WoW advices?

[ysobel]

Okay, I ... have not played in a couple of years. (Literally. There is a post from two years ago saying that I started a baby panda because the changes to my mains were too overwhelming.)

I have more or less decided that I am going to level my 85s the normal way and use boost-to-90 for a different char (probably my 62 feral druid). But I am stuck on, of all things, the UI.

I am most used to playing Lich King / Cata era with a bunch of addons -- one to give me a shitton of bars on the screen, one that was a bag organizer, one for profession management, and a bunch for other stuff. And I haven't kept up with stuff so I didn't expect to want to play again.

1) Does one really need addons any more, or is the native UI decent?

2) If addons are good, what ones are best? I am assuming it has changed a lot.

3) HALP HOW DO I TALENT. Well, not how, but I have no clue what to choose. (Enh/Resto Shaman, Fury Warrior, Feral Druid.)

4) Where is the best place to level an 85? How do I get started? Once I get started, how do I continue? How do I find the Count? Once I do, how do I find you again? Once I find you again, how do I escape? ...sorry, had a bit of Princess Bride slip in there.

5) Pleh?

(Links for things to read are fine, I just don't know where to start and am super overwhelmed and augh)

Comments

[helens78]

1.) I resisted addons for about 2 weeks, then got a few very very scant ones. I still use Curse for addons.

2.) Here's what I use now:

-- Master Plan for garrison missions.
-- Bartender 4 for reorganizing my bars.
-- Grid for healing. It still needs setup, but I just can't learn another UI.
-- Fishing Buddy. IDK, fishing was fun this expansion!

I should really get something that will move my tooltips off of my bars (I stuck them in the lower right corner), and I could use a bank-items-across-characters mod. But I'm trying to run as vanilla as I can!

3.) Oh, God, I have no idea. Feel free to look up Ovistine (Feathermoon) on the Armory, but I kind of just plunked talents down at random and haven't looked back.

4.) I'm told that leveling from 85-90 can be done in the very first Pandarian zone and then you should move to Draenor. I took the L90 boost and haven't leveled a second character.

5.) FWEH. More seriously, I have decided not to do anything this expansion that isn't fun, and I have been sticking rather fiercely to that. Some weeks I do nothing but garrison missions. Other weeks I do nothing but pet battles.

[asciident]

1. Native UI is ok. It's playable and they've made improvements. I don't use it, but that's because I like TukUI (complete UI overhaul) with a couple of additions. My UI... big overhaul can be overwhelming though :p

2. Ummm I'll just list what I use and why. These are in addition to TukUI.

• NPCScan and NPCScan Overlay. Alerts you when you're near a rare mob and puts a skull target icon on it so they're easier to find. The overlay part puts colored areas on your map showing the rare mobs' pathing areas.


• Addon Control Panel to switch addons off/on without logging off.


• Altoholic to keep track of all sorts of things amongst all my alts.


• Auctionator (but only on my bank/auction alt) to scan the auction house and buy/list things easier.


• BigWigs for warnings/heads up info in raids; the native UI has added lots of warnings for both raids and dungeons so it's not necessary for casual grouping.


• FishermansFriend to turn up the sound and autolure while fishing.


• Garrison Mission Manager and Master Plan are 2 separate garrison mission/follower addons that work together to make the UI a lot more friendly and give more info.


• GatherMate2 to track resources (ore, herbs, timber, fish, etc.)


• HandyNotes with DraenorTreasures to find all the treasures on Draenor. There's also a plugin for Timeless Isle and various others.


• LittleWigs same as BigWigs but for 5 mans.


• Overachiever adds extra info helpful to chasing achievements.


• Postal makes mailing easier (open multiple things, remembers your alts and others you've recently mailed).


• Skada is a damage/healing meter, which is generally not important for casual play.


• Squire3 is a mount randomizer that's been mostly replaced by the default UI, except it combines the mount button with various movement abilities (ghost wolf, travel form, etc.) so I still use it.


• TomTom for waypoints.

3. Icy Veins has pretty good talent guides. http://www.icy-veins.com/wow/class-guides
Once you're 100, AskMrRobot shows you stat priority options and how to optimize your gear/shows you upgrades. http://www.askmrrobot.com/

4. At 85 you go to Jade Forest. Either a quest pops up immediately or go to Orgrimmar/Stormwind and find one of those announcement boards to get you started. Play through MoP quests/dungeons/pvp until you're 90, then you should get an automatic popup quest to talk to Khadgar and head to Tanaan Jungle to start Warlords.

Feel free to ask more questions :)

[undomielregina]

1) I find the native UI border-line unusable, but that's primarily because I tank. It's acceptable for DPS by all accounts. Mostly, the problem is that with the health bars way up in the corner, it's really hard to see what's going on, and you have to look away from the fight to check your health, which makes it hard to use emergency cooldowns appropriately. I hear it's even worse as a healer, although I've never played one seriously. If you plan to heal, I suggest picking up VuhDo, which is a bit more user-friendly than Grid, but more customizable than HealBot. IMO, it hits the sweet spot between the two.

2) Your bar mod options are primarily Dominos or Bartender 4. I use Dominos, my SO uses Bartender 4. Both are relatively simple to set up.

I highly, highly recommend NPC Scan for WoD, because of the changes to how rares work. You want to know as soon as you're in range of one, and you really want to make a point of going after them. They all drop blues, with a chance of a purple upgrade, and if they happen to drop one for your class/spec, it will be worth having.

Addon Control Panel is great, and a must if you're having issues with lag, so that you can turn on things like archaeology mods only when you're planning to use them.

Tidy Plates with the ThreatPlates skin (the only thing on this list not really available from Curse at the moment -- download the most recent alpha build here http://wow.curseforge.com/addons/tidy-plates-threat-plates/files/ ) is the best thing ever. It simplifies keeping an eye on threat in instances, especially in the case of large trash packs.

I honestly use a bazillion mods, and I'm one of those players who has no part of the native UI left intact (every time I quit the game, I save my interface and WTF folders because the idea of having to reinstall is too depressing to contemplate.) But I think those are mostly the big ones.

Other mods I like. Most of these required a fair degree of setup, and I wouldn't call them anything like essential:

Prat -- Chat frame mod. Has a lot of nice features, including making it possible to copy and paste parts of chat.

Parrot -- floating combat text mod. Lets you organize and control all the numbers all over the screen

AdiButtonAuras -- adds auras to your buttons to track buffs and debuffs on the target. I use it in conjunction with WeakestAuras, which lets you set up custom onscreen notifications for buffs, debuffs, spell availability, etc.

Skada -- decent, lightweight damage meter/combat log parser.

Satrina Buff Frames -- buff and debuff mod. Needs a ton of setup, but very powerful, and can be useful in situations where you need to keep a careful eye on specific buffs or debuffs and their duration.

Chinchilla -- minimap addon. Basically just makes everything around the minimap movable.

Bagnon -- bag mod that displayes your backpack and other equipped bags as a single unified frame and makes the items in them searchable.

Archy and Archaeology Helper -- awesome if you plan to do archaeology. The two do different things and together make the experience pretty painless. Of the two, I'd say Archaeology Helper is more essential, but is also plug-and-play.

Ourfitter -- lets you save custom outfits, making it easy to switch to vanity gear or fishing gear, or between DPS/tanking/healing sets or whatever.

3) Talents and glyphs have relatively little effect on your viability for soloing right now. It's really hard to make a strictly wrong choice and really cheap to respec if you don't like how your choice feels.

4) You have already gotten excellent answers to this question and I can't really add anything.

[idonotlikepeas]

I've found that if you turn on the raid API for even party situations, it's pretty usable now. I don't even need a map addon anymore.

Here's the stuff I'm using addon-wise:

* Auctionator, because the auction interface is still completely terrible
* Master Plan, because the garrison interface is easier to use with it
* DBM, because even in heroics it's pretty helpful
* HandyNotes, because to hell with figuring out which glider in Nagrand you need to use for treasures (you'll see, trust me)
* SilverDragon, because there are a bunch of new rares and most of them are easier to kill and have neat rewards on them. It's a lot less necessary, though, because the default minimap shows skulls so you can track them down.
* Chatter, although I could see doing without it
* TomTom, mostly because I like getting an arrow pointing at my corpse
* Skada, because I want a damage meter and that one doubles as a threat meter so I don't need two addons

In general, I'd advise starting with the default UI and looking for addons for things that are the most painful. A lot of stuff that used to be addon-only can be done in the base UI now, so it's best to try it out and see if it's good enough for you.

For levelling, as Ascii said, just follow the quests. You'll be level 90 before you know it, and then you'll get breadcrumbs that lead right to your garrison. Once you're in WoD, it is super good at telling you where to go.

OK, so talents. First off, get a stack of tomes of the clear mind and keep them with you at all times. Try out talents, and just flip them whenever you discover you don't like how something plays (or if you want to try something new). Talents aren't make-or-break pick-this-and-you're-dumb stuff like they used to be and you can redesign them wherever you want as long as you're not in the middle of a fight. I'll offer you some totally off-the-cuff suggestions, though, if you want:

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#zsxJKc-RguMq0

1. These are all emergency buttons. Bulwark is the most immediate. I'd probably switch to nature's guardian at max level, but while doing primarily soloing Bulwark is just an instant-cast extra block of health.
2. Another emergency button, basically. In this case you're just stopping everything in the vicinity so you can run like hell. (Or deal with them one at a time, if you can do that quickly enough.)
3. Since you're still experimenting, this one is good because it lets you try out different totem combinations. Again, at max level I'd probably trade this, but it's helpful for now.
4. These are all good performance boosts, but this one happens naturally rather than having a separate buff for you to press, so again it's good while you're learning. I don't know if I'd stick with this at max level or not. (We're now getting into shaman details I'm not qualified to comment on.)
5. This one lets you keep on DPSing while healing you at the same time, so again pretty nice while soloing. The others are much more group-focused, and you probably won't spend much of the 90-100 experience in a group.
6. This is another one that's more about empowering an ability you already have than creating a new ability. You can probably get more benefit if you micromanage the elemental, but even just point-and-fire stuff should be improved.
7. Again, an ability you already are using, but also it looks like this one can do AoE where the others don't, so it's going to be more all-around useful while soloing. I almost picked storm totem because of the heals; that'd probably be reasonable too.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/tool/talent-calculator#ZZa!122222.!cMepKO

Not as many details on this one... it's the one I use for fury so of course I like it. >.>

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#zdxHAc-MajbkM

1. Again, a passive bonus over an active ability. Also it works in every form and is just generally awesome.
2. The most straightforward to use. Pres butan, receive heal.
3. Faerie Swarm seems like it'd be more useful in PVP. The other two are mass-CCs, but entanglement doesn't run the risk of knocking your current target into adds. (On the minus side, you can't use it to hurl monsters off of ledges, but so it goes.)
4. Another emergency button. I could definitely see using the other two, though, since they're more performance increases. Soul of the Forest involves more frantic button-mashing, though, so I'd pick King of the Jungle if you want to prioritize the damage.
5. Another mass-CC. (Druids have a lot of this, don't they?)
6. Normally I'd go for Nature's Vigil but I think most of the feral abilities don't count as spells.
7. Come on, how can you resist the power to become a temporary furry? Plus, the extra utility of being able to use spells just seems like a really cool thing for soloing.

Please feel free to ping me if you need anything!