Addons: Getting Organized with Adibags

With Blizzard announcing the imminent opening of the MoP Beta, it seems like a good time to go through my bags and banks and do some spring cleaning. Shannon at Shannon's Shenanigans has been doing the same thing on his livestreams, and it's quite a traditional end-of-xpac activity, at least for me.

I recently started using the Adibags addon with some encouragement from Jim at PowerWord:Gold. I've been rolling with it for a few weeks but was getting a little frustrated because I thought its categorizations weren't granular enough. This is because I am an idiot who apparently just downloads addons without reading up on how to use them. As it turns out, you can create your own categories in Adibags. Since I have actual OCD, this is Important to Me.

I've been logging into each toon in order and setting up categories for their stuff. Of course, I didn't take a complete Before screenshot, so you can't see the hideous mess I started with. However, my mage was one of the worst offenders, with tailoring, engineering (ugh!), and having recently dropped Alchemy, as well as actively questing and instancing. Can you say "tons of crap all over the place?" I can. She's sixth on my login screen, and since Adibags settings can carry over from toon to toon, she was already partially organized by the time I got to her. Here's a mostly-before shot of her bag and bank, though:

So how do you make categories? Pretty simple: Type /adibags to bring up the configuration screen, then on the left click on Filters->Manual Filtering. Drag an item into the Item box, select a top-level category (these seem to be set; more on that anon), type the name in the Section box, hit Okay, then hit Add association.

Once the category (which I suppose Adibags likes to call a Section) is created, you can add and remove items a bit more easily. Click on the top-level category under Manual Filtering on the left and the right pane shows a list of the categories/sections you've created. Then you can simply drag and drop items into the little boxes, et voila. It's pretty much just like sitting at the bank and moving things around into an aesthetically pleasing order, only better. Very soothing.

There's also a default action to split items by certain AH categories, which is pretty useful for gems and glyphs, at least. For whatever reason, I set up my own for consumables and most trade goods. I can tell you that with the following configuration, it shows gems divided by color, glyphs by class, and recipes by profession. (You have to uncheck the "Gems are trade goods" and "Glyphs are trade goods" to get it to work. At least I did.)

One of my favorite features of Adibags is its ability to merge all your stacks into one icon. Everything still takes up bagspace, of course, but you can see how many ores you have (e.g.) without having to count stacks. All you need to do is select Items on the left hand side and then click the options to merge stacks.

Here's what my mage's bank and bags look like now. Much better and easier to find things even without using the search feature.

The top-level categories that Adibags uses are:

• Ammunition (really? there isn't any)
• Consumable (includes water, food, potions, flasks, enchanting scrolls, etc.)
• Equipment (all of it)
• Free Space (this is just how it tracks your open bagspace)
• Junk (it puts rogue pickpocket stuff in here along with your hearthstone AND all your grey stuff)
• Miscellaneous
• New (it uses this to put a green highlight around your new items)
• Quest (self-explanatory)
• Trade Goods (whole lotta stuff fits this description)

Some examples: I've split up the consumables into water, food, pots, flasks, and moved enchanting scrolls into sections (by item slot) in Trade Goods. I put all my holiday and DMF items into Miscellaneous, sectioned by the name of the event. I have A TON of stuff I keep for potential transmog for my own toons, which is now filed under My Xmog in Equipment. No more combing through 10 rows of gear on my druid to figure out what I was keeping because it's pretty and what I actually intended to equip for stats. I've got lots more, and I'm sure the categories I use will change over time, but for now I'm really happy with what I've got.

Of course, I've also been vendoring a bunch of old gear that's both ugly and useless, and AHing all the things I think might sell and which I no longer want. After all, just pushing the peas around the plate doesn't actually get rid of them, does it?

What's your favorite bag addon? How strict are you with your inventory management? Are you clearing out for MoP?