Vanilla WoW Addons

Vanilla WoW Addons – Datchley's BlogSkip to content

So you’ve just rolled a brand new char. How much time do you spend sorting out the addons? Are you one of the people who prefer to use the basic blizzard ui or are you one of the people who spend days making your interface perfect?

At what stage do you set up the addons – low level, level 60, when you start raiding? How much is too much? Do you prefer a clean setup or do you not really mind as long as everything is there and is doing what you want it to?

I hate the standard blizzard UI, but at the same time – I also hate spending hours tweaking an interface to the point where it’s unrecognizable any more. I’m quite lazy when it comes to addons and as a result, my interface is quite messy. But I have everything there and it all works fine for me. Hardcore tweakers have fainted at the sight of my raid interface before. I’ve spent a bit of time browsing the addons forum, and noticed that a lot of Feenix members have very kindly made and tweaked their own addons for use on 1.12.

Since I’m not an expert, I’ve asked my buddy Tzyx to say a few words on choosing the right addons that work for you.

Don’t like having half of your buttons stuck to the right hand side of the screen? There are plenty of addons to let you move, resize and tinker with the button bars, my personal favorite being bartender. Being able to group up my important cooldowns on a bar nearer to where my eye rests is very handy.

There are a whole bunch of other addons for your bars to give you more information on your spells if you require, such as cooldown counters (shows you how long left on those important cooldowns), range checkers or theorycrafting mods (so you can see exactly how much better your pyroblast is than everyone elses).

Having your health on a blank bar in the top corner of your screen on a large monitor, frankly, is a pain in the ass. Especially with 5 angry gnomes chasing you, demanding their pretty flag back. Being able to move this around, and put some more useful information on it is really handy. Same deal as the bars (and most interface elements), most good frame addons let you move, resize and add information to the various frames around your screen.

A particularly useful feature is ‘targets target’ letting you see who you’re target is attacking (or healing or whatever).

Working on the same premise as the frames for you and your target, there are plenty of addons to let you customize the group frames you are given when you join a raid. the standard one in use is normally CT raid assist. As well as being able to move your bars around, it gives you alot of handy functions useful for both pve and pvp raids.

There are alot of nice addons for buff and debuffs for those of you who need more accurate timers than blizzards little flashing buttons. you can get nice looking timers on them, and there are plenty of addons that will alert you to things like HoT spells ending on your team mates, or DoT spells expiring on those gnomes you’re trying to cook. as a bonus, you can get addons that will let you see things enemies are casting on you, or timers for their spells (particulary handy for raid bosses).

There are a large number of mods to make your life as a healer easier (some might say too easy). ranging from things like automatic cleansing at the press of a button (decursive) to being able to heal people just by rolling your mouse over them.

There are plenty of addons for you to change the look of your interface rather than just moving the useful bits around. want a nice panel at the bottom of your screen, with pictures of horses either side? You got it.

The ones i listed above are pretty general.. everyone will probably find a use for one or more of those sections, but there are plenty more ‘specific’ addons. The auction house, hunters pets, tradeskilling, maps, your chatbox, you name it. These are some random ones i find interesting:

Atlas – this gives you a map for every zone (and you can get a mod to add little notes to it, for herbs or whatever) as well as a nice list of all the tasty lewts that drop from the dungeons there.

KTM – this is a threat monitor, so you can tell when your tank is drunk and in the wrong stance (or just low on threat, you pick).

Rollmod – a general category, these addons make your rolling-on-stuff box more useful/smaller whatever. i like to have a minimised one in the corner of my screen for those zg coin spams that block your view while you’re busy wiping to extra trash pulls.

Recap – this shows you detailed information on all of your skills used.

Outfitter – being a druid i have 900 sets of gear for all kinds of things. tanking, healing, or just plain roleplaying in orgrimmar after raids, this addon lets you swap between sets of gear quickly and easily.

Random extra mods for lovely druids – druidbar (shows your mana while you’re a cat! shows your energy ticks too which is nice). exdismount – lets you switch between forms and cast spells regardless of what form you are in at the moment. spam that heal and it’ll take you out of catform without worrying about it.