About Boss Notes
Boss Notes provides shareable notes and other information for your guild, party and raid community. The add-on lets you take notes from your boss encounter learnings and share this information with other players. You can also use Boss Notes as a general, structured in-game notepad. In addition, Boss Notes records trash and boss abilities and provides a collection of short encounter tactics.
Boss Notes is based on a modular design. The standard distribution contains the Personal Notes, Abilities and Tactics modules. Extension modules can provide additonal functionality.
Usage
If you have a Lightweight Data Broker (LDB) container add-on such as Titan Panel, Boss Notes shows in that container. Left-clicking the Boss Notes icon toggles the Boss Notes window; right-clicking the icon shows the options.
If you do not have an LDB container, type /bn toggle to show the Boss Notes window and /bn options to show the options.
Boss Notes provides a key binding to toggle the Boss Notes window. You may want to assign a key to that binding to gain quick access to Boss Notes.
Screenshots
The Boss Notes window lets you choose between the generic category and specific instances and encounters. The window then displays the information available on the selected category. Boss Notes automatically switches the category when a known mob is mouseovered or targeted in a dungeon or raid.
The Boss Notes tooltip provides quick access to the currently selected information.
All information can be sent to predefined channels.
Modules
Boss Notes functionality is provided by modules. The following sections describe the modules that are part of the Boss Notes standard distribution.
Personal Notes
The Personal Notes module provides shareable notes. The notes are categorized. There is a general category as well as categories per instance and per encounter. Notes are by default shared with other players in your guild, party or raid. Other players can browse your notes and you can browse theirs. Sharing happens transparently in the background. If you want to control the distribution of your notes, you can disable sharing for the guild, party or raid in the add-on options under Syndication.
To edit a personal note, left-click on the content area in the lower half of the Boss Notes window. This opens the editor. The editor supports in-game links by shift-clicking. This allows you to link to items, abilities, tradeskills and other information in your notes.
For each category, there is a public default note. You can right-click a note to bring up a context menu that allows you to add to remove additional notes in the selected category. Additional notes can be either public or private notes. Public notes are by default shared with other players in your guild, party or raid. To ensure that Boss Notes does not cause excessive network traffic, public notes are limited to 1'000 bytes per note. Boss Notes uses smart caching to further reduce network traffic. Private notes on the other hand are not shared with other players. Therefore, they have a much higher size limitation which is currently set at 10'000 bytes per note.
Abilities
The Abilities module lists the abilities of known trash mobs and bosses (NPCs) in dungeons and raids. The module differentiates between 10 player and 25 player difficulty as well as normal and heroic difficulty. Abilities are learned automatically as they are used by the NPCs.
Please note that only the boss abilities matching the current dungeon or raid difficulty are displayed and that abilities are learned seperately for each difficulty.
If you are playing in an instance that is not yet completely covered by the Boss Notes encounter database, you may want to use the /bn abilities learn command after entering the zone. This causes the Abilities module to begin associating unknown NPCs with the currently selected instance and encounter. Learning can be stopped by typing the same command again. Learnings can be cleared by typing /bn abilities clear.
The encounter database is still work in progress. It is fairly complete for Wrath of the Lich King, and less complete for older dungeons and raids. Please consult the Encounter Database Status page for more information.
Tactics
The Tactics module provides short tactics for dungeon and raid encounters. The tactics are maintained by DrKazza. Please contact him directly if you have feedback on the content or want to contribute.
Reporting Bugs
Please use the Ticket System on WowAce when reporting bugs. This ensures that your error reports receive proper and timely processing. You can log in on WowAce with your Curse Network account. Posting error reports in the comments section on Curse.com is not recommended.
Extending Boss Notes
Boss Notes is based on a modular design. The add-on can be extended with additional modules. Please see the Boss Notes Provider Modules page for further information.
- 9 comments
- 9 comments
Facts
- Date created
- 25 Feb 2009
- Categories
- Last update
- 05 Sep 2009
- Development stage
- Release
- Language
- deDE
- enUS
- zhCN
- zhTW
- License
- MIT License
- Curse link
- Boss Notes
- Recent files
Relationships
- Embedded library
- Ace3




- #9
Bethink Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:15:13Thanks for the report, the ticket and work around.
1.0.5 is now out with a more complete fix of this issue. (There are now both GetDungeonDifficulty() and GetRaidDifficulty().)
- #8
Wolfric83 Wed, 05 Aug 2009 09:27:45For anyone currently having an error pop up with GetCurrentDungeonDifficulty() being null, Blizzard changed that function to GetDungeonDifficulty()
I have been able to get mine working temporarily until this is updated here (i'm sure it will be very soon) by modifying one line in Abilities.lua in the BossNotes_Abilities folder:
what was:
becomes
Hope this helps and is not unwanted assistance.
and with this change i am able to access my old bossnotes again.
- #7
kenghua Tue, 04 Aug 2009 02:43:09Great addon! I would like to put up a suggestion to allow sending of information to custom channel and whisper (a textbox to enter the target name). Something similar to "recount".
Keep up the good work!
- #6
Bethink Mon, 08 Jun 2009 08:50:42Personal notes are stored in <World of Warcraft>/WTF/Account/<Account>/SavedVariables/BossNotes_PersonalNotes.lua.
- #5
DrKazza Sun, 07 Jun 2009 23:25:58the best way is to open the folder: BossNotes_Tactics then the file Tactics-enUS.LUA Have a look at the format there. Just edit this text file using Wordpad/Notepad if you want to know which Encounter is which boss look up the number on Wowhead e.g. encounter:11520 go to http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=11520 This will be overwritten when you download a new version. hopefully Bethink will tell you which file to edit for personal notes offline Kaz
- #4
mystykdream Sun, 07 Jun 2009 23:14:10Is there a way to edit your notes outside of WoW?
- #3
Squeeg Sun, 12 Apr 2009 15:45:52This has really come a long way, and is indeed awesome-face.
- #2
Bethink Sun, 08 Mar 2009 20:49:11Thanks for the info regarding that bad path within the ZIP. This has been fixed in the new beta release.
I like the idea about printing notes to the party/raid. Creating a ticket for this.
- #1
Squeeg Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:43:56You need to rename the Addon folder. :p It's currently boss-notes, instead of BossNotes. ^-^
Also, since I can't test it out atm, is there a way to print notes to your party? That'd be awesome for people that don't have the addon. And making boss explanation easy/quick.