WoW Maps - Cartographer & QuestHelper

January 29th, 2009
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When it comes to in-game WoW maps, I haven’t found a duo of add-ons more helpful than Cartographer and QuestHelper. Thanks to these addons, I don’t have to alt-tab out to look up a quest on Thottbot or WoW wiki anymore.

Cartographer uses the Google Maps API and applies to the Azeroth map. It lets you zoom in and out and mouse drag to change the location of the WoW maps. All by itself this wow addon is very helpful, especially considering the limitations of the default world of warcraft maps. But when you add QuestHelper to the mix, you see the thing really start to shine.

You see, QuestHelper examines your quest log and then reads through a database of quest info so it can plot out the best path for you to take to complete your quests. How do you know which way to go? Simple, it puts an arrow over your head to point the direction. This is simply brilliant. If you’re using Cartographer too, you can pull open your wow maps to see all the locations you’ll need to go to marked for you, along with a dotted line (called an ant trail) to show you the best route.

Using these two addons has made the game much more enjoyable for me, especially when I compare it to the first time I played WoW and had to put up with the crappy default map.

One last thing I want to mention is Zygor’s World of Warcraft Leveling Guide. This is what I’ve used to get my characters to 80 as fast as possible. Remember when I said that I hated alt-tabbing to look up stuff on Thottbot? Well, the same thing goes for leveling guides. I’ve tried others, but it was just such a pain having to alt-tab back and forth from the guide to WoW. With Zygor’s guide, you get an addon that actually brings the guide into the game, so you never have to leave your WoW window to use it! Even better, with Zygor’s World of Warcraft Leveling Guide, you never have to worry about having old information, like the off-the-shelf guides. Zygor is constantly updating to keep up with all the latest patches and strategies!

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Category: world of warcraft maps, wow maps

WoW Maps - Great World of Warcraft Map Tools

August 7th, 2008
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In WoW, maps are incredibly useful. I know, this isn’t any great wisdom of the ages. Its also no secret that the most useful time for a map is when you’re in an instance. For some reason Blizzard didn’t include highly detailed maps for these cases, like they did with the main part of the game.

Luckily, there’s a simple solution: just download the World of Warcraft addon, Atlas. Atlas works with the in-game maps to provide better, more detailed maps for battlegrounds, dungeon locations, flight points, and outdoor raid bosses. The absolute best part, though, is that it also comes with fantastic maps for every instance in the game!

If you’re still wanting some more WoW maps and WoW addons, then check out Gatherer. It suppliments the minimap with resource nodes. Basically, it remembers every place that you’ve encountered a resource node and then keeps it on the map. This is very handy for gathering because I don’t have to remember where all the nodes are, I can just check my map. Of course, it will still show the node, even if it is currently depleted, so you can’t rely soley on Gatherer. But even still, this has been a huge help as I used mining to buy my mount.

The last WoW addon I’ll talk about today is called AtlasQuest. It is a plugin for Atlas, which we talked about earlier. It basically shows you quest and story information for the instance that you’re in. It may not be the most necessary of addons, but it is fun and has some nice functionality.

Go ahead and try these addons for Wow maps out. But if you’re still wanting something more, check out the Ultimate World of Warcraft guide. It has tons of maps in it, plus a 1-70 level guide for both Horde and Alliance, a gold making guide, and lots of quest info. Plus, it is constantly updated, so you’ll never have out of date information. Best of all is that it comes with a money back guarantee, so you’ve got no reason not to check it out!

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Category: wow maps