Jul 30

The default UI in WoW is really good, and a lot of people use it (or something pretty close), but I love making my UI my own, setting it up exactly the way I want. In World of Warcraft, you do this through addons (or mods, though mods technically is not correct). The problem with addons is that first you have to find ones that work the way you want, then you have to keep them updated every patch.

I love addons. I have a lot. And, to help with one part of the problem outlined previously, I’m starting a new feature entitled “Mod Madness,” where I will bring you what you need to know about various addons.

Being The Altoholic, I naturally have a lot of alts. I thought it would be appropriate to start of the mod feature on just that addon: Altoholic.

Altoholic is all about making information about alternate characters, or your alts, available to you at any time. After the jump, we’ll take a more in-depth look at this addon.

Description

Altoholic presents a ton of information about your alts to you no matter which chracter your logged in as.

Download

Altoholic is available from several sources; I downloaded it from Curse Gaming.

Review

Altoholic presents itself as a minimap button (unless you use FuBar):

Clicking on the minimap icon brings up the main Altoholic interface:

As you can see, it lists every character from every realm that you have logged on as since you installed the addon, listing their levels, talent spec, gold, play time, and rested experience, as well as total levels, playtime, and so forth. (Warning: this addon will show you your total play time for all the characters it knows about. This feature can and will make you depressed and cause you to worry about yourself.) I’ve installed the addon and logged in to just a few of my characters for this demonstration.

Mousing over a character shows a bit more information about it:

Down the left side of the addon’s interface, you can see all the various information it captures, including equipped items and your inventory and bank. (Populating bank information requires that you visit the bank and speak to a banker while the addon is loaded.)

You will notice across the top is a search bar and some related options. This allows you to locate which character has a certain item.

If you open the guild bank interface, it will populate information (based on what you have access to view). Later, we will see how Altoholic makes use of this information.

If you visit the mailbox on your characters, you can also see what mail you have and even read it while being away from the mailbox.

One of my favorite features is the ability to browse the recipes known by all your characters. Again, you must open each profession pane from your spellbook and let Altoholic gather up the contents first.

Mousing over a material for a recipe lets you know which of your characters have that material.

This functionality is carried over to any item tooltip, including the ones that show up when you mouse over an item in your inventory:

The Altoholic is very nice for anyone with multiple toons, not just us fanatics who have a bazillion characters, especially if each has a useful tradeskill and you need to know who has what material and what recipe.

Related posts:

1. Mods for 2.4 Coming Around
2. My Addon: Nice Try
3. Greetings
4. What to Do with the Banner?
5. My Favorite WotLK Change So Far