Generally, I don’t use mods for MMORPGs. Or most video games. It’s not that I take some high-minded principled stand against them; I have absolutely no problem with their existence or the pleasure that others take from using mods. For me, it’s the combination of usually being satisfied with the default function of a game and not having to fiddle about with always-breaking addons.
Yet for World of Warcraft: The War Within, I was convinced by several others that a handful of mods were worth the bother. One of my overarching goals with this expansion is to cut through the confusion of content and have my options clearly laid out for me. So I installed five addons, and Bree twisted my arm to have me share those with you. Ow. Let go.
Dialogue UI
The mod I’m over-the-moon about — and one I really wish I’d known about a long time ago — is Dialogue UI. Being blind in my left eye, I find it slightly harder to read the left side of a screen than the right for me, and WoW’s bunched-up quest text box sulks over to the left. Not only does this addon allow you to put the text box left or right, but it also makes it vastly more presentable and readable. Truly, you’d think this was Blizzard making a more modern iteration of the quest box.
The mod does a couple other things that I appreciate. First, it zooms the camera in on the questgiver, making it slightly more immediate and cinematic. And second, it creates fun little pop-ups whenever you pick up an item with flavor text. Between the flavor text and the improved readability of quest text, I find that I’m tracking what’s going on in this expansion far better than I normally would.
Auctionator
There are a few tried-and-true auction house addons that the community uses, but the one that fits me the best is Auctionator. It’s a simple, no-nonsense, streamlined mod that helps you buy and sell items at the best prices — and fairly quickly, as well. It even makes going to the AH kind of fun now, because I know I’m going to get a chunk of gold for only a few seconds’ effort.
World Quest Tracker
World Quest Tracker is a mod that I remember using from back in my Legion days, and I’m glad to see it’s still around. It basically enhances the map to group up all of the current world quests in all of the expansion zones, providing a quick at-a-glance overview of where profitable or useful quests may be. This is particularly helpful if you’re waiting for certain world quests to pop or are hunting down a specific faction rep.
HandyNotes and HandyNotes: The War Within
These last two mods go hand-in-hand, so I’m lumping them together here. HandyNotes is another map augment that shows you where all the really good stuff is in any particular zone. This includes rare mob spawns, pets, treasures, and other interesting “points of interest.”
I like this because it makes cruising around a map fun, trying to find and obtain all of the extra goodies (which are conveniently deleted from the map interface once grabbed). It also provides some, er, handy notes about how to accomplish certain puzzles or conditional treasures. For example, I found a locked chest in Hollowfall, and the HandyNote told me that the key was on the body of a guy below the cliff on which I was standing. Lo and behold, that worked.
That’s it. Those are my five, at least for now. These are baby steps into the world of modding, I know, and while I don’t want to have 50 mods by the end of the month, I’m willing to be convinced of one or two more if any of you WoW fans argue well for them!
Stepping back into the MMO time machine of WoW Classic, Justin Olivetti offers up observations and ground-level analysis as a Gnome with a view. Casually Classic is a more laid-back look at this legacy ruleset for those of us who’ve never stepped into a raid or seen more than 200 gold to our names.
