by Mathew McCurley

This week, we bring you the core collection of addons that make Loremaster less of a giant pain in the butt. I am here to give you all the information on the addons that make this achievement a snap. Let’s read some quest text together! Awww, yeah!

Before we jump into the Loremaster addons, I wanted to give you all a little piece of my own history with the Loremaster achievement and a small anecdote. Back when I leveled the character that currently has Loremaster, my paladin created on launch day of The Burning Crusade, the dungeon finder was not implemented. The fastest way to level 60 at the time was a rigorous questing regiment that had you maximizing experience gains through easy-to-do quests. When the Loremaster achievement came around, I was already well on my way to completion. After scouring each zone with no option to show low-level quests, I eventually completed the achievement. No addons, no low-level quest options and no sanity remaining.

Fast-forward to today — a wealth of options open up for the aspiring Loremaster. With the ability to ping the server for completed quest information and addons that do amazing things with Wowhead data, Loremaster has never been more easy and fun. My warrior, the current Loremaster candidate, is armed to the teeth with addons to make this whole ordeal as simple as possible, and I’d like to pass on that knowledge to you. Sit back; it’s still a bumpy ride.
Read the rest of this entry »

by Mathew McCurley

One of the tent-pole addons in the addon customization realm is kgPanels, a simple and incredibly versatile tool that allows users to create dynamic panel art and cosmetic accents to any user interface. The concepts may look tough to deal with, but in reality, the addon is simple to learn and offers endless possibilities. People have created some pretty impressive setups using kgPanels as the back end, and this article aims not only to get you interested in working with kgPanels but to understand how to create the simplest piece of the puzzle: the simple bottom box.

What is kgPanels?

People like to throw around the label of “Best. Addon. Ever,” to a good number of addons. Recount, for instance, could be seen as one of the most functional and important addons WoW has ever seen. kgPanels is addon salt, bringing out the beauty, texture and flavor of every other addon that it touches. You can make your user interface pop with kgPanels, as either a tool to introduce some artistic elements into your UI or to separate addons using user-defined borders and boxes.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Mathew McCurley

Healer priests, this one’s for you.

Guardian Spirited

Guardian Spirit is one of those spells in the priest’s arsenal that is just plain sexy. Tanks simply love Guardian Spirit, and it really gives the priest something that stands out as an awesome priestly ability. Save your life? Yes, please.

Guardian Spirited is a neat little addon that is designed to announce to your channels of choice when your Guardian Spirit is activated, on which target and whether the spell has saved your target’s life or the duration ran out with no need to activate. Simple, straightforward options allow you to customize which channels get the messages, but the defaults are tuned to your party or raid — while in raids, the addon defaults to announcing in /ra, for instance.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Mathew McCurley

This week, Addon Spotlight is heading into mount and pet territory, discussing a wonderful little addon called Equus Infinata. Equus not only caught my eye because of how simple and pretty the addon looks, but how it integrates straight into your already existing mount and pet interface pane. As a special treat, I asked Robert, the addon’s author, a couple of questions about creating his first addon. Click for more!

Equus Infinata adds a beautiful interface to your mounts and pets frame in the character pane, directly over Blizzard’s own. This allows the player to be free of a slash command or special button, which is always a plus for me. Equus scores major points, however, through its mount and pet color classification system.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Mathew McCurley

Today’s Addon Spotlight is a grab bag of sorts. I asked my raid group for their favorite addons, and this is the result.

SquawkAndAwe

Some of my best friends are balance druids. Seriously. In fact, now that I think about it, a good number of my WoW friends are druids of some kind, mostly balance. You know how they say that you can learn a lot about a person by looking at who they surround themselves with? What does the moonkin thing say about me?

Much like ShockandAwe, a staple addon for enhancement shaman, SquawkAndAwe replicates the experience for our boomkin brethren. Squawk provides timers for Eclipse procs, trinket procs and use timers, and everything in between. If you’re a balance druid, you know that watching your buffs and procs intently is the name of the game, so anything that can help out in the slightest could be useful.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Mathew McCurley

The zen of UI

There’s something really special about building your user interface that way you want. The preconceptions of what is right and wrong go out the window and you have the freedom to make the control scheme you want to, within reason. The zen of user interface customization, therefore, lies in understanding what you want, which also happens to be the hardest part.

The first step is to think about the pieces of the user interface you use the most and for what functions. Play with the default user interface first. Do some quests, run some instances and just be natural about it. Begin thinking about your experience and what you wish you could do more naturally. Do you wish to have a smaller bar for your potions above your chat channels? Are the buttons too small for you to effectively click in a hurry? Are you having trouble targeting group members because the default group frame is on the far left, as opposed to below your character to the right, where you’d like it?

The worst part about building a new user interface is not knowing what you want, much less what the user interface is capable of. You don’t have to use the compilation, but seeing how others set up their mods might give you a good idea or two.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Mathew McCurley

The “other essentials” of the World of Warcraft user interface are DPS and threat meters, raid warnings and cooldowns. We will tackle each individually, hopefully making some nebulous concepts more clear.

DPS and threat meters

The DPS and threat meter has almost become a thing of art in World of Warcraft. What was once an incredibly inaccurate diagnostic tool and an encounter-specific crutch (Vael, KLHThreatmeters) has become something much more, evolving into a true component of the game’s structure.

DPS stands for “damage per second,” but more colloquially it refers to the amount of damage you are capable of doing to an enemy. “Threat” is the primary way of judging who a boss is going to hit. If you’re at the top of the threat meter, the boss will attack you. DPSers need to be careful not to do as much threat as the tank, or else there could be trouble.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Brian Wood

For almost every hunter who raids — and the vast majority of those who don’t — addons are an essential tool for optimizing gameplay. While it could be argued that the only addon the hunter class needs is a pet (and possibly a frothing mug of awesomesauce), addons can contribute a lot to your performance. Properly used addons can help you avoid void zones, keep you alive and improve your DPS.

Join me after the cut as we take a look at some of the key addons that every hunter should consider using. We aren’t going to cover every possible addon, of course, but instead look at what I consider the most important hunter addons.

Where to download them

Every boss mod mentioned here is linked to its download page on Curse.com. Curse also has thousands of other mods that you can filter through at your leisure.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Mathew McCurley

First, I’ll recommend some data broker displays, those bars you usually see on the top and bottom of people’s user interfaces, and then five broker addons that you can plug into those bars. Think of the broker display addon as the garden and the broker addons as the flowers you choose to plant.

LDB, or LibDataBroker to the addon aficionados out there, is the colloquial name for a set of addons that “plug in” to a Data Broker Display such as Bazooka or ChocolateBar (or the once-great FuBar). There are a few awesome broker displays out there, so let’s recommend some!

The display bar

My personal favorite data broker display addon that houses other broker addons is ChocolateBar. It was created to be a Titan Panel/Fubar replacement and does the job very well. Big daddy Titan Panel is still around, doing its job surprisingly well after all its years serving the WoW community. Bazooka, another broker display, was recently recommended to me and I have only heard good things. Many players swear by Fortress, which takes a different approach to the bar model and gives plugins their own, separately configurable, free-floating places to live. Basically, what it really amounts to is that you have a choice in data broker displays. Since all of these addons accept the same kind of data broker plugins, you can swap around the displays to see which one gives you the type of experience you want.

Read the rest of this entry »