WoW Mod Reviews

From AJS.COM

Welcome to WoW Mod Reviews, where we will be reviewing as many of the World of Warcraft mods as we can get our hands on. If you wish to write a review for WoW Mod Reviews, please leave a message with our editor.

Auctioneer Advanced

Type: Economy
Importance: Essential
User Interface: * * * *
Usefulness: * * * * *
Source: http://auctioneeraddon.com/
Review date: 2008-06-26

Auctioneer Advanced is the latest version of the venerable Auctioneer addon, which is an essential part of interacting with the WoW economy. Frankly, it's so essential that I'm frustrated at Blizzard for not simply including its functionality in the core UI and server-side features. It would certainly be more efficient for them to keep all of the statistics that Auctioneer users have to constantly scan the auction house in order to keep up to date with.

So, what does it do? Auctioneer allows you to "scan" the auction house, sucking in all of the prices for all of the items. If you do this often enough (at least once a week), it will give you a fairly good idea of what any item you want to sell should go for. It also provides extended tooltips for items that indicate how much it should sell for to players, vendors, after disenchanting/prospecting, etc. A very useful tool is an understatement, here. Just to give you an idea of how far-reaching this tool is, if you're not an enchanter, there will be some quests that give you rewards you don't want. You'll have to choose one of them and sell it to a vendor. Which one? Auctioneer's tooltips will show you which of these items sells best to a vendor. I've probably saved about 500g just from that one feature!

That said, there are some things you should know:

• Auctioneer can be tricky to use right. Read their forums for some good tips.
• Don't trust the prices if they seem wrong. Especially when you start out.
• The "Bottom Scanner" is very useful if you're a real dumpster diver, but it's horribly annoying to try to use well. Its UI needs lots of work (at the very least, some sort of feedback on what it's doing other than a message that says it started would be nice).

Pit Bull

Type: Unit Frames
Importance: Very
User Interface: * * * *
Usefulness: * * * * *
Source: Ace or Curse (Forum)
Review date: 2008-06-26

There are an awful lot of Unit Frame mods out there. These days, I think the two most popular are X-Perl and Pit Bull. We'll cover X-Perl at a later date, but Pit Bull is the one I use, so here we go...

First of all, Pit Bull is an amazingly rich addon. If you want a Unit Frame mod to do it, Pit Bull probably does. However, the drawback is that all of that rich functionality comes at the cost of UI complexity. I'm a computer programmer who develops code in at least 4 different languages on a regular basis, and this tool has stumped me from time to time. You'll have to take your time and ease into it. Read the forums and various posts about it on the Web. After a while, you'll find yourself configuring your Unit Frames UI like a pro!

So, what does it do? All Unit Frames mods have a common goal: replacing the default Blizzard player, party and raid windows that represent the characters, targets, pets, etc. They typically show health, mana/rage/energy, level, etc. Pit bull can do all of this. It also allows you to configure where each frame goes (it has a configuration mode for solo, party and raid). It will also let you move around where every element of the frame goes. Want the picture to be a live, 3D view of the player, and show up across the bottom of the frame? No problem. If you want a frame for your focus target's target's target twice removed, it's got that too.

The down-side of course, is that when you have 7,000 knobs to turn it can be hard to find them all, and that's certainly the case with Pit Bull.

Pit Bull used to use the Ace2 framework, but ckknight, it's author, has since replaced Ace2 with his own framework that he uses across his large stable of mods. That's called LibRock. We'll have an article about the various mod frameworks at some later date....