Project Lore

I've been playing WoW since the open beta. Today, I made a discovery. You can set your addons to be enabled or disabled for each of your characters! After you have logged in and are on your character select screen, the familiar window that allows you to load out of date addons or disable addons without deleting them also has a drop down that allows you to configure which addons load for which characters. I stumbled upon this when I was trying to uninstall addons. I thought it would be useful to try to manually delete the files instead of using a manager because addons have complicated configuration files; there are files in /WTF/Account/AccountName/Server/Character and /WTF/Account/AccountName/Server/SavedVariables, and sometimes its unclear where data is stored for modular addons like Cartographer, Atlasloot, or FuBar. I searched my computer for the name of the addon and a few files came up. I curiously found some files called "Addons.txt" that contained a list of my addons and whether they were enabled or disabled. More importantly, they were in the configuration folders for each of my characters! It only took a couple seconds of carefully examining the addon window to find out that I have somehow missed this feature for who-knows-how-long. This is great for enabling or disabling class-specific addons like Cutup or FaceSmasher. I disabled all my combat related addons, like Deadly Boss Mods and Outfitter for my bank alt. The GUI is easy to use, but manually editting text allows users to copy/paste among other things, such as saving "addon profiles", allowing you to switch between interfaces for PvP or PvE easily. In fact, that sounds like a great idea for an application. The load time difference was enormous! I decided to check out how many resources my addons were using. I whipped out the good old PerformanceFu and took a look at my statistics. It showed me how much memory LootLink and QuestHelper were using. Surprisingly, Peggle was not among my highest resource-intensive addons! Players with a few addons can hover over the menu button for some similar statistics. I timed a login with all my addons on and another with all my addons off. With my approximately 120 addons, it took 32 seconds to login. With no addons, it took 2 seconds. This could be faster if I wasn't in windowed mode or listening to music and browsing the web at the same time, but the fact that addons cost me 30 seconds while logging in and likely lots of Dalaran lag inspired me to clean out my addons. What tips do you have for addon management?

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Many people, including us at Project Lore, find monotony in playing at level 80. Without the overall goal of leveling up, you can feel misguided. Many people decide to create alts so they can again have that purple (or blue) experience bar on their screens. You may find that it is much easier to level than before! With a recent patch, more than 60 new graveyards now scatter Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. There have been a few new flightpaths added over the past few months (Un'goro, Ratchet, Mudsprocket), ghosts move faster as of 3.0.8, and the amount of experience required to level has been slashed repeatedly. The XP required for 10-60 is less than half of its original value, and 60-70 has been slashed by just as much since the release of Wrath. In the case that you have high level friends on other servers, you can now make a new level 55 death knight on their server (provided you have a level 55 on your "home" realm). I've already taken advantage of this and now have death knights running around a half dozen realms. If you have an active level 80, you may want to consider getting a few Heirloom items if you plan on leveling any alts. These items are "bind to account" and can be mailed between your characters. Their stats scale with the level of their owner, and even their armor type in limited instances. Perhaps most importantly, the shoulder pieces give you an additional 10% experience gain from killing monsters. This means you have to do about 10% less stuff for every level from 1 to 80. That's like requiring only 90% of the normal experience required level (provided all your experience comes from killing monsters). Not to mention, shoulder pieces don't really start appearing until the mid 20s, so its a good extra boost in power by putting something in that otherwise empty slot. You can pick up a pair of these shoulders in many flavors for whatever spec of whatever class you want for either 200 Stone Keeper's Shards (for pieces with resilience) or 40 badges of heroism (for pieces with more PvE stats). I'd use the Shards personally since most people will have many more of them than badges, but if you are swimming in badges and already have tier 7.5 gear, you might want to use some of those badges on heirloom gear. There are a couple cool trinkets too. They can be bought for 50 emblems of heroism and give you 2% of your health or mana back when you kill something. Additionally, they offer some stats. The Swift Hand of Justice gives you 2% health when you kill something and haste, while the Discerning Eye of the Beast gives you 2% mana when you kill something and spell power. These can greatly reduce your downtime while leveling. I'd personally pick the Swift Hand of Justice first since anyone can use haste and gives you flexibility to change your mind with which alt you want to level. In addition to these pieces, you can find every flavor of weapon, off-hand, and ranged weapon. The stats scale well with level, and it keeps your alts well-geared without having to worry about tracking down every last piece to keep them powerful. If you can convince your friend to start playing WoW with you, you can use the refer-a-friend program and get 3x the normal experience when you play together (provided you are both under level 60 on the characters you are leveling and are within 5 levels of each other) along with many other nice benefits, like the fancy zhevra mount. They don't even have to pay until after either 10 days or if they want to level past 20. Lastly, you may want some addons to help you track the rest experience status of all your characters. If you use FuBar, check out RestFu, which shows you the rest status of all your characters, time to fully rest, and more. What tricks and addons do you all use to enhance your alt experience?

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