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(Editor’s Note: I was planning on putting in some screenshots to show how some of these addons look, but the servers have been down since yesterday morning and I haven’t been able to get into the game to grab them. I’ll add some in later once WoW is working again.)

Note #2: Now updated with pics!

With WotLK being released tonight, and all of the many changes it’s going to bring, let’s take a look at some addons designed to help ease the transition, and take advantage of some new things offered in Wrath.

Postal - I don’t know about you, but I seem to be selling a ton of things in the Auction House lately. A lot of it is leftover Glyphs from powerleveling Inscription, some of it is Greens from leveling my new main, and the rest of it is just stuff that I’ve had laying around for some time. All these auctions mean I’m getting a lot of things in the mail - either Gold from the AH or the items themselves from auctions that didn’t sell - and I’ve grown tired of opening up each piece of mail and taking out all of the contents.

So I’m very glad that I found Postal, which makes dealing with large amounts of mail much simpler. Postal gives you several options for handling your mail, ranging from a simple “Open All” to selecting the specific letters you want opened. It also allows you to loot everything from a letter with a simple Shift-click. Definitely a great time-saver.

Mounted - With everyone and his brother setting their sights on getting the Leading the Cavalry achievement, people are going crazy about mounts. The only problem with having 20, or 30, or 40 mounts is that you have to choose one to ride each time, and there will invariably be some mounts that you forget about and rarely see. This is where Mounted comes in. It gives you a macro to put on your toolbar, and then randomly selects one of your mounts for you to ride. It will even auto-select between ground and flying mounts depending on your location.

AG_Unitframes - If you’ve never gotten around to beautifying your UI, this is a perfect time to do it. Nearly all of the addons out there have just been updated/upgraded for 3.0, you have several weeks to get used to a new UI before you start raiding, and who wants to quest their way through Northrend with an ugly UI anyway?

I mentioned a while back that I chose XPerl to play around with my raid frames, and I did stick with it for a while. I liked how XPerl looked and it had a good number of options, but I somehow broke it at one point, and it wouldn’t save my options globally anymore (i.e., I had to configure it again for each different toon) and that turned out to be a major pain.

After struggling mightily to fix whatever I did to break XPerl, I decided to just ditch it and go with another raid frames addon. I chose AG_Unitframes and it’s been great. I could use a few more options than are provided right out of the box, but overall I’ve been very happy with it. Here’s what my UI is looking like now:

TellMeWhen - With the influx of level 70+ spells and abilities, there are a number of new things we’ll all have to become familiar with to stay proficient with our chosen class(es). Among these new abilities are a lot of procs that can trigger in a given situation, thereby modifying another spell. For instance, Ret Paladins have the Art of War talent, that makes their next Flash of Light cast instant when it procs. Prot Warriors have the Sword and Board talent that can allow them to get in a free Shield Slam when it procs.

The only problem with all of this is trying to keep an eye on these things during the frenetic pace of combat. When you add in trying to learn new dungeons in Northrend, and potentially grouping with new players that you’re not familiar with, it’s easy to see how you could lose track of a couple of things you should be keeping an eye on.

TellMeWhen is a great tool for keeping track of all of those things. You can set it to watch for a certain buff (or debuff), and when the addon sees the buff occur, it lets you know and puts an icon up on the screen for you to click, so you’ll never miss another proc. You can also use it to monitor the debuffs on your target - e.g., it can tell you when your DoTs have dropped off and need to be refreshed. Definitely a very handy addon.

Quest Helper - Quest Helper has proven to be one of the most popular addons out there over the last few months, with its huge quest database and helpful logistics. And since it already has most of the Northrend quests entered in as well, there’s no reason not to grab it to help with speedy leveling in WotLK.

If you haven’t used Quest Helper yet, it has a database of just about every single quest in the game and tells you where to go on the map and what you need to accomplish to complete them. It can also show you the quickest route to travel to get all of your quests done in the most efficient manner. It essentially eliminates the need to Alt-Tab out to Wowhead to check up on quests you’re not familiar with, and has become a must-have for people trying to level quickly.

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