Posts with tag wow-addons

What's Tori Amos doing as the header? Well, since starting to do the research for this column, I haven't been able to get this song out of my head. I'm not 100% sure what the song's about, but I've replaced the words in my head with the two addons I'm going to be talking about today. There are other raid healing addons, and next week I'll likely be comparing the third of the big three, which I consider to be Healbot, Vuhdo, and Grid+Clique. If there are others out there that do the same thing which you'd like me to look at, do let me know via email on olivia@wowinsider.com or in the comments below, with links please!

But back to Tori. I never was a Vuhdo girl, I thought that was a good solution, hanging with the Healbot girls... I've been a Healbot user since I found out what a raid healing addon was, way back when, when I discovered that there were ways of healing that didn't require you to select your friendly target then cast spells. If you're not aware of exactly what all these addons do, they essentially replace your raid frames, and turn them into clickable frames, allowing you to heal with clicks on frames while holding various modifiers. I've talked before about why I don't like these for PvP healing, but for PvE, they're very handy.

That's not very "from the past", you say? That's a current tier raid, Feng the Accursed to be precise? Well, you'd be right. But, ladies and gentlemen, this is the UI of a chap called Justo. Justo emailed me his UI, and let me know that he'd had a UI featured once before back in 2007, five years ago! In that original article, Justo referred to his UI as "controlled clutter" presenting this out of combat image, and this in combat one. I have to say, he was right about the clutter, and I'm impressed he was able to maintain control.

Skip forward over five years and here we are. Justo's back, and it's really interesting to see how his UI has evolved! I was inspired by Justo's email to look back through my screenshots and get an idea of the evolution of my UI, but alas up until fairly recently, that is to say the last couple of years, I didn't really think my UI was worthy of many screenshots. It seems I preferred to hide it and take pictures of the world instead! If you have pictures of your UI going through the years, do send them in, I'd love to see a UI evolution take place!

But anyway, here we are, 5 years after the original article. Justo's UI now looks more like this, when he's in combat, and this, when he's not in combat.

Last week's Addon Spotlight was apparently a little confusing for some readers, since it dealt with raid-wide cooldowns and addons to assist in managing those cooldowns. It was not meant as a column addressing your own personal cooldowns. We talked about addons for your entire raid to follow, such as healing cooldowns for healers, so that your entire raid don't blow them all at once.

But fear not, this week we're going to look at personal cooldown tracking! This, in contrast to last week's column, looks at methods to monitor your own things, and not share them with other players. I touched briefly on this topic in an addon mailbag a while back, but my main recommendation is not behaving itself at all well at the moment, so I figure we ought to have a second look at this.

Not-so-sexy cooldown

This is the addon I recommended last time I discussed this, and up to recently was my addon of choice for personal cooldown monitoring. It's a pretty simple premise, really, it has a bar, as you use spells, their cooldowns move from one end of the bar to the other. They can either have a timer on them or not. Up to you.

I'm certainly not going to pretend even for a second that this is a comprehensive list of raid cooldown tracking addons, encompassing every addon that exists with this purpose. I'm starting off today's column with an addon suggested to me via email. If you want to suggest any addon for review, do email me with download links, a brief description, and why you think I should test it out!

Today's topic is the start of a set of raid-related Addon Spotlights. I'm really hoping that our commenters will provide more addons that they consider vital for raiding, with links and all, and that I can have a look at them so we can do this again next week. Inevitably, you'll have raiding addons I don't use, or maybe ones that I don't even know about. Tell me about them in the comments! And, of course, today's addons could also be really, really handy for PvP!

Anyhow, a while back in late October, Frego of The Wyld Hunt on The Sha'tar (EU-H) sent me an email regarding an addon he thought I should take a look at.

Welcome back to the second instalment of the new version of Reader UI of the week! Thanks so much for all your comments on last week's column, I'm doing my best to take them on board, but if there are things I'm failing at, do make suggestions! Feedback is always welcome.

This week, we're going to take a look at Synchrony's UI, which he sent in via email. If you want to do the same, please do, drop me a line by clicking the link, or send an email to olivia@wowinsider.com with some high quality screenshots of your UI, and let me know what addons you're using, why you've gone for the layout and look that you've chosen, what you like about it, and what you are still working on. UIs are always a work in progress!

Anyhow, let's get down to business.

Archaeology has been subject to some considerable improvements in Mists of Pandaria. For starters, you now get six digs at any one dig site, meaning artifacts complete faster, and leveling the profession is therefore faster. I've also heard of various other improvements that have been applied to Archaeology in Pandaria, but, alas, I have no Archaeologist characters with a sufficient level to do any Archaeology in the new continent.

A lot of players have messaged me asking about Archaeology addons, thanks for your emails as ever. Chief among the addon requests are the following:

Writing the PvP column Blood Sport here at WoW Insider, I am a little biased, but PvP is one of the two best parts of the game for me, specifically arena. So when an addon like ArenaLive comes along, which makes a tournament-style UI available to everyone, I have to let our readers know.

Opinions vary on whether WoW is a game that's suitable for e-sports. I know some may disagree with me, but I really, really enjoy watching arena matches. I sat in a hall in Cologne for 5 hours watching the European Invitationals unfold, loving every minute of it. But one of WoW's problems as an e-sport is the absence of a spectator mode. Tournaments have to create their own UIs, and the possibility for casual streamed spectator arenas was previously pretty much nil. Until now, with the launch of ArenaLive!

For a recent tournament, run by addon site Curse, ArenaLive got its first outing, allowing the author, Vadrak, to iron out any bugs, and it performed fantastically. Nilheniel built this addon from the ground up, rather than adapting existing frames, as he recognized the need for an independent UI for tournaments which didn't simply adapt Blizzard's unit frames.

Let's be honest, we all saw this one coming! It was just a matter of time before someone wrote an addon that really genuinely converted the pet battles into something remarkably similar to Pokémon. And it's already happened, just a few weeks after the launch of Mists. I am, by the way, sorry for constantly bombarding readers with Pet Battle addons! But, for Pokémon lovers, this is a pretty cool one.

Download WoWkémon from WoWInterface.

WoWkémon is installed simply by downloading the zip file from the link above, extracting and copying the contents into your Addons folder, which resides within your Interface folder in your WoW directory.

When you begin your first Pet Battle with it active, WoWKémon will enter its tutorial, with the eminent Professor Birch. He will guide you through the process of using this heavily adapted pet battle system, which has been cleverly squeezed into something as close to the original Pokémon format as possible. You will need to pay attention during the tutorial, as some of the commands are a little counter-intuitive, and intelligently the tutorial doesn't let you progress until you've actually done what it's telling you to do!

Do finish the tutorial on the first battle, though, otherwise it starts from the beginning again on your next battle, and it's not the very fastest process in the world!

With Mists of Pandaria, reputation has gone from being something you need a tabard for, to something that's really quite a big deal. Currently, with patch 5.0.5, the only way to spend your valor points is to grind out reputations with the various Mists of Pandaria factions. Disregarding my personal stance on this, it seemed logical, after two consecutive weeks of Pet Battle addons, to move into a category of addon that actually helps you do something useful for your characters!

Not that pet battles aren't useful, of course, they're just not directly contributing to your character in the same way as reputation grinding. And they're hopelessly addictive, unlike doing daily quests and other reputation grinds.

So, let's get started. I actually think the default interface for reputation monitoring is quite good from Blizzard, as it's a feature that's existed for a really long while, I suppose they've had the time to get it working well. But there are always ways you can improve on it!

So, from an addon perspective that Mists launch went off pretty darn painlessly, didn't it? I have to say I was impressed, as you may recall from last week's Addon Spotlight, I was not entirely sure how it was all going to go down. Did you have any addon problems? I know I had to switch off addons to actually get myself to Pandaria in the first place, but that is far more a reflection on my abysmal rural internet, and heavy server loading, than on the quality of work of our beloved addon authors.

I've been doing a lot of addon mailbags lately, to help people over the hump from Cataclysm to Mists, but this is the last one for a little while. I will, potentially, continue to tack them on to the end of other Addon Spotlight columns, depending on whether I receive questions that I think might be troubling a lot of people or not! If you have questions, or suggestions, do email me on olivia@wowinsider.com. I will try to get back to you!

Let's delve into the mailbag once again with a great question about Pet Battle addons!