Warcraft: Shadowlands – Recommended Addons
One of World of Warcraft’s strongest assets is the community building addons which dramatically improve the experience of the game. Not only do addons improve the visual design of the UI, but they also supplement gaps in the user experience. At the end of the day, WoW is a better game because of the addons its community creates. The goal with this guide is to provide you the list of addons I personally use to improve my Warcraft experience. I recommend using the WowUp addon management tool to install and keep addons up to date.
Must-have addons:
AdiBags – inventory management. Categorizes your inventory, instead of sorting by bags. You can also add custom filters to tweak sorting to your liking. There’s also a Shadowlands filter to sort Anima, Conduits, and Legendaries!
ALL THE THINGS – completion tracking. Shows the items, achievements, quests, etc you have yet to acquire or complete. This addon was a complete game changer for me in how I played WoW.
Angry Keystones – mythic+ information tracker. Adds useful information to the Mythic+ timer and some other helpful quality of life additions.
Deadly Boss Mods – dungeon & raid encounter mechanics timers. Timers and callouts for raid encounters. There are addons for each expansion and other content, so just install those you’ll use.
Details! Damage Meter – performance output charts. Traditional damage meter showing output for the group. Advanced users can leverage some of the heavier charting and logs to really dig into the encounter to min/max.
ElvUI – modern UI overhaul. A full UI suite to modernize the design and experience of the WoW UI. Highly recommend using this.
GTFO – hazard notification. Simple addon that yells at you when you are standing in fire.
HandyNotes – useful map notes. Support for adding notes to the world map. There are many different addons, so just browse through and choose the ones you find most useful. This also works nicely with TomCat’s Tours. Note: The Oribos notes are particularly useful as we learn our new hub for Shadowlands.
MikScrollingBattleText – floating combat text styling. Groups floating combat text and and allows you to style it how you like. This is great for reducing noise/clutter on screen and only showing what’s important to you.
OmniCC – improved cooldown text. Simple quality of life addon which standardizes cooldown text across the board.
Quartz – abstracted cast bars. While ElvUI will show you cast bars for all units, I find it particularly useful to have an enlarged cast bar in the middle of my screen for my target. That’s all I use this addon for.
Raider.IO – pve progression tracking. Tracks your raid and Mythic+ progression and assigns you a score. This will be important if you want to run max yield Mythic+ dungeons and is the measuring stick for player ability (for better or worse).
RareScanner – scans for rare spawns. Constantly scans the surrounding area and calls out any rare spawns in the vicinity.
Simulationcraft – export simc strings for raidbots. A simple /simc command will output a string you can paste to run sims for your character’s current configuration.
Talent Set Manager – save talent setups. Similar to a gear manager, this addon allows you to create sets of talents. Particularly useful for quickly swapping between solo, M+, raid single target, etc.
TomCat’s Tours – useful map notes. Compatible with HandyNotes, this adds maps notes for various content in the game.
TomTom – waypoint arrow to coordinates. Adds support for tracking coordinates and creates a waypoint arrow to guide you towards the destination.
Unlimited Map Pin Distance – removes distance limit of map pin tracking. There is currently a limit on the distance a map pin can be tracked. This removes that limitation.
Venture Plan – Adventure Table UI rehaul and success calculator. Adds a redesigned, more usable interface for missions and a button to calculate mission success.
WeakAuras – flexible buff tracking. Well known buff tracker. Leverage wago.io for a large selection of community snippets! Be sure to download the desktop client to ensure you always have the latest version of your WeakAuras!
Nice-to-have addons:
Astral Keys – mythic+ key tracking for guild. For each guild member who has this addon installed, it provides a list of their current key, level, and affixes. Extremely useful for grouping in guild and sharing for best in slot.
Auto Track Map Pin – automatic tracking of map pins. Map pins are great, but this automatically tracks map pins created, saving you a click or two.
CursorTrail – adds visual trail to cursor. It’s easy to lose track of your cursor in combat, so this adds a customizable trail to your cursor so you never lose focus.
Elkano’s BuffBars – buff tracking bars. While ElvUI‘s buff tracking is helpful, personal preference over the years has led me to use EBB to track buffs separately. This is a personal preference.
Method Raid Tools – various raiding tools. Adds tooling for raid encounters and tracking the raid. Buff and Battle Rez timers are particularly useful for raid leaders and tanks, but any raider would benefit from having ERT installed.
Hekili – rotation recommender. If you’re not feeling confident in your rotation or trying to learn a new spec, this is a good place to start helping the creation of muscle memory. While it’s not something you should blindly follow, the addon guides you down the path to optimal rotations and can help you learn as you try to consume spec guides on Wowhead. While not intended for leveling, I also found this useful for alts.
Leatrix Plus (Shadowlands) – various QoL improvements. This addon provides an assortment of quality of life improvements to the Warcraft experience. I recommend just looking through the options it provides and enabling what you find useful. There may be some overlap with ElvUI, so just be aware when enabling options.
Mythic Dungeon Tools – mythic+ routing & planning. Robust tool allowing you to import, share, and create routes for Mythic+ to coordinate with your party. This is really only required for pushing keys, but learning the efficient routers helps all Mythic+ runs go faster.
Narcissus – fancy screenshots. Gives more potentional for taking screenshots with an elegant UI and some additional controls to make screenshots more fun and awesome.
Overachiever – achievement tracking & recommendations. Adds some better navigation of achievements including a “Suggestions” tab and the ability to watch (track) achievements.
PetTracker – battle pet collection tracker. If you’re into completion and pet battles, this will add markers to the world map showing you pets you have yet to acquire.
Rarity – rare collection attempt tracker. For rares mobs or bosses that drop rare items such as mounts, pets, etc, this addon will track how many attempts you’ve completed so far.
Rematch – battle pet team management. Useful for those who enjoy pet battles, you can create teams specifically for an encounter to increase your chances of success.
TradeSkillMaster – economy & trade valuation. A robust interface for those looking to participate in the WoW economy. Less experienced players can use this to quickly create listings at a recommended price or check values, while experienced players can dig into the more advanced aspects of the economy.
World Quest Tracker – improves UI for world quest listings. Supplements the world map by grouping world quests for easy viewing. Review all current WQs, middle mouse click to add them to the tracker, and go go go!
Wowhead Quick Link – easily search wow-head. Provides in-game shortcut to go directly to the Wowhead page for any items, characters, achievements, etc. This is particularly useful for those who frequent Wowhead.
WeakAuras recommendations:
AfenarUI – spec ability timers & resource tracking. Choose the WA for your spec of choice and build your UI around it. This is an excellent set that you can use for each spec, maintaining a consistent experience from character to character.
Sepulcher of the First Ones – displays mechanic callouts for raid. Shows simple icon callouts for mechanics and timers as they occur. This is a good supplement for Deadly Boss Mods to ensure your quick reactions in a raid environment.
Dungeon RIO and Class – improves group finder UI for Mythic+. Adds group comp information and Raider.io score for the leader in the Premade Finder tool. Super useful for joining M+ groups.
Shadowlands-Dungeons – displays mechanic callouts for dungeons. Shows simple icon callouts for mechanics and timers as they occur. This is a good supplement for Deadly Boss Mods to ensure your quick reactions in a Mythic+ environment.
Mythic+ Interrupt Tracker – track interrupts for group members. Displays interrupt availability for group members, particularly useful for M+ when coordinating interrupts with the party.
Soulbinds in Talent Tree – show/swap active soulbind and view configuration. Provides the ability to swap between active soulbinds at any Rested area and see which Soulbind is active, along with its configured tree.
PvP Addons
BattleGroundEnemies – Enemy unit frames for BGs. Essential for anyone playing RBGs, this shows all enemies’ health and how many are targeting them.
GladiatorlosSA2 – Audible callouts for enemy cooldowns. Customizable audio callouts any time an enemy uses a cooldown. This is essential for Arenas, but I recommend disabling in BGs, as it can get noisy.
Gladius – Arena unit frames. Excellent replacement for Arena unit frames, showing all vital PvP information at a glance, including trinkets, buffs, debuffs, and diminishing returns.
Want to see them in action?
Being that these are the addons I choose to use in my daily play, you can view how I have all of these configured by either coming to hang out on Twitch or checking out screenshots I post on Twitter.
Do you have any addons you especially like that you’d like to see added to this recommendation list? If you have any questions or need help with your UI, don’t hesitate to reach out – I’m glad to help! I’ve provided a screenshot of my UI below.
Updated for Shadowlands on 4/3/2022!
