The Slacker's Guide to World of Warcraft

[Phanto]

Gamesradar.com have a worth reading guide of add-ons for those WoW players you can check it out here (http://www.gamesradar.com/us/pc/game/features/article.jsp?articleId=2006081116415279011&sectionId=1003&releaseId=2005120716480781115722)

If we're going to be totally honest here, nobody has time to grind through 60 levels of finger-cramping labor, no matter how fun it might be, so we figured we'd let you in on our dirty little secret to success in World of Warcraft. We present our library of the ten best add-ons we've employed to take our low-level adventurers all the way to the major league raiding echelons of greatness. The best part? These are all totally legitimate and none count as cheating. In fact, you never know when a new patch may arrive containing the very same functionality that these little downloadable helpers provide.

Is there anyone here that has been using theses add-ons for some time now??

[Nite_Moogle]

I would guess that 90% of players who have made it to level 60 are using at least five of these mods. Atlas, CTRA, SCT, Titan and DamageMeters are probably the most used mods in the game. If you haven't heard about any of these by now you're either not playing WoW with any seriousness or you're living under a rock.

For the record, I've had Gatherer running since Feb 05 and haven't had to update it once.

[SexualChoc]

Most serious guilds won't let you in without half of those anyway. And if you want to scream through to 60, get a Mage and hook up with a Priest and AOE till your finger bleed, or Hunter. Either one is good. Oh and don't bother choosing any other profession other than Mining, Herbalism or Skinning. There is some money in Alchemy aswell, but that's the easiest route. DON'T go for enchanting. You'll be piss poor. Believe me.

[Goronmon]

Thats actually not a bad list of mods. Most are fairly useful, CTRA is pretty much required for raiding. Out of those I use Auctioneer, CTRA, Atlas, SCT, DM, LL and Gatherer.

[Roc Ingersol]

sct is great.
mobinfo2 is great.
gatherer is good.
titan panel is good.
damagemeters is good.

auctioneer is trash.
CT_RA is... handy for raiders, i guess. pointless for anyone else.
Atlas is ok-ish, but not really that necessary.

never used the other two.

[Soap]

I used a compilation of all those mods and if you are going from the standard GUI to these, it'll be a night/day difference. Titan Panel, in general, is awesome because it has a lot of sub mods that you can plug into it. I usually had mine at the top.

[pheriannath]

I use or have used most of those. It's a good list, but anyone who knows about WoW modding already knows about them.

[Abednigo]

This was all news to me. Of course I haven't played WoW in many months. But I downloaded about half of them (the ones that seemed the most useful) should I decide to play again.

[ttoastt]

Having used quite a few of those, I'm pretty sure none of them help you level faster in the least, so I'm not sure why they start out saying 'no one has time to level to 60', especially since just about everyone IS 60

[Savok]

I think SCT is the neweset of that bunch and it's pretty god damn old as it is, some of them are downright ancient. I mean my god, there's a modified Atlas that has the items the bosses drop for quick reference which can then be added to Lootlink, is that mentioned? Of course not, it's only 6+ months old, hasn't made a blip yet.

Typical "radar" site.

[Qoz]

I played a long time ago. Played 2 months after release, hit lvl60 then quit.
I used all these mods except 1 or 2 that are newer.

Auctioneer and gatherer really made things easier.
And Atlas offcourse.

I don't think they make you lvl faster. That article is bogus - hinting that these mods are borderline cheats. They just help you remember things like locations, monsters, items.. what is really messing up WOW is thottbot.

[Mysterio]

When I play WoW, I use 110 addons. Since they streamline the gameplay so much for me, I would likely not play the game without a majority of them.

[51|RandoM]

Back when I played you had to use addons if you wanted to maintain any sanity as a shaman.

[bskeillor]

I leveled up my Warrior to 60 without a single add on. I never liked the idea of them and never used them. Now that I've been 60 a while and doing end game raiding I've been using CT Raid, and being a raid leader now and then the Invites go much more smooth because of it. I've started to make more gold also by using Auctioneer. I also like Outfitter and Tankpoints to help streamline the switching between FR gear and others as we are pulling different types of mobs.

[Deadend]

I wish I had known about Atlas when I was playing, oh well.

[ohnam]

Most serious guilds won't let you in without half of those anyway. And if you want to scream through to 60, get a Mage and hook up with a Priest and AOE till your finger bleed, or Hunter. Either one is good. Oh and don't bother choosing any other profession other than Mining, Herbalism or Skinning. There is some money in Alchemy aswell, but that's the easiest route. DON'T go for enchanting. You'll be piss poor. Believe me.
Lol you can make serious money by disenchanting mats and selling them. Especially on more mature servers. Large brillallant shards are easy to come buy when you farm/buy lvl 50+ weapons and they sell for more than you purchased the weapon for. Armor is not so good since they have a lower chance to get a large brillant shard.

[Heretic Machine]

I've been using Titan Panel for a LONG time, and it is great. I also use Atlas, which I love, as 90% of the time no one knows where anything is in an instance, and no body knows what exactly we're looking for. CT_Raid I have no use for, since I don't raid yet. Auctioneer I just didn't like very much. DamageMeters is something I'm thinking about.

[funtownarcade]

yes, they help you level because they show you coordinates and you can thottbott to see where quest drops are at.

[niakori]

Yeah I was a titan panel user as well, only recently (about 6 or 7 months ago) did I start using SCT and loved it to death. I also picked up a lot of useless ones for no apparent reason, like corpse info (just who are all of those dead bodies lying around?). Before titan I used CT everything. Addons are a time saver for sure. Especially that addon that tuned down zoning times, that one rocked.

[51|RandoM]

yes, they help you level because they show you coordinates and you can thottbott to see where quest drops are at.

That is the type of addon I wouldn't ever use. Exploration is most of the fun for me.

I have used thottbot to figure out what level range mobs drop a specific item, but that is about it.

[J Arcane]

I adore Auctioneer. And for that matter, the rest of that whole package. Informant and Enchantrix in particular. It's nice having some idea what the hell all this crap in my bag is actually worth.

Gatherer is a requirement if you're taking mining or herbalism. It will save you shit tons of time.

I need to get MobInfo2 though. I intend to prove that those goddamn Firewarder ogres in the cave in Duskwood have WAY too much mana for their level. When I drain Mana an equal level mob, goddamnit the mana bar should go down more than 1%.

But that's a bit of a tangent.

[BigJonno]

Got to level 60 and never used anything other than FlagRSP.

[PacerDawn]

Anyone who pans Auctioneer has never used it correctly. When I finally let my account end back in February, my little level 29 Horde hunter had nearly enough for an epic mount thanks to that add-on and buying low/selling high. Also, enchanting does make you cash, but not a lot at once. People sell magic gear all the time for way less than the disenchanted components will sell for. That's a nice profit right there. I used to scan for low items that were being sold for next to nothing and bid on all of them. I would usually only get 20%, but there were a lot of items so 20% did the trick.

The Auction House is a whole game in and of itself. You could live in there and never step foot outside, which is pretty much what I was doing toward the end. Unfortunately, the lag really affects your AH experience and is the main reason I didn't renew.

[Opty]

The mod that attaches to Atlas to show you boss loot is AtlasLoot. It simply wasn't possible as a mod until Blizzard changed how linking to items that haven't dropped on a server worked. In the past linking to a non-existant item would disconnect you but now it just puts the item up with a question mark for its icon. This new method also allows one to use AtlasLoot to look at Naxxramas and see which bosses have been beaten, as bosses whose loot is all question marks have never been beaten. Using this method I can see that only the first two wings of Naxxramas have been fully completed on my server.

Two, mana if you use CT mod and tell it to show target's mana as a number, which means Blizzard wants you to be able to see exactly how much mana that mob has but don't want you to see how much health it does. Most mobs have huge mana pools in comparison to human players, by the way. For any non-elite mob I use the percent I shave off per attack on their health to figure out how much I need to attack with and when. To me that mobinfo mod would only be useful in instances when I'm healing and want to know how close the mob's to death so I can know whether or not to heal or try and help dps it to death, since 1% with an elite mob/boss can still mean over 10,000 health.

For each class there's tons of mods that help with your oddities. For Druids there's Druidbar which keeps your mana visible while in a form. There's decursive for all magic classes that lets you spam one button and have it auto-figure out who to cast your particular flavor of decurse on. There's mods that handle Warlock's shard inventory, reagent mods for any class that need reagents, and mods that help with mana efficiency while healing so your heals only heal as much as the target has damaged rather than using your strongest heal all the time. For melee characters there's aggro mods that show who the monster's aggroed on and some that even try to calculate the hate list.

One glaring omission from this article is Natur's EnemyCastBar. This mod shows a timer bar for each and every spell your target is casting as well as timer lengths on ability cooldowns, diminishing returns, and durations. An example is a warlock's banish will be timed by the mod so they can prepare for it to be broken at the 30 second mark and start casting early so the mob stays in stasis rather than rumbling out of banish and ripping the warlock a new hole. It also links with CT Boss Mods to put up timers for some bosses' abilities such as Hakkar's life drain. And the final most important thing is that it shows what your PVP enemy is doing so you can disrupt that healing spell at the last second or pop a counterspell.

[SexualChoc]

Lol you can make serious money by disenchanting mats and selling them. Especially on more mature servers. Large brillallant shards are easy to come buy when you farm/buy lvl 50+ weapons and they sell for more than you purchased the weapon for. Armor is not so good since they have a lower chance to get a large brillant shard.

Nexus Crystals should hopefully go for a fair bit now. They used to hover around 30 gold, but now they are needed for the Necro armour, should go up. As for disenchanting, I was on a new server. Twinks were my bread and butter. +100 Health, +9 Stam, +7 Stam, Weapon with glow etc.

[Heretic Machine]

Got to level 60 and never used anything other than FlagRSP.

Oh yeah, I use that as well! FlagRSP is a great tool to spot other role-players.

[Savok]

The mod that attaches to Atlas to show you boss loot is AtlasLoot. It simply wasn't possible as a mod until Blizzard changed how linking to items that haven't dropped on a server worked.
Actually yes it was, considering I had the mod and left WoW before they changed the code (glad to hear they have)

Granted the only way you could get stats was to link it into chat which took a fair bit of filling in when you first got it, but you still had the name and a general idea of what it was. Also it did wonders for my Lootlink database.

[Chiron]

I highly reccomend FuBAR over Titan. The later versions of titan become really bloated and use too much memory. Plus, using Ace gets you OneBag (essential).

ItemRack becomes essential once you start collecting different gear sets (FR, NR, pvp/pve etc) as pressing one button to swap out all your gear is much easier than hunting through your bag for different pieces. It also does other neat things, like auto swapping mount gear when mounted and auto changing trinkets that are on cooldown.

Modding your UI becomes a game in itself, it's fun.