The World of Warcraft experience has always been one that you can customize and build to make your own, and the level of support from the community in the form of add-ons has been excellent since day one. The chances are that if you have something that you want to create, the community has an add-on for you.
However, there are many extensions that you should consider essential. They enhance the experience so much that you’ll soon wonder what you did without them. That said, here are the essential add-ons, regardless of your class, all of which can be found on CurseForge.
Related: The best mining specializations in World of Warcraft: Dragonflight
What are the best add-ons for WoW: Shadowlands?
Auctionator
Over time, the auction house has become ever more vital as Bind on Equip weapons and gear become more powerful and, therefore, more valuable, while resources needed for any profession leveling continue to take ever more gold to level efficiently.
Enter Auctionator, which makes using the auction house far more accessible, with shopping lists that include price trackers and a much simpler item listing system that makes something that’s usually tedious quite painless.
Bagnon
Bagnon is a great add-on for World of Warcraft: Shadowlands that allows players to view all of their bags in one place. This can be extremely helpful for organizing items and keeping track of what is in each bag. Inventory management can be a pain in any MMO, but Bagnon makes it much easier by condensing your bag into one panel. It also allows you to hide or ignore some bags and has the Quick Sort feature.
Deadly Boss Mods
The quintessential dungeon and raid tool, the Deadly Boss Mods add-on is an absolute must for anyone looking to enhance their game. Primarily a tool used during instances but will also help with mobs across the map, the tool highlights what you need to be doing whenever an enemy is using a certain ability.
If it’s something that you should avoid or that you should be in a certain position, Deadly Boss Mods will tell you. Without it, learning the mechanics of bosses, in particular, will be exponentially challenging.
Decursive
Decursive is an add-on that allows players to cleanse ailments. With this add-on, players can see a side panel that allows them to cleanse a group member with just a single click. It also displays a panel that gives information on the health status of group members; green squares for healthy members and purple for those with ailments. Clicking on the purple squares will cleanse your teammates without having to unlock your target.
Details Damage Meters
If you want to see where all of your damage is coming from, where you need to improve, what keeps killing you, and more, then Details Damage Meters will provide.
It is a tool that tracks all the data during fights from each participant, which can then be used to help break down a fight and see what happens over the duration. If your damage is low compared to everyone else, the meters can highlight what’s doing well and what needs improving. It won’t improve your skills, but it’s fantastic for drawing attention to what you need to work on. Especially for raiders, you will want Details to help you maximize your role.
Gladius – Shadowlands
Gladius is a highly configurable and customizable arena unit frames addon. It allows you to track the health of enemy units and their buffs, debuffs, cooldowns, and much more. This information can be vital in giving you the edge in PvP combat. The best part is that you can easily customize the information you want to see so that you can easily attack enemies.
GTFO
Standing in things thrown at you by enemies is, in most instances, not good for you. At best, it’s a debuff to you that will leave you weak, and at worst, your team wipes from the current battle.
Thankfully, the incredibly simple but life-saving GTFO will bark at you very loudly if you’re doing something as silly as standing in a pool of liquid death. Combine it with Deadly Boss Mods, and you’ll minimize your avoidable deaths tenfold.
Omen Threat Meter
In World of Warcraft, threat measures what person the enemy is focused on attacking. If someone aside from the tank player has a higher threat level, the monster will attack them instead. The job of the tank is to wrestle the threat back from them and play the “meat shield” role. Threat meters were less prominent in Battle For Azeroth as keeping threats was fairly easy. This has been tuned in Shadowlands, and it should make the classic threat meter become essential again.
TomTom
This navigation tool helps you navigate the map by providing coordinates and a GPS-style tracker (hence TomTom). If you’re struggling to work out where rare mobs or treasure is located, the coordinates provided by this tool will make finding an exact location easy. It’s fairly basic in its function, but it adds a surprising amount to the overall quality of exploration within the game. Especially at the start of a new expansion, you will be thankful you loaded this into your game.
WeakAuras
While an add-on for the UI can be beneficial, they are typically something that will work universally across your characters well but won’t necessarily give you all the information you need specific to your class. This is where WeakAuras fits in.
Using lines of script, plenty of which can be found through the weakauras community page, this excellent add-on can place all the information that you need on your characters, such as ability cooldowns and resource management, in one, easy-to-see place. It’s not restricted to characters either, as they can also be used to help with other utilities. If you’re serious about Shadowlands, WeakAuras is a must.
