The View From Down Here

Hello, my name is Namthe and I’m an Addonoholic.

Right, I’m glad I’ve got that out of the way.

I remember my first addon, way back in the mists of time when I was but a newbie. MobHealth did just what it said on the tin – it allowed me to see exactly how many hit points something I was fighting had left (players these days don’t know they’re born). I was happy with that (and a few others) for the longest of times, and after a while I started becoming more adventurous. Bongos Action Bars? Excellent. they saved a fir bit of screen space. X-Perl unit frames? They were nice too, giving a new look to how my UI presented itself. Eventually I went overboard and before I knew it there was far too much information on the screen. I didn’t need most of it, but it stuck there for a while because I’d got used to it.

Then, one day, I discovered the now-defunct MazzleUI. It changed my world. Once I’d got used to the keybindings, it solved a lot of my problems, and displayed just the right amount of data (ironically, still too much). More than that, it looked pretty in a way that my previous UI just plain hadn’t. For a while, I stuck with it, until the constant fixing-up after patches got too much. Since then I’ve tinkered with all sorts of action bar and raid frame mods, but always ended up with a few constants – the minimap in the centre of the bottom of the screen, some sort of health indicator either in the middle, or slightly above, anda graphical depiction of the raidmembers to the right and left. It works.

Recently, though, I tried an experiment. I threw everything  away and decided to start again, trying to replicate my existing UI’s layout and behaviour using as few addons as possible. It worked, mostly. Everything was trimmed down, the memory footprint was right down too.

Then I tried to repair, or at least thought I did. I had been using a tiny addon to auto-repair every time I spoke to a repairing vendor. And because of this, I’d got into the habit of just clicking on a vendor to repair. Embarrasing to say the least if you try that in a raid. As time went on, I noticed there were more and more of these tiny little things that I was missing, like plotting where ore nodes and gas clouds were on a map, or a decent crafting window, or turning on the combat log on entering an instance.

Before I know it, I’m back where I was before. Sure, I’ve saved a bit of memory, but nowhere near as much as I’d hoped. I know for sure I could tank without addons (though Omen on threat sensitive fights such as Malygos is still helpful), but could I cope the rest of the time? The jury’s still out on that one.

It’s a dependency  wonder if I’ll ever break.