WoW – My Favorite Addons

20 February, 2015. 909 words.

I started this post in November 2014, and TAGN’s recent post on addons reminded me that it was still sitting in Drafts. So I thought I would finally post it.

Addons are a fact of life when you play World of Warcraft. You can play without them (I’ve done it), and most of the gameplay basics are there, but Blizzard has consistently refused to put in any of the quality-of-life enhancements that we are all used to from every single other MMO released in the past ten years. (I’m thinking of Rift in particular here, which put in just about every quality-of-life improvement you could have ever wanted in an MMO UI.) Thus you’ll probably want some addons for WoW. Here are my favorites, not so much to recommend them but more as a handy index for later when I inevitably lose them all after a reformat.

I typically don’t do much to change the visuals of the game, I mainly concentrate on quality-of-life enhancements and things that other games have that WoW doesn’t.

Altoholic. I don’t really do much with this addon, but it’s very handy to display informative lists of all your alts on one screen, because numbers and statistics are awesome.

Deadly Boss Mods. Honestly I don’t even know what this mod is doing for me, but I assume it’s helping me in dungeons somehow. Anyway I’m sure everyone in PUGs would yell at me if I wasn’t using it.

Gatherer. Keeps records and statistics on every gathering node you come across. There’s also a neat radar thingy that you can enable if you just want to run around farming while watching Netflix. (I rarely do that, but when I do, it’s very cool.)

LiteBag ~~Bagnon~~. Merges all your bags into one. I mainly like it because it makes your inventory take up less space on the screen, because otherwise WoW covers up your minimap with your bags, which I hate. LiteBag is much more consistent with the WoW 6.0 bag interface, unlike Bagnon.

Moncai Compare. It boggles my mind that WoW still does not automatically compare items in your inventory to your equipped items when you hover over them. (I know you can hold shift, but come on, this is 2015. Nobody else does it like that.)

Multishot. I recently installed this to take screenshots of significant events like levelups and achievements. I suddenly got it into my head that I wanted an automatic screenshot every time I leveled a character. That way, I can track how long it takes me (in real-time days) to advance my characters. Not that I need to know that, but metrics are fun.

~~Omen Threat Meter~~. I very rarely need a threat meter, so I’ve struck it from my list. Usually the default threat display stuff in the UI is enough for me. (But if I did need one, this is the one I’d use.)

OmniCC. A recent addition, this addon displays remaining time on cooldowns numerically over your ability icons, as opposed to the radial spinning-clock countdown display. The radial thing is great for very short cooldowns but I like numbers when the cooldown is more than, say, 5 seconds.

PetTracker. Another recent addition, this very handy addon provides tons of useful helpers if you do anything with Battle Pets. The main thing I like is the ability to display Stable Masters on the map, because I always forget where they are. (This addon seems to have some issues with 6.0, though, as I see occasional debug reports from Swatter.)

Recount. Your basic DPS meter. I don’t know why I bother, though, because I feel like DPS is radically unbalanced between classes in normal dungeons from 15-70, which is where most of my group experience is. I mean, seriously, the tank is often the DPS leader. What’s up with that? At least in 6.0 it seems they fixed the ridiculously overpowered Shield Slam that practically one-shotted every mob below level 30.

TradeSkillInfo. Adds tradeskill information to item tooltips. I got this because I wanted something that would tell me what in the heck to do with the stuff that kept filling up my bags, as it’s not at all clear if you’re a relative WoW newbie (This particular addon isn’t quite as good as I’d like, though.)

XToLevel. A very cool addon that displays information about how long it will take you to get to the next level. A variation of this addon was one of the very first addons I ever installed for WoW, way back in the dark ages. It tells you how many mobs you need to kill, or how many dungeons you need to complete, or how many mining nodes you need to harvest, or any number of other things, because numbers and statistics are awesome.

Zoomout. Allows you to zoom out much farther than the default UI lets you. Absolutely essential. I love to zoom way out so that my character is like 10 pixels tall while fighting bosses. I wish more games allowed you to do that, but most don’t. I can’t stand it when the boss is so big that it doesn’t fit on the screen.

I think I might have had another post floating around somewhere in which I griped about the most common problem with WoW Addons: Too many options. Yes, I said too many. Perhaps six months from now I will have a post to followup on that.

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