Casual Healin'

This article was originally going to be part of a much larger post about many of the addons I use. I never seemed to get it finished, probably because I use so many, and they change so often that its a big moving target. Last week Blixia was talking in gchat about various loot related addons, and that she intended to post a forum article about what was good and what wasn’t. I mentioned my half written effort, and that I would finish it off (for the loot addons at least!) and get it posted.

And here it is!

There are really only a few loot addons you may want to investigate, and really you don’t need any of them to be a successful raider. I personally like my combo as with our loot system if we don’t make a decision about the loot in 30 seconds we get passed over for rolling. this encourages you to know if you want/need the item in advance. The addons I use allows me to keep a list of what upgrades are coming from the bosses we are working on, notify me when one drops, or evaluate an upgrade if it was an unexpected/unplanned drop.

Atlasloot

Of all the possible loot related addons, this one is the most useful. It basically has information about every equipable item in the game (well not quite, but almost!) including boss drops, craftables and everything else! Atlasloot will/does/is -

• Information for every piece of loot, from every dungeon or raid, including seasonal/event bosses
• Tell you drop rates for items
• Allow you to see EPGP/DKP costs on items (if you change some settings in the lua)
• Allow you to see the amount of tokens/badges items cost, and also work out the upgrade path for items like T10 armour
• Ingredients list for craftables
• Atlasloot includes a wishlist function, however it leaves a lot to be desired, at least compared to the functionality of Lootplan

LootPlan

LootPlans sole function is to tip you off when you see the item information of an item you want. This tool is best used in conjunction with AtlasLoot – browse the loot in there, tag it and add it to LootPlan. Then when the boss drops that long awaited trinket, staff or other shiney, it will pop up a reminder of what set you want it for (tank, ranged, heal, melee and other- and it will only show those applicable to your class.) Apparently the main feature is you can export your list for use with their on-line presence. I’ve never bothered as it does what I need inside the game. However, if you use RAWR, you can export from there into LootPlan. Even though I use RAWR, I have never found this to be a feature I really want to use…

Installing LibPeriodicTable is not essential, but it will add the boss or other location information to tool tips as well.

GearScore

Urrghhh… I hate it, but you got to have it if you want to PUG anything these days. This little addon simply calculates a score based on what gear you are wearing. It doesnt take into account whether the items are properly itemised, enchanted, gemmed or whatever… so it is, in many cases, worse than useless.

Elitist Group

Like Gear Score, but more than just a number. EG tries to gather a sensible amount of information about a player – what raids they have done, what gear have they got, it is correctly gemmed and enchanted; then presents that in a window so a PUG leader can easily check out those GearScore claims. Only really useful if you want to either lead PUGs, or if you want to rate players so you remember them for the future.

RatingBuster

This tool is useful when levelling, and even at max level (though serious players will want to theorycraft more than this will let you.) RatingBuster gives a simplified view of what the stats are on a piece of loot, and allows you to quickly tell whether or not it is an upgrade.

Outfitter

This little gem allows sets of gear to be swapped in and out, put in the bank, or otherwise manipulated. If you have Dual Spec this is essential – it makes the inbuilt tool look terrible (and existed long before that tool came along.) It also has the ability to auto switch in items based on what you are doing or what stance/shape/etc. you shift into. So if you have riding gloves, carrot on a stick and mithril spur equipped boots, it will swap them in automatically for you whenever you jump on your mount.

XLoot

XLoot replaces the inbuilt Loot frame, giving lots more info about what you are picking up, and all in less space.

(Thanks to Quintis for the suggestion)

PassLoot

This is a smart auto-roller. Always want to greed Frozen Orbs, disenchant ilvl 200 or below items and greed on everything else? Then PassLoot can do it for you.

PassLoot_ConfirmBoP will auto-confirm that disenchanting a BoP is ok, and PassLoot_AtlasLoot allows you to use AtlasLoot for filtering.

Just in case people don’t already, I suggest installing the Curse Client and installing all addons via it. They will be kept up to date (well, it will tell you what needs updating and do it for you when you click)

Also checkout Curseforge which supports a lot of addons in development, and is a great place to help out a developer looking for testers.