KnowledgeCheck

Knowledge Check lets a raid or party leader quiz the group on boss mechanics before the pull. Everyone answers four multiple choice questions about the boss you're standing in front of, and the leader sees who passed and who didn't.

It only works before the pull. It reads no combat data and does nothing while you're fighting.

How it works

1. The leader opens the window, picks a boss, a difficulty and a question mode, then clicks Start Check.
2. Everyone in the group with the addon gets a popup with four A/B/C/D questions written for their role and that difficulty, plus a countdown.
3. Anyone whose addon hasn't answered five seconds later is asked in group chat instead, and whispers four letters back. Nobody is left out of a check for not having it.
4. The leader watches the roster fill in. Each player shows up as waiting, answering in chat, passed, failed, or missing the addon.
5. Clicking a failed player shows the questions they got wrong and what the right answers were. One button posts a summary to raid or party chat.

The leader needs it. Everyone else wants it.

A check runs perfectly well with only the leader having the addon. That is what the chat fallback is for, and it is on by default. But it is not the same check, and it is worth being straight about the difference:

So: the leader must have it, everyone else should. The chat post says as much, so you don't have to. And when should doesn't happen, the website below is a much better second-best than a wall of chat.

There's a website too, for the group that won't install anything

kc.wow-achievement-plan.com runs the same check from a link. The leader picks a boss, a difficulty and a mode, and gets a URL to paste into chat. Players open it on a phone or a second monitor, type a name, pick a role, and answer their own drawn questions against a countdown. Nobody signs up and nobody installs anything, and a check is gone after a day.

It is the same check, not a lookalike: the same 832 questions, exported from this addon's data files rather than retyped, the same seeded draw ported so exactly that a test redraws hundreds of papers with the addon's own selector and compares them id for id, and the same pass rules. When the two disagree, the addon is right and the site is wrong.

Use the addon when you can and the site when you can't. With the whole group on the addon nothing comes close. Your paper appears over the game with no second screen and no extra chat, and the leader's roster reads the actual raid, so it can tell somebody who didn't answer from somebody who was never there. A web page cannot know that. What the site is for is the part of a group that will never install anything, and in a pug that is most of it.

One thing the site does that the addon doesn't: two to ten questions per paper, where the addon is fixed at four. At four it draws exactly the paper the addon would.

Two question modes

EASY is for a group that hasn't pulled the boss yet. The questions use no spell names, no add names and no numbers. They describe what you see and what it does, in the words people use in voice chat: the swirly on the floor, the orb heading for the raid. If you've watched a guide video once, you should pass. If you haven't looked at anything, you won't.

HARD is for progression. It names abilities, adds and positions, and assumes the group has already been in there.

No question appears in both modes, so switching gives you a genuinely different check. The leader picks the mode per check, and the quiz popup, the roster and the chat summary all say which mode was used.

What it does

Questions match your role. Half of every paper comes from a pool written for tanks, healers or dps, so tanks don't get asked about healing cooldowns.

Questions match the difficulty. Each difficulty holds only what that difficulty adds. A Mythic check always includes two Mythic-only questions, and a Normal check never asks about an ability that isn't there yet.

Everyone with the addon gets a different paper. Papers are drawn per player from the leader's seed plus the player's own name, so two hunters sitting next to each other don't get the same four questions.

Players without the addon are quizzed too. Five seconds after the start, anyone whose addon hasn't replied gets asked in group chat instead: one shared set of four questions, posted once, about a dozen lines. They whisper the letters back (abca), get their score whispered to them, and land in the same roster and the same summary as everybody else. Nothing extra is posted if the whole group has the addon, and the leader can switch it off. The pug, the trial and the friend who joined ten minutes ago are exactly the people worth quizzing, and they're the ones who never install anything. If you'd rather not spend the chat lines on them, send them the website link instead.

And they're told what they're missing. The chat post and the result whisper both say, in one line, what installing it would have got them: their own questions for their role, in a popup, instead of a wall of chat and a whisper in the right format. The leader's roster says the same thing from the other side: a count of how many players are on the fallback, and, on any of those rows, the sentence to pass on.

A live roster. Passed, failed, still answering, answering in chat, out of time, players running an outdated version, and players with no addon at all, flagged about five seconds after the check starts.

Wrong answers are reviewable. Click a failed name to see every question that player missed: the question, the answer they picked, and the answer that was right. Knowing which wrong answer someone chose is the whole point: "run out" and "stack" are different misunderstandings, and you can clear the right one up before pulling. The panel scrolls, so a player who missed all four is all there.

Chat summary. Post the results to raid or party when you want, or have it post by itself as soon as the check finishes. You choose whether failures and addon-less players get listed.

Solo testing. /kc sim runs a whole check against a fake nine person group through the real message handling, chat track included. /kc quiz opens the member quiz window on its own, with no group and nothing sent. You can see how all of it behaves before bringing it to a raid.

Settings. Submission timeout (60 seconds by default), default difficulty and mode, whether the leader takes the quiz too, a sound and a screen flash when your quiz opens, window locking and scale, and a minimap button you can hide. There's a Data Broker launcher as well, for Titan Panel, Bazooka and similar bars.

Every string goes through AceLocale, so translations can be added later. English ships now.

What's included

The Venomous Abyss, all eight bosses, in both modes:

That's 832 questions, covering Normal, Heroic and Mythic for all four roles. Every pool holds enough of them that you won't see the same paper pull after pull.

The content gets checked on every build: no duplicate questions, no pool too thin to fill a paper, correct answers spread evenly across A, B, C and D, and nothing too long for the quiz window to display.

Commands

Difficulty is normal, heroic or mythic. Mode is easy or hard. Leave either one out and your settings are used.

Midnight (patch 12.0)

Patch 12.0 blocks addon communication and chat sends while a boss encounter or Mythic+ run is in progress. This addon is built for that:

• Every outgoing message checks encounter, Mythic+ and combat state first, so nothing goes out during a fight.
• Anything posted to chat goes out one line at a time and re-checks that before every line, so a pull starting mid-post drops the rest instead of talking through the fight.
• The Start Check button switches off during an encounter, and its tooltip says why.
• No combat log events are registered and no protected values are touched. The addon has no access to combat data and doesn't need any.

This is a pre-pull tool. It won't warn you about anything mid-fight and it isn't a replacement for DBM, BigWigs or WeakAuras.

Worth knowing

• Only the group leader can start a check.
• Players who join after a check has started get no popup. If the chat questions have already gone out they can still answer those. Either way, start the check once the group is together.
• Everyone answering in chat gets the same four questions, so they can read each other's. Players with the addon each get their own. It's a deliberate trade: one post the group can share costs a dozen lines, private papers would cost a dozen lines each.
• Normal, Heroic and Mythic only. There is no LFR content.
• Running out of time counts as a fail.
• Your role comes from your assigned group role. If you don't have one assigned, you get dps questions.

Feedback

If a question is wrong, out of date or unclear, leave a comment. Every question file lists the source it came from and the date it was written, so corrections are quick. Bug reports and suggestions are welcome, and so are requests for other raids.

More from us

• Knowledge Check on the web: this check from a link, for the players who won't install anything.
• WoW Achievement Plan: put in any character and get their unfinished achievements as an ordered plan. Quick wins first, season deadlines flagged, thousand-hour grinds parked at the back, plus a chart of what they've earned over time.

License

The code is readable, as Blizzard's add-on policy requires, but it isn't open source. All rights reserved. Read it, audit it, or change it for your own use. Redistributing it or reusing the code elsewhere needs permission. The bundled libraries (Ace3, LibDataBroker, LibDBIcon) keep their own licenses.