Doctor Addon: MuchMoreMunch

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  There are twothings I love when it comes to addons.

1. I love it when Addon authors read my mind.
2. I love it when they execute the concept simply without adding a bazillion features.

Everybody I know who has a brain in their head has buttons on their action bars for bandages, health potions, mana potions, food and the like.  The problem is that these buttons are high-maintenance.  When you level past your current bandages or you run out of your preferred ones you’re outta luck if you forget to update the button with the ones you happen to have in stock.

Unless… you have MuchMoreMunch.

This addon is essentially a macro generator that updates on-the-fly.  Tell it to create a bandage macro and then drag it to an action bar button.  It will go through your bags and find the “best” bandages (that you can use) and put them on the button for you.  When you run out of those, it will automatically fallback to the next best ones without updating the button or the macro.

Ain’t that awesome?

Besides bandages, it will also do it’s magic with health potions, healthstones, mana potions, mana gems, health food and mana food.

You can get MuchMoreMunch (minus the hamster) here.

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When WoW Dies: Starting Over

No, I’m not speaking apocalyptically of the end of the game, when Blizzard shuts off the servers for good.  I don’t see any indications of that happening anytime in the near future.  I’m talking about when your copy of the game ceases to function.  One of the truly great things about the Windows and Mac versions of World of Warcraft is that the game is completely self-contained.  There are no “hidden” files or registry entries.  You can just copy the folder and be done.  This is a good thing because it makes backups really easy and makes moving it from computer to computer really easy.  It’s a bad thing because up until the other day, I’d been using the same installation for more than a couple of years.  Eventually something is going to get corrupted or break, and sure enough it did.  I did a Command-Option-Q to quickly get out of the game a couple of days ago and went to get a drink.  When I came back, the game still hadn’t exited.  I executed a “Force Quit” and restarted it, but it wouldn’t restart no matter what I did.  I deleted all the folders that they tell you to delete when you have problems.  It still wouldn’t restart, so I decided to do a complete re-install from scratch.

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Dr. Addon: Possessions Update!

Searching For "Fist"

It’s very rare that I will talk about something that I haven’t actually installed and played with yet.  But this is a new version of an addon I’ve used for a year or more, and if it does everything I think it does, then I need to spread the word as quickly as I can.  (If it blows, I can always delete the blog post later.  LOL.)

Possessions is one of my all-time favourite addons.  It’s one of the few that I really can’t imagine living without.  I blogged about it on the old Blogger blog as well as “that other place” that I used to work for.  Possessions really doesn’t get the fame it deserves.

Possessions keeps track of — you guessed it — your possessions.  Once it “sees” all your banks and inventories, you can search from anywhere from the command line.  (That’s one of the things I like about Possessions as opposed to other inventory mods.  For keyboard mavens like myself, it’s a breeze to find things without ever taking my hands off the keys.)  For example, typing “/poss silk” and hitting enter will search all toons and their inventories and banks for any item that has “silk” in the name.  It will even search guild banks but be forewarned that if you don’t visit the guild bank often, your information is going to get out-of-date fast because there is no way for the addon to know when other people deposit and withdraw items.

This most recent update adds new features that some of us have been waiting for for a very long time, including the ability to purge the Possessions database of characters you no longer have, or guilds you no longer belong to.  It was easy enough to do it before manually by editing the data file, but now it’s a simple command-line option.

Possessions is the perfect addon for the World of Warcraft packrat in your life.  Check it out today!

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Doctor Addon: Annoying Buff Reminder

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.

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Dr. Addon: Small Things Make Me Happy

The thing I’m finding out since the last patch is that a lot of my addons have been abandoned. It seems that an entire generation of add-on developers have just disappeared off the face of the earth, and I’m not exactly sure why. Sure the heavy-hitters are still around, but I’m one of the people who takes the road less travelled.

One of the things I noticed after the last patch is that one part of my cherished GarbageFu addon (which allows you to automatically dump vendor trash) stopped working. The button was still there, and the mechanics still worked per se, but none of the value estimates worked. When you moused over the button to vendor your trash, it would show you the value of the trash-on-hand, and it would give the individual prices as the items were vendored. Ever since the patch, all the values were simply shown as “??”.

I found a couple of add-ons last night that are just the kind I like. Small, simple, and useful. And one of them had an unexpected effect.

VendorBait – although the name sounds mildly dirty – is an awesome little add-on. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been making casual conversation with my guildmates on our Ventrilo server when I’ve sarcastically mumbled something to the effect of “Hmmmm… do I want the shield I can’t use, the leather I can’t use, the sword I can’t use, or the wand I can’t use?” during a quest turn-in.

VendorBait takes the values from SellFish (which also needs to be installed) and every time you complete a quest, it draws a little sparkly circle (like on a pet bar to denote an active skill) around the quest reward that has the highest monetary value. What a terrific little timesaver!

And… having Sellfish installed solved my GarbageFu problems. Yay.

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Installing Interface Addons

Yes folks, it’s true. On the eve of the second expansion of World of Warcraft I still know people who are addon virgins. To me it’s unfathomable. I don’t know how to survive without at least a few basic addons. First of all, let’s dispel some rumours that are very false.

1. Addons are illegal and will get my account suspended. FALSE. This is the one I hear from people all the time. Just about anything you download from Curse or any of the other big addon sites will not get your account banned. If addons were illegal, the addon maintenance panel in the character selection screen wouldn’t exist.
2. Addons are cheats. Addons are for lazy players. FALSE. While there are some addons like Lightheaded and Questhelper that help you find quest objectives, it’s nothing you can’t find yourself by tabbing out to a web browser and looking it up on a database site. Blizzard has in fact gone to great lengths in recent memory to block certain addons that it felt were making life too easy for people. Most addons just make information easier to find, or display it in a more appealing way or help you do something that’s difficult to do with the default UI.
3. Addons are hard to install. FALSE. If you can double-click a mouse, and drag ‘n drop, you can install an addon. See the tutorial below.
4. Addons only work with Windows. FALSE. The same addons work with both versions of World of Warcraft.

I wrote this tutorial in the forums of my guild. I hope you find it useful.

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