ClassTimers and why you need them

It sometimes startles me to find new players who are still using the bare Blizzard UI. While this sort of purism is admirable, it's also somewhat harmful to their play style. Far be it from me to insist that anyone should play a video game a certain specific way or claim that they're doing it wrong, but I will definitely assert that by not using some of these add-ons, they're simply making the game more difficult than it really needs to be. In some aspects, the difference between using add-ons and not using add-ons is much like the difference between calculating sales tax with pad and paper and simply using a pocket calculator (or decent cash register). Sure, you can do without, but you've got better things to do with your time--like looting monsters and buying stuff.

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Okay, so I'm going to start relatively simply with the ClassTimer add-on.

What ClassTimer does is relatively simple and straightforward. It provides very visible, and very obvious countdown timer bars for the various spells and effects your character uses. Having little buff icons near your portrait--even with time values under them--is mainly just useful in only the coarsest of ways. Looking at a bunch of them at once, you're more likely to think "Yep, I've got a lot of buffs on" than to notice anything out of the ordinary, like one that's gone missing. Put these babies somewhere in the lower right quadrant of your screen (I suggest top center of that quadrant) and you'll be able to tell with the briefest of glances which of your timers are about to run out, and in what order.

To be more specific about it, this add-on means a greatly reduced chance of you saying things like:

"Oh c**p I didn't notice the Soulstone had expired."

If you are playing a class with abilities that trigger randomly to let you perform extra actions for a certain period of seconds (like say, Mongoose Bite, or Shadow Trance) ClassTimer can even show you a cooldown for those so you know in a very deep and meaningful way just how long you have left to take advantage of them.

Basically, unless you're planning on just hanging around IronForge and talking in /2 all day, you want this addon.

As with all add-ons worth using, the size, fill, color, font, and location of the bars is completely customizable. Note, although many spells are already configured in ClassTimer, a few spells (like Demon Armor) aren't in it's list of things to watch for by default. In the configuration dialogs you can easily add new things for it to pay attention to by simply typing the name of the ability in the little input box.

For you PvPers, it appears that this will even show cooldowns some of your enemies abilities, so you see just how long before you can smack that cockroach..er..paladin in the face when his bubble runs out.

Although ClassTimer is obtainable through the WoW Ace Updater application, I'll simply suggest that unless you're into installing complex add-on management applications that you simply download the zip file of the latest Subversion build from this browsable directory as ClassTimer.zip.

Once it's installed, depending on what other things you have installed, you may wind up with a FuBar button, or a minimap button. If you don't, simply type /classtimer in your chat window and it will bring up the configuration dialog.

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I'll get back to Quartz in a bit, after I've had time to polish the instructional screenshots somewhat.