Tank like a girl

Welcome back to my addon corner. I am currently pondering moving this column to a Wednesday, as weekend reader numbers are traditionally very low. This means that the next addon corner might be happening in a couple days already, as I am trying to work out a posting schedule at the moment.

Today, I’ll talk about addons that will pep up your minimap. There are several different ways to spice up your minimap, from being able to move it around freely to using different shapes, etc.

I am currently using PocketPlot. I only recently discovered this gem of a minimap addon. This addon is very lightweight. Or what would you call an addon that’s 0.5kb in size? Really small. Why PocketPlot? I recently went back from having my minimap in the lower area of my UI to back to the default position. I personally don’t need fancy skins. I really enjoy the custom ‘blips’ that I like more than the default Blizzard ones, I like the clock underneath the map, I like the positioning of stuff like mail, LFG, tracking, etc.

What might take some people aback is that the addon has absolutely zero interface for setting it up in-game. And still, it’s very easy to set up. It requires you to open the pocketplot.lua file in any text editor and follow the simple instructions that Seerah provides in the comments.

As example, this is what my setup looks like:

If that’s all too minimalistic for you (which is the point of the addon), there are several great alternatives. The latest one on the scene is SexyMap by Antiarc (of Omen and Chatter fame). It seems aptly named, because the textures that come with it look gorgeous. If you are looking for a very shiny minimap, this might be for you. I am more tempted by such ’sexy’ additions as minimap buttons all gone unless you hover over the map.

Another staple is Chinchilla by cknight (of Fubar and Pitbull fame). I used this for a long time, and it’s very solid. Drag and drop your map, use several different skins, display coordinates, this minimap can do it all. Its only fault is probably that it can do too much and feels a bit bloated.

Simple Minimap falls into the same category. It seems as feature-rich as Chinchilla. Maybe a bit more modular, so you can delete all the features you don’t need.

Minimap buttons:

There are several addons that specifically deal with the problem of buttons cluttering up your minimap. I am using MBB, which stands for Minimap Button Bag. What it does is that it creates one button on your minimap that when clicked will show you all other buttons from other addons. Those can still be used normally, MBB just keeps them out of sight. If you want to have specific buttons not hidden by MBB, Ctrl-Right clicking them will put them back onto your minimap. In my above screenshot, I have one button moved outside MBB and have the rest happily hidden away. It does seem to have a problem with something called DagAssist, so if you use that, MBB might not be for you.

Another alternative would be to use Minimap Button Frame, which creates a frame with all your buttons that you can place anywhere on your screen. It’s a neat idea, but I prefer the buttons hidden completely when I don’t need them.