My rating: 
Website reviewed: Manaview’s Booster
Manaview offers four add ons: A leveling guide (Booster), a talent building guide (Edge), a key bind and macros add-on (Impulse) and a gold add on (Tycoon). We have tested all these products and here is our review of one of them, Booster, the leveling guide.
First of all, the homepage of Manaview is not updated. It still refers to a leveling guide relative to Cataclysm, from 1 to 85 in under five days and the screenshots are from Cataclysm. The guide is updated to Mists of Pandaria, though, so you can start a Panda as much as you like, and you can follow the guide to level 90.
Why Manaview didn’t find time to update their page the last four months (Mists of Pandaria is out since September and the date today is the 31st of January 2013) is a mystery to me. Especially when their products are pretty expensive, we could suppose they found time to update the homepage.
My first contact with Manaview was when I wanted to find out if their guide were only going to Cataclysm or if they were updated to MoP. The support didn’t seem to understand this simple question, or at least didn’t understand why this was confusing me and their answer puzzled me even more:
“We plan to have updates for MoP WHen MoP is released to the public… IT’s been out since the day of release.”
Were they still planning or was it updated? It took me not less than three mails to get an explanation, even though support told me they were clear:
“the addons have all the MOp data and have since the day of MOP release, quite clearly I said that the last time”
Okay, then we gave Booster a try.
On the positive side, the add on doesn’t take much place on your screen. It is very discreet. Because of this small size, you can only see the most basic informations: go there, do this. If you want to know more, you just have to mouse over the step and you get more details about what has to be done.
If you need more explanations, WoWHead.com is one click away. You can access those informations directly from the add on and that is a great help.
Booster is good to find out of where exactly you are. I mean, if you just bought the add on and you are using it for the first time, Booster finds out very quickly about which quests you have done, where you are in Azeroth, what you are about to do and what you will have to do next. You have to manually click on all the “take the flight path” on the way, though, but that is something I have seen with every single leveling add on, so I believe it can not be automatic.
You have an arrow, pointing you in the direction you have to go to complete the quests, which can be a good help.
On the not updated page, Manaview writes that you have a glyph and talent helper included. This is not correct anymore. If you want the talent and glyph helper, you will have to buy another add on. What you get, when you buy booster is an add-on to level and absolutely nothing more.
You don’t have any extra help (except the comments from WoWHead) and that makes it a bit tirering having to mouse over (and eventually click) before you can have very important details.
You don’t have many intermediary steps. Booster will tell you: Go here and there, but not necessarily how to get there: Where does the road starts from?
That can be a big problem and finding the way up, down, in, out can be a waste of time (or you have again to read comments on WoWHead).
Booster doesn’t keep track of the mobs you kill or the object you collect. If you have to kill xx mobs and collect yy objects, you can’t see any count of it anywhere. You have to have the Show Objectives of WoW put to “on” to know how far you are in the quest. That ends up taking a lot of space on your screen.
You may have wrong indications too, which will make you waste time. For example in step 215, in the Jade Forest, where you, as a level 86 are asked to go down in the middle of the water. No path indicated. I did survive the fall, though, and my rogue managed to vanish so she didn’t get chopped by the high level mobs that were on the shore (level 90 mobs, there?). She made it to the middle of the water just to find out that it wasn’t the place at all…
Here again, you might have to go to Thottbot (I prefer them to WoWHead) to find the details.
You will also miss informations about where the mob is, exactly. Also in this case, you will have to go to WoWHead to get details. In Zygor guide, for example, you can click on the name of the mob in the add on and it will mark it for you. A huge gain of time. You don’t have this option in Booster and you have to search.
Booster seems to be a bit more than a combination of free Add ons like QuestHelper, Carbonite pulled together with a TomTom like add-on and links to WoWHead and doesn’t justify its high price. You will have to give $37 for an Alliance guide or $37 for a Horde guide, or $57 dollars for both and that is way too expensive a product to have these glitches, this poor support and a bunch of links to WoWHead. The least that could be done was to include talents and glyphs into the product, so the consumer had an idea she was getting something.
Because it is a nice way to put it together, we will give it three stars and if you want to buy it, you can buy it here.