Everywhere I go, I keep seeing the same messages: “Cata was hot garbage.” I’m not going to be playing Cata. Cata was a mistake. During one of my typical workouts, though, I realized something huge, something that changed my Cataclysm experience permanently. Cataclysm has some cool new innovations; the raids are fantastic as well. However, without the proper Add-ons, we’re kind of leaving the game as a shell of what it could be. To make Cataclysm go from the worst expansion to the best expansion, we’re going to need to fix the four major problems with the game.

Interface Improvements Needed

First, we’ve got to fix the Interface. Everything from the busted group finder to the chat spam that makes it really hard to recruit for raids and hard to enjoy the game in general needs an overhaul. Players are complaining non-stop about the busted group finder, and Cataclysm groups have even been forced to advertise in the Barrens and hold section. It’s a disaster. The solution is the good old looking for group bulletin board addon; the Wrath version still works in Cataclysm and it’s really the best hope we have for forming groups. One note is that I had to go into the settings and select all the different dungeons and raids in order to get it to work out of the box.

Overcoming Clunkiness in Game Mechanics

Second, we’ve got to fix the clunkiness of maxing reputations and maxing your professions on every alt. Luckily, we’ve got a new AI tool that’s going to save us thousands of gold leveling our professions in a much more modern way.

Mastering Heroic Raids

The third problem we’ve got to fix is that the Cataclysm heroic raids are so insanely hard. So, I’m going to give you the exact same tools we’re using to push that 13 out of 13. It’s really going to help you a lot.

Enhancing Communication Tools in Cataclysm

For your group, the NPCs are always shouting some stupid thing, players are always advertising their leveling boosting, and of course, you always see some jerk that’s advertising his 13 out of 13 GDKP just shoving it in your face. The problem is, we can’t turn off chat because the groupfinder is so broken, so we’re forced to use the chat system. The solution is an add-on called the Global Ignore List. You can block terms like GDKP, boosting; you can even entirely ignore NPCs, so we can finally meditate in Oramar without anybody interrupting us. With our Interface fixed, Cataclysm is already feeling a whole lot better.

Addressing Character Progression Challenges

But there is a far bigger problem that most players are dealing with. Every single character you level has to have exalted with various reputations, they have to do specific daily quests, they’ve got to max very expensive professions—it’s really a nightmare. Four specific Add-ons have completely fixed the Cataclysm old experience for me. The first is the NCE to-do list, and just like any other to-do list on a phone app, this one just happens to be in-game. I find the alting experience to be way easier when I have all the steps I need to do just laid out in front of me.

Reputation Management Tools

The second add-on I’ve been using is the Reputation Guide. It shows your reputation remaining, how many mobs you need to kill, how many quests to turn in—it’s really all stuff that should be there by default in Cataclysm, but it’s just not. The third and most powerful reputation add-on is the DA add-on, made by the same people that made Atune. Once you pick up all your dailies, they’ll be saved to a list, and it’s much easier to track them every single day for something like a Tol Brad rep, which my Fire MCH definitely needs.

Optimizing Profession Leveling

So, our reputations are sorted, but we still have that expensive and frustrating problem with professions: you’ve got to max them on every single alt. That’s where the Gaming Tools app comes in. Recently, I had to swap from max Jewelcrafting to max Alchemy, and I had to do it as quickly and as cheaply as possible.

Revolutionizing Profession Leveling

So, I just input my server and my goal level onto Gaming Tools, and I immediately got a shopping list for the cheapest possible way to hit 525. It’s using AI to dynamically figure out exactly the cheapest possible route so you can save a ton of money. This is definitely the future of profession leveling and it’s making my Cataclysm experience a whole lot better. With our beautifully raid-ready, profession-ready character on deck, we’ve now got to tackle the biggest problem in Cataclysm: the heroic raids themselves.

Transforming Raid Experience

This is where the right tools turned my hatred for Cataclysm raiding into a love of Cataclysm raiding, and it’s what I look forward to each week the most. So, week one, we were getting slapped around by Nefarian, but we’ve now downed six heroic bosses and we’re making some really good progress. The first addition was to get Nova Raid Companion. It has updated Cataclysm timers for all the raid cooldowns like Tranquility. You can also click on the mini-map to instantly see if your raid is fully buffed, consumed up, and repaired up.

Enhancing Raid Tools and Add-ons

I also find the ability to see talents and even off-spec talents of every raider to be really indispensable. On top of the Nova Raid Companion, we also have WeAras, and getting the Murin WeAra pack was a must-have for every timer, every boss ability. It really improved our raid progression. I also recently started using a WeAra that automatically max zooms out the camera whenever I load into the game, which really helps with my raid awareness. A bonus raid awareness add-on everybody should be using is the GTFO add-on.

Optimizing Raid Alerts

It knows whenever you’re standing in fire, for example, and it’s just going to scream at you until you get out of it. The third set of Add-ons to make Cataclysm raid progression infinitely more enjoyable is a system where you need some way to note when a player should use their defensive cooldowns. We use Method Raid Tools for the notes, and we use the KweekR to text-to-speech announce each note to the right player at the right time. On 25-man especially, having the right cooldown at the right time is going to be the difference between raid success or a night of chain wiping.

Improving Loot Distribution

The problem is, all that raid progression is going to lead to some additional problems in terms of loot. You’re going to be getting so many new pieces of loot—how do we distribute them optimally? Who gets the new pieces of loot? That’s where Lon Beston Slot is fantastic. It adds in a tooltip for every single item based on the Wowhead best and slot list. It just makes things way easier for every raider to understand and distribute loot.

Enhancing Gear Management

They’re still going to be a burden if you’re struggling to manage them. I like to use equipment sets to manage my gear sets for looking good, though that is where the very popular Transmog Outfit Manager comes in. It lets you save transmogs and load them, which is something that really should be in the Interface by default. If you want to show off your gear to the masses, though, Narcissus lets you make some of the most beautiful character shots imaginable, the exact ones I have in this guide. After all, what’s the point of getting new gear if you can’t show it off to everybody?

Perfecting Raid Interface and Tools

So, we should by now have the perfect Interface for filling raids. We should have the most optimized reputation and profession tools that exist. We’ve even got Mythic world-first level raiding tools to finally break through and clear every heroic, and once we down Nefarian heroic, we have the best Add-ons to manage all our new gear.

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