You gotta love Blizz for making the interface customizable with mods & addons. If you spend a little time doing this you’ll find the rewards well worth the trouble. In this post I’ll tell you a little bit about addons and why I think they can make a huge difference in how you play WoW. Later I’ll show you which mods I use personally, and why. I certainly don’t know everything about mods, but I’ll share what I do know. Let’s get started.

First of all: I don’t provide any support for installing / configuring / troubleshooting mods and I don’t take any responsibility for any damages, so be careful. Secondly, "mods" and "addons" are the same in my mind, so I’ll use them interchangeably.

The History of Mods

I haven’t played WoW since beta or even release, far from it. But I have friends who have, and I have played long enough to see Blizzard make some significant changes to the WoW interface.

Where do the ideas for those changes come from? Well, oftentimes it’s a stand-alone mod which has become so popular and obviously useful for a majority of players that Blizzard simply swipe the idea and integrate it into their built-in UI (User Interface).

If you think about it, what that means is there are people out there who have been having big advantages in WoW by using these mods since way before Blizz implemented them for everyone, and there are players who now use mods to add awesome features not available to anyone with the standard UI.

Some examples of private mods that Blizzard integrated:

• Scrolling Combat Text - SCT has been around for a long time and became so popular that Blizzard made their own version called "Floating Combat Text" which you can enable under the "advanced options" tab in the interface menu. Imagine life without it… That’s why so many people used (and still use) SCT.
• CT_Raid - The "raid" tab in the social window is virtually identical to the one introduced by CT_raid. You used to not be able to see who was in your raid at all (!), just in your group (so my long time WoW friends say). So CT_raid became a required mod by almost all raiding guilds and Blizzard took notice. In fact, the CT_mod team have driven much of Blizzard’s mod development just by being first with very good and popular mods.
• Actionbars - Yep, you used to just have the belt and have to scroll it up and down to access more actionbar slots. (Amazingly I was told of an imba-skilled warrior my friend knew from that time who used NO mods and was a "clicker" at that, meaning he didn’t use key bindings for skills and abilities, but clicked them with the mouse instead. Imagine having to scroll the belt up and down to find abilities to click in the heat of combat, phew! For the rest of us there are addons.)

Blizzard have even admitted to building some raid encounters around popular addons like "Decursive" which was a mod for any class that could cleanse debuffs, one which reduced many players’ roles in raids to just spam a single button on the keyboard to auto-cleanse the whole raid, one at a time. Functionality for mods that auto-selected targets and spells to cast was removed with the 2.0 patch in December 2006, because the developers didn’t want people to play on auto-pilot like that.

My point is this: There are mods out there that are so powerful that even Blizzard take notice and make their own versions, and there are many more great mods that are specific to classes, the auction house, PvE, PvP, trade skills, and so on, that will NEVER be integrated in the standard WoW interface. So your only chance to get them is installing them yourself. And don’t be surprised if Blizzard rips them off later, something I welcome and should be taken as the highest form of flattery by the mod authors.

How to install mods

Here’s a very brief introduction on installing mods. For more help go to WoW Europe Interface Customization Forum, or World of Warcraft UI & Macros Forum.

The top 3 places to find mods are:

1. www.wowace.com
2. ui.worldofwar.net
3. www.curse-gaming.com

When you download a mod it typically comes in a compressed archive that you unpack using Winrar (free) or Winzip. Then you will usually see one or more folders containing the mods. Place those folders in your World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns\ directory. If you’ve done it right it should look like this:

Then just start WoW and login. On the character selection screen click the "AddOns" button in the lower left corner and check which mods you want active on that character.

Tip: It’s best to try one mod at a time and see what it does or you’ll wonder what the heck happened to your UI when you log in.

How to update your mods

Well, one way to do it is to manually go to the mod’s page on ui.worldofwar.net or wowace.com or wherever you found it and look for a newer version, download it, extract it, read any special upgrade instructions, or else just replace the existing folder with the new one you downloaded, which usually works. It’s kind of a pain though, especially if you have tens of mods or more.

Here’s how I do it instead: I use as many "Ace" mods as possible. (You’ll find those over at www.wowace.com) Wowace have a really cool program called WoWAceUpdater which will identify new versions of your mods, and download and install updates automatically! You just run the program and it will find your installed addons. Then click "Mark Installed Addons" on the Edit menu and then "Install Update Marked Addons" –> "With Externals" on the File menu. You can even install new mods directly from the program.

Ace mods are lightweight meaning they usually don’t use up much memory. If you find yourself running into error messages about your memory being low you can try going into the "AddOns" menu on the character selection screen and increase your memory dedicated to mods from there.

If you have mods found on ui.worldofwar.net you can create a free account there and set them as favorites and choose to be notified whenever a new update is released. You’ll get a short email message about the latest changes so you can decide if it’s worth the hassle of installing it manually. Ui.worldofwar.net also have a new tool which is supposedly a bit like WoWAceUpdater, but it doesn’t seem as stable yet.

Final Words

Mods can be a great help, to the point where they force Blizzard to hard code them into WoW. With the right mods some laborious tasks will be much easier, you’ll see things that no one else sees, make more gold and simply have more fun!

But don’t get too dependent on them. I used more than 100 mods when the 2.0 "Before The Storm" patch hit in December 2006 which made them ALL obsolete, i.e. needing updates to work. I was stunned because I’ve used mods almost since day 1 so I had no idea how much was missing without them. As the dust settled in the following weeks, and I somehow got by without many of the addons, I realized which ones I desperately needed and which ones I could do without.

I’ll tell you about the ones I can’t live without in coming posts.