Benecaster hasn’t been updated for over 130 days now, and even though it’s one of my favorite addons, I’ll probably have to look around for a similar one that’s still being maintained. Another addon that’s not seen much changes over the summer is QuestHelper. The latest version fixed compability problems with the 2.4.3 of WoW, changed a bit how the strategy for timing the background work task works, and added a new filter which limits routing to objectives marked in the Quest Log. This is for all the other cases of “I just want to see X quests”.

Another popular addon, Atlasloot Enhanced has gotten minor and major changes in the last few months. The season 4 pvp items have been added as well as the profession items. A ‘quicklooks’ feature has been added, which lets you bind up to four loot tables to Quicklook buttons for eash one-click access. One of the more recent updates makes it compatible with Atlas version 1.12 but sees the removal of the autoquery function as it was causing too many errors. Focus for the development team is now mostly on continuing the addon for Wrath of the Lich King. The Atlas team has released version 1.12 which includes mostly minor fixes. Read the patchnotes here.

Deadly Boss Mods has finally been able to add Void Reaver’s Arcane Orb to the addon now that it finally shows up in the combat log. Good news for any guild doing Void Reaver on a regular basis. The team is now focusing on DBM for Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK) and hopefully we’ll have a fully working version by the team the expansion goes gold.

That’s it for this round. I’ll start updating more frequently as we get closer to WotLK. Hope you all had a good summer. Cheers!

-Mischief

sRaidFrames

• Added an option to hide/show some groups like ct-raid assist and add an option to avoid to open all groups automaticaly every time I’m in a raid/bg group/arena.
• Added a feature that would show incoming heals on the raid frames and/or target(Grid style).
• Added a feature to show Main tank and Main tank target frames (only with ora2 I guess).

Atlasloot Enhanced

• New and improved searching system
• All professions data available in the crafting module
• More efficient memory usage due to optimizations in the 2.4 patch

Deadly Boss Mods

This addon has now been updated to version 3.20 which will be the last addon before version 4 which will be a total rewrite of DBM. :) 

• updated M’uru mod
• added Kil’jaeden mod
• updated localizations
• Sunwell/Kalecgos: the status command will now also show the demon’s HP
• Sunwell/Eredar Twins: the status command should work now
• Sunwell/M’uru: fixed the status command in phase 2
• fixed a compatibility issue with WIM
• fixed UnitNamePlayer bug (really!)
• added spanish battleground translations (by Herenvarno@C’thun, thank you!)

Recount

• Dots now have (DoT) suffix, which allows to differentiate between direct damage and dot damage of mixed damage spells like Moonfire.
• Various bugfixes

Cartographer version 3

A totally new version of Cartographer is in the works, and it will work very much like Google Earth does. Check out http://www.curse.com/downloads/details/12701/ for download link and details.

That’s it for now. I’ll report more when there’s anything interesting to report.

World of Warcraft PTR Patch 2.4.3

The latest patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/

The latest test realm patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html
General

• Dispel effects will no longer attempt to remove effects that have 100% dispel resistance.
• Parry Rating, Defense Rating, and Block Rating: Low-level players will now convert these ratings into their corresponding defensive stats at the same rate as level 34 players.
• Haris Pilton has launched a new line of bags and jewelry. Check her out in the World’s End Tavern!
• Mounts at 30?! Yes, it’s true: Apprentice Riding and mounts are now available at level 30. Training costs 35 gold.
• Blood Elf flightmasters outside of Silvermoon City and Tranquillien have traded in their bats for glorious fire-breathing dragonhawks.
• Alcohol cooldowns have been rolled into Drinks: All 10-second cooldowns have been removed and replaced with the 1-second Drink cooldown.
• Numerous flying non-combat pets have had their flight height modified to no longer skim along the ground: captured firefly, dragonhawk hatchlings, moths, owls, parrots, phoenix hatchling, spirit of summer, sprite darter, and tiny sporebat.
• Nether Ray Fry (a non-combat pet) is now available from the Skyguard Quartermaster. This requires an Exalted reputation with Sha’tari Skyguard.
• Equipping an item will now cancel any spell cast currently in progress.
• Placing an item in your bank will now cancel any spell cast currently in progress if the spell was cast by that item.
• You can no longer move backwards to stop racing rams.
• When a stun wears off, the creature that was stunned will prefer the last target with the highest threat, versus the current target.

Druids

• Barkskin: The cost of this spell is now reduced by Tree of Life Form.

Hunters

• Growl: Pets will no longer generate additional threat from this ability based on attack power buffs cast on them. Attack power buffs on their master will still indirectly increase the threat generated by the pet’s Growl.
• Pet Aggro: Pets will no longer generate threat immediately from being summoned.
• Scare Beast: This spell will now be limited correctly to one target.
  Paladins
• Greater Blessing of Light Rank 1: This spell will no longer overwrite Greater Blessing of Light Rank 2.
• Summon Warhorse is now available at level 30.

Priests

• Mind Vision: This effect will now be cancelled immediately on targets who use an Invisibility Potion or Gnomish Cloaking Device.
• Spiritual Healing: Ranks 2-5 of this talent will no longer prevent refreshing Prayer of Mending.

Rogues

• Cheat Death: This talent has been rebalanced significantly. Killing blows are no longer 100% absorbed. If the Rogue is below 10% health, the killing blow is still completely absorbed; if the Rogue is over 10% health, enough damage will be absorbed to reduce the Rogue’s health down to 10%. For the following 3 seconds, damage is not always reduced by 90%; it is now reduced by a maximum of 90%, depending on how much resilience the Rogue has. The damage reduction will be four times the damage reduction resilience causes against critical strikes.

Shaman

• Earth Elemental: This pet will now leash back to its totem when pulled beyond 50 yards away.
  Lightning Overload: This talent will no longer do excessive damage when used with Lightning Bolt Ranks 2-10.

Warlocks

• Curse of Shadows: This spell has been removed.
• Curse of Elements: This spell now applies to Arcane and Shadow damage, as well as Frost and Fire.
• Demonic Sacrifice: This ability will now interact correctly with the Spirit Guide resurrection system in battlegrounds. A sacrificed pet will not be resummoned on death, and will not prevent keeping a record of the most recently created pet.
• Health Funnel: This ability will now cancel channeling when the target pet is Banished.
• Ritual of Summoning: The mana cost of this spell will now be properly deducted when cast.
• Summon Felsteed is now available at level 30.

Warrior

• Revenge: Ranks 1-5 of this ability now have damage ranges instead of fixed damage values (like ranks 6-8.)

PvP

• The Warsong Gulch flag can no longer be picked up at the same time as a flag is capped.

Professions
Alchemy

• Philosopher’s Stone now requires 200 Alchemy.

Cooking

• Juicy Bear Burgers now correctly increase healing as well as spell damage.

Jewelcrafting Activated beneficial effects from jewelcrafting trinkets can no longer be dispelled.

Mining

• Green quality gems can be found in mining nodes again. The drop rate of blue gems from mining nodes remains unchanged.

Tailoring

• Removed the cooldown from regular Mooncloth.
• Herb bags can now hold Un’goro Soil and Evergreen Pouches.
• Mycah of Sporeggar has discovered how to create 28 slot herb bags.
• New Tailoring patterns are available from Haughty Modiste in Steamwheedle Port, Tanaris: Haliscan Jacket and Haliscan Pantaloons.

Quests

• Bhag’thera now spawns at a normal quest spawn rate.
• For the quests, Intercepting the Mana Cells and Maintaining the Sunwell Portal, phased characters will not be able to see non-phased character AoE effects and vice-versa.
• For the quests, Intercepting the Mana Cells and Maintaining the Sunwell Portal, pets gaining/losing phase status will now properly break off combat from unphased/phased opponents.

Dungeons and Raids

• Players can now be summoned to raid instances from heroic dungeons.

Magister’s Terrace

• The Stun component to the Sunblade Mage Guard Glaive Throw has been removed and the Bounce range reduced.
• Vexallus and Kael’thas are now tauntable in Heroic mode.
• Vexallus’ damage caused by Pure Energy has been decreased.
• Kael’thas’ Arcane Sphere has had its visual size increased. His Arcane Sphere attack has had its range decreased and the damage/second of Phase two on Normal mode has been decreased. (Heroic mode remains unchanged.)
• Sunblade Warlocks have had their damage reduced slightly.
• Fel Crystals in the Selin Fireheart encounter have had their health reduced slightly.
  Warlord Salaris and Kagani Nightstrike have had their damage output reduced slightly.

Sunwell Plateau

• Creatures in the area around Grand Warlock Alythess and Lady Sacrolash will no longer spawn while the twins are in combat.
• Nether Protection will now correctly trigger from Kil’jaeden’s Shield Orb Shadow Bolts.
• Vanish now correctly wipes threat on Kil’jaeden.

Items

• Bow of the Verdant Keeper’s Aim: This item’s triggered effect no longer breaks the effect of Scatter Shot.
• Brutal Gladiator’s Pummeler has had its Stamina value increased to the appropriate value.
• Clockwork Robot Bots fight amongst themselves again…without attacking people in the arena. Well… they’ll blow up other Bots in the arena, but you know what we mean.
• The Eredar Twins will now award the same items regardless of which order they are killed in.
  Invisibility Potions: These potions now are on the same cooldown as other combat consumable potions (such as mana potions.)
• Pendant of the Violet Eye: This item will again work correctly with Holy Light and Flash of Light.
  Shattered Sun Pendant of Acumen: The triggered effect from this Item can now occur on periodic damage ticks.
• Thori’dal, the Star’s Fury is now Unique as intended.
• Vengeful Gladiator’s Baton of Light: This item now appears in the correct position on the vendor list.

User Interface

• The help interface has been simplified dramatically. Players will no longer be required to select a category when opening a GM ticket. In addition, players can use the “Talk to a GM” button to fill out a ticket that requires a GM response or the “Report Issue” button to fill out a ticket that does not require a GM response.
• Target buff/debuff timers that appear when you cast a spell are now more visible.
• Time Management features have been implemented! These features include an alarm clock, stopwatch, and viewing your computer’s local time.
• The new stopwatch feature can be accessed via the /stopwatch, /sw, or /timer slash commands. Inputting a time into the slash command will make the stopwatch count down. For example, /stopwatch 1:0:0 will make the stopwatch count down from an hour, /stopwatch 1:30 will make it count down from 1 minute, 30 seconds, and /stopwatch 30 will make it count down from 30 seconds.
• Added the following macro commands: /targetenemyplayer, /targetfriendplayer.
• Added key bindings for tab targeting players.
• Ctrl-Tab and other target nearest friend functions will no longer target you.
• Targeting using /target will prefer live targets over dead ones.
• You can no longer click the minimap to cast ground targeted spells.
• Invisible players with Hunter’s Mark can see the hunter that put the mark on them.
• Vendor items now show their Duration in Inventory.
• For additional notes on Lua and XML changes please visit the UI & Macros Forum.

World Environment

• Winterspring Ice Thistle Matriarchs and Patriarchs may now drop Thick Yeti Fur.
• Skinning any Winterspring Ice Thistle yetis may now result in Thick Yeti Fur.
• Increased the drop rate of Pristine Yeti Horns from Winterspring Ice Thistle Matriarchs and Patriarchs.
• Goblin Weather Machine- Prototype 01-B weather changes will no longer force the affected character to stand.
• Collector’s Edition Pet Redemption NPCs/items/quests have been relocated/modified to/for towns with mailboxes (Goldshire, Razor Hill, etc.).
• Young Sporebats and Greater Sporebats in Zangarmarsh now drop Sporebat Eyes for the quest Gathering the Reagents.
• Blacksmithing Supplies vendor and repairer, Blazzle, in Area 52 is now next to the forge and anvil outside the inn.
• Banker Meeda, in Area 52 is now in the…well…the bank, along with a guild vault and guards. The other three Area 52 bankers are still located in the auction-house-turned-bank.
• Wastewander Bandits and Rogues should be more plentiful in the northern parts of Tanaris.

Bug Fixes

• The mage spell, Counterspell now shows in the combat log.
• Gan’arg Analyzers will no longer occasionally become friendly to players.
• Talented abilities that cost a percentage of base mana will no longer display an incorrect mana cost when inspected by a player of a different class or level.
• Guild leaders should now be able to properly promote a new guild leader regardless of their range.
• Druids: Mangle will no longer incorrectly indicate a 100-yard range on the tooltip.
• Hunters: Using an instant ability after Steady Shot will no longer lock out auto shot.
• Hunter Snake Trap will no longer break players out of stealth if the snakes pass near the stealthed character.
• Hunters: Concussive shot will now properly have a chance to proc Bow of Searing Arrows.
• Rogues: The talent Heightened Senses, Rank 1 and Rank 2 will now affect attacks from wands.
• Using Jewelcrafting figurines will no longer cause scrolling combat text to appear twice.
• Fixed an issue in which shadows were not appearing properly for users with GF4 video chipsets in Open GL mode.
• Corrected an issue in which users with Creative X-FI sound cards would sometimes here a slight popping noise when running.
• Players will now correctly receive a Battleground Mark message for the marks that are received at the end of a battle.
• Corrected an issue where the initial trigger or activation sounds for Immolation Trap and Explosive Trap could not be heard by some players.
• Smelt Hardened Khorium will now properly require a forge instead of an anvil and hammer.
• Corrected a typo in the tooltip for the Druid spell Rip (Rank 4).
• Looting a Nightmare Vine will now properly no longer apply poison when the node is looted.
• The Figurine- Seaspray Albatross ability will now properly restore the correct amount of mana.
• First Aid bandages can no longer be applied to a player with the Recently Bandaged debuff. An error message of, “Could not activate more than one bandage” will be displayed.
• Corrected the tooltips to read properly for the flight paths from The Stormspire, Toshley’s Station, Blade’s Edge, and Area 52.
• Greater Elementals summoned by a shaman will now properly have a combat log entry.
• Players will no longer become stuck on the Nimboya’s Laden Pike when driving it into the ground.
• The quest, “Going Going, Guano!” will now have a more consistent level requirement for the dungeon.
• The quest, “Into The Scarlet Monastery” is now available to players of the appropriate level for the instance.
• Blueleaf Tubers can now be properly looted.
• The quest turn-ins for the Ahn’Qiraj war effort now give the appropriate amount of credit for each successful quest turn-in.
• Cloak of Shadows will now properly remove Shrink.
• Nightbane will no longer become unresponsive and unkillable during his air phase.
• Several items sold by the Consortium reputation vendor Paulsta’ats are now bind on pick-up: Formula: Enchant Weapon- Major Striking, Design: Delicate Blood Garnet, Design: Shifting Shadow Draenite, Design: Lustrous Azure Moonstone, Design:Thick Golden Draenite.
• It is no longer possible to delete a character that is an arena team captain without first promoting another player to captain.
• Taunts will now properly stick when a target is stunned while being taunted.

VisualHeal gives you a PlayerBar and a HealBar which will give you some practical information. The PlayerBar will show the player with the current health and a an extension of the bar displaying any incoming heals with a timer for how long it takes until completion. If several people are healing, a second extension of the bar will display showing a sum of all incoming heals at a later time. This will give the player a heads up on what’s to come in the next seconds and if he should drink a potion, use bandages, or heal yourself (if you are a healer).

The HealBar will show a bar with your targets health, any incoming heals from other healers that will complete before your heal and your heal. If you are about to overheal, this will be very apparent on the bar showing how much you will overheal. This can be very valuable in bossfights when conserving mana is very important. If you see yourself overhealing a lot, you can quickly choose to either downrank your healing spell, or simply cancel it.

I’d recommend any raiding guild having a look at this addon to make the guilds healing more efficient. The addon is small, simple to use, and the reward seems pretty damn good. The bars that come with the addon are simple to move around and tweak for size and such. It should be mentioned that to be able to see the incoming heals from other players you need to have a addon library installed called LibHealComm-3.0 which is included in VisualHeal and a few other addons (Grid&Grid2, Pitbull, sRaidFrames and BunchOfBars). This means that you won’t see the incoming heals from anyone who doesn’t have any of these addons installed.

Download:
http://wowui.worldofwar.net/?p=mod&m=3749

Homepage:
http://www.wowace.com/wiki/VisualHeal

Have you ever found yourself wondering how many of a specific item you have spread around your characters? If you are a bit messy, like me, you’ll find that you often have the same type of items on several characters instead of organized where similar item types (ore or cloth for instance) are gathered on one character. Read on for the full details on Possessions, an addon that could make your life more organized and tidy.

It’s not uncommon that I have to log on several characters to check if I have anymore of a given item. Possessions handles this nicely by keeping tabs on all your characters items, including your bank contents. You can pull up a interface window to get a list of all your items, where you can search and filter for items and get the total quantity for any of your items from all your characters. You can filter by character, slot and location or do a word search.

This is a fairly simple wow addon, but it certainly something to give a lot of players. If you are very organized to start with, this addon might not give you a whole lot, but for anyone less than organized, this is a nifty helper.

Download:
http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info6443-Possessions2.0.2Updated.html

Slash commands:

/poss                     Open the possessions window
/poss text                Open Possessions and search for “text”
/poss [itemLink]          Open Possessions and search for the item linked
/poss -clear name         Clears all stored data for the character or guild named “name” on the current realm.
/poss -validate all         Queries the server for all items stored in your database for the current realm. This will get rid of the questionmark icons, but it has the potential to disconnect you.

One of the really old and useful addons for World of Warcraft is Gatherer, developed originally by Norganna. The main purpose of this wow addon is to show you the nearest potential herb, vein or treasure. It does this by keeping a database of where you have found these things in the past. The addon will show you possible nodes on your minimap or even in your main window as one of the new features. Read on for more info.

Let me explain a bit more in-depth how this wow addon works. If you are a miner or a herbalist it’s practical to know where herb and vein nodes usually spawn. There are a number of possible spawn places for these on every map and usually they have a spawn time of around 15-20 minutes. In a small area on a map there could be 3-4 possible spawn nodes for one resource. Every 15-20 minutes there’s a chance a given resource will spawn at one of the nodes, but it won’t spawn for several of those nodes. There are many node clusters like this around the maps and each time you actually find a resource and gather it, gatherer makes a note of this, and you’ll see it on your minimap when you are close to it from now on so you don’t have to remember exactly where it spawned the last time.

Gatherer will also show you possible nodes on the world map, so you can plan a route for gathering resources. Another nifty feature is that it tracks treasure chests for you, and we all know that there can come some sweet items from those! You can do a lot of configuration to gatherer. You can choose how far away nodes can be before they show up on your minimap, and you can choose to track specific node types. One of the new features is that it shows the path you travel with a red line in your main view, and it also displays the nodes near you, so you can plan your travel route as good as possible.

There are some addons that improve the functionality of Gatherer but the one everyone should get right away is GathererDB which is a prebuilt database containing a majority of the nodes in World of Warcraft. With it you can start hunting those nodes right away and your gathering efficiency should increase by a lot.

Download:
http://www.curse.com/downloads/details/24/

QuestHelper

In the last couple of weeks this addon has seen some improvements.  QuestHelper has now got a world map button for enabling or disabling the addon and the ability to right click the button to get a menu where you can set some of the commonly used slash commands. There’s a new slash command added ‘/qh perf’ to set the performance factor of the addon. A lower setting will increase your game performance, and a higher setting will increase your addons performance. Several language translations have been added: Danish, German, Korean, Spanish and Turkish. Some small and some drastic changes have been done to try and improve the general performance, but what exactly has been done is not mentioned. The issue with route changing repeatedly should also be fixed now.

QuestHelper is currently in version 0.46.1 and Nasher is reported to have joined the team. For the initial review and a download link, see http://wow.addongurus.com/questhelper-speeding-up-the-work/

Natur EnemyCastBar

A final release for 2.4.0 version is not out yet, as not all bugs are ironed out it seems. A beta version that should work fairly well with 2.4.0 is in place though, and the latest changes reported are as follows: A lot of the code in the main API files have been cleaned up and files have been combined that didn’t need to be separated. The addon has been evaluated on one of the recent PTR versions to make it more efficient and changes will be progressive. You can read my review of this addon and find a downloadlink at http://wow.addongurus.com/natur-enemycastbar-timers-galore/

Deady Boss Mods

DBM has gotten some improvements for the M’uru fight and will now show timers and warnings for: Enrage, Void Sentinels, Humanoids, Darkness, Dark Fiends, Phase 2 and Black Holes. Despite 2.4.2 patch notes saying that Void Reavers arcane orbs are supposed to show in the combat log, it doesn’t seem like they do, so still no warnings for those.

Recount

Info on development is fairly scarce, but looking at the changelog tells us that there have been fixes and improvements to the death log and improvements to the layout for all detail views. Spell count has been added to upper detail view also. That’s it for Recount currently.

Gatherer

This is an addon I haven’t reviewed for you yet, but I will shortly. The latest news on Gatherer is that it’s been updated to support the new zone added in 2.4 and the HUD has been split from the main addon and into a plugin addon. There’s also a new option available for filtering nodes based on your professions and what you are currently tracking.

That wraps up news for this week, but I’ll be back with more news next week.

Phlay comments that:

I am finding a timing issue in events and processing of events which is causing a significant number of errors being reported.

Can’t wait for an update myself as I use this BeneCaster with sRaidFrames myself.

Talk about a package deal. Atlas is an addon that gives you instance maps for every instance in the game, with bosses an important locations marked off. AtlasLoot is an addon to Atlas which gives you loot lists for all the bosses in the instances as well as a ton of item collections that I’ll get into with more detailed. Read on!

World of Warcraft has maps of all the game areas, but not the instances, but thankfully we have the wonderful addon community that comes to the rescue time and again. Atlas has the full package of maps for every instance with all the bosses and key locations marked off. It has a minimap icon, as most of the popular addons have, but you can also open the Atlas window by typing /atlas.

Atlas supports plugins, and comes with 4 plugins out of the box: Battlegrounds, Dungeon locations, Flight points and Outdoor raid bosses. These plugins are fairly self explanatory. Other popular plugins are AtlasQuest - Fan Update and AtlasMajorCities which gives you lists of instance quests and maps of all the major cities.

AtlasLoot Enhanced is sort of a plugin for Atlas, but can also be used as a stand alone addon. It gives you a list of bosses for each instance and by clicking on the bosses you get a full loot list with drop chance and everything. You can choose if you want the normal or heroic mode for all the dungeons. There are lists for both 5-man instances as well as raid instances. This is not all you get, though, as AtlasLoot has collections of item lists.

• Faction items - Browse through item rewards for every faction separated into reputation levels.
• PvP items - Browse through all the PvP item rewards that you can purchase. Battleground rewards, Arena rewards and other PvP related items you can buy.
• Item sets - Get a list of all the item sets available in the game, from the Tier 1 to Tier 6 sets, Crafted Epic sets or Heroic Token awards.
• Season events - Browse through all the items that are available for each of the seasonal events.

You can CTRL+Left Click on items in to view them in the dressing room on your character and do search for items and instances in the Atlas and AtlasLoot windows. All in all these are two top notch addons that work great together so it’s two thumbs up from me!

Download link:

Atlas - http://www.curse.com/downloads/details/354/
AtlasLoot - http://www.curse.com/downloads/details/2983/

Out of the most popular addons, Omen made the biggest headlines, as it was very buggy after the patch was released. I heard people in the guild not getting it to work properly still a couple of days ago, but I’m not sure if the version that was out yesterday was working. Let’s hope it was. Another of my favorite addons that is still missing an update is BeneCaster. I think it’s over 40 days since it was last updated, and even though it works for the most part, it could do with a few fixes.

Deadly Boss Mods is coming along nicely and there are only two reported problems still around. There are missing timers for Kael’thas, and tanadu@gmail.com wants chat log/Kael’thas’ yells mailed. Tanadu is also missing log files containing SPELL_CAST_SUCCESS or SPELL_CAST_START event for Arcane Orb in the Void Reaver fight to get that mod working.

CTmods have surprisingly enough NOT been updated for the 2.4 patch. This includes CT_RaidAssist. Personally I use ORA2, so I’m not sure if this is a major problem or not. All in all, it looks like the majority of the most used addons have been updated to a working state at the very least. Some have gotten a facelift, others have just been fixed for compability with the patch. I had very little problems when starting to play the new wow patch, and if things go as smoothly as this with the patches of the future, I’m a happy camper.