Since Wrath’s launch last Thursday both Joanne and I have been levelling our mains to 80, currently they (Krugash and Angelikuh) are level 74 and questing in the Dragonblight. We entered Northrend via Borean Tundra, completing all the quests there before moving onto Howling Fjord.

Both start zones have been quite fun, both have had their share of unique and interesting quests. They also both have gorgeous visuals with suitably cold feeling vistas.

After finishing the two start zones we’ve moved onto the Dragonblight, the first totally snowy and icy zone in Northrend. We’ve done the quests from the first quest hub, a hospitable place called Venomspite where we both dinged level 74 and promptly toddled off to Dalaran (which has recently flown from Alterac Mountains to it’s new home floating menacingly above the Crystalsong Forest) to buy a rather cute bear mount with evil, glowy eyes…

Next we have to finish the quests in Dragonblight and then move on to the slightly warmer climes of Grizzly Hills.

From there it’s onto Zul’Drak and Sholazar Basin where we’ll hopefully ding 80 leaving The Storm Peaks and Icecrown free to earn money from quests.

So far Wrath of the Lich King has been a totally pleasurable experience, the quests have been fun and the areas have been a joy to navigate. In fact, I can’t actually at this point think of anything negative to say about it!

It’s been really enjoyable playing through the expansion with everything being fresh, with no-one (barring those who were in the beta) really knowing all that much.

Oh, and I have an addon post in the works for the weekend… hopefully I can get back on track with posts…

Yup, Wrath of the Lich King launches at Midnight tonight, most places won’t be lucky enough to have midnight opening launches near them though leaving us lesser mortals the opportunity to pick up the game when shops open in the morning.

Then the exciting prospect of levelling to level 80 through completely new areas doing completely new quests awaits… after installing and upgrading our accounts anyway…

I’m REALLY excited about WotLK, should be great fun…

Click the picture to enlarge…

I’ve annotated the screenshot but here are the full details, including what can’t be seen visibly:

Ackis Recipe List (hidden) - Shows me which profession recipes I’m missing and where to get them from.
Ampere (hidden) - Allows me to turn addons on and off easily without having to log out and back in again.
Atlas and AtlasLoot (hidden) - Displays instance maps with boss locations and shows you what loot can drop with drop rates.
AutoBar (shown) - A bar which which gives quick access to quest items, food, drink, buffs and various class related stuff. It automatically updates to display relevant items. Saves cluttering up your regular bars with stuff.
BetterBlizzOptions (hidden) - Makes the new Blizzard options panel resizable and wider by default.
Buffalo (shown) - Lets you move and skin the default buff/debuff display.
ButtonFacade (hidden) - Lets you skin other addons, this is the addon causing all my bar and buffs to share their look.
Capping (hidden) - Displays various timer bars in PvP and lets you announce them to chat.
Carbonite Quest (shown) - Displays a rather funky google-maps like… map and using it’s own tracker lets you visibly see where and how far away quest objectives are. Covered in an earlier Addon Corner video.
Chatter (shown) - Various chat window improvements including timestamps, class-coloured names, invite links and many, many more.
Clique (hidden) - Enables me to “click-cast”, making casting healing spells as simple as pointing at a unit frame and clicking.
Combuctor (hidden) - A unique all-in-one bag addon that has various tabs to help ease tracking down various items in your inventory, also lets you look at the bags and bank of your other characters too.
CraftList2 (hidden) - Lets people whisper any of my characters with !craft text and get a whisper back with anything any of my alts can make. Useful to cut down on “can you make” queries.
EavesDrop (hidden) - Compact combat log replacement that is simple and easy to follow.
Examiner (hidden) - Easy to use inspection addon, lets you quickly and easily inspect someone of either faction to view their gear and see stats.
FishermansFriend (hidden) - Allows simple double-click casting as well as automatically using lures and lowering unnecessary sounds.
Fortress (shown) - Data Broker display, currently showing all the following:

• Top Row: TheTravellersReference, Broker_Factions, Broker_PvP, Attrition, picoDPS, Broker_Group, Bagsy
• Bottom Row: picoFPS, TopScoreFu, ToFu, picoFriends, picoGuild, Broker_AntiSocial, AllPlayed, Junkie, Haggler, MrPlow and MakeRocketGoNow

Hopefully seeing what I use will inspire you to check some of the addons out, I’m always looking for new addons and I’m always tweaking my UI…

Sound complicated? I guess it does, but it’s really not any different from using FuBar or Titan and their associated addons except for two important differences. The first being that for the addon programmer they no longer have to write code for all the possible “bar” addons and secondly it gives the end user (you and me) choice on how we want to display stuff.

Okay, okay, so how does this work you ask?

Basically it works much like FuBar or Titan does now, but instead of grabbing say FuBar and having to grab other FuBar mods, you now just pick a display and any Data Broker mods will work with it. This gives you choice and versatility.

First you need to grab something to display. LDB has been accepted by the community really quickly which means that pretty much anything you used to display on your old FuBar or Titan bars has been adapted to LDB. There is a category for Data Broker addons here at WoWInterface.

Second you need to choose a display addon. This is what makes Data Broker such a cool development, it gives you choice in how you want to display things.

Here are a few display mods:

ButtonBin - A simple tray-like display.
Carousel - A single block that enables you to rotate through your various Data Broker addons.
Fortress - Individual blocks that can be snapped together however you see fit. Can replicate a FuBar-style display easily.
MakeRocketGoNow - Focussed on displaying “launchers” for various addons. Generally used alongside a more traditional display.
StatBlockCore - Also uses individual blocks, similar to Fortress but with a slightly different design intent.

I personally use Fortress with blocks snapped horizontally to look a bit like FuBar/Titan, but you can snap the blocks together however you want. Prior to trying Fortress I used StatBlockCore which is very similar, I just prefer how Fortress looks and feels when snapping blocks together.

There are no doubt other displays than the ones mentioned above, these are just the more popular/visible ones. I suggest simply trying a few out and see how it goes.

So, first things first, what exactly IS an addon?

Well, World of Warcraft was designed so that players can create extensions that add or enhance World of Warcraft’s interface (the stuff you see onscreen). An addon is just that, an extension to the interface, generally to make something more accessible or easier to use.

Great, so what kind of things can addons do?

Addons have been created for a multitude of tasks, if you can see something onscreen then there have been addons to replace it with “better” versions. By better I really mean different, one person’s “better” is another person’s “worse”… 

Addons cannot “play” the game for you however, they can assist and aid you, but you must hit the buttons to move and cast. Pretty much anything else however is in an addons jurisdiction.

Okay great, so addons let you customise your interface, where do I get them from?

Well, this is the easy part, there are few websites that specialise in WoW addons. Both WoWInterface and Curse.com house the majority of addons available. Generally, if you’ve heard of an addon it will be available at one or both of those sites.

Cool, I’ve found an addon I want to use, what do I do with it now I’ve downloaded it?

Once you have the addon downloaded, it is just a case of “unzipping” it into your “World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons” folder.

Wait, what’s “unzipping”?

Addon’s generally come compressed, generally known as zipped (due to one of the most popular compression utilities called PKZip). This saves space and makes transferring files easier. You have to uncompress, or unzip these files to get them in a usable state. If this sounds complicated, don’t panic, the process is exceptionally easy.

You may or may not have some form of utility installed to aid with this process, but either way the process is similar. Simply navigate to where you downloaded the addon and double-click the addon to open it.

Then click Extract all files and click Next, then click Browse… and make your way to your WoW addons folder, typically “My Computer\Local Disk (C:)\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons” then click OK then Next then Finish.

Okay, I’ve done that, now what?

That’s it, the addon should now be functioning ingame. Start up WoW and have a look!

Wow, it worked! Now what?

Well, the answer to this depends on what the addon you installed does. Some addons require a little bit of configuring, some work straight away without you doing anything.

Generally there are two things an addon might do that lets you set it up how you want. The first is it might create a button around the mini-map area that you can click to get to it’s options or perform some task (the tooltip will generally explain). Secondly, more recently it might add a configuration area to the games options panel, to get access to this simply press Esc (or click the Game Menu icon) and select Interface. Select the Addons tab on the top-left of this pane and you’ll see various options sections for any addons you have installed that utilise this area.

Unfortunately, not every addon is consistent in HOW you access it, but generally one of those two methods will suffice. If you cannot figure out how to use an addon or how to access it’s options, I recommend visiting the addon’s page on the site you downloaded it from as there should be some kind of instruction there.

Hopefully this post is helpful, if you think I have missed something or glossed over something, please mention it in the comments and I’ll add or alter the post accordingly.

Currently Angelikuh is working on various achievements, mostly the Hallow’s End and Exploration ones at the moment while Twigleaf is busy levelling her way through Outland to 70. She is currently level 64 and just headed into Zangarmarsh. Hopefully with that pace she should hit 70 before Blade’s Edge Mountains… I can dream…

I still have a whole bunch of stuff to do on these to prepare them for Wrath, like getting Angelikuh’s fishing and cooking skill to max. Twiggers has been REALLY slacking and her skinning/leatherworking hasn’t even really gotten off the ground as she was so focussed on levelling it got left behind.

These few weeks to Wrath are packed with things to do. Reputations to gain, skills to level, gold to earn…

I’ll no doubt add to this over the days ahead.

Gear Organisation

The two most popular addons for organising gear have been updated with 3.0.2 support.

Outfitter - Version 4.3b6 (Beta) - (Curse) (WoWInterface)
ItemRack - Version 2.243 - (WoWInterface)

Map Enhancement

Carbonite Quest - Version 1.30+ - (Curse) (WoWInterface) (Addon Homepage)
Carbonite provides a pretty need Google Maps-like interface,  it also has it’s own quest log tracker with objectives linked to it’s map. Very nifty.

Cartographer - Version 2.1 - (Curse)
Perhaps the most used addon in existence, enables full maps (with optional fog to see where you haven’t been), guild and party member locations and a much more friendly map interface.

Atlas - Version 1.12.2 - (Curse) (WoWInterface)
Atlasloot Enhanced - Version 5.00.01 - (Curse) (WoWInterface)
Atlas provides detailed instance maps with bosses and points of interest marked. Atlasloot is a plugin for Atlas that extends Atlas to display what loot bosses drop. (Along with detailed loot tables for most areas of the game)

Chat Enhancement

Chatter - Version 79024-wotlk - (WoWInterface)
Provides useful “should-be-default” chat enhancement, like timestamps, player colourisation etc.

WIM - Version 3.0.1 beta - (Addon Homepage)

See you on the other side!

Patch 3.0.2 will be applied to the servers in tomorrow’s maintenance (0100 to 1300 BST) and when the servers come back up the world will be changed forever.

This is the biggest patch WoW has ever received while I’ve been playing, with every class having major adjustments, new abilities and talents.

So, without further ado, let me give some answers to what I believe will be the most commonly asked/shouted/QQ’d questions in-game come tomorrow.

Q: Why can’t I mount? My mount has vanished from my bag saying something about having learnt it!
A: Mounts and Vanity Pets no longer take up bag space, when you use them you now learn them as a spell and the item itself vanishes. You can access learnt Mounts and Vanity Pets on the new Mounts and Companions area on the Pet tab visible on your character sheet. Simply drag them from there to your bars as usual.

Q: Hmmm, the Pet Trainer will no longer teach my pet anything and keeps rambling about talent points, is he crazy?
A: No he isn’t. The Hunter Pet system has been completely redesigned, you no longer need to go out and tame random pets to learn new skills to teach your REAL pet. They learn all their appropriate moves as they level up.

Pets now have talent trees just like players, each pet family has one of three trees in which it can spend points and learn new abilities. Simply go to the Talent window and click the Pet tab.

Q: I’ve just received an Achievement and noticed I earned some points, where do I spend them?
A: You cannot spend achievement points, they are just a way of measuring how much you have accomplished. In much the same way as Gamerscore points on XBOX Live. However, completing certain sets of achievements can unlock various vanity items such as Titles, Tabards, Mounts and Vanity Pets.

Q: How do I get to Northrend? And how do I make a Death Knight?
A: To do either of those things you need to wait until Wrath of the Lich King comes out on the 13th November, purchase it and then install it. 

So there you go, if you see someone QQing, you know where to send them for answers…

The news that Starcraft 2 was being split into 3 campaign releases was an unexpected (and boo-inducing) announcement, the game itself still looks great though. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.

When it comes to WoW news though there wasn’t much. Patch 3.1 finally having ground mounts that can swim rather than forcibly dismount was noteworthy, as was the fact that the upcoming dual-spec system will remember your keybinds and glyphs meaning you won’t have to constantly keep re-purchasing glyphs each time you respec.

But, as I said in the previous post, there wasn’t really much Blizzard could announce without lessening the impact of Rash of the Itching. It’s just a tad disappointing when there has always been a “BIG” announcement at Blizzcon.

The panels were interesting as always though, even if there wasn’t much in the way of news, it is always nice to hear the devs thoughts and reasoning behind changes.

WoWRadio will have downloadable archives of the panels HERE over the next few days.