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?

TSM Categories for Transmog Gear

Yesterday I was watching one of Jim's amazing livestreams and I noticed that his TSM auctioning categories for Cata greens and mog gear were very different to mine. I didn't take screenshots of my old categories, and until the servers come back up I can't show you the new ones. But adopting the method he uses (and probably many other folks -- sorry I can't name everyone, this was just the first place I saw it!) made everything much simpler and made me way more inclined to continue selling this stuff.

Previously, I had a categories called, for example, gear - xmog - plate - 1000. Within that category I had groups for every individual stinking piece of armor that went into it. This got really messy and confusing really fast.

What I have now is a single main category, just called gear - xmog. (I'll post screenshots of how this is set up after maintenance.) Inside that category I have groups named after the price brackets, so 500, 750, 1000, 2000, 5000 -- at least for now. Here you can see one of the groups, my 500g group (which doesn't have many items in it yet; I'm still setting these up) inside the gear - xmog category. Please ignore the general mess that is my TSM categorization. I'm working on cleaning it up, and this is part of it.

In the group settings for transmog items, I checked the box to add by item ID, since stats are not important, and set up the threshold and fallback according to the price bracket. Here you can see my threshold and fallback for my 500g group. I forgot to get a SS of the "by item ID" checkbox, but it's at the very top in the group overrides tab.

In the category settings, I set the post cap to 1, post time to 48 hours, and the behavior to post at fallback when the market goes below my threshold. (I may change that to not post at all for a little while until I get a better handle on the pricing structure; it's easier for me to pick them out when the text in the auction log is orange.) Here are the category settings:

As I collect new items, I simply add them to the appropriate price group, rather than having to create an entire new group for them. This has already saved me so much time, and it's so much tidier. I'm following a similar method for my Cata greens, except I have those priced by level. (I bumped my prices on those up yesterday and already had a sale at the higher price, so woo!) I haven't had any mog sales yet, but it's midweek and I didn't get much posted before maintenance.

This post probably makes almost zero sense without pictures if you don't see TSM in your sleep, so I'll add screenshots soon.

Edit: I added screenshots but I'm not sure they're actually big enough to be useful. Still getting used to Blogger so I will revisit this sometime when my Internet connection is better.

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.