Guide

This guide is split up into several sections:

• Talent spec & glyphs
• Gear
• Rotation & cooldowns
• Water Elemental
• General tips

Let's go right into explaining what makes this spec tick.

Talent Spec & Glyphs

18/0/53

The frost build is fairly standard, but there are two extra points you can put toward flavor talents or to help round out your spec based on each fight. I'll go into some specifics here.

Frost Warding – This gives you a chance to gain some mana when you stand in fire or frost (or weird frostflamy stuff. Hi Marrowgar!). Since mana is usually not an enormous concern when playing frost, this talent is not as valuable as it is for other specs. Note that when Frost Warding “procs”, your ward is still intact at full absorption.

Improved Blizzard - You can add 1 point to this talent to give your Blizzard ticks a chance to proc Fingers of Frost, significantly increasing your AoE dps. Note that for encounters which specifically require very powerful AoE, you would probably be better off switching to a fire build. This is mainly a convenience talent that will be useful in common AoE situations.

Focus Magic - This is really a mandatory talent, but I thought I'd add a few notes. First, the buff does stack between two mages that cast it on each other. You'll have 3% permanent crit, and whenever the other mage crits, you'll gain the 10-second buff for another 3% crit on top of that. Your best bet is to trade it with a fire mage; failing that, pick another class that benefits greatly from crit, like a Boomkin or Spriest. Oh, and you can put it on your elemental in solo situations.

Glyphs

• Eternal Water
• Frostbolt
• Molten Armor

There's not a whole lot of room for variation here. Glyph of Ice Lance may prove worthwhile if you can shatter Lances on every ghost charge of Fingers of Frost without fail, but Molten Armor provides a more consistent dps boost.

Gear

Like every dps spec of every dps class, reaching the hit cap for your main abilities is the most important thing to do when thinking about gear. The hit cap for frost is 14%, or 367 hit rating. If you have a Boomkin or Spriest in your raid, you can make do with 11% (289 hit). If you're alliance and there's a spacegoat in your raid, subtract 26 from your situation and you're golden.

Let's delve into the more blurry dps stats. Crit rating, first off, is nasty in the way that your middle school bus driver was nasty. You'll get barely over half the benefit per point of crit rating that you would have from spell power. The reason for this? I'll give you a hint: It has something to do with Shatter and the fact that a solid portion of your casts have this "artificially" inflated crit already.

Haste rating is what you're after. Besides spellpower, it's your best-scaling dps stat. When you are well past 3000 spellpower, haste will start to catch up to the #1 stat point. Use a program like Rawr to weigh your stats and figure out exactly when this happens for you, so you can shift your gemming options to more emphasis on haste. Stacking an enormous amount of haste does put you at risk of being GCD-capped while Bloodlust/Heroism or trinket procs are in effect, but careful planning of your own personal cooldowns will help you mitigate this danger. You can read more below in the Cooldowns section.

Spirit is a little nauseating, and thankfully our T10 and a good selection of other ICC loot contains no spirit. So what makes spirit so bad? If you have 2pc T9, 70% of your spirit is converted into crit rating which is suboptimal to begin with, and once you grow out of that set bonus, that ratio drops to 55%. The mp5 you gain from spirit is largely ineffective as well. So try to avoid pieces with spirit, but keep it in scope: a huge chunk of spirit will provide more dps than a relatively small amount of haste or crit.

Intellect: Just respecced from arcane? Alright, you can finally switch out that Talisman of Resurgence for something a little less...healy. You'll also get a break from the Holy Paladins laughing at you. Bottom line: Don't worry about intellect for frost.

When considering gems, use Reckless Ametrines instead of straight-up Runed Cardinals and Quick King's Ambers, to get that one additional stat point. For blue slots, use Purified Dreadstones.

In summary, this is the stat priority you'll follow as frost.

Hit Cap > Spell Power > Haste > Crit > Spirit

Rotation & Cooldowns

It's okay if you want to laugh at the notion of having a "rotation" as frost, since all you do is spam frostbolt till the cows come home. In reality, your rotation involves knowing when you should deviate from that frostbolt spamfest, and how to treat your procs.

Your standard priority list is:

Before we go further, you should know how Fingers of Frost (FoF) works. When a chilling spell (like your Frostbolt, even glyphed) strikes the target, you have a 15% chance of getting a 15-second buff that activates your Shatter talent and treats the target as Frozen for the next 2 spells you cast, whether they're frost spells or not. Due to latency you can use the second charge of FoF on two spells used back-to-back (one cast-time, one instant) and gain the Shatter and Frozen bonuses for both. This is commonly referred to as the "ghost" FoF charge, and the same type of technique is used by frost mages in PvP. This allows you to use the second FoF charge on a Frostbolt+Deep Freeze, for example. Go to a target dummy and try it out. It will soon become second nature.

Possible Bug: Currently on live, FoF procs on spell hit. In the patch notes, it's supposed to proc on spell cast.

Deep Freeze only does damage against permanently stun-immune targets like bosses and some trash, but when it connects it'll do roughly twice the damage of a frostbolt. Try to squeeze it in at the end of a FoF proc to maximize dps if your latency is fairly consistent.

Brain Freeze Fireball will come into play when you pick up your 2-piece bonus of T10, which gives you 12% haste for 5 seconds after casting it. That's enough time to squeeze in three or four hasted frostbolts, so while the proc chance on Brain Freeze is only 15%, you should aim to keep the buff's uptime as high as possible. If you don't have T10 yet, it's not worth casting unless you're running low on mana. You can still use it on the move, and it'll usually do more damage than...

Ice Lance. Mainly used while you're moving and when you have FoF charges available and both Deep Freeze and Brain Freeze are nowhere in sight; it's not worth it to insert into your sit-on-butt rotation. Having the glyph to make it hit for quadruple damage on bosses is an improvement, but the fact that IL cannot proc FoF gives it dubious worth.

Frostbolt Spam is what you resort to when you're sitting in one place and you have no FoF proc available.

Cooldowns

Your cooldowns are split up into two categories: Offensive and Utility.

Icy Veins (144 sec) - Your bread-and-butter dps cooldown. Try to anticipate a fight's length to give you an idea of how many times you'll be able to pop this ability and when the best times to do so will be. Now, running with such high levels of haste in ICC will put you in danger of being GCD-capped, meaning every spell only takes the minimum 1 second to cast, and any haste you have after that is rather worthless. With Bloodlust, Black Magic weapon enchant, and all the trinket procs out there nowadays, you'll need to be careful of when you use this. Use a buff tracking addon like Power Auras or NeedtoKnow to give you more awareness of how much haste you have at any given time so you know the most efficient moment to pop IV.

Cold Snap (8 min) – You'll have a chance to use this once per fight (maybe more, it depends on whether the Lich King has 12 or 15 phases). Previously, you'd use it to reset Icy Veins, because it was your sole dps cooldown. Well, now we've got Deep Freeze, so be mindful of that as well. You'll want to Cold Snap right after finishing an IV and burning DF so you can do both again immediately, saving you the maximum amount of cooldown time. It can get tricky to do this, especially with how erratic FoF comes to you, but you'll have to play dynamically to make the most of Cold Snap.

(10 points if you can guess the mob in the picture)

Ice Block (240 sec) – Having Ice Barrier means you won't use Block in many of the dangerous, high-damage situations you might have previously. Instead, it will still retain its role as a great way to remove very annoying debuffs. With Cold Snap, you'll get two blocks, but you should plan your Snap usage around dps and not this ability unless you'd die otherwise.

Blink – Frost's low mana consumption rate means you'll be able to use Blink liberally to get to a better position, avoid harmful AoEs, and move in range of your target. Remember, every second you spend running is a second spent not dpsing, and even if you're spamming BF fireballs and FoF lances the whole way, it's still less dps than if you were to simply blink over there and start chain-casting.

Mirror Image (180 sec) – This temporarily drops your threat against the mob you have the most aggro on, then 30 seconds later (whether the images have died or not) you inherit all the threat you dealt over the duration. Use in conjunction with invisibility to truly erase your threat table. I recommend using an addon to track the duration of Mirror Image's threat drop, so you know when you need to begin your invis.

T10 note: The T10 4pc bonus conveys 18% additional damage for 30 seconds after using MI, turning it into an enormous dps cooldown.

Ice Barrier - Keep it refreshed when raid damage is flying everywhere, and don't bother if you're not in danger. It may be peace of mind to keep it refreshed all the time, but do know that if you're doing 6000 dps, casting Ice Barrier will cost you up to 9000 damage dealt. Use it wisely and reap the benefit of effectively having the health of a warlock when it matters, without sacrificing too much dps.

Water Elemental

You're now a pet class. Well, if you were frost before 3.3 you still technically were, but now you have to deal with the waterblobble full-time. Let's go over its strengths and weaknesses:

Strengths

• Fire-and-forget nature
• Does more than 600 dps by itself
• 90% pet damage reduction in PvE
• Immune/100% avoidance on some boss attacks
• Never runs OOM
• Scales with some of your stats...

Weaknesses

• ...but hit isn't one of them
• No abilities other than Generic Colored Bolt
• No way to heal it other than bandages
• Low crit modifier

With these in mind, learn to play to the elemental's strengths and diminish the severity of its weaknesses...well, okay. There's nothing you can do at the moment to help it reach the hit cap or make its crits any bigger. But you can put forth an effort to maximize the time it spends dpsing. For example, on Lady Deathwhisper, you can park him one side of the room, away from the add spawns and out of the way of cleaves, and let him whittle away at the boss's shield the whole time.

Alternatively, you can bind a key to /petattack and use it to direct the elemental's attention to your current dps target. This is also useful to prevent it from breaking CC.

You'll also have to manually move the elemental out of poison and fire and other nasty things by pressing Follow, as they tend to mimic bad mages and sit in one spot and tunnelvision their target unless it moves out of range. If it dies, resummoning it is no big deal, but that GCD cost you precious dps time.

The water elemental is not exactly an intensely high-maintenance pet, but you should learn to take care of it and minimize the chances of negatively impacting your performance like any other aspect of your playstyle. Have fun with the little guy and a year down the road, you'll think, "Remember when the elemental wasn't permanent?"

General tips

Here you'll find some miscellaneous pointers on how to improve your efficiency, performance and overall experience while playing. These pointers are useful for all mages...or any dps class, for that matter.

1. Maintain a clear, functional UI. Avoid encumbering the screen with a lot of pointless addons. Take a look at your setup and ask yourself: “Do I really need all of this?” You'll want to make sure your buffs, debuffs, status, and cooldowns are easily visible and take up a small footprint. Use light-weight addons to keep track of your major cooldowns, abilities, buffs and debuffs without having to scrutinize the buff festival on the edge of the screen.

2. Use the following command to zoom far out and help you keep situational awareness:

   “/console cameradistancemaxfactor 5” (remove quotations)

3. While moving, aim to constantly be doing something productive. Cast BF fireballs, FoF ice lances, a fireblast...hell, if everything is on cooldown or otherwise not available, just spam non-FoF ice lance until you get into position. Just pretend it's like a weak DoT ticking on the boss, that flies out of your hand as you move...of course, with proper positioning, you will be minimizing the amount of time you spent on your feet anyway. Which brings us to...

4. Positioning. By picking a spot close to totems, out of the way of conical or area effect abilities, and spread out from others, you will be keeping yourself safe while maximizing your sit-on-butt chain casting time. Don't tunnel vision, however, as you need to be aware of other raiders and the boss moving around you. Move before the coldflame is within 5 feet you, get the hell out of the way of cleaving adds before they're on top of you, and run from people with raid-damaging auras.

   Oh, and to quote Raisa's High-End Destruction Guide, Know Who the Idiots Are. You've seen them get bowling ball'd by Icehowl. Stay away from them.

5. What skills do you use on any given fight? What cooldowns, utilities, and items do you use in combat? Keybind all of that. I don't care how fast you can click. The boss certainly doesn't care how fast you can click. Your latency doesn't care how fast you can click. Putting all of your skills, whether major or minor, at the tip of your fingers will vastly improve your reaction time and efficiency when moving and attacking. Use a bar mod (I prefer bartender) to create keybinds and modify the look/size of your action bars. Your mouse hand will thank you, and you'll notice a great difference in the speed of your playing.

6. If your tank has solid initial threat generation and/or you plan on using MI at the start of a fight, use a Potion of Speed a second before combat starts; you'll get to use a second potion later in the fight.

7. Use a theorycrafting tool like Rawr to look at your gear options and weigh your stats.

Whoo, that was fun to write. Let me know if I missed anything or if you have suggestions. Thanks for reading, and enjoy playing frost! (weird, I know ^.^)

Edit this article: Frost Mage Raiding Guide

Add an image to this article

Audience

The mage has long been touted as the 'Glass Canon' in PVP/PVE events. The term implies that mages can dish out a significant amount of DPS, but are extremely fragile in their cloth armor. Mages are the most offensive spell damage class in the game, but can be easily killed if played incorrectly.

Guide

Introduction

The Warrior can deliver big time damage, has high armor points and significant mobility with Intercept and Charge, but Warriors are extremely vulnerable based on this Mage Strat. Frost Nova, Frostbite, Frost Bolt and Polymorph all root the Warrior and there''s not much they can do about it!

Experienced PVP Warriors will use a 1 Hander and Sheild to Spell Reflect when you cast a spell, but it costs them a lot of rage to do this, and you can just use Ice Lance to waste the Spell Reflect. Like many classes, the key to winning is simply keeping your distance. Blink whenever the warrior uses Intercept. Charge is only a 1 second stun so it's best to just Frost Nova and use that minor speed enchant on your boots!

Counterspell has a longer range then Charge, use it right away at maximum rage to keep them from getting free rage.

Frost Nova as soon as you can or Polymorph - most Warriors will exhaust their PVP Trinket right away so be prepared to double cast. Once you cast either spell, get some distance so that you can cast Frost Bolt before it wears off.

ALWAYS Blink when the Warrior uses Intercept. You don't want to get a Hamstring before you Blink, you can use your PVP Trinket to dispel. Save your PVP Trinket to dispel Hamstring after a Frost Nova, Frostbite or Blink.

Ice Block should always be saved for Bladestorm. An experienced PVP Warrior will time Bladestorm after you have used Blink. But, if you have Blink available use it and start to nuke the Warrior has he spins around hitting air.

No comments yet.

Edit this article: Frost Mage vs Warrior

Add an image to this article

Audience

The mage has long been touted as the 'Glass Canon' in PVP/PVE events. The term implies that mages can dish out a significant amount of DPS, but are extremely fragile in their cloth armor. Mage are the most offensive spell damage class in the game, but can be easily killed if played incorrectly.

Guide

Introduction

Since the introduction of the Death Knight in WOTLK, this class has provided many challenges in the arena. While they are similar to a Warrior, they occupy Unholy spells. Instead of a Rage bar they have Runic Power, which needs to be generated by opponent attacks. Luckily for the Frost Mage, the Death Knight can be easily kited provided you follow this strat. The key to defeating the DK is to constantly counter all their ability to reach you!

Strategy

Ice Armor is mandatory if you have Frostbite built into your talent tree. If you lack this talent, then use Mage Armor as it will reduce Chains of Ice by 50% in most instances. Frost Ward should be refreshed upon CD to ward off the DK frost damage.

If the DK begins to cast Death Grip or Chains of Ice, Counterspell will prevent him/her from doing so with a 4 second silence. It will also prevent the DK from using Strangulate, an interrupt ability. This can't be stressed enough. The goal of this fight is to avoid the DK's ability to reach you, therefore you can Kite and outlast the DK.

Upon interruption of the DK, this will allow you to quickly cast Frostbolt and keep you out of range. If the DK should come within melee range, he can still interrupt your spell cast with Mind Freeze. Or, the Ghoul Pet will interrupt your casts with Gnaw - in which case, you should always dispel with Blink.

Most likely, the DK will open with Chains of Ice. Use Frost Nova then run away (save your blink for Death Grip) and remember that it's on a 25 sec cd, so Blink will be available for each Grip. Frost DK also has Hungering Cold which can root the mage.

If you choose to Blink, be sure to slow the DK in some fashion. Either use Cone of Cold or Frost Nova. The will give you the greatest ability to escape and continue to kite.

PVP Trinkets should be saved for Chains of Ice should the DK get within range.

Anytime the DK uses the Anti-Magic Shell, the mage should Ice Block. You simply can't DPS when the DK and implemented this ability into the fight.

The Shatter Combo

The Shatter Combo is the Frost Mages Weapon of Mass Destruction. Your lack of understanding of this combo will most certainly make your mage more glass than canon. To explain, Ice Lance will do 3x the amount of damage when cast upon a frozen target. Because of this, you can cast Frost Bolt on a frozen target BEFORE Ice Lance and it will still deal the 3x damage. Here are the steps in a Shatter Combo:

1. Cast Frost Nova on a target - set pet to attack/freeze
2. Cast Frost Bolt then immediately cast Ice Lance

Here is some video instruction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ9fy9DYRWI

Shatter Macro
/use 14
/cast Icy Veins
/cast [nopet] Summon Water Elemental
/cast [pet] Freeze
/petattack [target]

Frost Mage Macros

Frost Bolt Macro:
#showtooltip Frostbolt
/run SetCVar("Sound_EnableSFX","0")
/use 14
/run SetCVar("Sound_EnableSFX","1")
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast Icy Veins
/cast Frostbolt
/stopmacro [target=pettarget, exists]
/petattack

Frost Nova Macro
#showtooltip Frost Nova
/stopcasting
/castsequence reset=21|Alt Frost Nova, Cold Snap

Ice Block / Counterspell
#showtooltip Ice Block
/stopcasting
/cancelaura Ice Block
/cast [modifier:shift]Counterspell
/cast Ice Block

Frost Nova + Deep Freeze
/stopcasting
/castsequence reset=21 Frost Nova, Deep Freeze

Fire Ball + Fire Blast - Fingers Proc
#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=6 Fireball, Fire Blast

Focus Polymorph
#showtooltip
/clearfocus [target=focus,dead]
/focus [target=focus,noexists]
/script SetRaidTarget("focus", 1)
/cast [target=focus]Polymorph
/stopmacro [nogroup]

Blink
#showtooltip Blink
/stopcasting
/cast Blink

Edit this article: Frost Mage vs Death Knight

Add an image to this article

Instructions

To Download

I can't and won't provide any 'tech support' for my UI, but if you want to download it and go it alone:

Kyth-Fusion-UI-Jan-09.zip

Remember, this UI was compiled in January 2009: you will want to update most or all of the modules.

Unit Frames

Grid

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/grid.aspx

I use Grid to keep an eye on the raid health, on who has aggro, and, with Clique, for decursing. I'm pretty free with dragging the grid frame around. That's its normal "parked" position, but I bring it to the right of my character on fights where I decurse.

The red dots in the upper right corners of the squares denote aggro.

UnderHood

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/under-hood.aspx

I adore this unit frame. It's technically a HUD, but it's so configurable that you can make it look like "normal" unit frames if you want, which is what I have in my UI.

First off, it supports sophisticated fade options. For example, I have mine be completely invisible when I'm OOC and not targeting anything. It's partially faded in if I'm OOC and targetting something, and then fully visible when I'm in combat. This allows for a very clean view when I'm running around town, without feeling awkward because my frames are visible but not the target's, while still being fully functional in combat.

Secondly, it supports creating arbitrary text strings through the use of "dogtags". These are complex, but very very useful and fully customizable. They let you do everything from specifying exactly the text string that you want for health and mana, to far more complex operations.

For example, I use dogtags in an UnderHood text box to show whether my target has CoE, Ebon Plague, or Earth and Moon. If you look *just* to the right of my character on the screenshot (or at the thumbnail to the right here), you'll see "C", "E", and "P" in a vertical row.

That's the output from the following dogtag:

[if HasAura("Curse of the Elements") then "C":Green else "C":Red]
[if HasAura("Earth and Moon") then "E":Green else "E":Red]
[if HasAura("Ebon Plague") then "P":Green else "P":Red]

The "J" is a similar dogtag for Judgment of Wisdom.

I also have a dogtag set up to let me know when my mana is far enough down to make hitting a mana pot worthwhile. I need to edit this for mana gems now that (1) I play a mage, and (2) pots are one-per-fight, but it's still useful to know it's doable:

[if (MissingMP >= 3000) then "Interface\Icons\INV_Potion_137":Icon(24)]

Personal Buffs/Debuffs

ElkanoBuffBars

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/elkbuffbars.aspx

I have heard from a lot of people "ew you use EBB? What a terrible addon, I hate how big the bars are!"

With EBB you get out of it as much as you put work into it.

I have EBB set up a lot of places on my UI. For one, it has a "normal" buffs display in the upper right. Can't see it? That's deliberate! It's almost completely transparent, and it also just shows names + icons. I can mouse over that area to see the effect of an unusual buff though (e.g. something I spellsteal) which is why it's there.

The second place is my debuffs: they're right under my cast bar and big and they show the bars to boot. I can always see when I get a bad debuff on a raid this way and I want to be able to react *quickly*. The one problem with my setup now is that the "Sated" debuff from bloodlust adds one too many debuffs to most fights, and my debuffs scroll up and behind my cast bar. I need to fix that.

The third place is my "short term important buffs" -- that's the tall list of buffs to the right of my minimap. As you see in the video, I haven't done a good job yet of filtering out the myriad of additional buffs I now get in Wrath. But EBB has the capability, and having an area of "short term buffs I care about" is nice: I can easily see the duration left on lust, on a trinket proc, or whether I just got Power Infusion.

The fourth place is my totem area. I have EBB set up to just show the totem buffs on me so I can easily tell when I'm in range of my shaman. That's directly to the top left of my player frame.

BuffEnough

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/buff-enough.aspx

BuffEnough probably wins my personal award for best mod ever. It's part of what allows me to completely ignore my normal buff display.

It looks at the members of your party or raid, decides what buffs it thinks you should have, and then shows you via the color of a square (resizable and movable) whether you have all your buffs (green) or you don't (red.)

You can also have it fade out when you have all your buffs (which is what I do): so when I don't have a buff, I see a big red square I can mouse over to see who is slacking. When I have them all, though, it goes green and then fades over the next 5 seconds, not showing up again on my UI until I'm short a buff.

It'll show yellow if you have a buff fading in 5 minutes (configurable time), and if you mouseover it, it will tell you which one.

You also can configure which specific paladin blessings you prefer, and whether or not you want it to make sure you have consumables up during raids.

Finally, you can shift-rightclick on it and when you're missing a buff, it'll send a tell to that person asking them to rebuff you.

PowerAuras

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/powerauras-classic.aspx

PowerAuras is the king of replacing text with need-to-know graphics, which is key to making a UI that is information rich and yet easy on the eyes.

You can see in the screenshot my "Hotstreak!" proc (something mages get when they crit two nukes in a row that allows them to cast an instant-cast pyroblast), but I use PowerAuras for many other things including showing:

• If I have replenishment right now

• If I have Vigilance from a prot warrior
• If I have bloodlust on me
• If my health is below 75% and...
• Another if my health is below 40%
• If my mana is below 25% and...
• Another if my mana is below 5%
• How many seconds are remaining on my Illustration of the Dragon Soul proc

Spells/Abilities

Quartz

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/quartz.aspx

Quartz has three functions for me:

• It shows my own cast bar with a GCD tick going across the bottom for instant-cast spells.
• It shows my target's cast bar, which appears right above mine but smaller
• It shows my buffs/debuffs on my target

I actually currently use both Quartz and Scorchio to show buffs/debuffs, and that area looks a little messy. The reason is that Scorchio just isn't reliable, but Scorchio tracks living bombs on other targets and scorch better than Quartz does, so right now I need both.

Scorchio

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/scorchio2.aspx

Just a mage mod.

As mentioned in the Quartz section, it misses living bomb and scorch sometimes, so I duplicate its information with Quartz's tracking of my target's debuffs. But I still keep it around because seeing my living bomb just exploded on our off-target lets me know to cast it again, and its multiple-mage scorch tracking (including number of stacks) is invaluable.

CooldownTimers2

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/cooldown-timers2.aspx

There's little special about this mod, other than it's generally inoffensive and does what I want.

The reason I use it specifically is its "announce" (aka "pulse") ability that flashes on my screen when an ability is ready. The bars are there if I want to know "how long until my ability comes off cooldown?" but the announce flash is what keeps me from looking down there every few seconds if I'm trying to time it exactly.

The size and duration of the pulsing animation are configurable. It's hard to see in the scale in the small the picture to the right, but the 'pulse' is wider than my unit frame.

BarTender4

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/bartender4.aspx

Most UI's have a lot of buttons visible. Mine doesn't.

There are 8 buttons on screen, and they are things I want to see the status of (how many charges of my mana gem do I have?) and the handful of things I click (evocation; clickies for dailies; rejuv pots since I haven't gotten around to keybinding those yet, but I will.)

Hidden offscreen, of course, are all my keybounded abilities. And BarTender4 has the nice feature that, when I get into a vehicle, it will make bar 1 visible, and I have it positioned right above my cast bar so I can do vehicle dailies (and fights like Malygos) easily.

People often don't believe they can play without seeing their bars until they try. I found it very freeing, as there's a lot more space on my UI now for actual useful information.

Geist

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/geist.aspx

I have every single combat ability (save the few mentioned in the BarTender section above) keybound, but there are still a few other things I cast -- and I hate using the spellbook for those.

For that I use Geist, a simple mod that, with a keypress, brings up 25 buttons on your screen that you can click on.

The keybinding is, of course, configurable (I use 'j' -- easy to hit but still out of the way, so it doesn't interfere with combat keybindings) and you can drag and drop spells onto the grid while it's visible (or edit your action bars in your bar mod -- the downside is it *does* use space on your main action bars.)

Combat Text

MyThreat

http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info8187-MyThreat.html

While using a full-blown threat mod like Omen isn't really necessary, I still like to know my own threat relative to the tank's.

MyThreat is a very simple display: your total threat, how much threat you can gain before you overtake the tank, and who that tank currently is.

I just have it centered on my screen, right over my character, where it's impossible to miss.

You can configure its thresholds for when it goes yellow and red to warn you that you are approaching the tank's threat. It also allows you to do things like track your threat versus your focus if you want to track threat versus two targets at once.

MiksScrollingBattleText

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/mik-scrolling-battle-text.aspx

Yet Another Scrolling Combat Text addon.

Why this one? Simply: it's the easiest, hands down, to configure. If you've ever fought with SCT before, you'll be so happy when you see how simple it is to set up MSBT. I've never regretted switching.

Still todo: filter out some of the extra crap that shows up in announce since Wrath -- e.g., I never want to see again that I've gained/lost Ferocious Inspiration!

EavesDrop

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/eaves-drop.aspx

A very simple mod, it creates a better 'history' view of what happened to you than either the combat log or scrolling combat text modules do.

It's very configurable, I took out a lot of the information so it could be very narrow and fit quietly on the side of my UI.

As a bonus, any line from it can be shift-clicked into your combat log, so you can, for example, link what killed you and by how much.

Recount

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/recount.aspx

It's a damage meter. It works.

I mostly have it for learning fights: I like being able to show, e.g., how many people were damaging "Mob That The Whole Raid Should Be Killing." Or conversely, who hit "Mob No One Should Touch."

It also lets me show decurse counts, healing meters, etc. and report all of that to channels.

The dps meters is just an added bonus.

Miscellaneous Non-Combat

Chatter

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/chatter.aspx

I use it as a replacement for prat, another chat mod. It adds timestamps, shortens channel names to just the numbers, and other sorts of simple chat cleanup that make it more pleasant to use.

ButtonBin

http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info10474-ButtonBin.html

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/fubar2broker.aspx

I no longer use FuBar, so ButtonBin (and the addon Fubar2Broker, which lets my old FuBar addons still work) is its replacement.

I like it because it has 5 different bins, which can either always be hidden/visible, or can show up on mouseover.

You also can just click the bin to "collapse" it, like you see in my screenshot. To the right is the bin expanded again.

The text is all configurable, so is the opacity. You can even make a bin look like a FuBar Bar if you really wanted.

All in all, it's a very nice mod for organizing your mod options without the overhead/fuss of FuBar, and it's more configurable as well.

Note that you will definitely want to pick up the second addon linked above if you want your older, pure-fubar mods to be able to show up in ButtonBin.

SexyMap

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/sexymap.aspx

Simply the most configurable map mod I've found.

The killer feature for me is that, as you can see in the screenshot, when your mouse isn't on it, all the buttons etc. disappear. But if you hover over it, you see them, zone info, etc.

Simply wonderful for additional "only as you need it" information organization.

RatingBuster

http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info5819-RatingBuster.html

Converts Ratings to Percentages, plus helps you compare two items of gear at the same time. Invaluable.

Edit this node

View this node's revisions

Add an image to this article