Whats your mod philosophy?

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With Warcraft being patched and expanded at the moment all the community created mods also require updates. Sometimes these updates are trivial and the author can easily make them compatible with the new version. Other times the work to maintain a mod is too much, and it becomes unsupported. At wost it ceases to function properly and breaks others. For the devs giving away their free time on Mods the patch/release period must be like Christmas and Tax time all rolled into one. The community loves the work, but is also very demanding.

For players with mods this means updating is an important part of any expansion or patch activity. I’ve been watching the forums and the chatter in game, and mods are back on the list of topics that we seem to love and hate.

So what is your mod philosophy?

  • those who hate them, and refuse to alter the game.
  • those who use only a minimal set
  • those who explore options
  • those who have hundreds of mods, and test, tweak, and alter their interface weekly rather than at patch and update times.

Blizzard has said that encounters are now designed with the fact that mods exists. In other words it is expected that mods will be used, and the complexity in raid fight mechanics reflects this. That means that competitive scenarios like pve, pvp, battlegrounds, etc are expecting players to be using performance enhancing mods.

My current philosophy is:

  • Find a minimal set of mods which gives me enough information to play the game quickly and efficiently.Essentially focus on as few mods as possible, with the least memory and cpu requirements.
  • Consider each mod in terms of the time it saves. (mailbox auto-open)
  • Is the information significantly performance enhancing.(boss warning mods, threat meter, next dps button, auction mod)
  • Look for mods which when removed alter the game-play in a negative way. (in-game map resizer, loot distribution mod, bag mod)
  • And lastly a mod which improves the visual aesthetic of the interface. (unit frame mods, bar mods, buff mods, move everything mod)

At the moment I’m using roughly 34 mods, and I aim to use around half that. Hopefully.

6 thoughts on “Whats your mod philosophy?”

  2. I enjoy testing new mods and I have approx 140 installed. However I usually only have 90 or so running at one time. I like minimalism in my UI and Blizzard’s default has too much crap. I look for addons that do the same job but have a smaller UI footprint and easier to use – Opie, Vuhdo, Shadowed Unit Frames, Bartender, Raven, Sexymap or Chinchilla, Mapster and Prat.
    That is followed by information and quality of life addons for mail, auctions, guild, gold, alts etc.
    Altoholic is the big one and consists of 20-30 addons by itself. Auctionator, Postal, Outfitter, Skillet and lots of data brokers – Social State, Broker_Currency, Whisp, RatingsBuster – more I can’t think of. Last of all are the combat and raid addons – Skada, DXE (not updated yet so trialing BigWigs and DBM), Eavesdrop, TellMeWhen, PhoenixStyle, RaidAchievements, DeathNote.

    If I had to limit my use of addons, I would really struggle without Opie the most. I have a ring for almost everything I use regularly. 1. General (travel items, vent details, mass rez,, pull countdown etc.); 2. Food, drinks and flasks; 3. Professions (cast, survey, cooking, campfire, tailoring, enchanting etc.); 4. Quest items in bags (don’t need to open bags); 5. Combat cooldowns (anything 1min or longer including potions); 6. Raid markers/Ground raid markers; All of these are hidden and only display when pressing the keybind. Great for a minimalistic UI.

  3. Opie looks similar to an old mod I loved on my Warlock called Necrosis. Same circular style mod which rolls out based upon actions. I’ll take a look at Opie, as it could help me get back some of my UI space and get rid of action bars.

  4. I like to try and keep my UI uncluttered but informative. I tend to use a bunch of Fortress data brokers (many of the ones that Ram uses) for info and bar mods for appeal and ease of arrangement. I also use raid based mods and some professions mods, bag mods and etc for ‘value of life’. I am actually overdue for an UI overhaul really, as I’m only playing casually at the moment I haven’t really bothered.

  5. I think casual is a great way to play given what we have to do daily, and also how good the game is now for more casual players. I feel it is very close to perfect for casuals – as a 3 hour block of time is almost enough to get a good LFR session done or a batch of dailies.
    UI wise I’ve removed a few more, and looking to strip even fewer soon too. If I’mnot going to be raiding I think I can remove Omen and Recount from being loaded in memory, and switch them on when I need them.

  6. Wow I am a minimalist if possible with mods. All I want is raiding mods (DBM and healbot and skada) rare trackers (npcscan and silverdragon) and mogit. Playing with vuhdo a bit but not yet sold.

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