WoW Reviews & Guides

BigWigs is a boss alert mod. It consists of many individual “boss modules”, mini addons that are designed to trigger alert messages and timer bars for one specific raid boss each. Modules are activated when you target or mouseover a Boss, or if any other BigWigs use in your raid does. In most cases only one module will be running at any given time.

Plugins

• Messages: Can be moved, re-coloured & locked.
• Bars: Can be moved, skinned to different textures(SharedMedia compatible), resized & also have an ‘emphasis’ feature to flash when they are about to expire.
• RaidIcon: Target painting (put an icon over a player that has been singled out by the boss).
• RaidWarn: Sending alerts to RaidWarning, tells & chat.
• BossBlock: Suppress “spam” sent by other player’s bossmods.
• Comm: Syncing via the addon channel (so that the player don’t have to be in combat range to trigger a message)
• Target Monitor: For enabling boss modules when you see them, instead of having them constantly enabled.
• Sound: Plays various sounds on different events(SharedMedia compatible).
• FuBar/Minimap: Button for easy access to the configuration menu, resetting running modules, and seeing what modules are active.

Extras

• Tranq: For keep track of hunters Tranq cooldowns, vital for some bosses.
• Proximity: For displaying players within a certain range on certain boss encounters.
• Test: Test your bars and warnings, and move them around.
• CustomBar: For ‘PizzaTimers’, create your own custom bars.
• Version: A query for not only the core BigWigs version, but also the instance version numbers.
• Flash’N'Shake: Shake and/or Flash the screen blue when something important happens that directly affects you, such as a debuff. (Off by default)

The creation

BigWigs is a boss timer and warning mod. Tekkub, the original BigWigs1 for Ace1 author, was inspired to write this after his very first raid run. He was horrified by the massive amount of spam his raid leader was creating with his boss mod. He was getting messages all over the place for things he didn’t care about (Hunters can’t dispel a curse or interrupt a heal). He also found that the “60 seconds until painful doom” timer messages were such a waste. Why not use a nice simple timerbar to show this?

The aim

BigWigs aims to be as efficient as possible (creating a lower memory per second footprint and using a lower amount of CPU than any other boss mod), as effectively as possible. When modules are written every aspect of the encounter is revised. Is syncing required? Is target scanning required? What events are really to be warned for. It also aims to have the latest boss modules out asap, that means that not long after the first few attempts of a brand new boss, it usually has a working boss mod.

Unique Features

Bigwigs has an ‘Emphasis’ feature that allows certain bars to be more prominent than others, so your attention is in the right place. SharedMedia support allows you to customize the look of your bars and choose different sounds for warnings. BigWigs can identify when you have wiped on a boss and reset the bars and timers automatically. It loads only the boss logic you need for the boss you’re currently facing, rather load up the logic for the whole instance.

Install Instructions:

BigWigs-r7428 download it. Click on a file link to start the zip file download. You would “open” the downloaded file or you can double click zip files to open them on Windows.

You unzip the downloaded zip file to the Game’s Interface\Addons folder and you are done.

Look at the shortcut (right click the Warcraft icon and select properties) you use to start Warcraft to get the path to where the game is installed.

Typical locations for the AddOns folder:

Windows XP: “C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns”
Windows Vista: “C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns”
Mac: “Machintosh HD/Applications/World of Warcraft/Interface/AddOns”

Warcraft only finds addons when it starts. Close Warcraft before you install an addon.

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Perl, with Extra stuff. Much enchanced from Nymbia’s Perl UnitFrames, and a complete replacement for Blizzard’s default unit frames, including raid frames and raid tools, with little remaining of the original Nymbia code.

Supports Game Version 3.3.0

Range Finder (combined with optional health check and/or debuff check) for all frames based on spell or item range test.

HoT Monitor will highlight units clearly that have your own active Heal over Time spells. Regardless of how many other heal over time buffs are on the raid members, you can keep track of your own ones and when they expire.

Debuff Highlighting in standard debuff colours on all friendly frames. Priority given to show debuffs that you can cure first.

Raid Frames, buff icons, MT list units and some other portions or X-Perl are Created on demand. Saving a lot of time and memory at system startup. Defering the creation of many parts of X-Perl to when they are actually required. And of course, most often outside of raids they are never required and are never created.

Raid Target icon support for Target, Target’s Target, MT Targets.

Raid Tooltip will show combat rezzers available (druids with Rebirth ready (or very soon available) and any normal rezzers out of combat) if you bring up tooltip of a dead person.

In-combat indicators for all units.

3D Portraits for player, pet, target, focus, party. Optional. Of course this may degrade your framerate somewhat because you are displaying more 3D character models that without this option. But some like it pretty, and it does look cool.

Red and Green combat flashes for frames when player, pet, target, party, partypets, raid take damage/heals. Useful indication of things happening.

Added time left on party member/target buffs/debuffs when in a raid, these depend somewhat on CTRA/oRA/oRA2 sending appropriate information over the addon channel, although some of it can be determined at run time by X-Perl, when a player gets a buff for example, we know how long it should last, and therefor when it should expire.

Totally new options window including all X-Perl options and access via minimap icon.

Configurable colours for borders and backgrounds. Including class coloured names, and configurable reaction colours.

Much care has been taken with code size, memory load, memory usage per cycle and so on. LuaProfiler/OnEvent mods used extensively and regularly to ensure that X-Perl does not do more work than is absolutely necessary.

Download XPerl-3.0.8_Release

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World Map

All the tasks QuestHelper wants you to do are displayed on the World Map. There are ‘marching ants’ connecting the objectives, showing you the order QuestHelper thinks you should complete them in.

You can right click on an objective to get a list of options for it.

Menus

Using the menus should, hopefully, be obvious. The only catch might be that they don’t automatically disappear if you click on something else.

You can right click anywhere on a menu to hide it, or select the Close Menu command from the end of the menu.

Priorities

There are 5 different priority levels an objective can have: “Highest, High, Normal, Low,” and “Lowest”.

Most objectives default to “Normal”. Objectives for timed quests default to “High”. User created objectives default to “Highest”. QuestHelper will try to arrange the objectives so that higher priority objectives get done first.

You can use priorities as hints to get the objectives in an order you’d prefer, without the need to micro-manage the route list.

Filters

There are 7 filters you can use to automatically ignore quest objectives, which you can turn on and off using the slash command /qh filter.

The first filter is “level”, which by default is on. It will cause QuestHelper to ignore any objectives that your current party probably isn’t high enough to complete. You can adjust the level offset used by this filter with the command /qh level "offset".

The second filter is “zone”, which by default is off. It will cause QuestHelper to ignore any objectives that aren’t in your current zone.

The third filter is “done”, which by default is off. It will hide objectives for any quests that aren’t complete. You can use this if you don’t want to quest and just want to turn the quests you do have in.

The fourth filter is “blocked”, which hides blocked objectives, i.e. ones that can’t be done yet, such as quest turn-ins for incomplete quests. This is probably most useful if you prefer to hide the “ant trails”, as the route it will compute will be somewhat of a lie.

The fifth filter is “watched”, which hides objectives that you are not currently tracking via WoW’s built-in quest tracker. This gives you a lot of control over which quests QH shows, but may limit you to fewer quests tracked at once.

The sixth filter is “group”, which by default is on. It will cause QuestHelper to ignore group quests while you’re not in a group. By default, it permits 2-player group quests, but not more. This can be adjusted with “/qh group”.

The seventh filter is “wintergrasp”, which ignores Wintergrasp PvP quests if you are not actually in Wintergrasp at the time.

You can force QuestHelper to show an objective that otherwise would have been filtered by typing /qh hidden and selecting “Show” from its entry in the menu.

Sharing

Sharing allows you to share your objectives with other party members, allowing you to combine your routes and work together effectively.

Note that sharing only tells your peers what objectives you have, your completion progress for them, and the priorities you have assigned to them. Information such as item drops and monster locations are not shared.

Each peer will take this information and calculate their own route from it. Assuming you stay together and work cooperatively, which was the whole idea behind this feature, your routes should end up being almost completely identical, and you can follow it and rest assured that nobody is getting left behind. Objectives shared by multiple users won’t be removed until everybody has completed it.

See the AddOns section for downoad.

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Questhelper tells you how to finish your quests in the easiest, fastest manner. It includes a database of quests, monsters, and items, telling you the exact location of that dang Perfect Satyr Horn you can’t find. It also computes the fastest path to complete all your quests – and gain experience – as quickly as possible.

For the most part, you just install it and leave it alone. It should hopefully be smart enough to do The Right Thing?, and not require you to meddle with it.

The task QuestHelper thinks you should do first is displayed on your minimap, which you can mouse over for a description. If the task isn’t in your current zone, then it will point towards where QuestHelper thinks you should go to get there, such as a flight master or the zone border.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrOjdw90pFM[/youtube]

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