One of my heroes from my childhood made a statement once about a starship he wasn’t too pleased with that he had just sabotaged. “The more they rethink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.” That statement has stayed with me for many, many years and it reflects my attitude towards addons. Yes Cartographer is wonderful (and I use it) but it’s just so damn big and there are so many things that can break in it — as is evidenced by how long it’s taken since 3.2 to get it stable again.
In a perfect world — in my perfect world — every addon would perform one function and do it well. That way there’s not as much that can break and when it does break, the loss is minimized when you have to disable it.
Annoying Buff Reminder is one-such addon. It does one thing (albeit for many classes) and it does it really well. Let’s use my shaman for an illustration of it’s use. Water Shield is — in my opinion — one of the best spells my shaman has. Unfortunately because of multiple things (attacking hits, critical hits scored, and time) that cause it to dissipate it’s very difficult to “manually” track when the buff has expired. Since I installed ABR, an obnoxious window pops up in the middle of the screen every time water shield drops. It also does the same thing when my weapon enchantment fades. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that my shaman is 250% more mana efficient since I got this addon, because my water shield is never down for more than a few seconds at a time. This alone — for me — is reason enough to have this addon installed, but it does something for virtually every class, not just shamans.
For my priest, it reminds me to cast Inner Fire and Fortitude. For my paladin it reminds me of blessings and Righteous Fury.
Last night I had to level my dagger skill from 0 to 360. With ABR it was a breeze. I just kept alternating Water Shield and Riptide, and my health and mana never dropped below 98% on a Northrend mob.
Tried it out last night on my pally. Love it.
Helps with righteous fury a ton. Another thing it helps with is auras. It assumes you do not want crusader’s aura up during a fight, which makes sense. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone inside an instance only to have my party members yell, “Hey dumbass! Mind putting up ret aura instead of crusader’s?”
After installing it and logging in, I typed in “/abr rf” and it told me it would remind me to use righteous fury. Cool. Then with crusader’s aura up, I rushed into battle, and as soon as I entered combat, it popped up saying: “Use an aura.” I put up ret aura, and it said “Use a blessing”. Put up blessing of kings and I was set.
Ran Nexus with Borley later on, and had righteous fury up. The thing I loved about it is it reminded me the second it was down. Right in the middle of a boss fight too, which was awesome, because I did not want to lose threat in the middle of it.
Thanks again, Dr. Addon.
-Borley
Glad you like it.