Mods We Love – Skada Vs. Recount And Omen

These days healers never worry much about threat.  As a matter of fact, besides the odd mage or lock aggro pig, it rarely comes into play.  But since I recently began playing a mage just to fiddle with, I began to have to pay more attention to aggro.  Remember, we never level alone, so I’m running the mage with an Arms warrior.  It’s a lot more fun to just stand back and nuke mobs til they glow, and without all the prot aggro abilities, a young mage has to watch themselves.

So as a result, I decided to go ahead and download Omen, since I was familiar with using it from back in the BC days.  Opened up Wowmatrix and typed in aggro to the search frame and there was no Omen in sight.  Apparently only Curse carries Omen. So, for one of the few times, however, I did no real research and decided to try out another mod in the list.  I’m just not a huge fan of curse, but that’s a personal thing.

The reason I chose the mod I did was because it claimed to replace both Omen and Recount.  I like consolidation, it cleans things up and keeps you from having to manage too many different things.  I run a lot of little mods for things like moving frames and gear comparisons and mailing tons of crud to bankers and other minor tasks – but when it comes to UI mods I stick with DBM, Bartender, Xperl and Recount.  I don’t want 500 things running in a big raid to kill my frame rates.  But a threat meter was in order, and so I thought I would give this new one a try.

And I love it.  The mod is Skada, and it was perhaps the best accidental mod find ever.  Like any mod interface and configuration, it takes a  little fiddling with and getting used to, but it does everything the other two do all in one package and you can configure it to suit yourself better than either Recount or Omen.

The one thing I really like is the ability to open multiple windows and name them for what they are tracking.  So now I keep three little windows up all the time.  There is one for DPS which shows overall damage plus DPS.  The next one shows healing, since I’m always interested in that sort of thing.  And the last – threat.

Now, when I’m healing, the threat window doesn’t help all that much, except to know who is messing up and nuking too hard at the start of a fight.  You actually can use it to tell who is about to get one-shot and maybe wind up a life saving heal.  Having DPS open let’s you know how you are doing against enrage timers and if you need to call out on vent for “MORE DOTS!”  And the healing window tells me who needs to step up their game or if we’re just fine and I can throw out a few dots myself during the fight just for grins.

Another nice thing about Skada is that the configuration is saved on the Interface level, so it spans across all accounts and realms.  Set it up once and you’re done.  You can have it do character specific windows as well, though – so whatever floats your boat it will do.  Fonts, window sizes, number of rows, number of fights to save – you can set it all with Skada and report any window to chat or whisper just like Recount.

Recount does a nice little graph, but I don’t necessarily need more visuals, I can make my own pie charts in my head.  With Skada, all you have to do is mouseover a bar in the chart and it will tooltip all the stats for that particular player without a single click.  It’s the same information with instant access for your entire raid.

All of this might be most helpful to those of you who regularly lead raids or have at least a leadership role.  Or maybe you’re just interested in winning, and more information about what happened can get you much closer to what you want to happen.  If you don’t know what is happening you have no idea how to fix what is wrong.  You might just tweak something that is working and get worse if you are just guessing.

Skada makes it easy to have all the combat data right in front of you in whatever way makes sense to you.  You can get too many mods and end up suffering from information overload, but for the raid leader who is used to watching what is going on Skada is a great way to take your Domination to a whole new, and easier level.