Hi everyone, your friendly raid leader here!
It's possible to install add-ons to WoW which help you out when raiding. If you've never installed an add-on before, it's actually not a very scary process and you can easily disable an addon later if you don't like it. Head on over to www.curse.com and install the Curse Client. (Pro tip, once it's installed go into the options and tell it not to automatically load on Windows startup and not to hide in systray once you close it -- it hogs a bit of memory).
Once you're in Curse Client, go to 'Get Addons', wait for it to load the list (could take a while..) and then choose the ones you want. Next time you start up WoW, those addons will be available.
Anyway, here's my list. A boss-mods is the only
"must have" for raiding, some others are highly recommended, and a few more are "nice to have". I have about 20 mods installed personally, YMMV :)
Must-have: Boss mods An addon in the boss mods category will tell you when a boss is going to do various important abilities. It also lists all boss abilities for your perusal.
For example, with Bigwigs on the Ascendant Council fight, you will see a bar saying "Quake......20" where the 20 means 20 seconds till next Quake and it will tick down. When the bar gets to 10 it gets bigger so you notice it, and when it gets to 5 seconds left, an audio will count down "5..4..3..2..1". So you know firstly that you have to get to a tornado, and secondly, exactly how long you have to get there.
Of course, these things are all configurable; you can add more warnings or fewer warnings for each individual ability. I'll add a screenshot from next time we raid.
There are various add-ons in the "boss mods" category; the two major ones are
Deadly Boss Mods and
Bigwigs. Another is "Rob Boss Mods". I use Bigwigs, although DBM is the most popular. You should pick one of these to install.
Recommended: Omen This is a
threat meter. (If you're not clear exactly on how threat an aggro work, follow the previous link, it's useful stuff to know). It will show the threat table for your targeted mob.
If you DPS it's good to know exactly what you can do without pulling aggro, and if you're a tank you know how far ahead you are , so you can decide whether to chuck in some self-healing or other moves instead of going for your max threat rotation.
Recommended: GTFO This mod is very simple, it will give an audio warning if you are standing in fire. I find this much faster to react to than visual warnings.
Recommended for casters: Quartz Quartz will replace the Blizzard cast bar with a nicer-looking one which also shows your latency window, and for channeled spells like Mind Flay, shows when the spell ticks (so you know when to clip it). You can seriously improve your DPS / HPS with this information.
Recommended: Timer bars Various timer bar addons are available. These show a timer for your buffs, procs, dots and hots, dots and hots on you, and dots and hots and buffs and debuffs on the mobs. For example, as fire mage you will get a bar up showing how long your Living Bomb has to go on each mob it's on. This lets you know when to refresh it. It's almost essential for shadowpriest to be able to keep track of DoTs, shadow orbs and Empowered Shadows for example, and any class with a proc-based spell rotation (DPS, healers and tanks included!)
The addon I prefer the most is
ClassTimer, there are several alternatives.
Useful: Addon Control Panel Lets you enable and disable addons without logging off.
Useful: Tidy Plates This is a nameplate replacement. Over each mob's head you will get a more useful frame than the Blizzard one. I have mine set up to show health and mana of course (with percentages as well as numbers), and also show over the mob's head what dots/hots/debuffs I have up on that mob. Great for multi-mob tanking and DPSing.
Another awesome feature of TidyPlates is that it shows the castbar for mobs you aren't even targeting, this will greatly expand your ability to interrupt.
Useful: Damage Meter As well as just recording damage and healing done, the meter will also show damage taken, interrupts, fails, etc. etc. - many useful stats about the fight. If nothing else, as a DPS you can use it to monitor your own performance and try to challenge yourself to get better. Popular meters are "Skada" and "Recount".
Note - if you have a slow PC then you can bypass the meter, as they use a fair bit of CPU.
