UI Fu – Equipment Manager vs ItemRack
UI Fu (yoo-eee-foo) is an ancient discipline, nay philosophy, that seeks to lead its ardent followers on the path to interface enlightenment. This week we’re looking at the new Blizzard provided Equipment Manager that was released in patch 3.1.2 and comparing it to our long-term favourite wardrobe switching addon, ItemRack.
With the mid-May release of patch 3.1.2. Blizzard have finally released the long promised Equipment Manager functionality that many have been looking forward to. It offers a basic mechanism through which WoW players can ‘save’ sets of equipment (ie: armor and weapons) and create a button for each which they can then place on an action-bar. Clicking on this button then equips all the equipment saved under that set. With the option to buy an additional talent-spec for any level 40 or greater character, the liklihood that a player might wish to frequently switch equipment is now greater than ever and thus many players will be looking for a simple and easy way to do just that.
The question to be answered therefore is whether the new Equipment Manager is a good option or whether players should still be going to the established third-party addons such as ItemRack, Wardrobe, Closet Gnome and so on for their equipment swapping needs. Well, let’s find out.
Using the Equipment Manager:
Before you can use the default Equipment Manager supplied by Blizzard you must first enable it by pressing ‘Esc’ until the in-game menu appears and then selecting the Interface option. At the bottom of the first pane of options you’ll see a tick-box that you’ll need to tick marked “Use Equipment Manager.” Simply click the tick-box and then click the “Okay” button.
With the Equipment Manager enabled, if you now open your character pane (default: press ‘c’) you’ll be able to see a new button appears at the top-right corner of the main pane. This is your Equipment Manager button.
If you click on this button, it opens the very simple Equipment Manager window with 10 empty slots that you will be able to use to save equipment sets to. To create an equipment set simply drag the equipment you want to save to your character frame from your bags or bank slots until you have a set worth saving. Then, simply click on the save button and another small window will appear from which you can select an icon and type in a short name to identify the equipment set. For those already familiar with the ‘macro’ interface within the game, this is consistent with that.
After you have saved a couple of equipment sets, you will then have a couple of icons in your Equipment Manager window that are ready to be used. You can click on the icons within the Equipment Manager window to select them and if you have all the equipment defined in the set available, it will be equipped.
In order to make better use of the equipment sets however, simply drag the icons from the Equipment Manager window onto a convenient spot on your actionbars. Then, whenever you need to swap your equipment, it’s just a convenient mouse-click or key-press away.
And should you ever forget what each equipment set contains, simply mouse-over the button and the tooltip describes the contents of the set.
In a nutshell, that is the limit of the functionality provided by the default Equipment Manager built into the game. It works, it does a simple job in a simple manner and should give good mileage for those with basic needs. So, why then would you want or need to use one of the ‘old’ equipment swapping addons? It’s time to find out more.
Using the ItemRack addon:
Since ItemRack is an addon, you’ll need to download and install it first. We’ll assume you know how to do this already and even if you don’t, we’re sure you can find out how quite easily. All we’ll remind you to do is to check that WoW is going to try to load the addon for the character you are playing via the Addons page. This page is available by clicking on the “Addons” button that appears at the bottom left corner of the character selection screen.
All you need to do is to ensure that there is a tick next to the addon you want to load. In this case, that means ItemRack, ItemRack Options and, for my preference, the plugin for the FuBar menu-bar addon called ItemRackFu.
The first sign that ItemRack is working and available can be seen if you open your character pane (press ‘c’) and then hover the mouse over one of the armor items. You should see a little icon-menu appear showing all the possible items you have that fit in that armor slot. If you’re away from your bank, it just shows the items you have in your normal bags. If you are at the bank, it’ll show all items, be they in your bags or your bank – note, you must have the bank window open though.
However, the normal way to intereact with ItemRack is via its dedicated options window. You may have a mini-map icon for ItemRack that you can click on to make the options window appear but the default way otherwise is to type “/itemrack opt” in the chat window.
The ItemRack options window has four tabs (Queue, Events, Sets, Config) and the main one you will use most often is the ‘Sets’ tab. If it’s not already selected, click on the ‘Sets’ tab to select it and you’ll then see a layout similar to the default character pane. Hovering over a slot allows you to see icon-menus of appropriate gear as before. In this way, you can select ‘sets’ of equipment.
To save a set, simply type a name into the box, pick an icon from the area in the middle of the tab-pane and then click the ‘Save’ button. Job done.
To switch between the equipment sets that you save in ItemRack, you can either click on the minimap button if you have one (it’s the default behaviour) to see a small icon-menu of your available sets. Clicking an icon selects and equips that set, where the equipment is available.
However, prefering a clean icon-free minimap, I prefer to use the plugin for the FuBar menu system called ItemRackFu. This creates a small icon/name on FuBar and when you click on it, you see the same icon-menu of saved sets and again you simply click an icon to choose the corresponding set. It can then display the name of the currently equipped set making it easy to see at a glance what gear you are using. Handy for characters that swap gear like its going out of fashion. Good tanks do this a lot. Trust me, they love equipment swapping addons!
And once again, in case you forget what equipment a given set contains, simply mouse-over its menu icon and look for the tooltip. It’ll list the set’s contents in full.
Thus, we can see at this point that the ItemRack addon provides all the same functions that the default Equipment Manager does, more or less. (Or alternatively, we could say that the opposite way around as well.) What then are the advantages of using addons like ItemRack?
First of all, flexibility. If you create an equipment set and save it using the default Equipment Manager, you will not be able to edit the set’s contents should you for example win a new piece you want to insert into the set. Therefore, you have to essentially recreate a set from scratch whenever you just want to edit one item. It’s not the end of the world since it’s quite easy to do but it is not quite as convenient.
Another popular advantage of an addon like ItemRack is to configure it to switch equipment sets when certain events occur. For example, the addon can automatically equip your casual gear when you enter a city or a PVP set of gear whenever you enter a battleground. Perhaps you play a hybrid class like a druid and would like it to equip a feral DPS set whenever you enter cat-form but a resto-healing set whenever you enter tree-form. ItemRack can do all this easily and flawlessly.
So, which should you use?
The answer to this question is reasonably easy to answer. If, after having read the above, you believe you will not need any more functionality than the default Blizzard provided Equipment Manager supplies, then make life easy on yourself and just use that. It’s one less addon to worry about, to keep up-to-date come patch-day and it really does work quite acceptably well.
If however you would want more functionality than the default Equipment Manager supplies, you’ll have to explore the various alternative addons that all do far more. It’s worth trying a few out because they each do the same effective job in slightly different ways and in the same way that “you say toh-may-toe and I say toh-mah-toe”, each is perfectly valid in its peculiarities and you’ll probably find you like one more than the other “just because.” Don’t be afraid to experiment, it’s worth it to get the UI of your dreams. But remember not to admit publicly that you dream of the perfect UI. It’s not considered ‘healthy’ in normal circles. Bah! Humbug!
Blizzard have indicated that the functionality that the default Equipment Manager provides now is pretty much all that it will ever provide. It doesn’t provide any automated functions but that’s fine. Blizzard’s stance has long been to provide a working basic type of functionality and then to supplement that with an API (it’s a programmer’s term meaning Application Programming Interface) which other addon developers can use to hook into the same functionality. These addon developers can then write addons that use Blizzard’s own equipment swapping routines and add additional features, such as automated switching when changing zones, entering raid or battleground instances, when switching ‘forms’ (bear, cat, berserker-stance, etc) and so on. In fact, Blizzard’s position seems to be “it’s the community’s responsibility to write the addons that provide the additional functions they want.”
So, in the short term if you want more functionality than Blizzard’s own Equipment Manager provides then look to the existing established equipment swapping addons such as ItemRack. However, in the longer term, you can expect a whole host of new addons to appear on the scene that integrate with Blizzard’s equipment-swapping API to give the best of both worlds. The future’s bright, and I just auto-equipped my shades.
-B-