Basics : Addons

Today I will be talking about addons, from installing them to picking the addons to suit your needs.

First of all, addons represent a big part of the game, and customizing your User Interface(UI) could not only clean up your game screen, but also provide tons of useful functions and features.

Where do I get addons?
There are many sites on the internet who provide a whole array of different addons, but the two sites i would reccomend is either wow.curse.com and www.wowinterface.com

How do I install an addon?
Installing an addon is very simple. You could either use the curse client found on the curse website mentioned above, or you could follow this step to get the addon set up and installed :

Once you have downloaded the %Addon%.zip file, you could extract it to %/wow/interface/addons (where % is the drive where wow is installed)
Make sure to close down wow completely after installing an addon, because addons for wow are pre-loaded when wow starts up.

Which addons are useful to have?
There are so many addons that provide functionality in the game, and it is impossible to name them all. But here is a list of addons that i find useful and you can go and test them yourself to see what works for you.

Onebag and Onebank
This addon consolidates all your bags in your backpack and your bank, into one big bag, which you can shrink/grow and even have it flat or very tall.

Mik's Scrolling Battle Text
Great addon for showing some important battle factors happening, highly customizable, and you can even change where the text scrolls, the font, and the size of the text.

ButtonTimers
This is a useful addon for tracking cooldowns of your own abilities.

Gladius/Gladminish
Great combo of addons for the arena players, helps you keep track of your enemy, and also cooldowns and diminishing returns.

Quartz
This is one of the most important addons if you are playing with a high ping such as me. This addon factors in your connection's speed, and shows a red bar on your castbars, indicating where the spell can be pressed again due to the delay. This can boost your dps alot if used on high latency connections.

Bartender
Sick of all the single line actionbars that come with wow? This addon helps you set up a multitude of actionbars, which you can customize alot and really clean up your screen. Also a much easier addon for setting up hotkeys for spells.

This is but a small list of addons that I find useful, i would suggest visiting the addon sites at the top of the page and explore some addons that might oneday just blow your mind :D

Peace,
Senzaki