WowAce

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 as well as boss emotes and provides a collection of short encounter tactics. With the powerful Rules module, you can extend your existing boss mod with additional encounter rules for custom notifications, timers, raid target icons and yells.

Boss Notes is based on a modular design. The standard distribution contains the Personal Notes, Abilities, Emotes, Tactics and Rules 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 various types of chats.

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. 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 limit the distribution of your notes, you can disable sharing for the guild, party or raid in the addon 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. 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.

Player Name Colorizing

Player names can be colorized in personal notes. This is useful for raid leaders to quickly check and update encounter setup macros. To colorize a player name, enclose it in double curly braces, i.e. {{Player}}. Players with this markup are colorized as follows:

• Green if the player is in raid groups 1-5
• Red if the player is in raid groups 6-8
• Grey if the player is not in the raid

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 size and difficulty are displayed and that abilities are learned seperately for each difficulty.

The encounter database is still work in progress. It is fairly complete for Cataclysm and Wrath of the Lich King, and less complete for older dungeons and raids. Please consult the Encounter Database Status page for more information.

Emotes

The Emotes module lists the emotes, whispers and yells of known trash mobs and bosses (NPCs) in dungeons and raids.

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.

Customizing Tactics

You can right-click on a tactics entry in order to copy its content to the clipboard. From there, you can paste it in a personal note and customize it to fit your needs.

Rules

The Rules module allows the definition of custom encounter rules for notifications, timers, raid target icons and yells. In a nutshell, it supports a roll-your-own boss mod approach to encounters which is completely in-game and does not require programming. Instead, declarative rules are used. The rules module is not intended to replace your current boss mod. Rather, it provides bridges to common boss mods that integrate your custom rules with the regular display provided by your boss mod. As the Rules module is powerful and complex, its complete description is on a separate page.

Learning Mode

Learning mode is an advanced feature that is used by the Boss Notes development team in order to maintain the encounter database that is included with Boss Notes. When playing on live, you generally do not need to use this option. Especially, you do not need to use this option for Boss Notes to learn NPC abilities.

You may want to use the learning mode when playing new content on a beta or test realm where the encounter database is not yet up to date. Use the /bn learn command after entering the zone. This causes Boss Notes to begin associating unknown NPCs with the currently selected instance and encounter while you are in the zone. Learning can be stopped by typing the same command again. Learnings can be cleared by typing /bn clear. NPCs are always learned on the currently selected instance and encounter. Please note that this selection must be adjusted manually in many cases as there is no automatic switching for learned NPCs.

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 and most likely leads to the respective comment being deleted without consideration.

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.