Addon Recommendation: Daily Checklist

 

Recently I stumbled across a little addon that might as well have been written for me. If you happen to have memory issues due to illness (or even just have a lot to do and tend to forget some of them) this is a great addon for you to look into.

It allows you to create little checklists on a profile system so that you can either have a little checklist for each character or (like I do) a global list broken down into several sub-lists for each character so that I can see it on all the characters.

You can choose to have each entry on the checklist reset on a daily basis, only on specific days or weekly and you can set the day and time for resets. In the accompanying picture, you can see my setup. As the titles are all character names, I’ve blanked them out (mostly because I have problems if people try to whisper me during a raid as it ruins my concentration) but the rest should be clearly visible. As I complete each task I just click the box next to it and depending on the settings the entry either disappears completely or gains a yellow tick mark in the box.

I use it to remind myself of all my crafting cooldowns, AH restock, reminders to check on my farm or hand in lesser charms for bonus rolls once a week and well anything else I can think of!

If you are interested in taking a look for yourself, you can find it here.

 

 

 

 

An Adventure in Beta Testing

When my beta key arrived for the Mists of Pandaria beta, I was excited. I thought that while I might not manage to put in the endless hours that some of the more dedicated testers do, I am not afraid to give feedback and I tend to think about changes in a realistic way. I understand that the classes must all be balanced and while I might occasionally wish that a heal spell was more powerful or that I could do something that a different class does, I know that it would not be as much fun to play the game if my character was unfairly balanced against others.

I clearly hadn’t thought this through to the conclusion.

I thought the biggest problem with allowing so many people to test the beta would be that many wouldn’t understand the role of a beta tester and would just treat it like they were getting the game early and complain endlessly on the chat channels without ever providing Blizzard with feedback. I had forgotten what it was like to play the game without addons.

Now I know that most of you are probably thinking that this is going to turn into a sulky post about how the game isn’t as much fun without my addons – whinge whinge…

It isn’t.  I totally understand and support Blizzard’s reasons for not enabling the use of third party addons at this time in the beta testing process. It would take forever to get the game ready for launch if half of the bug reports and character balance feedback that was coming in was actually due to problems in addon code rather than the game itself. A large part of the beta testing population are also testing for the first time and may not be very experienced in troubleshooting addon problems. All this I know and support wholeheartedly. However, I actually require some addons to modify the base game in order to be able to play at all. I have written here before about the addons I use and why they are essential to enable me to play. Without them, I struggle to do more than move around and hit a couple of abilities.

So the reality of beta testing for me is that I’m currently unable to test past the Pandaren start zone, and even doing that much has been a real struggle. My testing will have to wait until a few basic addons are allowed to be added.

 

Slightly Alive!

Honestly, I’m not dead yet!

Lately things have spiralled out of my control a little as my computer seemed to develop several nasty problems after a random crash.  Its meant no end of hassle for me as I use several tools to enable me to be able to use the computer at all with any degree of comfort.  Inevitably, these would be the settings I had forgotten to back up, so I’ve spent several weeks trying to fix things and recreate it all from scratch.  Annoying to say the least.

What this has taught me, or at least I hope it has taught me, is that I can’t afford to forget to back up my settings!

There was something good to come out of all this tedium though.  Finally I was driven to overhaul my WoW UI as I have been planning to do for months.  Several years ago, I worked hard to plan exactly how I would like my UI to look.  In all this time, the actual layout of my UI has changed very little.  Addons have broken and been replaced and the aesthetic fluff has changed, but the bare bones and locations of each element of my UI has remained the same.  In my rush to get back from my unexpected absence from the raid team, I took a little look at some of the UI compilations that others have made and found something that made me smile.  Derevka from Tales of a Priest (on my blogroll still as he’s returned to blogging – Hurrah!) uses almost the exact same layout as I do.  And I don’t just mean a little similar; the position of every element of his UI was in the exact position that mine was! Fantastic!

In an ideal world, I’d have access to the same screen resolution too and just be able to copy things across, but I did have a few other things to take into account because of the ME/CFS that Derevka thankfully doesn’t have to worry about.  I need to have a few more action bars showing as the “brain fog” descends at the most inopportune moments and I suddenly forget all my keybindings.  Being able to glance at them if that happens is a life saver (for my raid that is – I’m a healer).  I also exchanged a couple of addons for similar alternatives that I preferred, but that’s just a preference thing.

So, what does World of Warcraft look like for Dwarf Wench?

 

Addon recommendation: MogIt

Many of my guildmates have been looking for tools to make the new transmogrification process easier.  Until now, most of us had been using the 3D view feature at Wowhead or using model viewing applications such as Wow Model Viewer.  While very good utilities, both of these options were a little lacking for people who wished to do this work from inside the game or just make it easier to know what to look for.

Enter MogIt!

3D tooltips!

MogIt is an addon designed to help make choosing items to transmogrify that little bit easier.  One of the first features I noticed (which is optional) is a 3D model of your character wearing the item added to item tooltips.  I would almost have added the addon for this feature alone.  I know that you can ctrl-click to view any item on your character, but my energy is limited and anything I can do to reduce the amount of clicks involved in mundane tasks is a very big help.  Now when looking at items on the auction house, I only need to hold my cursor over the item to see it.

This is only one tiny part of the addon however.  Its main use is to enable you to view all armour and weapon options in game.  You can filter the models by item slot, level, armour type and best of all in my opinion, approximate colour.  One thing to bear in  mind whilst using this addon is that it is calling on many files whilst in use, so it may slow down some slower computers.  I haven’t noticed any extra lag on my own use of this addon, but then I am only using it while stood in town with very little going on.  I have no intention of leaving this addon enabled when raid time comes around.

Filtering by colour

Now, if this sounds to good to be true already then its a good time to mention that the addon also allows you to save a wish list of items and has a note of how to obtain each item making it easy to save a record of outfits that take your fancy.

So, if you have been bitten by the transmogrification bug, go ahead and give it a try!