What are the best WoW addons? Blizzard’s critically acclaimed MMORPG hides a lot of useful data it collects, and picking up a mod that offers a peek behind the curtain can be a literal game-changer when going up against deadly bosses. Of course, the best World of Warcraft addons aren’t just aimed at avid raiders. Some are more focused on utility and freshening up MMO’s geriatric UI, while others help track material nodes for those all-important professions.
With so many options, it’s tough to know which WoW addons are worth your time, especially following the WoW The War Within. We’ve dug deep and tracked down the best of the bunch for general, all-purpose use in one of the best PC games of all time. Each addon will make your World of Warcraft experience far more pleasant, whether you’re a raider, tradesman, or simply keen to level up fast.
Here are the best WoW addons in 2024:
ELVUI
One of the most popular all-in-one addon collections, ElvUI earned its unique status as one of the best WoW addons. It provides a sleek revamp of the entire default WoW user interface, combining many of the most popular improvements to spell bar placement, inventory view, portraits, and basic utility. It automatically configures your display based on your role, and provides easy options for changing configurations, moving windows, binding keys, and a host of other tweaks to display and function.
Text windows are helpfully divided between chat channels, loot, and other screen-scrolling information. At the bottom of those windows and your mini-map, tiny configurable status displays tell you everything from how many resources you have to what your durability is at to how many free bag spaces you have left. They can also give one-click access to your bags, your guild, or your friends list. This will undoubtedly become even more valuable after the introduction of WoW cross-faction guilds.
ElvUI is updated ridiculously often. Unlike most WoW addons, this package can’t be added to the Curse client; instead, you’ll need to update separately. There’s a paid client to do that automatically, but the ElvUI collection is available to install manually for free.
All The Things
Want to track those achievements, rare kills, items, treasures, pets, transmogs – or anything else you’re missing – and display them by the zone or area you’re in? The All the Things WoW addon has come to your rescue. It identifies everything you’re missing and presents them to you in one simple interface, allowing you to feed your inner Warcraft completionist obsession.
The mod gives you a nice heads-up for game content you might be missing and also provides extra tooltip information about the things you’re collecting. A fanfare of chimes announces when you’ve collected or lost new appearances, pets, or items. All the Things is a must for Warcraft collectors and a fun addon for most players.
Separate databases keep All the Things from slowing down your gameplay, too.
Deadly Boss Mods
For five-man dungeons, Deadly Boss Mods is a great quality of life improvement, giving you warnings about important things – the boss is about to use a spell, you need to interrupt that mob’s cast to save your buddy – and generally acting as your gameplay guide.
For raids, DBM is essential, helping you to navigate tricky boss mechanics, giving you timers for when important events are coming in a fight, and generally giving you advance notice about all the things you need to do to keep your groupmates from yelling at you.
DBM is our choice because of the funny choices in its sound files; for example, a mechanic that makes you scatter from your teammates is typically accompanied by the Karazhan’s Big Bad Wolf yelling at you to “Run away, little girl, run away!” If you find that obnoxious, BigWigs Bossmods is another solid choice with less whimsy.
Weak Auras 2
Several WoW addons allow you to set up simple ‘if this then that’ notifications for yourself. Is your major damage spell coming off cooldown? Is that crowd control spell about to expire? Mods like Weak Auras 2 allow you to set up a blinking icon, text notification, sounds, or other noticeable cues.
For beginners, you might consider using TellMeWhen, which is perhaps the simplest, but still fully-featured version of these mods out there. For everyone else, the go-to is Weak Auras. Creating a new notification using a template is relatively easy, but the reason to use this over other mods is the huge array of pre-built notifications, trackers, and simple quality-of-life doodads that have already been built by other people.
Want something that tells you in no uncertain terms what your “decrees” from Queen Azshara are in Eternal Palace? Something that tracks when the interrupt abilities of your party members are on cooldown in five-man dungeons? Something that tells your party what Mythic Plus dungeon key you have so everyone can decide where you want to go? There are Weak Auras already made for all of those, plus collections for pretty much every class and specialization. Find a pile at wago.io after you’ve installed the mod.
If you’re a bit uncertain which class is currently reigning supreme in the MMORPG‘s meta, be sure to take a gander at our WoW tier list, so you can truly feel the benefits that Weak Auras provides.
Details!
There are plenty of damage and healing counters out there, but Details! is our favorite for its flexible displays, intuitive handling of things like pet damage, and lightweight installation. This mod allows you to track your damage or healing output (including absorbs like shields) based on the spells you cast and the abilities you use, how they hit your opponents, and how you compare against your group.
We especially like the ability to mouse over individual players to quickly glance at what they’re casting and why they’re doing bigger numbers than you are. You can easily see segments like a single boss fight, or totals for an entire dungeon.
GTFO
This simple WoW addon does one thing: bark at you when you’re standing in something awful. A lifesaver for hectic boss fights, GTFO sounds a blaring alarm when you’re standing in fire and a warning tone when you’ve been hit by a single ability you could have avoided.
Simple, lightweight, and a shortcut to looking very smart in groups. This is largely an audio addon (though visual warnings are possible with integration with Weak Auras or Power Auras Classic.) But if you look at the screenshot above, where we’re standing in green gunk, you can picture the alarm merrily blaring away.
Auctioneer
There’s a lot of money to be made via the WoW auction house – if you know what you’re doing. Auctioneer goes some way to streamline the process. This addon for WoW effectively appraises items, providing you with an intelligent price to sell a product for, making it easy to undercut others in the auction house.
It doesn’t stop there, though. The Auctioneer suite also tracks your bidding, postings, and mail, making it a breeze to list plenty of items at once. There’s also extensive support for enchanting, with figures available for disenchanting as well as selling enchantments. Used correctly, it’s quite the moneymaker while saving you the effort of completing market analysis yourself.
Auctioneer boasts a truly impressive toolset, but it can be overwhelming if you use the Auction House on a more casual basis. If you find that many of the options available through Auctioneer are surplus to requirements, Auctionator is a lightweight alternative that’s guaranteed to fit the bill.
That said, if you really want to feed your inner goblin, TradeSkill Master is the state-of-the-art for tracking and placing auctions, undercutting, combining raw materials from the auction house into items that sell for more, and the like. It comes with its own desktop app for maximum gold-making analysis and requires a separate download. It’ll identify good deals currently posted for sale and tell you what things should be worth. Using TSM correctly is a skill in itself, so we don’t recommend it for beginners.
Bagnon
Keeping an eye on your inventory is a complex business once you own a few large bags, or you have multiple characters. Bagnon is a lifesaver in this context. Instead of having to view items bag by bag, it collates all your items together in one simple-to-view inventory screen.
Each item has a different color assigned to it, depending on item quality, and there’s an intelligent search engine, too. This means you can see at a glance what’s going on inside your bags and that makes it easier for you to tidy them up.
Going one step further, the WoW addon also shows what all your characters possess, from how much gold they own to if certain items are duplicated across multiple characters. If you’re trying to move possessions from your main to an alt, it’s the perfect way to keep on top of everything.
OmniCC
Tracking cooldowns can be an unnecessary layer in your mental stack when in the middle of a hectic boss fight. Fortunately, OmniCC is here to provide customizable countdown timers for your abilities, making it infinitely easier to parse when they’re coming back online.
If you’re really prone to losing track of your ability bar in the heat of battle, then you can also set OmniCC up to make your skills flash once their cooldown’s ended – a huge boon if you’re working with more complex rotations.
Rarity
Finding a rare item drop is immensely satisfying, but often it can be quite frustrating, too. The Rarity addon for WoW acknowledges that you want to know what the odds are of getting a good drop, tracking how many times you’ve tried to obtain everything from mounts to toys and battle pets.
In each case, it tells you how likely you are to obtain the item, tracks how long you’ve been trying, and determines how lucky you’ve been so far. No longer will you have to question whether you’re making progress or not, as you’ll have a proper idea of your chances through statistical analysis. Basically, it’ll keep you sane.
Due to a change in the way Warcraft handles looting, Rarity does poorly at tracking items that drop from mobs that come in groups or drop nothing at all. If they drop gold, you’ll get the correct count; if they don’t, that ‘attempt’ won’t register.) Still, it’s a useful tool.
MoveAnything
MoveAnything does what it says on the tin, offering a fully customizable user interface that you can manipulate to your liking. Every panel and screen element can not only be moved but also rescaled and hidden – there’s even an option to adjust their transparency, too. If you’re partial to kitting out your UI with addons galore, MoveAnything is indispensable for keeping your layout coherent and getting rid of the clutter.
HandyNotes
World of Warcraft’s map is fairly good at showing you where you need to go, but it’s not perfect. HandyNotes fills an important gap in the form of being able to add notes as you go along. A quick alt-right click on the world map lets you type in whatever you need to remember. More importantly, published collections of HandyNotes allow you to keep track of everything from the locations of treasure chests in Battle for Azeroth to the location (and whether you’ve killed them!) of rare creatures in Nazjatar or Mechagon.
As a result, HandyNotes is great for keeping track of locations such as secret entrances or even particularly scenic spots for light roleplaying. Prepackaged HandyNotes collections are their own WoW addons, but they all require HandyNotes to run. We highly recommend the Battle for Azeroth Treasures collection, and Nazjatar or Mechagon by TomCat’s Tours.
Angrier World Quests
WoW Legion brought with it World Quests: special daily and weekly quests for maximum-level characters. The problem was that World of Warcraft’s UI did a poor job of highlighting them and making them easy to track. Angrier World Quests does the job for Blizzard, tracking quests in previous zones as well as those in Battle for Azeroth.
It lists quests directly on the world map, showing what the rewards will be and allowing easy filtering for quests that fulfill today’s emissary requirements and those that award gold, Azerite power, loot, or War Resources.
While the original Angry World Quests has been effectively abandoned since 2018, Angrier World Quests is a worthy successor that continues to implement fixes and received regular updates into The War Within. However, if you’re looking for an alternative, we’d recommend World Quests List or World Quest Tracker, both of which offer similar functionality.
Bartender 4
Bartender 4 is a very useful mod that allows you to customize your action bars. It gives you full control over ten action bars, allowing you to customize their scale, position, fade-out settings, and more.
RareScanner
Never miss 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 that denotes a rare, an event, or a treasure – an alert will sound, and a button will appear in the middle of your screen with the rare’s name and the loot that it drops. If you want to go after it, click the button, and a skull will appear over the NPC so you can track it down. RareScanner also adds icons for everything rare you discover and will show extra information about it on a tooltip.
BugGrabber / BugSack
If you’re a WoW addon fiend, odds are you’ve encountered the dreaded LUA error pop-up. This error usually occurs when one of your addons requires an update, and often appears at the most inopportune moments. BugGrabber and BugSack work together to catch these LUA pop-ups before they happen and produce a bug report to pass on to your favorite WoW addon creators. The more addons you have installed, the more likely you are to run into a bug, so these two are well worth picking up if you’d rather not have to deal with a pesky pop-up while you’re on the cusp of a raid wipe.
Plater Nameplates
Plater Nameplates are an OP tool in World of Warcraft. With the game’s default UI, all you’ll see is an enemy’s health bar. However, once you’ve slapped Plater Nameplates on you’ll gain access to a world of information, including debuff tracking, enemy cast bars, and more. This is incredibly important if you’re whittling away at M+ or are looking to make a name for yourself in your raid group, as it’ll help you perfect your timings and understand AI behavior better. You can also color-code your plates, which is great when you need to quickly mark priority targets on a pull for your own reference.
Immersion
Immersion is the ideal WoW addon for players who find it difficult to parse the constant walls of text that appear when taking on quests or picking through lore. Instead, Immersion breaks it into bite-sized paragraphs you can click through at leisure. It also splits WoW’s bulky, old-fashioned quest frame into individual frames, complete with talking heads and dialogue selection buttons, allowing you to take in your surroundings (and the words on the screen) without sacrificing your immersion. If you prefer a clean UI that gets right to the heart of any matter in Azeroth, then Immersion is a must-have mod.
Narcissus
If you’re trying to showcase your transmog as if you’re at Stormwind fashion week, then Narcissus makes capturing your blue steel incredibly simple. It comes bundled with plenty of other character UI QoL improvements, too, including a cleaner way to compare gear, parse through different NPCs in a dedicated viewer, and take group selfies with the gang.
Hekili Priority Helper
Hekili is a fantastic WoW addon that bridges the gap between convenience and accessibility. This priority helper provides real-time recommendations for the next ability to use no matter the situation, so you can get to grips with class rotations and manage tough encounters. It’s the ideal WoW addon for anyone who needs a helping hand with sensory processing, or players who’d prefer to sit back and relax at the end of a long day. Hekili comes with a ton of settings and customization features to suit your needs, from UI styles to “action packs” for specific class specs. If you’d rather experience The War Within free from the threat of becoming overwhelmed, Hekili has got your back.
Clique
Clique is one for the macro lovers in the audience, allowing you to bind spells and macros to mouse and keyboard combinations, then ‘click-cast’ or ‘hover-cast’ over unit frames and other in-game elements. The value you get out of this WoW addon directly correlates with how much you put into it – healers and raid-ready spellcasters will have the most to gain from this addon, but Clique is guaranteed to cut down on reaction times across all classes.
Raider.IO
Raider.IO is a companion addon that accompanies the popular raid rankings site of the same name. Naturally, you’ll only see the benefit if you’re a dedicated Raider.IO user – but if you are, it’s well worth the installation. Instead of endlessly switching tabs to look up the raid progress and mythic scores of other players, you can see all that information in their in-game name panel, so you can spend less time in your web browser and more time raiding.
Scrap
Do you love to pack your inventory with junk but hate the arduous process of selling it all off? Scrap is a lightweight WoW addon that automatically sells off all your junk items whenever you speak to a merchant, with optional junk filters that identify any other non-grey items you typically prefer to sell as well. This lightweight WoW addon also repairs your equipment for you, leaving you with an empty bag and fresh gear at the click of a button.
Pawn
Are you tired of making endless mathematical calculations to decide whether to replace your equipment with the latest gear in your bag? No need to give up and equip any old item – Pawn is here to ensure that your gear score is always in tip-top shape. This lightweight WoW addon helps you to easily differentiate between items and see how they can benefit your specific class and spec by running all those calculations and spitting out a value in each item’s window pane, which you can easily compare and contrast at a glance.
Pawn even comes with an extensive site of options to import custom stat weights and track multiple specs at once if you switch your build on the regular. Unfortunately, the latest WoW updates have disabled Pawn’s signature green arrows, but creator TravisSpomer assures us that you can still get them back with your favorite bag addon.
Now you’ve got the best WoW addons up and running, be sure to brush up on the best World of Warcraft console commands. We’ve also got the lowdown on the WoW talents system and WoW professions, which may cause you to rethink some of your favorite addons. Finally, check out our WoW The War Within review for our thoughts on this landmark expansion.
Original contributions by Heather Newman and Jennifer Allen.