Filed under: Add-Ons

It's fairly common knowledge that Blizzard has kept updating the Armory with new features and new apps. Now, Bornakk comes forth with news of an app that will be to the armory what a giant Steve Allen pog was to pogs: behold, the ultimate feature! In the glorious future, we'll be able to work our auctions from the Armory itself or apps for the iPhone and iPod touch. Yes, one more step closer to actually living full time in Azeroth. I have my eyes on a nice cottage outside of Elwynn, myself.

In all seriousness, I know a lot of people who would probably club me over the head and hand me over to a cabal of secretive necromancers for this feature. No news yet on exactly how it's going to work, and Bornakk does point out that with the amount of work it will be to develop, you're probably going to have to pay extra for it.

This is a fairly complex service to develop, due in large part to its unprecedented integration with the game, so we don't have an exact release date yet. It's important to note here that certain elements of the service will be premium-based, which we'll go into more detail on once the service functionality is finalized. As with all of the services we offer, we plan to integrate the Auction House and Armory in a way that won't disrupt the gameplay experience, and we won't release it until it meets the quality standards that we've set for our other features and services.

See the rest of the announcement after the break.

We've received many tips about Vuhdo and it was only a matter of time before it would be featured here. Vuhdo is one of the most popular raid healing addons available. It offers enough features and customization options to keep even the pickiest of UI enthusiasts happy. At the same time, if your entire UI is fried and the raid is about to start, Vuhdo works great out of the box.

What's so great about it? I thought you'd never ask. Let me show you.

Two Bosses Enter ... but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW.com's series of fantasy death matches. We're moving from the quarter-finals into the semi-finals of the Original Five-Man Wrath of the Lich King season. Grab a seat, and let's get ready to rumble!

This week, the Original Five-Man Wrath of the Lich King season of Two Bosses Enter moves into the semi-finals with a repeat match: Ley-Guardian Eregos versus Loken. If you believe voters cheated Loken out of his last victory against the Ley-Guardian based on their distaste for Eregos and The Oculus, now's your chance to set things right!

In last week's final quarter-finals battle, King Ymiron demonstrated the power behind his throne with a decisive Thunderdome victory over Krik'thir the Gatewatcher. More than 64 percent of the crowd roared its support for the King, while just shy of one-third believed Krik'thir could hold his own. Here's a sampling of the debate from the stands:

Dreamstorm: This is one complicated fight. I'm going to wait with voting until I read what others think and why.

Qot: Two Bosses Enter is sort of like the NBA All-Star voting. The people decide, but they usually decide based on reputation or history rather than actual skill. Xevozz was perfectly tuned to kill Loken, but Loken's a BAMF in the lore, so he wins the match.

Dreamstorm: If the king wins, we'll have ourselves a Nerubian, a Vrykul, a blue dragon and a creation of the Titans ... PIT FIGHT!! :D

Eddy: I was kind of thinking that. I feel like I'm biased towards King because then the fights would just seem so balanced -- the end bosses from a number of lore-intensive instances. I feel like the lore supports the king's victory.

Curse Client version 4 for Mac has been in open alpha for some time now, and I'm happy to report it's pretty good -- far better than version 3 ever was. I have no idea how the Windows version is, but the Mac one is probably better than WoWMatrix ever was, from a usability standpoint, without that nagging "steals bandwidth from hosting sites" issue.

Things I like about it:

• It's pretty fast. It doesn't lock up for seconds at a time, and it doesn't max out my CPU.
• It works well with links on the Curse site to install addons; it also makes it pretty easy to get new addons from within the updater.
• It's easy to update all your addons; one click does it.
• The changelog for a new version is pretty easy to bring up, in case you're wondering whether to update.

With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown.

Tori asked...

"What do you think will happen with the Undead after the Lich King is defeated? I realize for gameplay purposes they won't suddenly disappear from the Horde, but from a lore view Sylvanas' entire grudge against Arthas was most of the reason for using the Horde as a means to her end.

Plus after all the Wrath Gate drama... it just seems as though the Forsaken should almost be their own faction or something."

Our buddy Rufus from the WoW LJ brings word of a sneaky change in the recent patch: raid warnings (those warnings that pop up in the middle of your screen, created by typing "/rw" while leading a raid) no longer work in parties. Apparently you have to be in a raid to actually toss off a warning. Of course, that could have happened before this patch, but at any rate, it's in the game now. No more /rw in party chat.

Not only is it a bummer because some people used to use it constantly to keep party members in line, but this also means that there's one less means of communication between all of these random parties forming out there on the realms. Sure, in a perfect world, everyone would know the fights and chat would be enough to make sure everyone was on the same page (or depending of your vision of a perfect world, everyone actually uses the in-game voice chat -- a quick survey of our staff here presumes that it works in cross-realm PuGs, but given that I've never actually seen it used on the live realms by anyone, who knows?), but we're hardly running instances in a perfect world. Sometimes chat is not the best way to get a complicated boss fight organized and ready.

With patch 3.3 just hours away, we thought it might be nice to do a quick list of major addons that have already been updated to give you something to do while waiting for the servers to come back up, then waiting in the login queue, and then waiting for Dalaran to load. You've got a good fifteen minutes worth of downtime just trying to get out of Dalaran. Oh, and don't forget to set your game client to load out of date addons to cover all of the ones that haven't updated yet.

Author Gronzig emailed us a note about this new addon of his called RankWatch, which serves a simple purpose: it alerts you if anyone is using downranked spells. I'm sure we've all seen the player who forgets to train, put on their bars, or update their macros with new ranks of important spells. Heck, I was using rank two of Binding Heal well into Naxxramas, since I had it bound directly to a key with Dominos.

If anyone in your party or raid uses a rank lower than the maximum for their level, RankWatch will tell then about it in a whisper. The only exception is for Life Tap, which warlocks will often use rank one of to proc effects without taking much of a health hit. Back in the day, healers would commonly downrank heals as a mana-saving measure (if I recall correctly, Heal rank four was a staple in classic raiding), but this strategy is long-gone (since patch 3.0.2), because downranked spells now cost the same amount mana as top-rank spells (or more).

Configuration options include turing off the auto-whisper and ignoring certain players, which are both vital for a potentially-annoying mod like this. Overall RankWatch looks like a useful little tool, if only so I no longer have to worry about checking up on myself.

Download RankWach at Curse

Huntsman's Lodge has a terrific set of tips for running Power Auras as a hunter. I'm not running this addon (yet) on my hunter, but apparently it's pretty old news -- our old friend BRK had some ideas on how to use it a while back. But HL goes even farther, and I like a lot of his ideas, like a star that lights up when Dragonhawk isn't turned on -- I'll admit I make that mistake from time to time -- and warnings for "special circumstance" spells like Lock and Load and Kill Shot.

You can mix and match them all to fit your own gameplay as well, so maybe use some from HL's list and throw in one or two from BRK's old setup. And even if you're not a hunter, the addon is helpful for any class that needs a heads up on buffs and debuffs coming their way. We hunters can get all the help we need though -- HL's list is a great resource for using the addon with our class.

New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. Visit WoW.com's WoW Rookie Guide for links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's.

Last week, we talked about how add-ons add zing to your game, and we explained how to download and install them. We hope you spent time poking around some of the major mod sites and found some things that caught your eye -- but if not, we're back to fill you in on some of different types of mods along with some of the most popular add-ons that will streamline and enhance your game experience.

What are the major kinds of add-ons?

The bulk of what most players consider to be WoW's "must-have" add-ons falls into some half a dozen loose category types.

For anyone that has tried leveling up a profession, you know that it can be a bit of a grind. This can be especially true with things like engineering or jewelcrafting that have little parts that you have to make in order to make the actual items. Even leatherworking has the ability to upgrade leather from one grade to a better grade and still make something out of it. All of this can be confusing, especially with the categories that Blizzard has setup in the normal trade window. Advanced Trade Skill Window can help out with that problem.