Gas Bandit's Recommended WoW Mods

I'm not one of those people who load up their WoW UI with so much crap that they aren't even playing WoW any more. Though I am no longer a UI purist, the very concept is still anathema to me. I want my interface addons to enhance what I'm used to, not change WoW into watching the Bloomberg channel. I like addons that make what I've got faster and better, rather than redefining everything so that I have to learn to play all over again. So, I've found a few that make life a little easier, and now I'm going to recommend them to you.

The first thing you need to get is UI Central. This isn't a WoW addon, it's a standalone program that connects to an online database of addons. Using UI Central, you can browse, find, install, and update addons with ease, even to the point of a single click updating all your addons so you don't have to hunt down updates after every patch from each individual addon's dev page. It's a little buggy on my system, but still a huge timesaver.

Probably my most favorite addon is the Auctioneer Pack. Auctioneer adds more tabs to the auction window and creates and maintains a database on your computer of what the "going prices" for everything is. This makes it a lot easier and faster to know the market value of an item, so that you don't pay too much for one, and don't price yourself out of the market or give away the farm when selling. It also has intuitive controls for setting up multiple auctions (like, say you have 20 of something you want to sell in stacks of 2 or 1 or 5 or whatever), and makes buying and selling stuff at the auctioneer a much more rewarding experience since it is faster, easier, and you have price information parsed and averaged going back as long as you've used the addon. It will even scan every single auction and add the info into its database, provided you want to let it do its thing for around 10 minutes.

If you are an enchanter, while you are at the Auctioneer site, you will want to get Enchantrix from there as well. It will tell you (via tooltip) what you're most likely to get from the objects you disenchant. Very handy.

If you have mining or herbalism, you're going to want the Gatherer addon, made by the same people who did Auctioneer and Enchantrix. It seamlessly meshes into your map and "radar," storing the location of each resource node you gather, making future gathering runs much more efficient.

If you're like me and you do a lot of mailing and auctioning, you'll probably also want CT_MailMod, simply due to the "open all" button it adds into your mailbox. That dumps all the items in your mailbox into your packs with one click. Fast and convenient.

For my paladins, mages and priests, Decursive is a real headache saver. It creates a small grid of translucent green squares that represent the members of your group or raid. When somebody gets a debuff, disease or poison that you can cure, their square will turn BRIGHT RED so you know, and you can cure it simply by clicking on the square. No retargeting, no hunting for the spell button, no fuss, no muss. It even keeps track of range, so you'll know whether they are in range or not by if the square is "hazy."

Then there's RABuffs. I like this one alot. It is a quick, small graphical display that lets you know what members of your party/raid are missing buffs you can cast on them, and lets you do so simply by clicking on the readout. No hunting through screens or targets, just keep clicking "Blessing of Kings" until its bar is full, and voila... everybody who needs it, has it. Saved the sanity of my paladins. Unfortunately, UI Central doesn't update this one, but it's worth it.

ReagentCrafter is good for, say, engineers and smiths who often have to make several little things and then combine them into big things. It's a pain in the ass to have to sort through your entire list of recipes to make the blasting powder, then the mithril casings and whatnot... when you could just (with this addon) go to the recipe for the final product and Alt-Click the listed ingredients you are missing, and automatically make what you need. Doesn't work for smelting, or cross-discipline ingredients, but still an unobtrusive, intuitive time saver.

Cartographer enhances the built-in map system to add instance and battleground maps, and some other good things. A few of its options are redundant with Gatherer, but I like Gatherer's way better so I just turn those few options off, here.

Extended QuestLog makes the built-in quest log easier to read and manipulate, and improves the way the quest tracker handles tracking quests (and removes the irritating 5-quest limit to the tracker). It doesn't change the 25 quest cap, but it does make it easier to see what you've got and what you need.

That's about the size of it. Granted, the big raiding guilds are going to want you to load whatever UI addons they use to take all the "actually playing" out of running their raids, but these ones I find to be unobtrusive and very handy.