Useful addons from Tekkub

I use a lot of addons. I made a list before the 3.0.2 patch dropped, and I had more than 60 installed. Now some are multiple addons from a single package, like the 10 or so components of Deadly Boss Mods, but still that's a lot.

I've talked about healing and UI addons before. Addons like Pitbull and Grid and Clique can totally change your playing experience, and I would hate to live without them. But today I wanted to focus on a few addons that are less essential, but just make life a lot nicer.

Specifically, I want to focus on a few of the cool addons I'm using from Tekkub. He has a minimalist philosophy for his addons; they're generally small and focused on a single task. This also means they're typically easy to install and operate, with minimal to no configuration needed. His stuff is mostly very clean; I've had a couple small problems when his pieces have conflicted with other addons, but for the most part they just work.

His page has a list of 45, and I've probably tried about a third of those. But I'll just talk about four of my favorites today.

Buffet

If you just try one of these, try Buffet. Basically, it gives you two buttons for your action bars — one for health and one for mana. But these are smart buttons.

Consider the health button. Normally it will show you food. But what food? It will pick the best food you have available in your bag. As you use up one kind of food, it will swap in whatever else you might have available. Oh, did the mage just give you [Conjured Mana Biscuit]? Buffet is smart enough to show that first (or any equivalent conjured food) instead of the stuff you bought. However, it doesn't show you buff food; it's only going to use the plain health-regenerating stuff. Buffet does the same thing for the mana button, showing you the best drink you have available, and showing conjured water in preference to purchased.

That's cool enough. But when you go into combat, it switches to show you potions instead. Just like with the food, it's smart about that, showing you the most powerful potions first, then scaling back if you run out of your best stuff. And it's smart about conjured items here too, showing you healthstones or mana gems first, switching to potions when the stones are gone (or on cooldown).

For a final trick, the health button will switch to show you bandages instead if you hold down the Shift key. All in all, it's a slick way to consolidate a lot of stuff. On my mage, I used to have separate buttons set up for food, water, bandages, and mana gems; I had to swap between conjured food/water when I was soloing and conjured biscuits when I was grouped. Now, it's all automatic.

There are a few limits. The biggest one is not Tekkub's fault: you have to be careful about those times when you think you're out of combat but aren't, or you'll drink a potion when you meant to eat food. But that's easy enough to do. I've found some food that Buffet doesn't know about, like Stewed Trout. (It does know about the new Northrend foods however.) It's also unaware of Charged Crystal Focus, the poor man's healthstone if your friendly neighborhood warlock isn't around*. These are all trifling complaints; there's no good reason not to use Buffet.

Buffet does take just a bit of setup. Once it's installed, you get to the config screen with /buffet. From there, click on the Generate Macro button, and drop the resulting button into your action bars.

Download Buffet here.

FriendsWithBenefits

FriendsWithBenefits is a lot simpler to explain and operate than Buffet. In a nutshell, it gives you the same friends list across all your toons in a given realm. It works completely in the background and doesn't require any configuration. After you install it, it will keep track of your friends lists on various toons. When you load another toon, it will add those friends to the master list, and add all your other known friends to the toon's list. I haven't tested it extensively, but it seems to be smart about removing friends too; if you remove a friend on one toon, it then propogates that correctly to your other toons.

Download FriendsWithBenefits here. [Note: no actual 'benefits' are received from your friends via this addon. Don't expect any auto-cybering...]

StealYourCarbon

The basic premise of SYC is simple: it's a shopping list. Whenever you visit a vendor that sells stuff you need, SYC will automatically stock up. Use it for all sorts of things: Reagents. Food. Water. Arrows/bullets. You tell it how many of each item you want to keep in your bags. Then when you visit the vendor, SYC will automatically buy enough items to top you off.

It's pretty simple to configure. Type /syc to bring up the config window. Then drag an item you want to stock from your bags to the config window. You can use the up/down arrows to say how many of this item you want to keep; set it to 0 if you want to stop stocking the item. There are a few other config options, but nothing that's too complex.

I used to have a problem with SYC where it was reporting a huge memory footprint. It was likely a conflict with another addon, and may not have been Tekkub's fault. But it appears to be fixed now.

Download StealYourCarbon here.

tekJunkSeller

This is another no-config, dirt-simple addon. Whenever you visit a vendor, it sells all your gray items. Nothing earth-shaking, but if you've ever found some [Basilisk Liver] wasting space in your bag, you'll appreciate this addon.

The one thing to watch for is any gray items that you want to save. My bank toon has a small collection of the starting gear for various classes, like the [Novice's Robe] for druids. She doesn't visit vendors often, but for a while she was selling that gear whenever I would visit a vendor, and I had to remember to buy it back. I solved this problem by putting that extra gear in the bank. (tJS only sells gear in your bags — nothing that you're wearing.)

Download tekJunkSeller here.

OK — I've now written more text about these four addons than the code that makes them up! That's the beauty of these addons — they're small and simple; they don't require a lot of maintenance, and they don't tend to break or do weird things. They won't solve world hunger, or help you down Illidan... but they can make your life a little bit nicer. And that's good too!

*The Charged Crystal Focus is on his issues list. I guess he's concerned because you might be saving these for another use. But it's still an open question.