Raid Leader Addons: Raid Buff Status

Over the next few weeks I will be detailing what addons I recommend for Raid Leaders. I've tried and tested loads and am constantly looking for new releases and updates. A great place to read up on addons in general is http://www.nostockui.com a place that I recommend to any WoW player of any class.

Raid Buff Status is one of the addons that I consider to be one of my "Core" simply because it's ease of use, setup and the amount of buffs that people "forget" or seem to miss for whatever reason.

Raid Buff Status works right out of the box extremely well, but if you want to maximise it's potential and really integrate it into your raiding practice then there are a few options you will want to configure. Those such as where to announce warnings and what "extra" announcements to make. These extra announcements include a warning when a raid member puts down a refreshment table, soulwell and buff foods such as fish feasts. Not only will it announce these facilities are available it will also announce when they are about to expire and even name a raid member who might be missing a food buff before it disapears!

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Raid Buff Status uses what it calls the "Dashboard" to give you easy access to a massive amount of information in decently sized space.

Starting at the top you can easily Identify what the icons show as they are using the same buff icon as you would expect, however if your not sure hover over the icon with your cursor and find the tooltip pop up.

RBS shows you which buffs are missing by displaying a buff icon with a number inside, this number indicates the number of raid members who are missing the buff. In most cases you can hover over the buff icon and see an actual list of who is missing that buff and who can cast it.

Raid Buff Status is Highly Intelligent, so far i've never had it fail to recognise the classes and specs within my raid team and configure itself to track the necessary buffs.

One of the area's that you'll want to configure is the ability to track raid members health, mana and survival status. This is crucial, but taking it one step further RBS allows you to break that down into healers, tanks and DPS giving you a quick overview of the raid situaion at a glance. Not only that but it can also be configured to send a warning message on tank or healer death so you can take appropriate action as a raid leader and redirect other resources to avoid a wipe.

There are three easy access buttons on the botton of the RBS Dashboard"these are used to announce the status of the raid buffs to whatever channel you have configured. You can easily see what buffs are configured to be announced for the boss or trash buttons by using the dropdown arrows you can see at the top of the Dashboard. That area of configuration can also be used to decide if those buffs will be displayed on the dashboard and if they have an announce warning associated with them.

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The other button thats included at the bottom of the dashboard is an "R" and will initiate a readycheck for the raid.

One of the excellent features of this addon is that once the fighting starts the addon goes into "battle" mode and the only information that is displayed is that relating to party health and the status of soulstones. This is massively helpful in saving valueable screen real estate when your not only leading but playing at the same time.

To Download this Fantastic addon for Raid Leaders go HERE --> http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/raidbuffstatus.aspx

Maybe you should check out its Twitter as well, it's certainly deserving of a lot more followers so lets get the news out there. RBS beats all the other Buffing addons out there in my opinion and is far superior to Big Brother and XRS.

Good luck with your raiding fellow leaders, I hope this makes your role a touch easier.

Cybac.

Last Updated on Monday, 25 January 2010 12:16