Five Ways to Use the Outfitter Add on for World of Warcraft

Chances are that you've got some extra gear in your bags for special situations. You might have a riding crop, some resistance gear, a few pieces of hit rating gear. At some point, you're going to need to switch your gear to optimize your game play.

Sure, you could do this yourself. You can manually move items in and out of the bank and manually equip what you need in every situation. Wouldn't it be better if a module could track all of these things for you and automate the process?

That's exactly what the Outfitter add on does. It lets you create sets of gear that you can withdraw from the bank or equip with a single click of the mouse.

This add on is a must have for hybrid classes - like Druids and Paladins. It also offers some great tools for every player. To get you started, here are five ways that Outfitter can help enhance your gameplay.

Create Alternative Gear Sets

The simplest use for Outfitter is to keep track of alternate gear sets. For example, let's take a Protection Paladin. Chances are, our Paladin has an entire gear set for tanking and an entire gear set for healing.

Our Paladin could open his bags and manually switch each of his tanking pieces for healing pieces. However, this takes time. There's also the likely possibility that he will accidentally forget to change an item and that he's healing with some tanking bracers equipped.

With Outfitter, you can easily create two complete outfits - a Tanking outfit and a Healing outfit. You can name them whatever you want. When you want to switch outfits, you can either click on the Outfitter icon and select a new outfit or bind the outfit to a key. I've bound my tanking outfit to Shift-T and my healing outfit to Shift-H. With a simple button press, I'm switched from tanking to healing and ready to go.

Check That Your Set Isn't In the Bank

You can also create partial gear sets. For example, let's say you have created a Shadow Resist set with several pieces of Shadow Resist gear. You probably don't carry this around with you every day, and you'll pull it out of the bank whenever you want to use it.

If you do this manually, you could easily forget one piece and not have it when you get to the boss that you need it for. With Outfitter, you can easily check that you have each piece of gear you need. If you click on the Outfitter icon, any outfit that is missing pieces of gear will have its name in red. If you're "Shadow Resist" set is missing a cloak, the name will show up in red and you'll know that it's in the bank.

You can also use Outfitter to automatically withdraw the items from the bank and deposit them in the bank. This may mess up the organization of your bags and your bank, so it's not for everyone. But it is a surefire way to make sure that you actually withdraw everything you need.

Automatically Switch PVP Gear

Outfitter has a number of settings to automatically equip and un-equip gear for you. For example, you can place your PVP gear in the pre-created "Battleground" outfit.

Although you can still manually equip and un-equip this outfit like usual, it's designed to automatically equip itself in certain situations. For the Battleground outfit, your gear will automatically be equipped whenever you zone into a battleground instance. When you leave the instance, the gear will be unequipped.

There's a similar Outfit for "Riding." Every time you mount up, your gear will be equipped. When you dismount, the gear is replaced with your normal pieces. With this, you'll never accidentally leave your Riding Crop on again. No more nagging whispers from raid leaders!

Automatically Equip Gear for Innervate

This use requires a bit more in depth understanding of the Outfitter module.

When you create an outfit, you can set it to automatically equip under certain conditions. This is similar to the Battleground outfit, but you set the conditions.

Let's take the example of a Druid that Innervates herself. The Druid may want to switch her weapon and offhand to maximize the regeneration derived from the Innervate. She could use a macro to do this, or she could set up Outfitter to automatically equip the weapon and off hand.

Likewise, another character - i.e. a Priest - could set up Outfitter to swap weapons when he gains the Innervate buff. Since the Priest is not casting the Innervate, he has no reliable way to know when to use his weapon swap macro. Outfitter does it automatically and takes out all the guess work.

If you'd like to create an outfit like this, here's a guide to creating an automatic Innervate outfit.

Customize Librams, Totems, and Idols

A final use, similar to the previous one, is to customize which Libram, Totem, or Idol you use for a specific spell.

Many of these items only affect one or two spells. For example, a Paladin may have a Libram that grants a bonus to Holy Light and a different one that grants a bonus to Flash of Light. He could choose one to use all the time, or he could manually swap them in and out when he deems appropriate.

He could also create an automatic outfit with Outfitter. Whenever the Paladin is casting Holy Light, the appropriate Libram would be swapped in. Whenever the Paladin is casting Flash of Light, the other Libram is swapped in. This is a great way to optimize your gear for the current situation, rather than picking one item and using it all the time.

Try It Out

Bottom line, this is a great add on. Even if you only use it for the Riding outfit, it's worth it.

How many times have you shown up for a raid and had somebody whisper you that your Riding Crop was still equipped? We're all human and we tend to make mistakes, so let this add on eliminate some of them for you.