Using the Equipment Manager

The latest patch finally brought us the Equipment Manager. Since I’ve been using Outfitter to manage my gear sets and I wasn’t using any of the automatic features it provides, I switched it off and turned to the ingame version. I have to say it isn’t by any means perfect and I really wish it would have some additional features, but hey, it works and does the same basic thing.

I do have some tips and tricks for you if you want to try it out, so continue reading if you want. :)

The basics

First of all, the Equipment Manager is not enabled by default. You need to go into your Interface options screen and check the “Use Equipment Manager” box at the bottom of Controls section. Then you will have a new button in the top right corner of your character screen.

Making a set in itself is pretty simple. Just equip some gear, click the Save button, enter a name for it, choose an icon and there you have it. Clicking on one of the sets changes your gear to that set.

Now at some point you would probably like to change your saved set, probably when you get some new item. Unfortunately you can’t do it, at least not in a way that you’d imagined. The way it works is you activate your set, put on your new item, and then just save the set with the same name – you will get a confirmation box asking if you’re sure to overwrite an existing set – yes, you do want to do it.

Another useful thing is an equipment changer for a specific slot. If you hold Alt while mousing over an equipped item, you will get a little box similar to the one on the right. You can click the other item to equip it, or the bag icon to put your current piece into your backpack. It might not seem like a really useful thing, but I use it all the time on my warrior and druid to change tabards from my Argent Dawn one to the reputation ones – it saves me some time on searching for them in my bags.

Making a partial set

Part of what I liked about Outfitter was the ability to make a partial set – for example, I had one with my fishing rod and a hat, and that set would leave whatever else I had equipped intact. So if I enabled pvp set first and then fishing, I could safely go to WG (or Scholazar) and didn’t have to be afraid of being ganked left and right. The endless joys of a PvP server…

Anyway, at first I tought the Equipment Manager didn’t have that ability, but after a bit of searching on the web I found how to do it in a comment on Frostbolt’s post. Thanks Adawin, that’s a really helpful piece of information and it deserves to be known.

So, here’s exactly how to do it. Start making your set like you would make just a full one. Equip your fishing rod, a hat or whatever else you might use. Then, with the Equipment Manager window open, hold Alt and hover your mouse over an item. You’ll notice a new icon which will say “Ignore this slot”. Click this on every item you don’t need in your fishing set and it should look similar to what you can see below.

After you save this set, you will have a partial set that will work exactly like the Outfitter ones do – it will leave all ignored gear and just replace the items you want.

Unfortunately as you can’t edit the sets anyway, you will need to ignore all your gear again if you get a new fishing rod.

Easy changing of sets

Another very useful function of Outfitter is the minimap icon (or the Fubar/Broker plugin to put it on your panels). Of course Blizzard didn’t make their version of it, so you will need to do it in a different way. The most basic is of course opening your character panel, then the Equipment Manager window and clicking a set to equip. That will of course work, but it’s not very efficient or quick way to do it, is it.

You can also pull the set icon out of the Equipment Manager’s window to one of your action bar and just simply click that. This works a bit better and you still get to see the tooltip that shows what gear goes into the set, but most of my characters don’t have a lot free space on their action bars left. YMMV.

In the end I turned to addons again. Since I use LDB panels now, I found a little addon called Broker_EquipSwitch, which does the same thing as Outfitter icon – it creates a dropdown list of all your sets and shows which one you actually have active. There’s probably a bunch of similar addons, so just choose whatever you like.

Additional resources

Well, since I wasn’t using the other features of Outfitter, I will stop this article at that. If you want to find additional information about incorporating the Equipment Manager into macros and emulating the automatic switching behavior, you can most likely find it somewhere. Here’s something to start:

• WoWWiki’s Wowpedia page for Equipment Manager
• EventEquip addon on WoWInterface (be sure to read the info and the comments if you want to use it)

Have fun!