Modular Monday - OPie

Today we've got a surprisingly light-weight mod with a lot of functionality, especially class to class. OPie is a tool that aims to save you space on your action bars. It's kind of hard to describe, but the video above gives you a pretty good visualization and a basic idea: set up hot keys in order to make ring-like menus pop up (basic or animated) at your whim. Like PowerAuras, a lot of the specialization and customization comes based on the class you play. All classes can use it as a cool way of managing your mounts, pets and trade skills for example, but here are a few cool uses for each class specifically

Paladins - Easy way to manage your auras blessings and seals

Mages - A godsend for keeping all your portals and teleports on a few buttons.

Warlocks - Great for keeping all your pets on one button, as well as soul and spellstones

Druids - All your forms at your fingertips

Hunters - Aspects on the fly, pet commands whenever you need

Death Knights - Easy presence swaps, ghoul commands and various cooldowns

Warriors - Stance swapping for all you dancers out there

Rogue - Stealth, Vanish or Shadow Dance, poison management, and stuns plus crowd control on one key

Priests - All your raid buffs on a ring, and quirky spells like Mind Control or Mind Soothe

Shaman - Can be used in conjunction with your new call totem spells, plus a great way to manage weapon imbues

I'm sure there are a ton more out there. The default rings on the mod include things like trade professions, raid markings, mini-map trackers, and other class specific rings. It's super customizable and I highly recommend you give it a shot.

Shazam-all-up-your-Interface-holez

(title taken lovingly from one of my favorite in-game shaman macros)

One of the first things a lot people will ask after looking at videos or screenshots of different WoW players are questions about their User Interface or UI. I myself run a pretty heavily modified UI and thought I'd get to sharing it. So let's start with a screenshot of me at a Test Dummy:Obviously most of the heavy customization comes at the bottom, so we'll start with a closer look at that:

Probably one of the most commonly used Mods for moving around your action bars is Bartender. It's pretty much everything you could ask for in terms of being able to move and resize your your action bars. Bartender can be somewhat of a double-edged sword however in that it can take quite a long time to set up, and isn't the most user-friendly when it comes to the set-up. If you keep it turned on for all your characters, expect anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes setting up your bars the first time you log in.

The next most noticeable UI element is the black bar across the bottom. Initially I was turned on by the wide screen look after watching so many Tankspot videos posted by Ciderhelm. While he initially posted the mod that he uses as CBH Viewport, it hasn't been updated in quite some time and is prone to integrating background elements. Skinner is the viewport mod that I use now and works quite well. It also has the option of reskinning the rest of your interface by taking away some of Blizzards default graphics and creating a more sleek and unified feel that I enjoy a great deal.

The in-game minimap can be moved around with a lightweight mod called simpleMinimap. If you feel like adding a little extra to your minimap, try Sexymap instead, as it will literally make your minimap quite sexy with some in-game resources. Outfitter is also posted closely to the minimap. Even without dual spec, it can be very helpful for players with multiple sets of gear (I used it to manage a Mitigation set, a Stam set, and a Frost resist set).

The middle shot is a very simplified shot of where a lot of action can take place. At the bottom near my feet, you can see a timer surrounded by some faint blue lines. Thats PowerAuras showing my Divine Plea uptime and how long I have till it falls off. PowerAuras has a metric ton of different usages by giving you a very easy to use resource of creating in game graphic overlays. It excels at giving a quick information through whatever visual cue you want to set up, and every class can find something handy to use it for. Death Knights can create visual symbols to show that your target has your diseases set up on them. Rogues can create a more visual combo points frame. Enhancement Shaman can show Maelstrom weapon procs. If you ever find yourself constantly looking up to your buffs to see if you got a proc of some sort, I highly encourage you check out this mod.

The text on the left of the shot showing my Blood Draining proc is Scrolling Combat Text or SCT. It's another mod with lots of customization that can give you a little or a lot of info. I currently have mine set up so that I see incoming buffs on the left of my screen, and incoming damage on the right, essentially creating a flowing combat log thats very easy to see. This helps out a ton when tanking as I can easily look at a glance how much the boss is hitting me for on average, if I block / dodge / parry an attack, or even if I'm taking damage from standing in one of WoW's numerous fires.

Over on the right of the screen is a more recently downloaded mod called CowTip. Simply put its a Tooltip mod that allows me to reposition the tooltip box and lets me see more data than what the in-game tooltip offers. It's handy just for moving the tooltip box to a certain section of the screen.



Up at the top we have two simple mods even though only one is present at the outlook. The first that is a unique mod for Paladins out there is Pallypower. If you are a paladin that does any kind of dungeons, raiding, or even pvp, you absolutely MUST get PallyPower. It's a very simple buff manager for paladins that syncs with other paladins in your group. As paladin's have the widest selection of buffs to hand out to a group, this helps out immensely with coordinating buffs and making sure reagents don't go to waste. I can't stress this enough, if your a paladin that plays in the endgame GET PALLYPOWER.

The less obvious mod present in the screen shot is a handy tool called Buffalo3. This mod allows you to reposition your buffs anywhere you like, very similar to how bartender lets you move around your action bars. Just handy if you want to line everything up or resize your buffs.

The mods mentioned here are only a handful of what I run on any given day. I'll list the rest now and go more in-depth with posts on Modular Mondays

-ArkInventory

-AutoRepair

-Bigwigs (and all the boss plug-ins that come with them)

-CLCRet

-Grid

-Omen

-OmniCC

-OPie

-Postal

-Quartz

-QuestHelper

-Recount

-Titan (panel hidden up top until mouse over)

-Utopia