GetRare

Which rares are up on Timeless Isle?  Where are they?  Or when and where were they last killed?  GetRare keeps track by monitoring the traffic of users of RareCoordinator, RareAnnouncer, RareShare, and GetRare.  (You don't need to run the other addons yourself.)

The addon fires up when you enter the Isle.  You don't need to do anything after installing it but move the window to where you want it.  Its demands on memory and CPU are very low, it has no discernible impact on frame-rates, and outside Timeless Isle it remains dormant.

Major Features

1. It is compact.  Longer rare names are shortened, and you can choose your own short names.  By default it displays only recent kills (in the past 2 hours, or longer for Golganarr), but you can display all by clicking [^].

2. It remembers the state of rares when you last logged off.  This is handy if you are jumping between alts, particularly alts of different factions, or if there's no one else to get data from.

3. For each rare you can choose a different alarm, or place it on ignore.  You can add any Blizzard sound file to the supplied list.  You can sound a special alarm for a rare needed for the "Bigger Bag" achievement.  Nearby rare activity, or a "vignette" (boss-icon) on the minimap, invokes a window with an image of the rare which you can click to target it.

4. If you need a drop for the account-wide achievement "Going To Need A Bigger Bag", the bar to the left of the rare's name is AMBER, otherwise GREEN.  If your alt needs the kill for "Timeless Champion", the rare's name is YELLOW, otherwise WHITE – becoming BLUE after the first kill each day, signaling fewer timeless coins.

5. The red button for each rare normally displays its current health% while it is alive, or the time since it was killed otherwise.  The health% is in GREEN, and the time since the last kill is in WHITE, AMBER, or BLUE, depending on how long ago.  Most rares respawn a random 30-60 minutes since the last kill, i.e. when AMBER (25-60 mins).  Respawn-times are specified in the configuration screen.  If a rare was last seen alive, but the last report was over 7 minutes ago, then its status is doubtful, and the time since last sighting is displayed (in GREEN) instead.

Left-clicking the button of a live rare announces its current health% to General.  Left-clicking when the rare is dead announces how long since it was killed.  You can make as many announcements as you like, but an automatic kill-announcement is normally made by only one GetRare or RareCoordinator user – whoever was first to announce it alive.

Right-clicking the button, if tracking is turned on, marks the rare's last known position on the world map, and points an arrow to it on the minimap.   (Actually it marks the position of a player targeting it.)  While tracking is on, live rares are tracked automatically, but right-click chooses a different rare to track, or stops tracking a rare that you don't want to track.  Right-click also displays in your chat-window what would be announced by a left-click.  Alternatively, you can send the coordinates to TomTom or Carbonite for tracking.

6. You can view your data-source for each rare in the Configuration window, valid since your last login or resync.  This can help identify data-trolls.  Players on your ignore-list cannot supply data directly to you.

Caveats

1. GetRare is deactivated if you enter a raid group, or if you are in a party with any cross-realm member from a non-connected realm.  "/gr" forces GetRare to double-check whether it should be active.

2. GetRare exchanges data with users of the excellent addon RareCoordinator, and optionally eavesdrops on two other addons.  Unfortunately, the two other addons eavesdrop on RareCoordinator but don't honor requests for data, which can stop RareCoordinator refreshing your data when you log in.  GetRare mitigates this by polling multiple users from multiple channels.

3. Like it or not, rare-timer addons use PC-GMT-time, not server-time. This is a problem if anyone's PC-clock is fast or slow.  GetRare sidesteps the problem for live data, but if you sync with someone's bad timers or with some other victim of that bad clock then it becomes your problem too. GetRare 5.4.0q checks that your own clock (minute-hand) agrees with the server-clock. It can also tell you whose PC-clock differs from yours by two minutes or more, after adjusting both clocks to GMT.

4. Messages are in English.  Rare names are translated to your local language if the rare is in your Blizzard cache.

Related addons:

LookingForGroup (LFG) Nazjatar Rare Share Mechagon Rare Share – MRS RareTrackerMechagon (RTM) TomCat\’s Tours Long Forgotten Hippogryph Server Hop SavedInstances