World of Modcraft

I've long been a vocal supporter of add-ons to improve one's performance and enjoyment in WoW. Some misguided purists believe this dilutes the experience, but on the contrary, it adds a whole new dimension to customizing and personalizing WoW. Think of add-ons as Bind on Account glyphs, and you get slots in proportion to your CPU cycles. Not using add-ons, especially in raids or rated PVP is like an Olympian refusing to use the super-high-tech aerodynamic polymer discus because the Greeks used one made of stone. So let's dig in with reckless abandon and make our screens look absurd. And as a disclaimer, I am biased towards lower-resource add-ons, 'cause my box is shit.

ESSENTIAL MODS - Get them, whoever you are.

1. Quartz: makes cast bars cleaner, bigger, and more informative. Includes lag as part of the bar, as well as lumping batch crafting into a single bar (handy when you're smelting 1000 saronite bars say). It's so goddamned delicious.

2. Deadly Boss Mods: timers for every boss ability, handy anouncements of events during the fight, and friendly beeps when an especially dangerous debuff or ground effect is thrown out. This is worth it JUST for adding an audio queue for standing in stuff; the more ways to realize you need to move, the better.

3. Recount: useful for more than checking out who has the biggest e-peen at the DPS urinal, it offers helpful breakdowns of rotations and is indispensable in increasing performance and analyzing wipes.

4. Auctioneer: it's a huge fat hog of a beast, but nothing else works as well as it. Keeping track of market trends and informing you of when X item is below it's normal value ON YOUR SERVER is without peer. And for lowbies, nothing makes easy gold like looking for items listed below vendor price.

POWERFUL MODS - Essential for some, depending on role.

1. Gatherer: keeps track of all nodes, and highly customizable. It can even record a route through a zone to later follow with a special HUD. Must have for anyone with a gathering profession, or who thinks they might roll one ever.

2. Need To Know: this would have once been essential, but with the integrated aura warnings, a lot of the critical buffs are tracked in-game now. It's still an excellent dot timer, as well as useful for tracking short-duration buffs and a few things the built-in system ignores (clearcasting, for instance).

3. Postal: I used MailGet in Wrath, but since it's been slow on the update, grab Postal. The only thing that's really powerful here is the button to take every item in your mailbox at once. Absolutely necessary for AH captains of industry, a helpful convenience otherwise.

4. DKi Runes: default rune UI is ass, DKi runes is far more visible, customizable, and nice to look at. It comes with a DK disease timer too, if you don't like N2K.

5. Clique: If you're a healer, you NEED clique. It literally will double your reaction speed by halving the number of clicks required to cast a heal. Less clicks=better UI. Also get a unit-frame add-on of some kind to preview healing done (Grid is the classic, I prefer SUF. )

There are a bunch of other mods that will serve various levels of practicality. Some (Dominos, Shadowed Unit Frames) will make your screen more minimalist, informative, and easier to understand. Others (OPie, ThreatPlates, OmniCC) will serve small, but helpful roles and are mostly a quality-of-life thing. And still more (DamnAchievements, SexyMap) are purely cosmetic options to pimp my WoW. So get off your ass, get on curse or wowace, and get to downloading; few things are as fun as personalizing a game you love to play.