13.7.09

Useful Tanking addons.

Actually, the title of this blog is a bit misleading. Thinking about it, I don’t use any addons that are intended specifically for tanking. However the ones I use I’ve set up so they help me tank. I’ll talk about each a little bit.

Grid.
Grid is basically an addon that lets you view the members of your party or raid in a small window (it is an actual grid, so in a 25 man raid it looks like a square divided into a 5x5 blocks.) I’ve got it setup so I can see each members health, mana, debuffs, range (in or out of range for spell) and dead-or-alive status. Most importantly I can see at a glance who in the raid agro. I also have a mouse-over macro for Righteous Defense so when someone who isn’t supposed to has agro I hold my mouse over that person on grid and press the button for the macro, redirecting the mobs to me. Grid isn’t easy to set up, I had to view a tutorial video on youtube but when you get it to do what you want it’s awesome.

AG_Unitframes.
AG let’s me change the way I view my own, my targets, and my target’s target health, mana and casting bar. Which information is displayed in the bars, where the debuffs are and where on my screen this is all displayed.

NeedToKnow.
NeedToKnow allows me to track a specific buff or debuff and display on screen whether or not it is active. I track Holy Shield, Divine Plea, and various procs and cooldowns. So I can see at a glance whether my divine protection is going to run out soon.

I also use Pally Power (nothing to do with tanking) I believe that every paladin ever needs to have this. It makes casting your own blessings and coordinating with other paladins very easy. It can also manage Aura-coordination and it can cast Righteous fury and your seal of choice.

Lastly I use a few cosmetic addons, Bartender, SexyMap and MoveAnything.

All in all it doesnt add new information but it does make the information easier to deal with.

2 comments:

  1. Another good addon I've heard about is Aloft. Since many times while AoE-ing as tank or DPS, people show the health bar of the incoming mobs. However, the default look makes the health bars pop all over the place often. Aloft changes this and it also shows certain debuffs/buffs I believe. I didn't get a chance to get quite into it.

    IceHUD is a heads up display addon that shows your hp and mana around you. It also has its own cast bar integrated into the HUD. You can see your own buffs/debuffs located centrally rather than glancing up at the upper right hand side of the screen. I haven't found HUD addons to be much useful as a healer but perhaps they are more valuable to DPS or tank classes.

    MikScrollingBattleText is also another addon that is helpful because it will inform you textually when buffs proc or when CDs come up.

    OmniCC also puts down actual numbers on your action bars, counting down the time for your CDs to be up. This way you don't guesstimate or have to mouseover your action bars or set up something via DBM.

    Hope this helps!

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  2. Thanks for the tips! I use MSBT actually, forgot to mention it. I really like the look of ICEHud but never actually played with it. Definately having a look at Aloft though!

    I used to have cooldowncount that did something similar to OmniCC but as paladin tank I tend to my rotation (which is always up) and a few cooldowns which are easy to monitor, having numbers counting down tends to distract me and tunnelvision on my abilities :)

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Thanks for your thoughts!