Addon Spotlight: Grab Bag 7, probably the best grab bag
by Mathew McCurley 
Jan 19th 2012 at 6:00PM
Do I need to remind you again that right now is the perfect time for you to tinker with your user interface? WoW feels much more relaxed now. A second cataclysm has been averted, Deathwing has been defeated, and life is feeling pretty good right now. Sit back, relax, and clean up your interface. You'll thank me when Mists of Pandaria comes out.
Grab bag Addon Spotlights are some of my favorite editions of the column because the regular format means a lot of words about just one addon. That's great and all, but what about those addons that just don't have many words worth saying about them? These little guys fall through the cracks and land in my grab bag collection sack, thrown into the back of a shady-looking truck and taken off for "processing." It's totally painless -- no one complains too much.
LightMyMacro
LightMyMacro is an ingenious little addon from Adirelle that allows Blizzard's action button glow effect to activate on action buttons that contain a macro. My Revenge macro on my warrior, for instance, will not light up with it's traditional I'm available! glowing alert because it is buried in a macro. Now, with LightMyMacro, macros with abilities that will notify the player of activation with a lit border. Good times.
I used to think that the whole macros not lighting up thing was a bug and was going to be fixed. Has it been fixed? This problem could very well have been fixed a long time ago, and I've just been using an addon for over a year to fix a problem that didn't need fixing. Interesting. Very interesting. If this is still an issue and macros are still not properly displaying the glowing action bar effects, then this is the addon for you.
Yes, yes, it's an old addon, but it works. Like an old Zippo.
Download LightMyMacro at [Curse].
Who Taunted?
Our next addon is finding out who That Guy is. You know who I'm talking about -- the tank with Taunt in his or her rotation. Yes, there are tanks who do this. Yes, they need to stop it. Don't be rude about it; kindly let this taunter know that Taunt should be saved for actual tank swaps and not as a threat gain. Just because you can't miss with it doesn't mean it should be on cooldown permanently.
Who Taunted? simply lets you know in the chat window who taunted what mob with what ability. It is super-simple, works out of the box, and quickly identifies losers in raid groups who steal your aggro with taunts or announce to you that your off tank just screwed up. Wait and see if he says anything about it. Just go on and wait, then move on to the checklist below.
- If your off tank who has just accidentally taunted the boss 'fesses up to his mistake, jokes, or says "my bad," allow this off tank to remain amongst the living.
- If your off tank who has just accidentally taunted the boss remains quiet and says nothing, even after you bring up a potential misclick in your tank chat, you get to throw him off a cliff.
Download Who Taunted? at [Curse].
Twitter user @ibzysevic clued me in to Aurora, an addon that changes the default Blizzard user interface windows into a simpler, smoother, and more minimal form. Windows are translucent and thin black lines separate windows and provide contrast. The Auction House interface looks especially nice, in my opinion. There's a simple box around an incredibly complex mechanism. I think it fits.
There are many addons that skin the interface like Aurora, but I've never been a fan of any of them. Colors were always too dark or would clash and hurt my eyes, so they didn't last very long in my interface folder. Aurora is the first time that I've been really impressed with a full reskin. It's easy on the eyes, makes the Auction House look simply awesome, and takes a lot of the texture work out if you aren't a fan of it.
Take a look. I think you'll like Aurora.
Download Aurora at [WoWInterface].
Addon mailbag kaboom coming out of nowhere.
Mat -Sadly, there is not an addon that will allow you to do this. Addons are not allowed to request raid IDs from other players without that player's having an addon themselves that gives up that information to the asking addon. One such addon is called WhisperRaidInfo which, if installed, will allow others with this addon to send you a tell and request all of your lockout information. Without these guys' installing the addon, however, we're all out of luck when dealing with these notorious raiders.
Do you know of any addon that can tell me which one of my BH PUG members is about as sharp as a bowling ball? Ok, that's too harsh, but 5 times this past week, trying to get a 10 or 25 man BH run in, someone was saved - and it took forever each time for someone to realize it was them - my favorite was "can't be me - I only ran it on 10 man just now" . Is there any way to determine who is already saved? If there's no API - an addon that can pop up a textbox with the raid members' names to copy and paste in a site to poll their activity feed might be a way to solve it...
Also - there might be a decent mailbag article if you get a lot of the "I need an addon that does x,y,z..." emails
Thanks,
Tired-of-PUGs
I don't think that this type of thing should be required, however. What Blizzard should do is just put a border around the people in a raid group who are ineligible to enter the raid instance so that raid leaders can quickly remove the people who are unable to enter. I feel your pain, man. I feel your pain.
To be quite honest, I think we might see the end of lockouts in a weird way soon. I don't know. It's not even a problem with the Raid Finder, so maybe the PvP/PvE Wintergrasp/Tol Barad type Battlegrounds of Mists of Pandaria will also be included in the Raid Finder.
Mat,I was going to recommend Forte after reading the first part of your email and then was dismayed when you had already tried Forte and it didn't do what wanted it to do. Unfortunately, that was my recommendation. Let's see if we can get the commenters' insights for this one. Which cooldown bar that is like SexyCooldown is your favorite that isn't Forte? Leave your suggestions in the comments.
first off, thanks for the great work. Whenever I feel the urge to rework my UI, the first thing I do is skimming your awesome blogs, looking for news.
Now that I'm at it again, there's one thing that really starts bugging me - SexyCooldown isn't being updated anymore. There are inofficial updates for it, but surely it's only a matter of time before it breaks completely; a few features already don't work anymore. I've been looking for altenatives repeatedly the last few months, but found nothing that came close to it. ForteXorcist has too many features and couldn't be configured in the way I wanted to. Being a hunter, I'm using Serenity, which has a similar cooldown bar, but it doesn't work the same way. Instead of being a logarhytmic timeline, the icons all start at one end and move at different speeds to the other end. That's just not the same and I couldn't bring myself to using it (I tried, I really did).
So yeah - here's my question: do you know an addon that works exactly the same way as SexyCooldown?
Thanks,
Rilgania from Dun Morogh
See you guys next week.
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 mat@wowinsider.com.
Filed under: Add-Ons, AddOn Spotlight
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Tala Jan 19th 2012 6:16PM
Re: Who's saved
DBM handles this! Try /dbm lockout ; it requires everyone to have DBM and hit yes to share their lockouts, so it generally just eliminates who's not the problem.
DonSerrot Jan 19th 2012 6:23PM
I've been using CoolLine recently, mostly beecause I was trying to help figure out an issue with an editless skin that makes it fit nicely into my ElvUI look. I liked it enough to keep it around and it has a nice set place in my UI right above my actionbars. I'd post a pic but posting from my phone lol. But yeah, that might be worth a look too.
Cennic Jan 19th 2012 6:48PM
I also use Coolline and like it quite a bit. It's just a line with time increments on it (I have mine showing from 6m back to 10s). Your ability icons just slide along the "line" from one end to the other based on how much time is left on the cooldown. It's easy to use and you don't have to set it up, you just put it wherever you want it on your screen and it's good to go. There are however plenty of options to edit it should you wish to. I especially like the fact that once you use it for a bit you get used to where in the timeline your abilities are so you don't even have to look at it, you can just tell how much time is left with your peripheral vision.
twilit.soul Jan 19th 2012 8:25PM
I also
Jack Mynock Jan 20th 2012 12:11AM
Aura Frames. It's not quite as slick as SexyCooldown, but it's close and has a ton of custimazation options. It also doubles as a buffbar addon. If you're a fan of SexyCooldown, Aura Frames is the way to go for a stable replacement, imo.
Faith-lb Jan 19th 2012 6:26PM
macro's not lighting up has been fixed in 4.3 I think, I noticed they started lihgt up again then, (maybe it was 4.2 ,not sure?) wish i knew about that addon before though ! more visual cues are always welcome !
DonSerrot Jan 19th 2012 6:32PM
I can kinda confirm this, I have my Priest loaded with healing macros and they all light up appropriately. I think it was earlier though, I made her about a year ago and she's been max for about half a year now... 4.2 might be about right actually.
Harvoc Jan 19th 2012 6:41PM
Yep, this problem was fixed in 4.3: "Using #showtooltip in a macro should now cause the action bar icon to become highlight at the appropriate times." from the patch notes for 4.3 from Wowpedia.
Sinderion Jan 19th 2012 6:48PM
I'm not certain but I think it works if your spell is still like, on the first line that's run in the macro, such as in a mouseover macro, or a macro that has nothing but one line with a bunch of modifier options.
If you have /startattack before it, or another large list of stuff like some warriors are prone to do, it will not.
All my healers use mouseover macros, and I've never not had the light up buttons. They've worked fine. I do, however, remember copying some larger macros from a guildy, and the notifications were gone. I deemed it more important to have the flash, than have several abilities macrod together, as otherwise I was prone to not noticing at all! I could setup louder sounds for it or something, but I'm not into macros with like 8 or more abilities meant for spamming.
DonSerrot Jan 19th 2012 9:01PM
You can also force it to show a specific tooltip by putting the name of the spell after the #showtooltip. I've always been a big fan of that. Even if the spell is 2nd, 3rd, or whatever it always shows it. Works on items too.
Quidamtyra Jan 19th 2012 6:36PM
The definitely have not fixed abilities lighting up when they are inside a macro, my dk's obliterate button still has no /startattack macro =(
I was in LFR last week and the tank kept taunting off me when I had no sunder stacks. I told him he was doing so, and he responded with "I can't keep threat off you". He kept taunting everything off me and the group started getting angry at me for not holding threat, being able to easily prove he was taunting off me would have made that run just a tad less frustrating (he then proceeded to BoP me on Hagara and leave the group, just a douche...).
As for Rilgania's question, a quick look at Curse shows CoolLine Cooldowns and nkCooldown are close to SexyCooldown, but I didn't dig enough to find if they are logarithmic or linear.
Elrandir Jan 19th 2012 9:00PM
They definitely have actually, from the patch 4.3 notes:
Using #showtooltip in a macro should now cause the action bar icon to become highlight at the appropriate times.
My Obliterate and every other macro is highlighting just fine for me.
Rob Jan 20th 2012 8:09AM
I would greatly appreciate this item. Thank you!
Rob Jan 20th 2012 8:10AM
You probably just need to use "#showtooltip Obliterate" as the first line of your macro.
Sinderion Jan 19th 2012 6:37PM
Re: Forte as a replacement for other cooldown mods.
I have a feeling by "Way too many features" you meant an extremely intimidating options section. It's really big and has 10 billion things that could really be simplified if the that was the authors intention. Maybe someone could go help them out with that?
It's really really not as complicated as it looks. Instead of only giving you the bare minimum set of customization options, the author gives you all of them... basically in minimally categorized list.
Many of my characters use it without any configuration. The only time I even open the options if i'm not going for a customized setup is to disable tracking of some things, like... hearthstone which it tracks by default still I think.. and mage table iirc. Some things you just dont need to be constantly reminded of...
Once you get that down, which is just right clicking on it i think, and selecting 'disable' from the dropdown across from it's name on the list that comes up, you can go into it as little or as much as you want.
Like many awesome addons, you can't let yourself be scared by badly implemented/un optimized options menus. If you were a developer, working for free, is that where you would spend your valuable programming time? Probably not, you spend it on adding features and making the part you see all the time into something cool, even if the addon is really simple.
TL;DR Forte is actually pretty awesome, and simple. Like many awesome addons, dont let yourself be scared by badly implemented/un optimized options menus, if this is your actual concern.
Felix_rew Jan 19th 2012 6:40PM
Having just started PvPing again only my rogue I find it quite hard to stay behind my target constantly when my camera is zoomed out so far, is there an addon that tells me I'd I'm behind my target?
Sinderion Jan 19th 2012 7:29PM
This, yes this. My first instinct was to say uh.. rogue.. see if backstab is blanked out. But the more I think of it, even in dragonsoul, you benefit greatly from having your camera zoomed way out, but yes, it's then really hard to tell, even if your toon is a big night elf, whether you're behind the boss or not. When I play my rogue, a little gnome, in a 25 man raid it really is tough in the crowd of melee to make sure you're doing max dmg by being behind.
There is no question, making sure you have good situational awareness is a top priority in raids. For many (myself included) this involves having the camera zoomed almost out to max. It would be nice to have something to make the dumb little minigame of keeping yourself in a tiny little optimal dps box a little simpler. No wonder I like playing my mage way more lol.
Maybe managing mana is way easier while keeping SA since it's just a little bar to look at, not a mob of ppl to play where's waldo in constantly.
I've talked myself into really wanting such an addon now. Like the DBM range indicator, but more like showing yourself relative to the boss so it's as simple to look at as a mana bar is to keep track of. Like a local map version of the large overall map of the encounter as a whole. There has to be something simple and dumb I'm overlooking. No, just zooming in isn't an answer, I can't feel effective if it's not visually obvious what's comming in the next few seconds.
Blagaah Jan 19th 2012 11:09PM
You have 180 degree arc. Stand opposite tank. You're behind. Bosses lik Rag, the imovable ones, have a 270 degree arc. Dont hive me that, man. Turn your name on, other friendlies off, and follow the blue/green line.
Pyromelter Jan 20th 2012 12:32AM
Okay, I don't play a rogue, but if backstab only lights up when you're behind, then you should be able to make a power aura indicator, set it to show up when backstab is available.
Felix_rew Jan 20th 2012 4:40AM
See if it lets me comment this time..
I only have the problem in PvP, where my tiny gnome gets covered up, I'll try Power Auras, thanks all