WoW Maps - Cartographer and QuestHelper
August 24th, 2008No Comments »
We’ve already talked about how useful addons can be in WoW. Maps and quests addons are probably my favorite to play around with. Like most people, I tinkered around with a lot of different combination of addons before I found the ones that really let me play the game the way I wanted to play. Because of that, I go through phases where I don’t want to mess with the perfect little balance that I’ve achieved, afraid that a new addon will screw everything up.
But then I start browsing the various addon sites and I’ll see something looks pretty cool. Sometimes the new addon’s functionality isn’t as neat as it sounds, but sometimes it will be even better. The tricky part is being able to tell when one addon will compliment another one. What I mean is, sometimes a WoW addon will improve the functionality of a different addon and together they’re like chocolate and peanut butter, two great tastes that taste great together. This is certainly the case with QuestHelper and Cartographer.
Cartographer is already known as an excellent WoW map addon that basically turns your world map of Azeroth into a Google Map. You can zoom in and out and use your cursor to drag the map around the frame. That’s pretty cool and it means that the World map isn’t taking up your entire screen, which is always a bonus.
QuestHelper is an addon that keeps track of your quest log for you, telling which quests can be completed close to your current location and groups them together. What this means for you is that QuestHelper will tell you the order to do your quests in so you can complete them in the shortest amount of time possible. So, the less walking you have to do the faster you can complete your quests and the faster you’re going to be leveling up. This is a genius idea.
So how do these things work together? Well, QuestHelper will display your waypoints on the World map and draw little “ant trails” between them, but it can do that with any map, addon or not. Remember a couple paragraphs ago when I said that Cartographer lets you resize your world map so it doesn’t take up the whole screen? Well that’s one way they work great together. But the absolute killer thing that they do is when you use both of these addons together, an arrow is displayed at the top of the screen that points the direction of your nearest quest. This is great because now you don’t even have to consult the map, you just follow the arrow and level up faster than you ever have before.
Now, both of these addons are fantastic and I wish that I’d had them the entire time I’ve been playing WoW, it would have been fantastic. But to really get the most out of the experience and the time I can spend playing, I use a WoW leveling guide. I’ve looked at several of them, but the one I like the best is the Ultimate World of Warcraft guide. It has leveling guides from 1-70 for both Horde and Alliance, along with a fantastic gold making guide. It also comes with quest and class strategies, some cool WoW maps, and more. The best thing is that the guide is constantly being updated, so I’ll never need to buy another one again. And even better, they’ve got a money back guarantee, so try out the Ultimate World of Warcraft guide today!
