Coming back to WoW, what addons would you recommend?

[Tuma]

Weakauras2 and DBM is a must. Nameplates, I would recommend Tidyplates, Life without a damage meter is good, you do more damage, because you spend less time staring at it. Don't get Skada or recount, just go with the flow


Yes, I use it

Tidyplates.

Thanks! TidyPlates was exactly what I wanted.

[Machinelf]

15 Addons That Changed my WOW Life

Get to know Weakauras, it's the most powerful and useful addon ever created and will eliminate the need for a good chunk of your smaller addons

General:
Healing (and every class really) - Vuhdo is my favorite, I've tried them all
Bartender
Move Anything
Tidyplates
Miks Scrolling Combat Text - great for spellsteals/dispels,not a fan of spammy stuff though
ArkInventory - you have insane amount of control over your bags
Macro Toolkit - 30 more macros! yes Please!
Zoomout - Very very quickly zoom in/out out your camera
Zone Map Helper - resize your zone window - doesn't sound like much until you see it

I personally think spell announcers are the bane of WOW

PVE:
DBM/Skada
VEM - audio upgrade of DBM - get it, a British female voice tells you what to do in any fight. It's like a pocket girlfriend! Enables you *almost* to go into fights without watching vids or even knowing anything

PVP:
Battleground Targets
Healers Have to Die
Gladiatorlos
Cap Monitor

[plastkaze]

I just use ElvUI as a base and mix around with the settings whenever I feel I need some change.

This together with these for raiding:
DeadlyBossMods
Weakauras
Affdots (Since Im lazy and dont know enough about coding to get Weakauras to do the same) <-- if you play warlock, feral druid or mage this is a must have
Reforgelite Input your preferences or stat priority that you get from Simcraft or AskMrRobot and it optimizes reforging for you. Only needed until WoD though.
Tidyplates
MikScrollingBattleText

Quality of life stuff:
Postal
SavedInstances - Tracks daily / weekly quests on all your character as well as valor, justice, honor, and conquest point progress. Also tracks which bosses you have killed in which wings
Auctioneer

A few others as well depending on which alt I play.

[ComputerNerd]

Does Postal work even though it's out of date? Because I installed it but it says it's out of date so I just uninstalled it.

Being out of date means that the ToC (Table of Contents) has not been updated to reflect the current or a recent patch.
That means nothing, since if an addon is not requiring any functional changes then not all authors are willing to push out an update for what is in effect changing a few digits in a number.
Read comments on the addon page, or try using it even before dismissing it that easily.

[st33l]

ElvUI
DBM/BigWigs
WeakAuras2
Postal
Prat
AskMrRobot addon (if you care about actually min/maxing your toon)

and you're done.

[Feali]

Everyone saying "WeakAuras" is a must. I don't get it...

[SlippyCheeze]

Everyone saying "WeakAuras" is a must. I don't get it...

I kind of do: it has this momentum where everyone seems to love it, so folks feel like they should too. Plus, it is easier to get small, targeted addons that do one thing (aka, import this auras string) than the all-in-one addons on curse.com and so forth.

I totally wouldn't advise it to anyone who hasn't thought "if only I could write an addon for this", though. It usually isn't worth it compared to the maintained ones you find on curse or whatever -- if you don't know enough to write it yourself, and fix it when it breaks, you should take advantage of someone willing to do that for you.

(Plus, it is wildly complex to create simple notifications, compared to the competition. Sure, you can do amazing things, but if all you want is "pop up a thingy when my X is off cooldown", 99 percent of that complexity is just in your way.)

[st33l]

I kind of do: it has this momentum where everyone seems to love it, so folks feel like they should too. Plus, it is easier to get small, targeted addons that do one thing (aka, import this auras string) than the all-in-one addons on curse.com and so forth.

I totally wouldn't advise it to anyone who hasn't thought "if only I could write an addon for this", though. It usually isn't worth it compared to the maintained ones you find on curse or whatever -- if you don't know enough to write it yourself, and fix it when it breaks, you should take advantage of someone willing to do that for you.

(Plus, it is wildly complex to create simple notifications, compared to the competition. Sure, you can do amazing things, but if all you want is "pop up a thingy when my X is off cooldown", 99 percent of that complexity is just in your way.)

The thing with WeakAuras is, you can find a string to do 'everything.
One could go and download ExtraCD to track internal CD's, TellMeWhen to track arbitrary events, ClassBar or something to track class info - or, you could just download WeakAuras and find strings that will give you _all that functionality; plus you can change it all to look exactly the way you want it!

[Deleted]

My personal addon list
Core:
Bartender-saves a huge amount of screen space if used right
AuctionLite - not so pro as the other auction house addons but its light enough and probably the most easy one to comprehend, if you aren't a heavy AH junky I reccomend that.
WeakAuras- bunch of threads that explain what you can do with it, brickwall at first but when you get the hang of it...
AtlassLoot - This thing is a bit heavy, and sometimes buggy but still immensly valuable, you can check every craftable item, loot table for a boss, a whole collection by 2 clicks.
Adibags - tried all bag addons and this one looks and runs the best.
Tidy plates - very good replacement for blizz clunky nameplates
reforgelite - saves allot of dead brain cells
Shadowed unit frames - the frames I use for my dps chars
Grid- healers best friend (personal preference! )

[SlippyCheeze]

The thing with WeakAuras is, you can find a string to do 'everything.
One could go and download ExtraCD to track internal CD's, TellMeWhen to track arbitrary events, ClassBar or something to track class info - or, you could just download WeakAuras and find strings that will give you _all that functionality; plus you can change it all to look exactly the way you want it!

Let me give you a mental game: "The thing with addons is, you can find an addon to do 'everything'". Does that sound plausible? It should, because WA strings *are* addons. They have a different framework and API they run in, and a different distribution method, but ultimately they are able to do the same things.

Even your last point, about custom look? In my experience to date (including writing my own addons for some things, and using WA to write some of them) you are absolutely right to say that you can change a WA string to look exactly how you want. It is wildly easier to customise the look of a WA based addon than a lua based addon. (The later might offer the same abilities, but only if the developer built them in; WA makes them part of the framework so it is always available.)

On the other hand, it is absolutely my experience that addons will make it much easier to set *behaviour* how you want: most WA strings have embedded that into lua code, or put it behind a pretty steep wall of complexity in that there are lots of things you don't want to touch sitting there along with the one or two that you do.

Neither one is better or worse than the other. If you use the curse or wowinterface for addons, updates are likely easier, but if you follow someone with good WA strings that vanishes. WA is better at some things and weaker at others.

Overall, I think WA on balance is worse for players who don't yet know what problem they are trying to solve. With great power comes great headaches, and WA has great power right there on day one. Addons limit that -- you can only do what the author thought you might want to do, but on the other hand, you don't have to *not* do anything or risk breaking it all.

If WA had an in-game, or out-of-game, service like curse or wowinterface, and/or a nice client that could automatically update strings, most of that advantage of addons would vanish. Give WA the ability to build a nice (and custom) configuration thingy for your string, and bam, it easily beats writing an addon for anything small, for sure.

Without that, I think the drawbacks *FOR NEW PLAYERS* are greater than the advantages. We should send them to addons, wait for them to figure out the limitations of those, *then* tell them all about WA and how it can solve their problem. Let them grow into it.