Patch 3.1 goes live today, and it brings with it a lot of big changes, some of which alter our interface a good deal. Blizzard has detailed for us, and the authors, what the changes mean for our addons. Is your UI ready for patch day?

Preparing For Patch Day

Some of the ways you can prepare for patch day include the following:

• Back up your current UI. There are some tools to automate this, but I am wary of those. The simplest way is to navigate to the folder where your copy of WoW is installed, often C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\. Right-click on the Interface folder, and choose Send To -> Compressed (Zipped) Folder. If you use an application such as WinZip, WinRar, or 7-zip, you may have other options in your right-click menu that allow you to accomplish this task. Repeat this for your WTF folder, and place the .zip files that are created somewhere safe. For those of you who like to take a walk on the Apple side and play on OSX…
• Update your addons. If there are addons you know you’ll need to play the way you’re used to, start checking the big addon sites, such as Curse and WowInterface, now for updates to those addons. Many authors have already been releasing versions that are compatible with 3.1. These sites will still be around on patch day, but they will probably be getting slammed with traffic and very slow to navigate.
• Lighten your load. Some people view dependence on addons as a bad thing. I view them as (usually very) good tools to help me do my job better, faster, or more efficiently. However, you might be able to avoid some patch day headaches by looking for addons you can do without. The less addons you use and depend on, the less addons you have to worry about breaking. But that’s not really our style at NoStockUI, now is it?

• Keep your PC in top shape.You can start by updating your video drivers, checking Windows Updates, defragmenting your harddrive(s), and running a full virus scan of your whole system. You want your PC to be at its best so that when patch day rolls around. If you instead play on a Mac, make sure you’re caught up on System Updates, and if you still use anti-virus software, keep that up to date as well.
• Use the Background Downloader, Luke. You can save yourself some time come patch day by running the Background Downloader to download as much of the patch data as possible prior to its release. Right now we’re already looking at 714MB of patch for the enUS client locale.

Below I’ll list the addons I’ve seen work or not, from my own experiences. Be sure and check the comments for other users’ experiences, and add your own if you’ve been on the PTR! You may also find this forum thread at PlusHeal very helpful.

3.1-Ready Addons

The following addons are either shown to be functional in 3.1 by my own (brief) use on the PTR, or are marked as 3.1-compatible on their respective pages on WowInterface or Curse.

• Action Bar Addons
  • Bartender4
  • BindPad
  • Dominos
  • DrDamage – though the information may be inaccurate with all of the pending talent changes
  • OmniCC
• Auction Addons
  • AuctionLite
• Bag Addons
  • Bagnon
  • BankStack
  • Combuctor
• Chat Addons
  • BadBoy
  • BasicChatMods
  • BottleCap
  • PhanxChat
  • Prat-3.0
• Combat Addons
  • ClassTimer
  • Clique
  • EavesDrop
  • EventAlert
  • PowerAuras Classic
  • Simple Buff Bars
• LDB Addons
  • ChocolateBar
  • DockingStation
  • NinjaPanel
  • most plugins
• Map/Minimap Addons
  • Mapster
  • pMinimap
  • TomTom as of r198, currently in beta as of this writing

• Questing Addons
  • Carbonite
  • LightHeaded
  • TourGuide
• Raiding/Instancing Addons
  • BigWigs
  • DBM – Status unknown. May or may not be functional in 3.1, may or may not have Ulduar data.
  • Omen3
  • oRA2
  • PallyPower
  • Recount
• Tooltip Addons
  • Mendeleev
  • Pawn
  • RatingBuster
  • SellFish
  • TipTop
• Unitframes
  • Gladius
  • Grid and assorted plugins
  • oUF and oUF_P3lim and most if not all plugins
  • Proximo
  • VuhDo
• Utility Addons
  • Addon Control Panel (ACP)
  • AddonLoader
  • BugSack and BugGrabber

3.1-Broken Addons

The following addons are known to be broken by 3.1’s API changes by my own experiences.

• Chat Addons
  • PhanxChat – This addon was updated this morning
• Map Addons
  • EWOlson_POI
  • HandyNotes and its plugins. This is related to the embedded Astrolabe library. If these are not updated by the author prior to 3.1, running an addon with an updated version of the Astrolabe library, such as TomTom listed above, will allow these addons to function.
• Miscellaneous Addons
  • UnderAchiever

Other Resources

WowInterface has their requisite Patch 3.1 Survival Guide online, with a list of all the most popular addons and their update status. You can see Curse’s list of recently updated addons here.

Share Your Experiences

Have you been playing on the Public Test Realm? Are you a veteran Ulduar raider already? Are the live servers back up? We want to hear from you! What you are still using, what doesn’t work anymore, the whole nine yards. Leave a comment with your 3.1 addon experiences!