Monday, February 15, 2010

Nameplate Mods

I like nameplates, but I greatly dislike Blizzard's styling for them. It's too bulky and blocks your view of things beyond them. I far prefer having transparency to my nameplate mods, and throughout TBC, I used Aloft to personalize them: unfortunately, Aloft is a very resource-heavy mod, and since it uses the DogTag lib, it had conflicts with Pitbull as well as Cowtip.

So, in WotLK, I set out to find a new nameplate mod. I have two recommendations.

1) caelNameplates

Cael comes as-is: no setup options, though if you reaaally wanted to, you can personalize it by digging through the LUA. I don't recommend editing LUA, however, as you'll have to redo the edits every time you update the mod. Regardless, I like Cael's setup and defaults, and really didn't feel a need to edit it from how it came. It's a great simple nameplate mod for someone who wants to see the plates and not be overwhelmed by them. I used these for quite a while, and plan to keep it installed in case I need to revert back to them for any reason.



2) Tidy Plates + Threat Plates

It's much heavier than the caelNameplates, but it has customization options and a wonderful threat detection system that I have fallen in love with (and it's not as heavy as Aloft!). Based on low, nuetral, or high threat, you can alter settings for colors, scale (bigger vs smaller plates), and opacity. Now, I did have to tweak some of the settings because the default "low" threat value had an annoying bright green glow (which you can see in the screenshot below), and I wanted them smaller than the default, but it didn't take much digging to find and make changes to these settings. It also has different options for tanks, who would be more interested in seeing the ones they DON'T have good threat on, and it can switch each time you change your dualspec. I am currently using this mod.

Ignore the power auras going off around the screen :D Below, the large red bars are ones I have aggro on as a healer; the smaller green ones (I have since removed the green glow) are ones that aren't trying to kill me.

6 comments:

Alyae said...

Tidy Plates+threat Plates were a bit awkward at first but I'm getting used to them and I love them. With the mobs making circles around you these days its very difficult to keep agro on everything like the ass-swipe of a bear, so I find it very useful to see what mobs I need to give some extra loving to.

Kaethir said...

Are Tidy Plates and Threat Plates available via WoWMatrix or the Curse client, and/or do they seem to require updating often? I've grown accustomed to being able to update my addons once a week or so through these 2 programs and I'm not sure I'll be able to convince myself to stay up-to-date with an addon that's not available through them.

Also, I am not one of Kae's alts. Really, I have my own blog. Go look!

Alyae said...

You can get it via Curse client. I've only had it for a few days so can't comment on how often it's updated.

Kae said...

There's actually a Kaelynn blogger, too: a rogue. :)

Tidy plates gets updated semi-frequently, probably just to keep it from hitting the out-of-date addons flag. It seems to work often enough without constantly updating it, though. Seems pretty stable in the relatively short time I've used it, and from what others (who recommended it to me) have said.

Unknown said...


This is such a lovely idea! I totally want to try this!!
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