there'll be a Riptide tick or a small heal that goes off and I'll notice that Grid marks me as having aggro. 90% of the time it'll be nothing (a resist on the consecrate, a miss with a swipe, etc.) and the tank will pick up the mob just doing the normal AoE rotation, but every so often there's a caster somewhere just out of reach. Click on the gigantic plate, Wind Shear to reduce my threat and interrupt and the caster will either run right to the tank or will run over the consecrate/into the swipe, etc.
So, I guess Threat Plates made me a worse tank on my healer and that's a good thing.
Matt Jul 15th 2010 4:12PM
What tidy plates skin is that in the pic?
icepyro Jul 15th 2010 4:44PM
Grey plates which is the default that comes with Tidy plates.
zdave Jul 15th 2010 4:14PM
commenting on the video: i always see people die and groups wipe to shadow blast, even today. and the saddest part is, it's the classes with interrupts! like that mage in the video lol.
on tidy plates: i'm all for addons that clean stuff up. i'll have to give this a shot.
CaryEverett Jul 15th 2010 5:27PM
I always assumed she killed herself on purpose in that video to show off how it works for DPSers.
Shadowblast is a pretty easy and constant way to get yourself killed fast as a DPSer in a Heroic.
Boobah Jul 16th 2010 3:25AM
It's a pretty easy and constant way for tanks to get themselves killed fast. In my experience, very few people with interrupts do anything about these, nobody prioritizes killing the spell flingers, and since shadow blast does a percentage of max health, they're actually more dangerous to a tank that outgears the content. These are the same tanks that scoff at the bosses in heroics, much less the trash, don't check for their healer to be anywhere near them when they pull, and grab two of these guys at a time. Anywhere else in heroics and they could get away with it. Here, they drop from full to dead in a couple seconds, depending on how synced the spell flingers are.
Bluelightning Jul 16th 2010 1:36PM
Without looking at the video (I'm at work and videos won't play) are we talking about the Old Kingdom spider mobs with shadow blast? When I tank on my warrior, I purposely tell the group to not interrupt them bc I like to just spell reflect once and let those spiders one shot themselves. Lol