Curious about the best WoW addons? While Blizzard’s epic MMORPG keeps a lot of valuable data under wraps, installing a powerful mod can utterly transform your experience, especially when facing formidable bosses. But these essential World of Warcraft addons aren’t just for hardcore raiders. Many focus on boosting utility, revitalizing the game’s classic UI, or helping you pinpoint crucial material nodes for your professions.
With countless options available, choosing the right WoW addons can be overwhelming, especially with major updates like The War Within. We’ve meticulously curated a list of top-tier, all-purpose mods for one of the most enduring PC games ever. Each one is designed to significantly enhance your World of Warcraft journey, whether you’re tackling raids, mastering trades, or simply speeding through levels.
ElvUI: The Ultimate UI Overhaul
ElvUI stands out as one of the most beloved and comprehensive addon packages for WoW. It delivers a complete, sleek overhaul of the game’s default user interface, integrating highly requested enhancements for spell bar organization, inventory management, character portraits, and general utility. This addon intelligently adapts your display based on your chosen role, offering straightforward tools to adjust layouts, reposition windows, assign keybinds, and fine-tune various display and functional elements.
Its text windows are cleverly separated for chat, loot, and other scrolling information. Below these, and near your mini-map, you’ll find small, customizable status displays that instantly show your current resources, gear durability, and available bag slots. These displays also offer quick access to your bags, guild, and friends list, a feature that will prove even more beneficial with the upcoming introduction of cross-faction guilds.
ElvUI receives frequent updates, ensuring compatibility and continuous improvement. Unlike many other WoW addons, it’s not managed through the Curse client; you’ll need to handle updates separately. While a paid client can automate this, the full ElvUI package remains freely available for manual installation.
Waypoint UI: Never Get Lost Again
While comprehensive addon packs are excellent, sometimes all you need is a simple, effective tool to guide your way. Waypoint UI does just that, projecting a clear beam of light toward your tracked objective. Despite its minimalist appearance, it offers extensive customization and toggleable information, including sound effects, unique icons, contextual descriptions, and even estimated arrival times.
Plumber: Essential Quality of Life Upgrades
Plumber is the quality-of-life addon pack you’ve always dreamed of, pushing WoW’s UI capabilities far beyond its base game. With this mod, you can effortlessly track items by adding them to your backpack currency bar, transform cumbersome talking head frames into clean subtitles, create organized drawer macros to group spells, enjoy seamless auto-loot, and much more. Be warned: once you experience Plumber, you’ll wonder how you ever played without it.
All The Things: The Collector’s Companion
Do you obsess over tracking achievements, rare monster kills, elusive items, hidden treasures, unique pets, transmog appearances, or any other missing collectible, all neatly organized by zone or area? The All the Things WoW addon is your ultimate solution. It meticulously identifies every item you’re missing and presents them in a single, intuitive interface, perfectly satisfying your inner Warcraft completionist.
This mod provides helpful alerts for content you might overlook and offers extra tooltip information about the items you’re collecting. A triumphant chime signals when you acquire or lose new appearances, pets, or items. All the Things is indispensable for Warcraft collectors and adds a fun layer for most players.
Its separate databases ensure that All the Things won’t bog down your gameplay.
Deadly Boss Mods: Your Raid Navigator
For navigating five-man dungeons, Deadly Boss Mods is a significant quality-of-life upgrade, providing crucial warnings—like an incoming boss spell or a mob cast that needs interrupting—and generally serving as your in-game guide.
For raids, DBM is absolutely essential. It helps you understand complex boss mechanics, offers timers for important events during a fight, and gives you advance notice of everything you need to do to avoid group wipes. We particularly enjoy DBM for its humorous sound files; for instance, a mechanic requiring you to scatter from teammates is often met with the Karazhan’s Big Bad Wolf shouting, “Run away, little girl, run away!” If that’s not your style, BigWigs Bossmods offers a solid, less whimsical alternative.
Weak Auras 2: Customizable Combat Alerts
Many WoW addons allow you to create simple ‘if this, then that’ notifications for yourself. Is your primary damage spell ready off cooldown? Is that crowd control effect about to expire? Mods like Weak Auras 2 enable you to configure blinking icons, text alerts, distinct sounds, or other prominent visual cues.
For newcomers, TellMeWhen is a good starting point, offering a simple yet fully-featured version of these mods. However, for most players, Weak Auras is the go-to choice. While setting up new notifications from a template is relatively easy, its true power lies in the vast library of pre-built notifications, trackers, and quality-of-life utilities created by the community.
Need something to clearly communicate your “decrees” from Queen Azshara in Eternal Palace? A tracker for your party members’ interrupt cooldowns in five-man dungeons? A way to inform your party about your Mythic Plus dungeon key? Weak Auras exist for all these scenarios, plus extensive collections for nearly every class and specialization. You can find a huge selection of these at a community site after installing the mod.
If you’re unsure which class dominates the MMORPG’s meta, consulting a WoW tier list will let you fully appreciate the advantages that Weak Auras provides.
Details!: Your Performance Analyst
While numerous damage and healing meters exist, Details! is our top pick thanks to its adaptable displays, intuitive handling of elements like pet damage, and minimal installation footprint. This mod allows you to meticulously track your damage or healing output (including absorption shields) based on your spells and abilities, how effectively they hit opponents, and how your performance compares to your group members.
We particularly appreciate the ability to hover over individual players and quickly see what spells they’re casting and why their numbers might be higher than yours. You can easily view statistics for specific segments, like a single boss fight, or totals for an entire dungeon.
GTFO: Stay Out of the Fire!
This straightforward WoW addon performs one vital task: it screams at you when you’re standing in danger. A literal lifesaver during chaotic boss battles, GTFO emits a blaring alarm when you’re caught in fire and a warning tone if you take damage from an avoidable ability.
Simple, lightweight, and a guaranteed way to look incredibly smart in groups. While primarily an audio addon (visual warnings can be integrated with Weak Auras or Power Auras Classic), imagine the alarm blaring away as you stand in that green gunk depicted in the screenshot!
Auctioneer: Master the Marketplace
A significant amount of wealth can be generated through the WoW auction house – if you know how to play the market. Auctioneer helps streamline this process. This addon intelligently appraises items, suggesting optimal selling prices and making it easy to undercut competitors on the auction house.
But it doesn’t stop there. The Auctioneer suite also tracks your bids, postings, and mail, simplifying the task of listing numerous items at once. It also offers extensive support for enchanting, providing figures for disenchanting as well as selling enchantments. Used effectively, it’s a powerful moneymaker that saves you the trouble of manual market analysis.
Auctioneer boasts an impressive toolset, but it can be overwhelming for casual Auction House users. If you find many of its options excessive, Auctionator is a lightweight alternative that perfectly meets simpler needs.
However, if you truly want to embrace your inner goblin, TradeSkill Master is the ultimate tool for tracking and placing auctions, undercutting, combining raw materials into profitable items, and more. It even comes with its own desktop application for maximum gold-making analysis, though it requires a separate download. TSM identifies excellent deals and tells you an item’s true worth. Mastering TSM is a skill in itself, so it’s not recommended for beginners.
Bagnon: Your Organized Inventory
Keeping tabs on your inventory becomes a complex challenge once you accumulate several large bags or manage multiple characters. Bagnon is an invaluable solution. Instead of sifting through items bag by bag, it consolidates all your possessions into one intuitive inventory screen.
Each item is color-coded by quality, and a smart search engine is included. This allows you to quickly grasp your bag contents and simplify organization.
Going further, this WoW addon also displays what all your characters possess, from their total gold to specific items duplicated across alts. If you’re transferring items between your main and an alt, it’s the perfect way to stay on top of everything.
Mythic Dungeon Tools: Strategic Dungeon Planner
Mythic dungeons are WoW’s equivalent of military operations, demanding meticulous planning and foresight. Going in unprepared often leads to a quick wipe. If you prefer to skip the pre-dungeon homework, the Mythic Dungeon Tools mod is your ideal companion. This comprehensive dungeon planner maps out all NPCs on an interactive interface, allowing you to craft and share detailed dungeon routes with your party members. It even features a note system to help communicate complex strategies.
OmniCC: Cooldown Clarity
Tracking cooldowns can add unnecessary mental burden during intense boss encounters. Fortunately, OmniCC provides customizable countdown timers for your abilities, making it significantly easier to see when they’re ready for use again.
If you often lose sight of your ability bar in the heat of battle, you can configure OmniCC to make your skills flash once their cooldown ends—a huge advantage for players managing complex rotations.
Rarity: The Collector’s Odds Tracker
Finding a rare item drop is incredibly satisfying, but the pursuit can also be frustrating. The Rarity addon acknowledges this by tracking how many times you’ve attempted to acquire everything from mounts to toys and battle pets. In each instance, it estimates your likelihood of obtaining the item, records your efforts, and assesses your current luck. No longer will you second-guess your progress; you’ll have a clear, statistical understanding of your chances, which helps maintain your sanity.
Due to recent changes in Warcraft’s looting mechanics, Rarity struggles to track items from mobs that appear in groups or drop nothing at all. If they drop gold, the count is accurate; if not, that ‘attempt’ won’t register. Still, it remains a valuable tool.
MoveAnything: Your Personalized Interface
MoveAnything lives up to its name, offering a completely customizable user interface that you can adapt to your preferences. Every panel and screen element can be moved, resized, and hidden, with an additional option to adjust transparency. If you love to deck out your UI with numerous addons, MoveAnything is indispensable for maintaining a cohesive layout and eliminating clutter.
HandyNotes: Your Personal Map Annotator
World of Warcraft’s map is generally good at guiding you, but it’s not flawless. HandyNotes fills a crucial gap by allowing you to add personal notes as you explore. A quick alt-right click on the world map lets you jot down anything you need to remember. More importantly, community-published collections of HandyNotes enable you to track everything from treasure chest locations in Battle for Azeroth to the whereabouts (and whether you’ve defeated them!) of rare creatures in zones like Nazjatar or Mechagon.
As a result, HandyNotes is excellent for remembering secret entrances, specific resource points, or even picturesque spots for roleplaying. While prepackaged HandyNotes collections are separate addons, they all rely on the core HandyNotes mod to function. Alongside the War Within HandyNotes, we highly recommend the Battle for Azeroth Treasures collection, and the Nazjatar or Mechagon packs by TomCat’s Tours.
Angrier World Quests: Enhanced Quest Tracking
WoW Legion introduced World Quests: special daily and weekly objectives for maximum-level characters. The default World of Warcraft UI, however, often fell short in highlighting and tracking them effectively. Angrier World Quests steps in to improve this, tracking quests in older zones as well as those in Battle for Azeroth.
It displays quests directly on the world map, showing their rewards and allowing easy filtering for those that fulfill today’s emissary requirements, or those that grant gold, Azerite power, loot, or War Resources.
While the original Angry World Quests has been largely inactive since 2018, Angrier World Quests is a worthy successor that continues to receive regular updates and fixes for The War Within. For alternatives, World Quests List or World Quest Tracker offer similar functionality.
Bartender 4: Action Bar Customization
Bartender 4 is an incredibly useful mod for customizing your action bars. It grants you complete control over ten action bars, allowing you to personalize their scale, position, fade-out settings, and many other aspects.
RareScanner: Never Miss a Rare Again
Never overlook a nearby rare enemy again — RareScanner triumphantly announces rare monsters, treasures, and events in your immediate vicinity. Whenever a ‘vignette’ appears on the minimap (a star indicating a rare, event, or treasure), an alert sounds, and a button appears on your screen displaying the rare’s name and its potential loot. Click the button to place a skull marker over the NPC, making it easy to track down. RareScanner also adds icons for every rare discovery and provides additional information on tooltips.
BugGrabber / BugSack: Your Error Management Duo
If you’re an avid WoW addon user, you’ve likely encountered the infamous LUA error pop-up. This error often occurs when an addon needs an update and frequently appears at the most inconvenient times. BugGrabber and BugSack work in tandem to intercept these LUA pop-ups before they disrupt your game, generating a detailed bug report that you can share with your favorite addon creators. The more addons you have installed, the higher the chance of encountering a bug, so these two are invaluable if you want to avoid pesky pop-ups during crucial moments like a raid wipe.
LiteMount: Smart Mount Management
LiteMount is the ultimate WoW addon for dedicated mount collectors, offering intelligent customization that far surpasses WoW’s default randomizer. With LiteMount, you can summon rarer mounts more frequently and even have it identify the most thematically appropriate mounts based on your current location, faction, and class. It accounts for Druid travel forms, as well as item and journal mounts, ensuring you experience the full breadth of your stable as you play.
Plater Nameplates: Unveiling Enemy Information
Plater Nameplates is an incredibly powerful tool in World of Warcraft. While the game’s default UI only shows an enemy’s health bar, installing Plater Nameplates grants you access to a wealth of information, including debuff tracking, enemy cast bars, and more. This is vital for optimizing your performance in Mythic+ dungeons or making a name for yourself in your raid group, helping you fine-tune your timings and better understand AI behavior. You can also color-code your nameplates, which is excellent for quickly marking priority targets for your own reference during pulls.
Immersion: Story-Focused Quest Experience
Immersion is the perfect WoW addon for players who struggle with the endless walls of text often encountered during quests or while delving into lore. Instead, Immersion neatly breaks down dialogue and quest text into easily digestible paragraphs that you can click through at your own pace. It also transforms WoW’s bulky, antiquated quest frame into individual, modern frames, complete with talking heads and streamlined dialogue selection buttons. This allows you to absorb your surroundings and the story without sacrificing your immersion. If you prefer a clean UI that gets straight to the heart of any matter in Azeroth, Immersion is a must-have mod.
Narcissus: Your Personal Photo Studio
If you dream of showcasing your transmog like it’s Stormwind Fashion Week, then Narcissus makes capturing your perfect “blue steel” look incredibly simple. It comes packed with numerous other quality-of-life improvements for your character UI, including a cleaner way to compare gear, a dedicated viewer for different NPCs, and the ability to take group selfies with your guildmates.
Hekili Priority Helper: Master Your Rotation
Hekili is a fantastic WoW addon that expertly balances convenience and accessibility. This priority helper provides real-time recommendations for your next ability, regardless of the situation, helping you master class rotations and manage challenging encounters. It’s an ideal WoW addon for anyone who needs assistance with sensory processing or for players who simply want to unwind and relax after a long day. Hekili offers a vast array of settings and customization features to suit your needs, from UI styles to “action packs” for specific class specializations. If you prefer to experience The War Within without the risk of feeling overwhelmed, Hekili has you covered.
Clique: Click-to-Cast Efficiency
Clique is a game-changer for macro enthusiasts, allowing you to bind spells and macros to various mouse and keyboard combinations. You can then ‘click-cast’ or ‘hover-cast’ over unit frames and other in-game elements. The value you derive from this WoW addon directly correlates with your investment; healers and raid-ready spellcasters will benefit the most, but Clique is guaranteed to reduce reaction times across all classes.
Raider.IO: Instant Player Metrics
Raider.IO is a complementary addon that integrates with the popular raid rankings website of the same name. Naturally, you’ll only fully appreciate its benefits if you’re a dedicated Raider.IO user, but for those who are, it’s an indispensable installation. Instead of constantly switching browser tabs to check other players’ raid progression and Mythic+ scores, you can view all that information directly within their in-game name panel, allowing you to spend less time in your browser and more time raiding.
Scrap: Effortless Junk Management
Do you love hoarding junk items in your inventory but dread the tedious process of selling them? Scrap is a lightweight WoW addon that automatically sells all your junk whenever you speak to a merchant. It includes optional filters to identify and sell any other non-grey items you typically offload. This convenient addon also repairs your equipment for you, ensuring you have an empty bag and pristine gear with the click of a button.
Pawn: Gear Upgrade Advisor
Are you tired of performing endless calculations to decide if new gear is an upgrade? No need to give up and equip just any item; Pawn is here to keep your gear score in optimal shape. This lightweight WoW addon helps you easily differentiate between items and see how they benefit your specific class and specialization. It performs all those complex calculations and displays a clear value in each item’s tooltip, allowing for quick, at-a-glance comparisons.
Pawn even offers extensive options to import custom stat weights and track multiple specializations simultaneously if you frequently switch builds. While recent WoW updates have disabled Pawn’s signature green arrows, its creator assures users that they can still be reinstated with your preferred bag addon.
Altoholic: Master Your Alts
If you have a multitude of alt characters and constantly lose track of their inventories, currencies, or progress, salvation has arrived in the form of Altoholic. This flawless addon compiles every data point you could possibly desire across all your characters, presenting it in an easily readable UI. Whether you need to check your alts’ gear, their gold reserves, or what they’ve stashed away, Altoholic delivers the goods.
OPie: Streamlined Action Rings
Cluttered action bars can be an absolute nightmare to navigate, and a messy UI can severely detract from your immersion. OPie offers a sleek solution, enabling you to stack numerous keybinds into dynamic action rings that only appear on your screen when their designated key is pressed. It might take some getting used to, but the drag-and-release mechanic for selecting actions within each ring becomes incredibly fluid once you develop the muscle memory.
RCLootCouncil: Fair Loot Distribution
Distributing loot after a raid can often become a contentious moment for any guild. While the Loot Council system has its pros and cons, with RCLootCouncil, at the very least, it won’t take an eternity to divvy up the goods. Based on the need/greed/pass system, RCLootCouncil sends all the loot to a Master Looter (typically the group leader), who then initiates a session. Once gear candidates have made their choices, council members can make an executive decision on who receives what. Simple, efficient, and fair.
Now that you’ve got the best WoW addons up and running, be sure to brush up on essential World of Warcraft console commands. We’ve also got the lowdown on WoW housing and all the WoW Plunderstorm rewards from this divisive event’s latest outing. Finally, the WoW talents system and WoW professions may cause you to rethink some of your favorite addons.