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I wonder how many people played with the raw interface as provided by Blizzard & who could raid without the various add-ons?
For example.
Any raider must have Ventrilo, it's not an option. Warcraft did introduce (patch 2.2 for The Burning Crusade) an inherent voice comms, but it's weakness was that it was in-game, so if the game went down, so did your voice comms, if you were lagging badly, so was your voice comms. With Ventrilo, as it's 3rd party software that works outside the game, it was a must have. It didn't matter if you didn't speak (some guilds prefer it if only the raid leader, lead tank & lead healer speaks), but you had to be able to listen & do your job for the raid to succeed.
Omen, (or the equivalent there of), another must have for any dedicated raider. There is a saying amongst Warcraft players, "If the Tank dies, it's the Healers fault. If the Healer dies, it's the Tank's fault. If the DPS dies, it's their own damn fault". A player simply must know how to manage their threat, without which, a raid would often be in danger. How could anyone raid (successfully) without this add-on?
Bag-non (or the equivalent). This was sooooo handy, being able to just click the bag icon & all bags were opened simultaneously. Later editions gave ghost information of what was also in your bank & guild bank too. Very nifty, saved a lot of running around.
Outfitter, I will confess, this was my favourite add-on. For all that I liked to raid in the game, I also liked to look good (like Codex in The Guild). Being able to instantly swap between outfits, I felt like Cher on tour!!! Much better than swapping each piece over one-by-one. But being able to swap between DPS - Healer (my Shadow Priest would occasionally get called on for back up heals) or Tank - DPS (occasionally it was not necessary for a tank to be plated up to the gills, so they could put on the DPS set & go all out etc). Or simply swap between trinkets, that too was handy. A great add-on.
Recap, this add on was basically a "recap" of "who did the most damage" in a raid or a particular fight. I was never a fan of this add-on because it highlighted individual play rather than team play & some, in their private quest to have bragging rights as "the biggest damage causer" would push their threat overboard & cause a wipe. The better raiding guilds will have a special "DPS chat channel" set up where the DPS can brag amongst themselves about damage. But woe unto any of them that causes a wipe....
Gatherer, it was the nature of Warcraft that the "resources", be they herbs, ore etc, would always re-spawn in the same place. So this mod would store information as to where you'd collected something & then, when playing later & "doing the rounds", you could go about the various points, collecting the herbs and ore as required. It was nifty when filling in time waiting for a raid to start or if you didn't have much time to play on a certain day but wanted to get a few things done.
Tom Tom & Questhelper, these 2 go hand-in-hand. Questhelper is a database of quests on somewhere like Curse.com because someone had already completed the quests (on the Public Test Realms if not in the actual game) & showed you exactly where to go, while Tom Tom (after the GPS navigation device) showed you exactly where you were. They were handy for someone wanting to level quickly so they could raid & I will admit that I did use them occasionally on my alternate characters (repeating the same quest lines seemed silly when it was the end game raiding that I was interested in). But they detracted somewhat from the game if you relied on them from the outset, so then the game seemed a little less immersive & a little more of a process & leads into the next mod...
Glider (& its equivalent). I'll spell it out now, I hate botters & remote farmers. These are the mods that play the game for you, while you're at work, sleeping, eating, whatever, 24x7, it can be on, leveling, grinding, farming for you. The terms of service from Blizzard (& NC for its games too) is that when someone is found to be using these mods, these accounts are suspended. I understand why someone would use them, to them, the game is only about end-game raiding or arena matches, nothing more, so the glider program does the work in between to allow them, to get to that point. There is an argument from some (especially those that use these mods) that "hey, I pay my subscription fee, I can do whatever I want", but I disagree, it's not playing the game at all!!! There is nothing gained at all really, certainly nothing "earned", to me, paying a subscription fee to allow a computer program to play the game for me seems silly, especially when your account is in danger of being suspended.
X-Perl, this completely re-vamped the User Interface and made it totally customizable. In short, it's everything that perhaps the original UI could have added as an option. Loved it.
I'd like to hear what other mods, add-ons & UI changes people liked to use. What was a must have, what was a avoid at all costs & if you thought of any of them as "cheating".
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Jared Heath
United States
Dallas
Texas
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Bag-non is a pain. I always used Arkinventory and found it far superior.
I also never cared for Gatherer...there was one I used that worked alot beter IMHO.
X-Perl is really old now compared to some of the other bigger UI mods, unless things have changed recently. I think it was something about a fox that I used. Don't remember the name.
Back when I was playing, I believe I maintained over 60 mods...almost nothing in my game environment was the basic setup.
Grid has to be the biggest one you don't mention...for any healer or leader its really pretty critical...raid frames that can be made small enough that they don't dominate the screen.
Pretty much, if it wasn't an Ace based mod, It had to be best in class for me to install it....the only one I can remember installing was Auctioneer...which easily made me 400,000 gold in my 2.5 years of active playing.
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jaredh wrote: ....Back when I was playing, I believe I maintained over 60 mods...almost nothing in my game environment was the basic setup.
Grid has to be the biggest one you don't mention...for any healer or leader its really pretty critical...raid frames that can be made small enough that they don't dominate the screen.
Pretty much, if it wasn't an Ace based mod, It had to be best in class for me to install it....the only one I can remember installing was Auctioneer...which easily made me 400,000 gold in my 2.5 years of active playing.
Yeah, something for the Healers was essential to allow them to monitor the health of the raid (I rarely pulled my Shadow Priest into normal form as back up heals, never enough to worry about a healing monitor mod & I never specced as a healer ever).
I knew about Auctioneer but was never interested in it (something to do with my real world work in finance perhaps??) But yes, it could be a real money spinner for sure.
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Darrell Pavitt
United Kingdom
Unspecified
Unspecified
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I would also add a bar replacement mod such as dominoes. Lets you put up to 10 bars of 12 slots anywhere on the screen, and have you "main" bar swap out with different slots for stealth, druid forms etc.
Auctioneer is excellent, even if you aren't particularly interested in some sort of wheeling and dealing, as it can automatically set the price of all the stuff you sell, at competitive prices.
Consequently you are not being ripped off by selling too cheap or never going to sell stuff because you are wildly overpricing it.
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Simon Lundström
Sweden
Örbyhus
Now who are these five?
Come, come, all children who love fairy tales.
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The only addon I ever used was some RPG-thingie that allowed you to enter surplus information about your character.
But yeah, I used Ventrilo. Or Teamspeak or whatever was the jig.
Automating too much takes away too much from the game, and sometimes it takes away from the game that _others_ are using them; I hated the damage counters that braggers used, and I hated those aggro-meters that everyone used so that encounters were geared so that they HAD to be used because you simply didn't have a chance without them. All that automating madness takes away too much for me and it's pretty sad that playing the game at an immersive level and actually enjoying the whatever annoying travelling and picking and note-scribbling and whatever you needed to do, eventually becomes undoable as the majority of the players turn into addon-filled automatons.
I mean, who can compete for the mats gathering with people who have radar pings on where they are and special programs that run their characters there?
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Adam Ruzzo
United States
Vernon
Connecticut
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Zimeon wrote: The only addon I ever used was some RPG-thingie that allowed you to enter surplus information about your character.
But yeah, I used Ventrilo. Or Teamspeak or whatever was the jig.
Automating too much takes away too much from the game, and sometimes it takes away from the game that _others_ are using them; I hated the damage counters that braggers used, and I hated those aggro-meters that everyone used so that encounters were geared so that they HAD to be used because you simply didn't have a chance without them. All that automating madness takes away too much for me and it's pretty sad that playing the game at an immersive level and actually enjoying the whatever annoying travelling and picking and note-scribbling and whatever you needed to do, eventually becomes undoable as the majority of the players turn into addon-filled automatons.
I mean, who can compete for the mats gathering with people who have radar pings on where they are and special programs that run their characters there?
Auctioneer is great. I don't use all the crazy features in it. All i use it for is to acquire the "market price" of any given item so i know what to sell things for (and when not to sell them because the market has crashed).
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Simon Lundström
Sweden
Örbyhus
Now who are these five?
Come, come, all children who love fairy tales.
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Auctioneer is another example of addons that affect you even if you don't use them. I can see the immense useability of that addon, but it made auctioning much more boring.
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Adam Ruzzo
United States
Vernon
Connecticut
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Zimeon wrote: Auctioneer is another example of addons that affect you even if you don't use them. I can see the immense useability of that addon, but it made auctioning much more boring.
Was auctioning exciting before? I found it very tedius to try to remember how much Mithril sold for last time and If I should hold onto it or write down the current prices. Most of the time I just undercut the lowest bidder, because that was the fastest way to unload my bags and actually get back to playing the games. That method was losing me a lot of money, however. Auctioneer keeps the unloading process fast but also lets me get the most gold possible for the things I'm selling.
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Meshell Brown
United Kingdom
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I used Vent for raiding too.
I also used Deadly Boss Mods.
Gathermate was my addon of choice for herbing (with my main - didn't really bother with professions for alts)
Recount to keep track of my DPS and for my interface I used Tukui
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