There’s a lot to like about WoW, but for many players, the basic functions of the UI aren’t among them. Blizzard aims for a lightweight experience, but one that cuts out a lot of valuable information and can make your life a lot harder. Thankfully, they encourage a robust add-on development scene that allows you to customize as little or as much as you want. Still, many users can find it hard to select the addons that will help them most.
The best Addons for WoW Shadowlands are Bartender, Bagon, Details! Damage Meter, and WeakAuras if you like that kind of stuff.
There are a few things you just plain need to have to make your game experience smooth, and many sources will provide you with too much, or too little for someone just beginning to alter their UI. At a basic level, the most important thing is getting a better handle of the things the normal UI already gives you. Action bars, your bags, those sorts of things are presented in a fashion that is certainly flavorful but lacks in function.
How To Instal Addons and Managers
It’s not explicitly necessary to get an addon manager program, you can install and update your addons manually. However, while it isn’t necessary, it is massively helpful and I would recommend it. A number of options are available to you, and they’re all largely interchangeable, I would avoid those known for game integration. Overwolf has done this in the past with their chat client, and you do not want to be messing around with an external program injecting something into WoW.
If you come across any charging money avoid them, they’re likely a scam, the community-supported options are all free. WoWup is what I use, but most perform more or less the same functions.
If you choose to install manually, you’ll want to place your addon files inside your WoW install directory. Blizzard’s default path for addons is your WoW Folder > Interface > AddOns; make sure that if you play both Classic and Retail that you choose the correct base WoW install folder.
The Most Important Addons: Bags and Bars
The thing that the basic UI does the worst job at is the management of your action bars and your inventory. It may sound crazy if you’ve always used the default options but your hotkeys and inventory can be so much easier. Some players prefer to keep things as close to normal as possible while getting this functionality; if you’re that type Bartender and Bagnon are your friends. They give you a more or less normal look that has powerful functionality and helps you control the game in less unwieldy fashion.
However, I recommend most players pursue a full base-UI replacement that fits their needs and most of these include the most important parts of the previously mentioned addons. I use ElvUI because I enjoy the amount of customization it offers me in resizing, moving, hiding and adding UI elements. It’s featured in almost all screenshots you see. A user with less interest in that much customization might likely prefer Spartan UI, it focuses on being lightweight and getting out of the way more than anything. In both cases, these UI replacements cut down on the amount of visual clutter on your screen and put important information front and center instead of drawing your eyes in several different directions. It’s hard to understand how helpful this is until you’ve done it so I very much recommend trying these out.
Improving your Performance: Details! Damage Meters
People argue over the value of a damage meter, but they give you a window into how you’re doing that isn’t present in the normal game. They enable you to check back on how you handled your character throughout a fight and demystify whether you’re doing your best or not. It can be hard to process everything in combat by yourself with just the log, and the normal on-screen feedback places huge emphasis on ability damage and crits that can overshadow the individually small, but constant contributions to what you’re doing.
For healers and DPS, you really should use a meter. If you play tanks primarily, it’s less necessary, but the information is still invaluable. Don’t get overly focused on it, but use it to improve. For instance, one of the things that most commonly comes up when healers are asking for help improving is if they know how much overhealing they’re doing. You need a meter or lots of hand math to appreciate that on your own, as the default UI will only tell you how much you overhealed on each individual cast. It doesn’t give you knowledge on how often you overheal, or how much of your total output is being wasted at any given time.
For DPS, buff or DoT uptime fill similar roles, and are even harder to understand without a meter. The most common is Recount, it’s lightweight and tries to give you everything you need with no frills. I personally recommend “Details! Damage Meter” which you’ll see in most screenshots. It lets you dig deep and track what you need, but like ElvUI, it may be a bit much for someone who doesn’t intend to use those features.
Do I Need Bossmods? An Auction House Addon? Etc.
Plainly speaking, no. I used to heavily recommend some sort of Auction House addon to every player who intended to buy or sell at all, but recent patches have made the default auction house a lot more usable and I think it is now good enough for the average user.
If you intend to really get into the Auction House, TradeSkillMaster is invaluable, but you don’t need it. Similarly, boss mods are certainly powerful and useful, I would recommend you get either DBM or BigWigs but I don’t think you’ll have trouble controlling or understanding your character without them. I nearly included a Boss Mod of some description specifically for a pull timer, but I think until you’re looking at raiding, you’re not likely to have someone use a pull timer even if you could accept them.
An honorable mention to TomTom which is still useful, and used to be the sort of addon that the game should’ve had as a basic feature. Blizzard agreed though, and as of the Shadowlands Prepatch the core functionality of TomTom is part of the base game. If you’re a returning player and wondering why it isn’t on this list, that’s why. I still wouldn’t fault anyone for installing it for the ways it beefs up the map waypointing system now present in the game though and there are a lot of legacy guides out there that will likely not be updated and use TomTom’s text commands to provide you waypoints.
WeakAuras?
If you’re looking for the next step up, WeakAuras would be my pick for the most useful addon period. It offers way more power than you need, though and I think you can live without it, though it’s hard to overstate the number of ways WeakAuras can improve your ingame quality of life. You would produce a shorter list by asking what it can’t do than what it can, but it can be rather confusing to get to grips with if you’re doing anything more than importing someone else’s auras. Keep that in mind if you decide to use it.