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There
are about as many addons for World of Warcraft as there are
applications for the IPhone at this point. A lot of them are
worthless, and take up valuable memory that could have been used to
show more violent blood splatters. However, some are near
essential and will make you a better warrior once you get accustomed to
them. We'll take a look at some of the more useful and
popular mods out there and break down what they can do for your
game.
Recount
is an in-depth analysis
tool for damage and threat. If you
are looking to see if a talent point is worth it or not, a five minute
test with a training dummy with it and without it will give you your
answer with this tool. Average memory use is about 3-5 MB,
and it can store data for the complete raid on any encounter and save
or export it
for further analysis. Data can be reported real
time in a line graph format to show your output spikes and give you an
idea of what you or the raid is putting out in terms of damage per
second, or even threat per second of the tank. At any given
time you can output key stats, or not so key stats. Well,
outputting dispels might be key to us if our raid is wiping due to a
lack of dispelling... but I digress.
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A breakdown of one of my Sartharion 10 man encounters.
The
primary reason to use Recount is the Details screen of an
encounter. This screen will give you a breakdown of what
damage you're dealing with each skill, and give you ideas as to how
your abilities contribute to the overall picture. Obviously
increasing your critical rate will give you a boost to all damage, but
you won't see the resulting bonus to Deep Wounds unless you take a look
at data such as this right here. One more critical in a
clutch spot will keep that deep wounds stack going, and could end up
giving you tens of thousands more damage over the course of a
fight. You can also use this to analyze your allies that
fight alongside you, and see just what they contributed to the
fight. It can be useful when comparing arms vs. fury,
different gear setups, and different party make ups to optimize your
raid's total output.
To be honest, I couldn't live without it at this point. No
other mod has come close to
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graphical functionality and power of
Recount in my opinion, and you get instant results and analysis of all
aspects of your combat. Even if it includes the stuff you
don't want to see, like the occasional dodge or glancing blow, that too
is data we need to take into consideration and note. As such,
I have to give recount a 10/10.
Omen
is a threat managing system. It maintains a fairly small
window and pretty much displays everything you ever need to know about
threat. You can set it up so that it displays the tank's
current threat vs. your threat, or whoever is right below the
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so you can tell them to slow down (or you step it up!). It
uses a steady 2-3 MB memory footprint in all situations. If
you are on DPS, it can sound warnings when you are nearing the point of
stealing the enemy's attention, alerting you to stop pushing buttons
and take a drink. Very useful for that alone!
I would love to endorse this, but only a few fights or players will
ever pose a threat to your threat. Until you or your guild
mates start pulling 6000 or more damage per second, as long as you're
doing your part in heroic strikes and shield slams, threat really isn't
that difficult to manage in most fights. One of the primary
fights to use it on, Kel'Thuzad, no longer has the clean slate on hate
for his mind control skill, where sometimes people had to be careful as
the tank picked him back up and established a comfortable threat lead
once more. Don't hate the mod, hate the game, I
suppose. Omen does a great job of real time threat in a tiny
package, and for that I give it a 9/10.
Outfitter is,
well, a program to change your outfit. It sounds simple, but
it's a huge time saver and can save any number of
configurations. With the press of a button, you can swap any
number of gear slots around. So two button presses, and you
will fully switch from tanking, to DPS. Or with one button
press mid combat, switch to a sword and shield instead of your two
hander for spell reflection to make that Shaman eat his lava
burst.
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Good to go in one click here, and one click in your dual talent
specialization window.
It's a little unwieldy at first, and you'll need to do a lot of
checking to make sure the right gear is assigned to the right slot, but
it'll save you from having to pop open a bag and right click 20 times
to change gear. It can also open up more slots on your bars
so you don't have to have the shield ready there in PVP.
However, with the new dual spec being near fully functional, but
Blizzard's gear manager still having the bugs worked out of it,
Outfitter is here to stay. It's nearly essential to stay sane
when you can fill two roles and have two sets of gear on you, and it
gives you that added PVP reaction time. As one of the last
essential mods for the WoW Warrior, I give it 8/10.
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