The Ultimate World of Warcraft Mod Guide

What mods can't do
As flexible as WoW UI programming is, there are many things you can’t do. Obviously directly altering values such as health or armour is not possible. Well, it is, but the changes will be purely cosmetic.

Sadly, the Draenei racial has nothing to do with UI modding. It does make a cool noise however.

Earlier versions of the game allowed you to send keyboard commands and spell casts programmatically. This made it possible to make mods that would automatically move your character or cast a spell on certain events. This feature has since been removed as it was possible to write ‘bots’ or computer-controlled players to automate tasks such as levelling.

If you’re thinking UI mods might be a way to help you cheat, think again. Blizzard has been very careful in what is has chosen to expose to the modding community. Although it is still possible to break rules in the game using UI mods, the rules you can break are fairly basic (your running speed for example) and will no doubt be picked up either by a Game Master or reported by another player and you run the risk of having your WoW account banned. WoW also features algorithms to detect ‘banned’ mod functionality and will either prevent the function from running, or stop the mod from loading altogether – as was the case with Decursive, a mod that automated the removal of negative buffs.

Superseded functionality
Blizzard is continually updating its default UI to keep it ‘competitive’ with the modding scene and so has implemented usability into its UI that was once provided by the community. Such functionality includes:

• Scrolling combat text. By default, the Blizzard UI will not show events that occur to the player on-screen. A mod, called SCT, once provided this functionality, but has since been incorporated into Blizzard’s UI.

• Automatic self-casting. The original spell casting defaults were a bit dumb. For example, in order to cast a spell on yourself, you would have to select your player and cast the spell. ‘Selfcast’ mods quickly appeared that allowed you to click the spell and, depending on certain variables – Is an enemy selected? Is a friendly player selected? Does the player have a mana bar? – cast the spell in the correct manner. Again, this functionality is now a part of the Blizzard UI and can be enabled via in-game menus.

• Action bars. This was a significant deficiency in the Blizzard UI. In earlier versions of the game, the player had just 12 buttons in which to assign commands, which for some classes was far from enough. As you can guess, mods came out to add additional action buttons and eventually action bars that could be moved, rearranged and coded to only show in certain circumstances. Blizzard added more bars and buttons to the interface but these bars cannot be moved or resized and so it’s still prudent to use a third party action bar mod.


While mods still exist to implement the aforementioned now-default UI features, and in some cases, improve on them, you should be able to make do with what Blizzard has provided, the advantage being that you don’t have to worry about updating these mods when new patches come out.

Dependencies
Mods can function alone but, like anything programmatic, good mods use libraries or ‘dependencies’ to improve efficiency and reduce size. Dependencies are mods that do nothing themselves but provide a set of functions that can be shared among mods and include Sea (found in Cosmos), Ace and others. Using mods that share a common library can provide memory and load time savings and reduce the chances of bugs. The disadvantage is that if the dependency is ever abandoned you’re going to have to find replacements for all the mods that require it.

To the left is Bongos, a mod that lets you move your action bars around and easily perform keybinds, while on the right is OneBag, which combines your bags into one frame.