Addons: Blizzard’s Equipment Manager
3.1.2 brought no interesting changes for Shamans, but finally the long-awaited Equipment Manager was implemented into the default UI. You don’t know why you should ever quickly change your gear set? A) dual spec B) different sets for different tasks (pve vs pvp, single target vs chain heal spam) C) being naked quickly.
My addon of choice for such tasks was ItemRack, which still works perfectly and is of course more advanced than blizzard’s own gear manager. After some raids without Itemrack, I felt Blizzard’s manager really offers all I need: Switching from set X to Y quickly, Easy updating of sets and synergy with the dual spec functionality.
If you want the manager to work smoothly, it needs some tuning though. Especially if you often alter your gear sets. At this point, this doesn’t work properly (if this is intended behavior, then no pat on the back for the programing guy from me): If you click on a set and then swap a new item into this set and click on save, a new window appears, where the name of the set you want to change is already written.
Not so the icon you picked for your set. So every time you want to update your set, you have to scroll through all icons to find the appropriate one or just stick with icons that appear on the top of the list.
Blizzard, please fix this. It’s just silly that something so incredibly annoying finds its way into a patch that goes live.
Before I’ll talk about how to fix and improve the equipment manager, here’s how to activate it: hit escape, click on “Interface” and then click on “Use Equipment Manager” in the “Controls” tab, the manager is turned off by default.
If you did not fail in activating the manager, whenever you open your character’s window, a button will appear in the upper right of the window, click on it and you can save and delete those cool gear sets. If you click on a set in the character window, you will instantly equip it.
Equipment Manager with additional Update Button and Crossdresser Button
Now if you want to improve your Equipment Manager, Tekkub is all you need. He offers two nice little addons:
- EquipSetUpdater: This addon will prevent you from going crazy every time you want to update a set and search for the appropriate icon again. It will add an “Update” Button to your Equipment Manager Window, which does exactly what it promises: Updating the set under the same icon/name as you selected in the very beginning.
- Crossdresser: Install this addon and you’ll find the needed configurations in the “Interface” -> “Addons” Tab. You can now assign gear sets to your dual specs. You switch spec, gear will switch as well.
If you use an LDB addon (which you should), Broker_Equipment should make its way into your addon folder. It displays your actual set, lets you swap between sets easily as well as access the Equipment Manager window.
Broker_Equipment in ChocolateBar
That’s it for today. Comments are welcome, as always.
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Nice! I’m glad you gave that one the detail treatment. I haven’t had the guts to switch off Outfitter yet. Since the Blizzard implementation is clearly based on ItemRack, it is less like what I’m used to.
Outfitter has a couple tooltip features I presume aren’t present in this. The key thing is Used In: line on tooltips that lists what equipment sets a piece of gear is part of. The other is that when you shift-highlight an item to compare, all pieces of set gear are included. So I might be wearing a healing set, and I can still shift-compare pieces of Enhancement gear against my melee outfit.
I guess you’re absolutely right, all Outfitter users will probably stick to it. Outfitter offers a lot of neat additional features, especially the management of sets that are in the bag/bank etc. For me, that was always far more than I needed, that’s why I was happy with Itemrack over a long time.
If you use Itemrack or nothing at all, switching to the built-in equipment manager is an excellent choice, if a default UI element is working well, I’d always pick it over an additional mod.
*giggle* you said Elemental
As my mom used to say, what the heart is overflowing with, the mouth brings out 
Guess yer enjoyin Dual Spec huh!
That’s the result of posting a comment while being elemental at Thorim Hard-Mode. I’m really looking forward to the point, where my rotation comes more natural and doesn’t need that much concentration.
Thankyou for the guide, I was un-aware of the problem with it – something to bear in mind in future use.
What is the addon that you have providing the item colour glow and durability information? It looks really nice and functional.
Thanks for Articles!
Edit: Ooops, just remebered you did a post about the addons you used – found it in there (tekability and oglow if anyone is interested).
Your comments are really helpful. ,