Monday, February 14, 2011

Addon Pimpage: ErrorMonster, & BugSack + !BugGrabber

A'ight, so this is gonna be a kinda short post.  I had originally considered doing a post last week about Ursagate, but the few people who actually do read this blog already know my opinions and feelings on that, so there you have it.

So my last post I talked a little bit about what I do and do not need to know when tanking (or at least, what I think I do and don't need to know =P)  You know what else I don't need to know when I'm tanking an encounter?
 "You do not have enough rage."
"You cannot do that yet."
"You do not have enough mana."
"That ability isn't ready yet."
 Yeah, OK, I get it guys, I'm a button masher, call me bad, call me w/e, but it works for me.  I know I hit the ability too soon, or I don't have enough rage, I don't need my character telling it to me emphasized by red lettering across my screen.  (A. I hate my character's voice. B. Shouldn't it just be a bear grunting something about rage, not some prissy Night Elf saying it?)  Now, this first part, the voice, that can be turned off in sound options (YAY!) which is really handy, it gets in the way of my Alan Jackson blaring in my headphones, and Vent when I turn off my music to raid.  And the second part? The red text that makes my movies look like shit because you can clearly see that I'm a button masher?  That's where  ErrorMonster comes in.  It's very simple, lightweight, and configurable for a variety of messages, you can even filter out procs, buffs, etc. or only certain error messages.  I simply disable all of them, like I said, I know I hit the ability too soon, I can see the ability on my cooldowns, and I can see when something fired off or not, I don't need error text to tell me that, it just clutters my viewing area.  That's that, it's a bit of personal preference, but I feel it helps to eliminate some on screen distractions while tanking.

Ok, so the next two addons are a little bit different, and more crucial, IMO.  In fact, I don't consider these ones optional if you choose to play the game with -any- addons at all, you should have these installed.  Heck, even without addons, you may find yourself in need of these.  This is because of one other thing that "I don't need to know while tanking.":
  LibBabble-3.0-2 (LibBabble-Boss-3.0):51: LibBabble-Boss-3.0: Translation "Deathknight Understudy" not found. ...gs_RazuviousAssistant\BigWigs_RazuviousAssistant.lua:19: in main chunk: <in C code>: in function `LoadAddOn' BigWigs-2.0 r4929\LoadOnDemand.lua:34: in function <Interface\AddOns\BigWigs\LoadOnDemand.lua:26> BigWigs-2.0 r4929\LoadOnDemand.lua:228: in function <Interface\AddOns\BigWigs\LoadOnDemand.lua:204> <in C code>: ? AceEvent-2.0-91091 (Ace2):298: in function `TriggerEvent' BigWigs-2.0 r4929\Core.lua:401: in function <Interface\AddOns\BigWigs\Core.lua:397> <in C code>: in function `pcall' AceDB-2.0-91094 (Ace2):24: in function <Interface\AddOns\Ace2\AceDB-2.0\AceDB-2.0.lua:23> AceDB-2.0-91094 (Ace2):1863: in function `ToggleActive' BigWigs-2.0 r4929\LoadOnDemand.lua:249: in function <Interface\AddOns\BigWigs\LoadOnDemand.lua:238> <in C code>: ? AceEvent-2.0-91091 (Ace2):298: in function `TriggerEvent' AceEvent-2.0-91091 (Ace2):910: in function <Interface\AddOns\Ace2\AceEvent-2.0\AceEvent-2.0.lua:903>
 "Wow, that was alot of nonsense that just popped up on my screen in the middle of an add spawn on a boss fight, crap crap crap close window I need to pick up these mobs."  Next spawn, same thing happens, huh, that's annoying, and really hard to deal with.  Not only that, it is apparently from some addons, it would be nice to catalogue these and show them to the bug report forum, or better yet, the addon maker, in order to fix it, but I'm too busy deleting the message across my screen to get back to tanking to deal with it.

Having an addon break mid fight can be deadly, but still manageable, but having that addon spamming your screen throughout the fight while it's breaking can be even more so, as it can cover up alerts/players/mobs that you really need to be paying attention to.

This is where !BugGrabber and BugSack come into play.  Simply put, !BugGrabber will capture any error alerts that pop up and instantly put them into BugSack.  (It also defaults to having some crazy gnome voice saying "Fatality!" whenever it happens, which got kinda irritating, I turned it off)  By default, your Bugsack will be green, when it has an error captured, it will be red, you simply click on the red sack in your Minimap menu, and from there you can select and copy the error, to paste into a notepad, word, or w/e you want in order to use it for reporting purposes.

So that's today's addon pimpage, three little addons that have done wonders to make my game play more streamlined and viewer friendly!

No comments:

Post a Comment