Dragonflight: Overall Addon Suggestions From The Bellular Team (2023)

Addon time! Last time we did one of these videos, it was before the massive ‘addons bad’ debate sprung up over the course of Shadowlands, so we’re going to be taking a different approach. First, we’ll go through the QoL addons we think you need for Dragonflight. After that, we’ll dive into the forbidden territory of addons with POWER, but that may detract from the experience the devs designed for you. The huge changes to Dragonflight’s UI means we have a some new addons that we consider critical, so even though I know a few of us will be trying to run with as few addons as possible, thanks, always, to the real hard work of these devs… And and our sponsor!

First up, the stuff you always need. In 99% of circumstances, we recommend having these installed because they’ll make your life easier with basically no downsides.

Details! As much as measurement of DPS has some negative outcomes, you still need to know how you’re doing so you can either improve or feel good about yourself. Ez.

WeakAuras! We’ll go into more depth in an upcoming video on our recommend UI setups, and then again in a video breaking down why WeakAuras is so important, but right now you just need to understand that WeakAura UI setups are the best you can possibly have in the game, and we mean that literally. You can find WeakAuras you need on Wago, and we’ll have plenty listed in our upcoming UI video.

Leatrix Plus — While ElvUI and some of its enhancements have baked in a lot of LTP’s features over the years, it remains the best way to get some of the nicest miscellaneous upgrades to WoW, like fast loot — and we don’t even recommend using ElvUI anymore anyway. It’s still a great option, of course, but no longer a must-have.

Angrier World Quest, World Quest List or World Quest Tracker — World quests are still in Dragonflight, and the quest UI still doesn’t do a great job with them, but thankfully there are many options to help you out. Some people prefer Tracker, some like List, others prefer Angrier World Quest — just try them out and see which style clicks with you. For what it’s worth, Angrier looks the most default UI.

Auctionator — The new AH from Shadowlands has great functionality, but Auctionator adds just a little bit more to bring it up to being very, very usable — especially when selling. And now that professions are a bigger part of the game, having a quick way to engage with them without going knee-deep into

Plater — While it isn’t exactly 100% required, the density of enemies in dungeons means Plater’s improvements to spotting enemies and the casts you should look out for makes life so much easier. For our UI video, we’ll investigate available profiles and see if we can find something that works well with Dragonflight’s default. This isn’t literallynecessary, but it’s such a massive upgrade over the base nameplates.

This is the most exciting thing about Dragonflight to talk about, on the addon front: the addons you actually DON’T need. Sort of.

ElvUI — It still has amazing features and an unmatched level of customisation. But a lot of the most important features are now baked in, or available elsewhere in a less “complete overhaul” kind of way.

And with ElvUI, Bartender! It’s still way more powerful and customisable than the base UI, but it’s no longer necessary. If you like a weird setup that you can’t replicate, you should definitely continue using it.

Bagnon — A favourite of many, the game itself now has a combined bag feature and even a search bar. Again, the addon has more features, like the caveat here with ElvUI — the addon is better, but it’s also an extra addon that removes you from that clean, fresh World of Warcraft feeling.An addon for the mission table. There is no mission table, so you don’t need one. Simple as. Feels good to say.

Technically, theoretically, and we’re saying this to highlight a point instead of being totally serious — DeadlyBossMods and BigWigs! Reports from raid testing say that raid design language has improved so much that groups were able to understand and clear the fight without using addons. The developer of DBM was even thrilled about this! Of course, DBM will warn you of mechanics well ahead of time and present them in ways its hard to miss, so it is useful — especially with other info frames like the range checker, but perhaps you’d enjoy looking at the game world, rather than hearing RUN AWAY LITTLE GIRL. (morph me saying this into the actual SFX)

Next, a few UI things that aren’t necessary, but are absolutely worth trying out to either spice up your UI or solve existing problems.

MouseoverActionBars — One of the trends we’ve noticed is that, instead of UI replacements like we usually have, we now have UI improvement addons. MouseoverActionBars was designed specifically to add some of the missing features from the new UI, obviously the main one being… the mouseover feature, and some bars’ visibility settings. Now, rather than have your bar of items and out of combat stuff being on-screen all day, you can make it visible only on mouseover without having to rebuild everything in Elv or Bartender. Or even hide all of your buttons until combat starts. Sweet! As one commenter said “Your set of addons are what will allow me to stay with BlizzUI.”.

MoveAnything — This one has a big asterisk — at time of writing, it hasn’t been updated for Dragonflight. I really, really hope it is, because the base UI does not let you move everything. The bag bar, micro menu and experience bar are the worst culprits, and this would solve it.

In the same vein of fixing issues, we have Advanced Raid Frame Settings and HealthBarColor — addons that add a bit more functionality to the raid and unitframes, like some extra sizing and colour options. ARFS is planned to be extended, so hopefully a lot of things are added over time…

Clique — Unfortunately, we do sort of recommend Clique if you really want to click cast with options. Click casting exists in Dragonflight, but it has some frustrating limitations. Right now, it only works with mouse buttons, whereas Clique has full keyboard support. Not a huge deal, with mouseover casting baked into WoW, you can just mouseover-cast your actionbar hotkeys, but if you used Clique before extensively or want the no-actionbar-binds lifestyle, just keep it installed.

OPie — It’s pretty advanced as far as UI goes, but OPie is still one of the best addons for saving on keybindings. You can hold a button and then use your mouse to make a selection, which obviously beats having to bind a whole ton of different buttons. It’s perfect for utility items: teleports, hearthstones, talent swaps, emotes and raid markers.

Dragonriding UI — So, this is just an honorable mention. We don’t even recommend using this, but it’s cool. It’s a WeakAura that shows you specific details on your Dragonriding current status.

As with all things, the new talent trees are nice, but there are just a few little tweaks to make them even better. And thankfully, we’re already sorted on this front.

Talent Tree Tweaks — This is a brand new addon that, right now, adds only a few features — spell ID on talents, which is for advanced users, and a way to copy other players’ talents. You see someone in raid pumping out serious damage? Inspect them, copy it, and use that build for the next boss — all without hearthing or using a tome. Sick, and the dev is open to feature requests.

Talent Tree Viewer — By the same dev, this is basically an in-game talent calculator that lets you fiddle around without overwriting your existing talents. Or check other class and spec talents. Or, if you’re below max level, plan a build on the fly and save it for later!

Glows Refundable Talents — Another fun thing, if you want to play with your own talents on the fly a lot, is this WeakAura! If you right click a talent and it ends up breaking the point requirement and undoing half your tree, it’s a massive pain in the ass. This will actively glow the talents you can remove without breaking the rest of the tree, which lets you see at a glance what you can kind of swap in and out without worrying about your overall setup.

And now, this fun section is for the players who want some general addons to spice up their non-sweaty gameplay time.

HandyNotes — This is where we get a bit controversial. HandyNotes is a great addon with a ton of modules, but a lot of the time the modules show you the location of every secret in a zone and tells you the solution. That turns the “discovery” of secrets into just following off a checklist, which is a lot less fun and wastes a lot of the hard work the devs put in. If your first instinct is to do this for rares, secrets and even the Dragonriding Glyphs, I’d recommend trying to go raw and do some of your own discovery first. Matt had a lot of fun in beta trying to find the glyphs — he was incoherently shouting something about WoW finally being a real videogame with real level design, or something like that…

Immersion — makes quest text appear like the talking head frame, breaking it up nicely and making it more enjoyable to read through. Definitely recommended in Dragonflight, because these quests are worth paying attention to.

TomCat’s Tours — This is the big one. If you need to track some Zereth Mortis or Korthia-like stuff damn near anywhere in the game, or you want to do any holiday events efficiently, this is your addon. Daily tracking of rare spawns, shows what they drop on your map, and even has routing to efficiently get stuff like the Candy Buckets for the Hallow’s End event that just passed. Crazy amount of work in this — hopefully, you only need to install this when you want to, and not for any Korthia or Maw-like power grinds in later patches.

Altoholic — Dragonflight has basically no grindy systems, and it has some pretty key things shared across accounts, like Dragonriding glyphs. You know what that means? Alt time! Anyone with a ton of alts will know Altoholic, but we figured we’d bring it up anyway. It’s still the number one addon for tracking everything you need to know about all of your alts.

Instance Achievement Tracker — Now, this one may not be too appropriate for Dragonflight, but if you want to kill some time during pre-patch, IAT is a lovely little thing that helps you get achievements in old instances by tracking your progress and showing concise explanations, in its own window, and in chat. Brilliant.

BTWQuests — This is an old addon, but it’s only really come to our attention recently. It tracks which questlines you’ve completed in-game so you know what you haven’t done. This is super important going back to get the story for old zones, but with the quality of some side quests being way higher than usual in Dragonflight, it’ll be good to have a list of good content you can go and do.

All The Things — Tracks all the things. That’s it. Reach 100% and win a prize.

M+ addons can get really hyper-specific… but until Dragonflight is in the wild, those addons won’t really exist. Here’s a solid core you should consider, though!

Mythic Dungeon Tools — If you’re a big M+ sweatlord or a tank, this will be pretty helpful as always, importing, planning and sharing dungeon routes so people know what’s going on.

Angry Keystones (Or a WeakAura equivalent) — The default M+ display over here does the job, but you probably want more information. Thankfully, Angry Keystones and many of the WeakAura-based equivalents have you sorted.

Astral Keys (Or a WeakAura equivalent) — Coordinating keys with guild and parties quickly can increase your efficiency — more dungeons per hour means more time actually enjoying the game instead of sitting around and waiting.

WeakAuras — As always, there’ll be the dungeon WeakAuras, and for anything else that people want coordinated, be that Thundering or any dungeon mechanics, an aura will pop up in the first few weeks of Dragonflight, so keep an eye out.

OmniCD — OmniCD is a very good standalone way to display party CDs. You don’t need this, but it’s always good to know when your party has shit ready.

There aren’t that many raid-specific addons. DBM or BigWigs were already discussed, and all you really need for raid is a good set of WeakAuras,.

WeakAuras — Get the standard raid WeakAuras if you want them, they’re usually really good. Anything boss-specific will crop up as the popular one once the raid is live, like with dungeons, so keep an eye out!

Method Raid Tools — There’s so much in this it’s hard to know where to begin — cooldown tracking, expanded ready check, battle res availability and combat timer are the most personally relevant, but there’s a shit ton of others tools like notes, attendance logging, invite tools, etc. It’s seriously a great piece of kit, but most of it is definitely for officers or raid leaders.

Grid2 — If, even after playing with Advanced Raid Frame Settings, the default raid unitframes aren’t to your liking or are lacking features, Grid2 is a pretty good alternative that looks the part. Healers obviously might want to continue using Healbot or VuhDo for enhanced functionality, but for most others, Grid has a certain… efficiency to it.

BUT I THOUGHT DRAGONFLIGHT WAS THE END OF ADDONS, you may be screaming at your phone or monitor. That’s never going to happen — addon devs are too brilliant and solve too many genuine problems — and that’s not sarcastic, these are all insanely good and required a ton of effort. But if you stick to our advice and rock only a few from each category, and only when you need them, you should find yourself a much cleaner experience in Dragonflight than maybe ever before. Hell yeah, Blizzard, keep it up.

• Details! https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/details
• WeakAuras https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/weakauras-2
• LeatrixPlus https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/leatrix-plus
• Angrier World Quests https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/angrier-world-quests
• Auctionator https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/auctionator
• Plater Nameplates https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/plater-nameplates
• ElvUI https://www.tukui.org/download.php?ui=elvui
• Bartender https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/bartender4
• Bagnon https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/bagnon
• DBM https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/deadly-boss-mods
• BigWigs https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/big-wigs
• MouseoverActionBars https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/mouseoveractionbars-mouseover-action-bars
• BlizzHUDTweaks https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/blizzhudtweaks MoveAny
• https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/moveany
• AdvancedRaidFrameSettings https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/advanced-raid-frame-settings
• HealthBarColor https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/healthbarcolor
• Clique https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/clique
• OPiehttps://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/opie Dragonriding UI https://wago.io/dmui-dragonriding
• Talent Tree Tweaks https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/talent-tree-tweaks
• Talent Tree Viewer https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/talenttree-viewer
• Glow Refundable Talents (WeakAura) https://wago.io/pogAL95VQ
• HandyNotes https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/handynotes
• HandyNotes Dragonflight https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/handynotes-dragonflight HandyNotes Dragon Glyph https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/handynotes-dragon-glyphs
• Immersion https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/immersion
• Altoholic https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/altoholic
• Instance Achievement Tracker https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/instance-achievement-tracker
• BTWQuests (Also download whatever expansion version you need!) https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/btw-quests
• All The Things https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/all-the-things
• Mythic Dungeon Tools https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/mythic-dungeon-tools
• Angry Keystones https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/angry-keystones
• Astral Keys https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/astral-keys
• OmniCD (Not Updated Yet) https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/omnicd
• Ability Team Tracker https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/att
• Method Raid Tools https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/method-raid-tools
• Grid2 https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/grid2