World of Warcraft has been one of the great time sinks of my life. These days I feel like a slacker when I'm not putting in time to help the guild (I know ...guilty for having a life ...how odd). The great thing about wow has always been the programming framework exposed to developers within the game. This is the only MMORPG that I'm aware of where you can change almost ever element of the UI if you don't like it. The gameplay itself is also quite addictive though I often find myself at odds with many of Blizzards policy decisions (such as the power gap in gear btwn the original game and the Burning Crusades expansion). Below is a list of some addons that are essential to my wow game experience. I encourage anyone to try these as I believe they will change your wow experience for the positive.
- Gatherer
- Auctioneer
- Bartender
- Mapster
- QuestHelper
- RatingBuster
- SmartBuff
- TitanPanel
- ZHunterMod
- EasyMail
- Quartz
- VisualHeal
- TankPoints
- HealPoints
- Decursive
- OptiTaunt
- Lunar Sphere
- StealYourCarbon
- Deadly Boss Mods
- FlightMap
- Omen
- Recount
- Satrina's BufF Bars
- Sexy Map
- WIM (Wow Instant Messenger)
- X-Perl
- Grid
- Clique
I also have some addons of my own that I have written and while I don't feel they are as good as some of the ones listed above, I am proud of them and they do work well (when I keep them maintained). The only warning I give is that I tend to burn out from the game for periods of around half a year and I don't tend to maintain addons during those times ;). So with that said, here are some of my addons:
AbsoluteQuestLog - A library for tracking your quests and all data/events associated with them. This is not intended to be used directly by players, it is a library that other addons may use. This addon makes sense of the myriad of quest events that blizzard fires and weeds out the crap so that if you just want to know when a player accepts/abandons/etc. a quest, you can find that out. This library tracks a very detailed history of all quests you interact with on any character as well that can be used by other addons to provide some very interesting enhancements.
SocialQuest - This addon allows you to broadcast your quest events in a variety of channels as channel messages or as data for other players running SocialQuest. The addon is highly configurable as to which messages you wish to see or broadcast. The channel spam feature is really only there in case the other players you are questing with, don't have SocialQuest installed/enabled. For players that both have the addon you get nice little status messages on screen about other players' quest updates similar to your own. SocialQuest goes beyond just notifications however, because it also shares each players questlogs with one another. Right now this is only being stored as data and there is no nice interface for players to read this (though one is planned). It does however make it possible right now to do things like display a message to everyone in the party when every player in the group finishes a specific quest (as long as everyone is running the addon). SocialQuest will also allow a player running the addon to know when another player running the addon begins and stops following them. SocialQuest also modifies all quest link tooltips in game to tell you whether it is a quest you have completed (this works for any quest, not just ones you complete after installing AbsoluteQuestLog). For quests you are currently on it provides further enhancements to the tooltips, rewriting them with more information.
TitanSocialQuest - A plugin for TitanPanel that displays your quest data nicely organized, grouped by zone, and color coded by difficulty.