Casual Huntering

Posts Tagged ‘Addons’

Okay, I admit to all of you that I have a lousy memory. I have to give myself reminders constantly or I will forget important to-do items at work, at home, and during raiding. How many of you hunters have been guilty of forgetting to get out of Aspect of the Viper after your mana is completely replenished? I use to have a nice little addon for that called ViperWatch, but the mod writer stopped updating it. So, I tried to just remember on my own. Well, that has been a joke. The only thing that will cut down your DPS more would probably be dying early on in the raid. I don’t know how many times I would look at the dps meters and wonder why my dps was in the pits and then look up to see myself having perfectly full mana. It was a little embarrassing.

Consequently, I had to show my friend Dave that Aspect of the Viper is not the default aspect even if it’s nice because you never run out of mana. We had that discussion awhile ago. Turns out he did a lot of leveling that way. I can’t remember if I covered that in a Dave’s Hunter Guide or not.

Anyway, I always knew when to switch to viper because I couldn’t do anything but use autoshot, mana is completely gone. It’s just way too easy to keep on Viper too long… way too long. Really, you want to get back to Aspect of a Dragonhawk as fast as humanly (or dwarvenly) possible.

So, here you have it. This is the Aspect of the Viper reminder addon that I’ve found that works for Patch 3.3. It works beautifully. It’s called ViperNotify and it very simple. When your mana is back up it give an annoying “ding” sound over and over and over again until you switch it off. The last viper addon was too easy to miss, but you won’t miss this one. You’ll spend less time in Viper and more time DPSing the h3ll out of those bosses.

I’m sure many of you already have this figured out, but for those of you who don’t I hope this helps out.

Last night Kydra and I finally hit level 80!!!! Here are the screen shots to prove it.

I think we may be some of the last people who actual reached level 80 (even though we were 70 before the WotLK came out).

By the way, thanks to all who suggested mods to take the screen shot, I ended up going with Multishot (suggested by Anea). This is a great little mod that takes a screen shot when ever you hit a new level, down a boss, or get a new achievement. I would suggest that if you know you are about to down a boss that you try to position your screen so you can actually see the boss downed or at least angle it to show your better side. Here’s a shot it took when we finished Culling the Strat:

So, now what to do, what to do? I thought I would get back with my obsession with mounts and get my hippogryph by getting my Cenarian Expedition Rep up. I need to also get my Chopper which means I need to get off my arss and get my engineering finally leveled. Oh yes, and the many heroics that need to be done. Oh and I could work on my DK who is currently level 71. So much to do now, so little time.

Any other suggests as to what I should do now? Go to disneyland or something? Any suggestions for a new dps pet?

I thought that I’d make a list of my addons to give other people suggestions, but to also get some ideas (via comments) of what other people like for addons. I’m sure that I’m missing something, but I’m pretty happy with what I have right now. Here are the addons I use the most with a link to where you can download them.

Auctioneer
If you like making money on the auction house then this is just mandatory.

PetEmote
I love this mod, if gives your pet a voice, weather its a pet for hunters, a demon for locks, or a ghoul for DKs. This mod is especially important I would imagine if you roleplay.

SmartBuff
I’m an idiot. If I don’t have something to remind me to buff up, I’ll forget. Mind you who’s a hunter going to buff, but my DK’s bone shield thing is constantly going up. So this is mostly for my alts. My wife loves this mod with her mage.

SexyMap
Just added this one, I’m not sure of all the features besides the sexy animation that is around the minimap.

Cartographer
Nice map mod, I love that it includes the dungeon maps. There is a lot of features of this mod that I don’t utilize. Sad I know.

Quest Helper
This little mod has changes all of our lives. Of course in Northrend it doesn’t always get it right. Can’t always trust Quest Helper (like the time it told us to go to Nagrand to assassinate that one guy instead of Borean Tundra /shakes his head at his own stupidity).

Gatherer
If you do any flower picking *herbalism*, or mining, this is a must for you.

Kharthus’s Hunter Timers
This mod keeps track of timers for me. Like my serpent sting, lets me know when I last put it own and how soon I’ll need to refresh it.

ItemRack
This is a nice little mod that will let you change your outfit quickly. I haven’t had much use for it, but someday I’m going to level that Druid, and by golly I’m going to have at least a couple sets of gear on me. This mod (or one similiar to it) will especially be helpful when we get into duel specing (unless Blizz adds some feature to the game like the hinted about).

Minipet
This mod will remind you to pull out one of you noncombat pets, and gives you a button to do so, randomly. I’m a dork, I love this mod!

Mountiful
Basically the same randomness of Minipet, but with your mounts. As stated in previous posts, You get to the point where if you have too many mounts (I have 60 now!) then you can’t fit all of them into a macro *even if you are using numbers instead of the names of the mounts*.

Omen Threat Meter
Gotta keep your aggro down. I’ve heard it said, if you aren’t being forced to feign death then you are dpsing enough. Here is your aggro meter so you can make sure that you don’t pull from the main tank.

SKG *suicide kings*
This is our guilds current system for distributing loot. Its designed for a casual guild, but I think we are going to more of a traditional DKP system sometime in the future. I for one like SK more because I’m more casual and I’m not punished for it.

Deadly Boss Mods
I love this mod, it helps out in all of those nasty boss fights. It gives you useful stuff, like telling you when the next phase of the fight is coming up, when you are suppose to spread out, when are suppose to hold still, etc, etc. All of that junk. “Don’t move – Flames!”

ViperWatch
This is a Hunter only mod that gives us a little reminder to turn your Aspect of the Viper on when your mana is down and turn it off when your mana is back up. I don’t know how many times I would forget to turn the d@mn thing off!!! The funny thing is the sound that they use for this particular reminder is the same sound when you failed a quest, so at first I was always thinking, “crap I failed something, what did I do”. But now I’m use to it so it’s no big deal. This is a must if you are a hunter, not so much if you aren’t. There is another one called ViperNotify. It looks like its more popular according to Curse Gaming, but I haven’t tried it out.

Little Black Book
I just got this and I haven’t played with it yet. This is particularly nice to have on a PvP server. It is a kill-on-sight mod that keeps track of the Horde (or Alliance) characters that have killed you, it puts them on a list. I think its suppose to let you know when you are in the vicinity of someone on that list so you can kill them. I only got it recently (after being ganked by at stupid level 80 DK when I was minding my own business). But I think if you are on a PvP server an addon like this is a must. If anybody out there has a kill-on-sight mod that they love, please do share.

Is there anything I’m missing? I’m sure there is a uber mod that I should have and I don’t at this point. I’m open to suggestions. I’m also wondering if there are any good mods spedifically for Death Knights (I’ve been Playing Elliahna a lot these days). Let me know what mods you like and what they are good for.

Finally!!! I get to fly again. No more do I have to sneak over to the Outlands to mount up and fly about. I got my cold weather training last night and I can start breaking out my epic flying mounts. Now I need to farm like crazy to help get Kydra her epic flying training. I care a lot more than she does. But she hasn’t yet experienced the epicness of epic flying (maybe should have used a different adjective, getting a little redundant).

So, I’m up to 54 mounts right now, I just found out from twitter friends that I could buy all the nether drakes. I thought I only got my free one. So, I’m going to do that once I get my money up. Why would I want to do that seeing how I already have my 50 mount achievement (Leading the Cavalry). Well, I don’t have a good answer for that. It is really fun to use a random mount add on (I use Mountiful) and you never know what mount you’ll use. Many people in the guild (including my brother) think I’m a little silly with my obsession with mounts. They’re probably (most likely) right. I got him convinced that its what I like to do when I’m not leveling with my wife, but truthfully, I would do it anyway.

I just like to collect things I suppose. When I was in high school I was really into collectible Star Wars cards. I spent hundreds of dollars on those stupid things, and now they are just collecting dust. When I was even younger I collected pennies. I have several Indian head ones and one that goes all the way back to the 1880′s. Wow, information you probably don’t care about. But what do you collect?

I really like getting vanity pets as well, but I’ve been lazy about doing that lately. I’m still at 39 vanity pets. Need 11 more to get my skunk. Wouldn’t want that for a mount, that’s for sure.

So, if you like to randomly pop up on one of your mounts then here are a couple of things you can do:

Here is a link to a great macro that will work from, but it needs some explanation from the place I got the macro at Less QQ, More PewPew.

#showtooltip Swift Red Wind Rider
/run if IsMounted() then Dismount() return end local t if IsFlyableArea() then t={7} else t={1,2,5,6,8} end CallCompanion(“MOUNT”,t[random(#t)])
/dismount [mounted]

However, if you have over 50 mounts, even if the macro is using numbers instead of full mount names, a macro still can’t be long enough to truly be random for all of your mounts. At this point I went to look for an Addon that can do it for me. And i found Mountiful. This addon will let you preselect which mounts you would like to randomly select from and it will know if you can be on a flying mount or if you can’t. It also has a feature that will act like a safeguard, not allowing you to accidentally dismount midair. One more thing it will let you randomly pull out one of your vanity pets (but I don’t use that feature, I use an addon called Minipet for that.

Its about time! Us hunters who forget to look up to see what aspect we are in finally have a mod to save us!!

Have you been in a raid/instance, run out of mana? You switch to aspect of a viper to get your mana back only to find 30 minutes later YOUR STILL IN ASPECT of a VIPER???!!!! Oh @#$@!, maybe you haven’t done that before but I have, felt really stupid. /facepalm.

Now we have an answer: ViperWatch! It keeps an eye on your mana and when your mana gets to a predetermined level it reminds you to switch and when your mana is back up it kindly reminds you to switch back to aspect of a dragonhawk (or if you are a slow leveler like myself – aspect of a hawk). No more embarrasing moments. As long as you keep growl of your pet and don’t randomly have him pull new mobs to your group.

(2/22/10 – update, viperwatch doesn’t work much for me anymore, I now use ViperNotify, I’ll put an update an that soon.)