wow Top 10 Quality of Life WoW Addons

[Odinn 95]

 

Which addons to use can be hard to keep track of - what's up to date? Are there new addons out there I don't know about? Will this addon continue to be updated in the future? To try and make things easier, I've picked out 10 addons I don't think anyone should be playing without.

 

 

 

Honourable Mention: Tidy Plates

 

For people who use name plates, upgrading to Tidy Plates (and for tanks, with the Threat Plates theme) is a no-brainer. Not everyone makes use of name plates, but for those who do, Tidy Plates comes highly recommended.

 

 

 

10. MoveAnything

 

In 10th place is an addon that allows you to adjust whatever elements of the default user interface you either like, or simply don't need to replace. MoveAnything gives you the ability to move, scale, hide, or adjust the transparency level of every item within the Blizzard UI. Take your focus frame somewhere more useful! Hide the objective tracker! Keep the best, move some, and hide the rest of the core elements you end up with when you're done with all of your other addons.

 

9. TomTom

 

Despite being built into World of Warcraft natively, the default UI does not give you any useful way of utilizing map coordinates. By using TomTom, you can display coordinates, set waypoints using them, and even get a navigation arrow to point you in the direction of your objective or waypoint. After enough years of, "It's next to the 'D' in 'Dustwallow'!", you should definitely be taking advantage of coordinates.

 

8. OPie

 

Not everyone will love this one, but the people who do will love it immensely. OPie lets you set up custom action 'rings' to free up keybinds. Set a single bind to pull up a ring, and then release the bind once you've moved your mouse in the direction of the ability or effect you want to use. If nothing else, OPie is great for things like raid markers! See it in action:

 

OPie demonstration video.

 

 

 

The next three addons are individual feature replacements for unit frames, raid frames, and bar management. If you're looking for a quick solution, rather than the individually-named addons here (which are all highly customizable and best in class), you can choose a complete interface modification like ElvUI. Elv is less robust, but allows you to quickly and easily configure a new interface that is scaled to your resolution with a solid suite of features.

 

Here's a standard ElvUI layout.

 

 

 

7. Shadowed Unit Frames

 

Easily the most efficient and configurable unit frame replacement out there today, SUF lets you decide exactly how you want each of your frames (player, party, target, focus, etc.) to appear. Move them, anchor frames to other frames in sensible ways - the immense amount of customization you can do will be the big selling feature here.

 

6. Grid

 

Raid frames are among the oldest and most needed of addons in WoW's history. From the venerable CT-Raid onward, most every WoW player has always chosen to take  some kind of improvement over the default Blizzard alternative. Grid premiered during The Burning Crusade, and while iterations have changed to match the various tweaks Blizzard has made over the years, it remains one of the most granular and popular raid frame solutions to date.

 

5. Bartender4

 

Bartender gives you complete control over how and where your action bars appear. If for nothing else than the ability to remove the unnecessary art and scale the bars to a more manageable size, living without a modern action bar addon is unthinkable. Reclaim your visual real estate.

 

 

 

The top four addons at the end of this list are a mixture of simple and complex, but cannot come strongly recommended enough. There is value in each of these addons for basically every WoW player out there.

 

 

 

4. Clique

 

You have mouseover macros. If you don't, you probably should. For every class, but quadrupally so for healers, Clique lets you react faster and make infinitely better use of a ton of your abilities. Whether it's a heal, a taunt, an interrupt, crowd control, or otherwise, casting it when you select your target rather than selecting your target and then casting a spell is a massive improvement that you will notice and appreciate immediately.

 

3. Master Plan

 

With the advent of Garrisons, finding ways to quickly optimize your missions and get the results reported back to you was a priority for pretty much every player, regardless of what other content they enjoy. From the options that exist, Master Plan is the sleekest and most popular way to minimize the time it takes to maximize your Garrison's effectiveness.

 

2. Deadly Boss Mods

 

Constantly updated, well developed, and easy to use, Deadly Boss Mods is the single most downloaded WoW addon of all time for a reason. For every contemporary encounter, DBM gives you relevant timers, warnings, and excellent utilities (including the nigh-mandatory range radar). If you aren't one of the over 100,000,000 (yes, that number is correct) downloads recorded on Curse already, get thyself to the link above, post haste.

 

1. WeakAuras 2

 

This one is not for the faint of heart. WeakAuras is the spiritual successor to PowerAuras, but has since evolved into the single most powerful framework for personalized alerts available today. Even for users who aren't entirely sure how to navigate the complexity of building their own strings, a number of talented theorycrafters have exported strings elsewhere online - on forums, blogs, or otherwise - that you can quickly import for your own use. It is the best addon available today, and players who make effective use of it are setting themselves up for tremendous success.

 

The WeakAuras configuration screen.

 

 

 

Do you already use all of the above addons, or did one of them leap out at you as something you should download? Does some other addon not mentioned live at the heart of your UI? Let me know in the comments.

[Regal 21]

I definitely use DBM. AMAZING!

and Master Plan is really helpful and constantly updated. Helped me get a 685 mythic shield.

I have heard many positive things about Weak Auras, but I don't use it myself. However, I've considered it a lot, and I am thinking more about it after reading this. 

 

Another addon I really like is FloTotem for the UI 

I main a resto shaman and I like that it constantly adjusts as I change my talents. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that's the addon that's preventing me from clicking in-chat links.

 

Thanks for the great list!

[Storm 426]

I avoided weak auras for a long time. when it first came out, to me it was just DBM that needed a lot more work to customize everything. but I recently got into it more, and now I could never go back. I still use DBM for out of the box boss timers and raid warnings, but I use weak auras for my dps rotation, for custom tracking of buffs and debuffs on certain fights, and all sorts of other stuff. Once I learned how to make my own custom stuff it really elevated my game.

 

I just downloaded Master Plan, and I'm really liking it so far. I just assigned all my missions in about 15 seconds and they were almost all 100%. without master plan it would have taken me 2-3 minutes to assign all my missions, and a lot more would not have been 100%.

[Archimage 98]

I agree that Weakauras and DBM are the best addons ever. Refer to each class's own forums if you are looking for Weakauras assistance. 

 

I would suggest using Paste with TomTom when you have a set of Coordinates (treasures and rares) to insert.

 

WoWPro if you want to level faster. 

Gladius is a nice PvP Arena addon if you are not using ElvUI.

[theASCHE360 2]

wow I never heard of Opie before but its totally amazing! thansk a lot guys, now I'm using 8/10 addons listed :D

[AwkwardSquirtle 0]

Interesting. I might need to check some of these out. I'd also give an honourable mention to postal. Adds a couple of binds for "collect all" from the mailbox, which saves a bit of time and is just convenient.

[Sajakain 104]

Personally, I use 5 of the 10 that you listed:

• 10: "MoveAnything"
• 9: "TomTom"
• 8: "Shadowed Unit Frames"
• 5: "Bartender4"
• 3: "Master Plan"

All of them are top-notch in utility and are a "must-have", in my opinion. Great list overall. 

 

You'll notice, however, that I didn't list your number 2 addon, "Deadly Boss Mods". While it may be the most downloaded and familiar boss mod out today, I prefer Big Wigs. While it does the exact same thing that DBM does as far as the encounters go, I feel it better, overall, with the way it handles the encounters. In addition, Big Wigs is also account-wide customizable; there's no need to set it up on each character unless you hold specific settings that differ between each character. In my raid team I definitely promote Big Wigs over DBM or it's counter-part, VEM.

 

As far as other addons that I also consider a "must-have" I use:

• Bagnon: It's a simple addon that manages your personal bags, bank, reagent bank, guild vault, and void storage. I personally disable the guild vault and void storage but the options are there.
• Gnosis Cast Bar: A very simple yet very customizable cast bar addon that proved to be even better than my previously used "Quartz" addon.
• NeedToKnow: This addon, like others, tracks a lot of stuff: buffs, debuffs, totems, cooldowns, internal cooldowns, etc. It's easily customized and reports in a bar fashion. The great thing about these bars is they're set in a fixed position; the abilities don't move up or down based on time left, etc so if a bar is missing from your setup you know exactly what debuff / buff / etc you're missing. I use this addon regardless of what class or spec I'm playing.
• Prat 3.0: A chat-modifying addon that is pretty easily customized and makes my chat box a lot better to manage and read. 
• RSA: A very nice, all-in-one, spell announcer. By default, you can use it straight out of the box. It does have options for customization, however.
• Trade Skill Master: If you know anything about the auction house and your professions.... this addon and it's individual modules are all a must-have. It takes time to get used to and properly set up but, when enabled, gives you everything you need to get the most out of the AH.

There are several other addons that I use for cosmetic or other purposes but are not necessarily a "must-have".

 

This is a great topic as I like reading other's opinions on their addons and UI; sometimes I find something I'm not currently using and end up keeping it simply because of these type of threads. 

[HeartlessBastard 0]

Elvui.   Can't say it enough.  ElvUI alone replaces most addons. 

1) Elvui
2) DBM
3) Details! (or Skada)
4) Pawn
5) Postal

 

I used to use OPie,  It was quite handy.

And Addon Control Panel, used to be top on my list
Now it's only real use is to have Addon Builds that you can swap between on the fly.