Sunday, March 4, 2012

Addons: Panda for Inscription

I am an addon addict, it's true. My poor outdated computer has a hard time handling all the stuff I want to run, so I do a lot of switching on and off as needed using Addon Control Panel, which is pretty great in and of itself. Recently I found another addon I just had to grab, introduced to me by @Faid of Nerf Faids fame. (She also does awesome livestreams.)

That addon is Panda, and it makes milling like... super fantastic easy. It apparently has other features for disenchanting, prospecting, etc. but I haven't tried those yet so I can't speak to them.

Previously, I found milling to be a giant pain, because you're trying to manage stacks of who knows how many different kinds of herbs, which may be all over the place in your bags. I had set up a ton of macros for each "level" of herbs, but I couldn't keep track of which macro was for what on my action bars. Panda lets you set up a single macro that will mill any herb you've got. Check out this screenshot:
You'll probably need to enlarge that to see it better. Panda is at the top left of my UI right now, and if you look in Panda's upper right corner, you see the milling icon. Mousing over it provides the tooltip I highlighted: All you need to do is set up a macro that says '/click MassMill' (without the quotes, obviously) and throw it on your toolbars. I tend to bind stuff like this to action key 1 when I'm actually going to use it, and then just move it out of the way otherwise. I know some folks like the scroll wheel binds but they don't really seem to work faster for me since I just get a lot of "You are looting something" error messages. You need to have the Panda window open for the macro to work, at least in my experience.

Panda will also show you icons for all the herb types that can be milled, with a count in the lower right corner showing how many of that herb you have. In case you've got stuff in your bags you don't want to mill (Azshara's Veil, anyone?), you can instead click the individual herb icons to mill one at a time. Bit slower, but if you don't have bank space or are too lazy to go stash some of your herbs, it does work.

So now I've got a visual display of what I have to mill, along with a one-click macro to do it all. I no longer have to switch through multiple macros. Inscription is a really time-consuming profession, so anything that saves a few seconds here and there is great. I do wish it could somehow detect uneven stacks and move those to the bottom (so, like, if you have 44 whiptail it doesn't try to mill the 4 first and give an error), but I'm not sure that's even possible.

Overall, highly recommended. I'm going to be trying it for JC/DE shuffling in the near future. I understand that TSM has similar functionality, but I haven't figured it out, and this interface is super simple. Thumbs up with a night elf flip hop.

1 comment:

  1. Panda doesn't seem to work any more for milling. What addon will show all those beautiful herbs on one screen like Panda. It was a wonderful way to figure out what herbs go to what inks and with TSM if I hovered over each herb, it gave me its location among my 15 toons.

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