Addons. Those little bit's of code that are supposed to make our WoW lives easier. If used correctly they are quite adept at this task. If used incorrectly they can vastly decrease the performance of both you, and your machine.
Every addons in existence uses system memory to do what it is intended. Most of them only use a small amount, but the effects compound with the more addons you chose to utilize, and therefore starts to wear on your available system resources and drain them. So the trick is getting the most bang for your buck by finding what is useful, and what isn't. The goal is to keep your user interface (UI) as lean, and streamlined as possible while still having all essential information available in an easy to understand format.
I have found (through extensive trial and error) that most addons fall into the following categories:
- Essential
- Situationally Useful
- Raid
- Out of Raid
- Non-Essential but Nice
- F***ing Useless
By now your eyes are probably rolling back in your head, and you're tasting butter. Don't worry the seizure will pass because I am going to break this down into easy steps.
First things first. You need to know where to get these wonderful little trinkets we call addons. Personally I prefer to get everything I can from
Curse. They have everything I will be recommending in these guides. So go ahead... Click the link. Get the client V4. I'll wait.
Now that you have downloaded, and installed you're shiny new curse client you'll need to understand how to use it. It's fairly straight forward but nonetheless you can find a tutorial on Curse's website
here.
Now something to keep in mind is that this guide is being written with a tank's needs in mind. I will cover UI setups for DPS, and Healers at a later date. Now onto the tanky goodness!
