Tank like a girl

I have to admit that I am a heavy addon user. It’s an addiction I can’t shake. Not just flashy addons that will completely change my UI, but small utility addons. I’ve always had it on my to-do list to write about my UI and never got around to it. Yet.

However, the past week saw a dramatic change for me regarding addons, and I am kind of surprised that no one posted about it yet. How is that? Am I the only blogger in the world who is hooked on addons and WAU?

A short history about my addon stages. I have been playing since March 2005 and sometime in summer of that year discovered addons. I kept the basic UI, but used CT_Mod to better use action bars, started using TitanPanel for more information, and that was basically it. The longer I played, the more addons I used, and bloat became obvious. I eagerly jumped on the Ace train when it first cropped up, ditched Titan for Fubar, and grabbed just about everything Ace delivered at Wowinterface Updating was done manually, using the ‘My favorites’ feature at WoWI. Even back then I mostly avoided Curse and WoW UI, who were getting known for being riddled with keylogger ads.

I discovered the WowAce forums as beautiful source of keeping me up to date on new addons, and that’s where I found WowAceUpdater. This client would scan your addons folder, compare it to the index at files.wowace.com and grab the latest copy. From then on, I would run this once a week, would always have the latest copy, always on top of changes. In my early Ace days, I often had library conflicts, so I downloaded with no externals and always had the most recent copy of all libraries as well. Of course this also meant that my addons folder was bloated with dozens of library folders, making it hard to follow which libs were actually still in use or just dead-weight.

Other updaters showed up on the scene, and most of them were able to access the repository at Wowace as well. All was well, until Kaelten had to pull the plug. I immediately felt a tad bit guilty, because this guy had to pay huge traffic costs so that people like me could one-click update their addons. Mind you, I don’t blame Kaelten that he’s putting an end to it. The site had a terabyte of traffic in months with patch releases. That’s just nuts.

All release versions of Ace addons are now up at Curse, who incidentally have hired Kaelten to create CurseForge. Imagine SourceForge for addons. You can only use CurseClient if you don’t want to manually update, and that client reportedly will delete more recent versions and is still pretty buggy. To make things worse, it will force the CurseProfiler on you, if you want it or not. If you don’t want to use the Client, you can stick to manually updating, which is what I am doing now. It’s pretty awful timing. I know that the casual community of WoW players will be kinda shell shocked when they notice WAU is dead. The ladies over at wow_ladies certainly were when I told them about the changes.

This morning I spent a couple hours to create the perfect 3.0 UI. Fubar goes the way of the dodo, to be replaced with the more flexible Data Broker plugins with Fortress as display. Bongos 2 goes Dominos. I went to using lots of super-tiny Tekkub addons. I actually deleted every single Ace library and downloaded everything manually off Curse to include libraries. I started tracking my addons on Wowinterface, which is by far my favorite UI release site. Those I can’t find at WowI I marked as favorites as Curse.

I actually like going back to only updating addons when they need it, instead of using alpha or beta versions. Sure, it’s a lot more work now, but I love fiddling with my addons. WowI has an updater client as well, for those who want to update manually.

Whew, that was long. Am I the only tank in the world who’s addon-obsessed? Surely not.

Now, I got you covered when it comes to reviewing 3.0 changes for protection warriors. But what if you happen to have alts or play other classes and look for similar info for other classes? Anna over at Too Many Annas has you covered with her Best of 3.0 Information Guide.