Useful Addons: Yarnball.

What I admire about WoW when I started playing.

When I started playing WoW, one of the greatest invention I thought was.. showing buff durations. I started WoW as a Mage and.. Mages are all about buffs. Not only buffs are sorted by “buffs” and “debuffs”, but its got durations on it.

Just imagine your Poison and Silence debuffs are all in second row, and all your “good buffs” are on the first row.. wouldn’t that just make life easier? Instead of stacking em all and… “oops, accidentally clicked off Protect”.

You can argue one way or the other… that WoW doesn’t requires skills since all these information are already “presented” to you but in my opinion… WoW is about how you use your “other” spells, but FFXi is simply about “how to be efficient”, if you ask me :D We spent quite a lot of time just to make efficient macros whlie WoW just throws it at you “Display Buff Duration“.

Yarnball Addon

Anyway enough bashing! So now we can bring a portion of that WoW dream to FFXi through Yarnball!

Yarnball is a plugin that displays the duration of the buff in earth time before it expires.

Screenshot on the right shows an arrow that the spell gets pushed. The order of the spell is the order you cast it, not necessary the next spell that wears off (which I wish it was the other way around). There is another similar addon, which displays the buff duration right under the buff itself… but then how do you display others’ refresh? So I think Yarnball is the winner. Also, Yarnball knows how to “renew” the timer if you overwrite the buff before it wears off. The other one doesn’t so.. yea gogo Yarnball!

Yarnball also supports FOOD (it displays the time based on what you ate), songs, corsair buffs, refresh, even RERAISE!

Its also got a nice little feature call Chat Logging. Where you can record down chats. Not something new but hay, nice bundle.

Its pretty easy to use. When you click the addon, there’s a new icon that is next to your task bar :D (the bottom right of your screen, next to clock), then you just right click and start adjusting its options ^^

Credit goes to Shayx :) She introduce me to this addon ^^; (ah ha! no wonder she knows when buff wears off!)

But you know what… make sure you know how to do it manually before you rely on addons. Like for RDM, make sure you know what “Refresh Cycle” is before you use these things :) Don’t let these thing spoil you :) Else when the patch comes out and these addon breaks… then you’re fuked!

Does it makes you less skill?

IMO not really. I mean you can have all the plugins in the world and.. you -can- still suck because you the player, don’t cast the spell at all. Just like some WHM refuse to haste (thinking its a RDM job to do both refresh + haste). The addon is only as good as the player who knows how to utilize those information. So yea.. IMO yes, it might spoil some people but… hay… it makes the good ones even better, now that we can totally be efficient with MP (by not overwriting our 30sec remaining refresh with a new one) ^_^. I mean you can wait till it wears off to… recast.. but then you’re missing a few ticks of MP by then :)

Where to get it?

Like it? Go download it. Remember, scan all files before you run it.
Download from: Author’s Forum / StarOnion Server (in case that doesn’t work)