While I use many “general purpose” UI addons, I plan to showcase a few that I think would benefit most players of the druid class, be they resto-specced, feral-specced, or oomkin.
A couple of months ago, a priest friend of mine turned me on to the ArkInventory addon. Developed and maintained by Arkayenro of Khaz’goroth, ArkInventory combines all of your bag slots into one pane, similar to the All-In-One Inventory addon. ArkInventory goes a step further, however, allowing you to use predefined categories (or create custom categories) for sorting items. You can then create regions within your inventory to associate with one or more categories. After that, whenever you pick up an item, it will automatically be added to the appropriate inventory region (assuming you’ve set one up), allowing you to easily group all your consumables or leatherworking items into their own sections without having to try to logically sort items into bags of variable size.
Example setup of ArkInventory
Any druid who collects multiple sets of gear Druids, in particular, really benefit from this addon. As an example, I have created individual regions for Healing, Magical DPS, Melee DPS, Tanking, and PvP gear sets. This is in addition to regions for consumables, tailoring, leatherworking and skinning, non combat pets and mounts, quest items, assorted resistances, and non-soulbound green items for selling/alt distribution.
To be objective, there are some downsides to using this addon:
- ArkInventory does slow the transfer of items between your bank and inventory. You can minimize the delay, however, by doing the following:
- Turn off auto sorting. This keeps the addon from resorting your items every time you make an inventory change. Under the main menu, go to the Sorting submenu and uncheck Instant.
- Turn off bag display. You must turn off the display of your bags for the toggle on auto refresh to take effect. Under the main menu, go to the Hidden Frames submenu and check Bag Changer.
- It can be difficult to switch out bags since there is no indicator of which bag contains which items in your inventory pane (luckily, profession- and class-based bags have slots which can be color-coded). As infrequently as this is an issue, I generally disable the addon, switch out my bag, then reenable it.
- Obviously, should you ever play your character on another system, the contents of your bags will be in disarray. You’ll need to move both the addon and its configuration files (which specify how your want your category regions setup) to keep from losing your settings on a new computer.
