Here you can discuss anything and everything pertaining to ESO in general.
Good morning, time for another weekly ESO guide. Today, I am just going to do a rundown of my most valued addons. There are literally thousands of addons available for the game, I have only a small fraction of those addons and I feel like I have a lot. My choices are not necessarily a guarantee that these mods are the best at what they do, but the ones I’m listing all have a lot of users and generally great reputations. (I have a few others that I think I need to purge out before the next update, so obviously I am not listing those for you guys!)
The Craft Store addon interface(s). This is an older version, its even better now.
HOW TO ADD ON ADDONS
- It’s really easy. Go here and install Minion. Don’t worry this isn’t like installing Mod Organizer for Skyrim, you literally click download, it finds your ESO directory when prompted, and you’re good to go. This client is your search engine for addons, your download tool, your updater. Incredibly intuitive.
- Also: there are no load orders for addons. You don’t need to worry about that. If addons conflict, the game will tell you and you can choose which addon to keep. Conflicts are rare.
- Note: the one COMPLICATED part of using addons is that each addon these days require a set of community-shared database files called “libraries” to function. It’s not really complicated, just tedious, you need to look at the description of each addon, see what libraries are required, and download them. That’s all. The libraries are all searchable and downloadable from the same interface as the addons, and will just sit in your list like another addon.
- The good news is that these are community libraries shared by many mods. So once you’ve downloaded about 20 or so of these addons, you are mostly covered for most addons.
- One final note: addons do take up resources from your rig. Depending on your setup and internet connection, you may find that some addons affect your game’s performance. I don’t really have a problem but I have a strong rig and fast connection. Best way to manage this is to add a few addons at a time and make sure everything still runs smoothly, then add a few more, etc.
MY ADDONS
Here’s the list. Why no links, Avi? Because they would be useless, you are going to need to look these up in Minion and download them. Each name will work as a search term. I’ve grouped some together where it seemed logical. Try these out, let me know how it goes, do NOT ask me for tech support (!), and if you know of better options or other addons people might want to try, please let us know in the comments!
Alpha Gear – Super amazing addon that allows you save configurations of gear and skill loadouts, and switch to those loadouts with the push of a button. ESSENTIAL. Great for when you play your character different ways (healer for trials, DPS for PVP, etc.), and also great for advanced players who switch gear during a trial depending on the upcoming fight. Caution, only works out of combat, and if you try to swap while transitioning into out of combat, you may end up with the wrong skills or gear on your bar.
Champion Point Respec – Like Alpha Gear, but for Champion Points. If you are poor, you will not love spending 3k to swap your CP around constantly, but once you’ve played for awhile, that is a tiny sum. Using Alpha Gear and CPR, I can turn my character from a PVE DPS to a PVP healer in five seconds.
Advanced Filters – gives you more things to use to search and filter your character/bank/storage inventory.
Craft Store Dragonhold – incredibly useful and broad addon. This lets you track all sorts of stuff across all of your characters (you can see every character while logged into just one toon). Research timers across all of your characters, learned and unlearned recipes and motifs, crafting skill levels, horse training timers, you name it. Absolutely essential addon. It even fixes the terrible crafting interfaces for several crafting skills.
Awesome Guild Store – like the name says, gives you a much better interface for guild store shopping—better search options by far than vanilla.
Harven’s Extended Stats—shows you more stats in your character interface. Really important ones include your spell and weapon penetration (a MAJOR determinant of damage). TBH I don’t know if this is necessary anymore; it hasn’t been updated in 2 years and it works fine and just sits in my addon folder.
Harvens Improved Skills Window—really helpful addon, does things like show actual percentages of a current skill level (e.g., 58.47% of leveling Soul Harvest II to Soul Harvest III), showing you the root ability and both morphs when you scroll over an ability, etc.
Combat Metrics—definitive tool for tracking your performance in any engagement. Shows you your DPS or HPS (heals per second), breaks down your average stats, average uptime on buffs, damage done by various skills, light attacks per second…everything you need to help you as you practice, see where you need work, and improve.
Someone's Combat Metrics after-action report (not mine)
Dustman—highly customizable addon that will automatically slot things that you pick up as junk and sell them when you vendor, or even just automatically destroy some things you can’t sell.
Easy Travel—really great addon if you have one or several large guilds. When you open a map, there is a list of zones on the right; you can right click on any zone, and if anyone in any of your guilds is there, you will fast travel to them for free without a wayshrine.
Fence Data—puts a widget on your UI that shows you how much of your fence and launder limits you’ve used in a given day. Really useful for thief characters or when doing justice achievements.
Lorebooks / Skyshards / Destinations / Harvest Map / Lost Treasure / Map Pins—All six of these addons make your map far more useful by putting things you need to find on the map. There is some overlap with a few of them, but I am 99% sure each of them has a few things the others don’t. Just grab all six. You can customize most of these addons to show or hide anything.
Hide Login Announcement—it hides the login announcement.
Inventory Insight—Essential addon that lets you view your ENTIRE inventory at any time—all your character’s inventories, your bank inventory, storage chests, guild banks, everything.
Itemization Browser—lets you look up any item set in the game and see where it comes from and what its specific stats and bonuses are. Specifically useful for seeing quickly which monster sets are sold by which of the three Undaunted quest givers.
LUI Extended / Greymind QSB / Srendarr – I’ve grouped these three addons together because they are my main UI overhaul mods. This is one area where you have choices; LUI, FTC, AUI, Bandit UI and others are all options for your primary UI interface, it comes down to preference which one you want to use. Some of these mods duplicate the features of Greymind (puts a potion/consumables hotbar on screen and lets you assign hotkeys to change your consumables) and Srendarr (comprehensive buff/debuff tracker). I use these three for my setup. Try these, try other UI mods, pick your favorites. All comes down to giving you information you need, in the way you want/need to see it.
Master Merchant / Tamriel Trade Centre—the classic and the upstart. They don’t really compete, Master Merchant tracks all store sales in all your guilds, to provide you with price and volume history to help you when buying or selling. Tamriel Trade Center has the same purpose, but it pulls from current LISTINGS (not sales) from all over Tamriel. Both are useful info for trading effectively. Tamriel Trade Center requires you to run an .exe file every couple of days to receive up to date pricing information; I think there is an option on the TTC website for Mac users who can’t run .exe files or people that just don’t want to. Master Merchant is a pretty big resource hog, so you shouldn’t run it while engaged in “big” content like trials and PVP with tons of actors and activity happening.
No Accidental Stealing / Vampire’s Woe: Two of my favorite small mods. No Accidental Stealing lets you customize rules for letting you steal something (double click, only with a confirm prompt, only when in sneak, etc.), so no more getting a bounty by fat fingering and stealing some trash from a table. Vampire’s Woe suppresses the Vampire Feed ability with a key toggle—REALLY great when you are trying to pickpocket or assassinate NPCs, as you might imagine if you’ve tried that as a vamp.
No Thank You—another favorite small mod. It moves lots of annoying messages from your notifications screens or from the dreaded UI error screen, into your chat window.
Potion Maker—helps you make potions. No instructions required, just download and thank me. Another in the long line of examples proving that Bethesda should outsource UI design.
Raid Notifier—not important at all if you are not doing trials content, essential if you are. The cues in trials for incoming attacks and mechanics are often wonky and can be very hard to see even if you know the content well; this addon just flashes simple messages to warn you when something is happening.
Rare Fish Tracker / Votan’s Fisherman / Votan’s Fish Fillet—essential if you are going for fishing achievements, useless if you are not.
SuperStar—great addon, you just hit a hotkey, and a full interface of your character’s information pops on screen—skills, gear, enchants, traits, CP, stats, everything. Great for sharing your build information with other people, just screenshot and post on discord or wherever.
Urich’s Skill Point Finder—great for when you are leveling. This small-font interface displays every skill point available in the game, lets you know how many you have, and shows you each skill point you still need and where to get it.
Votan’s Minimap—my choice for minimap. There are one or two others.
Dolgubon’s Lazy Writ Crafter—The essential tool for anyone who does daily crafting writs. Thank the Gods for Dolgubon! You walk up to the writ quest bulletin board, it automatically accepts all the daily writ quests. You walk up to each crafting table, it automatically crafts the required items. You walk up to the turn-in station, it automatically turns in the quest and picks up your prize box, and then automatically opens up all the prize boxes without you even needing to go the inventory screen.
Writ Worthy—Fantastic tool for those doing daily writs, and specifically for those who want to use or possibly sell Master Writs. Gives you the cost per voucher to craft the writ (my rule of thumb is never craft anything over 500g per voucher unless you are grinding to get thousands of vouchers). More importantly, lets you “queue” master writs, and if you have the skills and materials to craft them, you just need to walk up to the crafting table and it makes the thing(s) automatically.
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Replies
I installed Inventory Insight along with the required Library Addons and my item menu still looks like the normal default menu. Not sure what I'm doing wrong
It's a separate menu system. If you go into your "controls" settings, you can set hotkeys for general game functions, and then there's a separate category to set hotkeys for addons. Go there, scroll to inventory insight and set a hotkey for it. That will bring up the menu system for I.I.
I.I., in addition to letting you search for items across inventories, also has a few little screens you can view by scrolling your mouse over some icons in the top right corner of the interface. One of them lets you see all of your currency across characters and banks (gold, tel var, ap, vouchers, etc.). The other one lets you see how much inventory space you have, and how much you're using, on every character, in your bank, etc.
(Edit: Likely obvious but I.I. is.a "view only" inventory add-on. It doesn't sadly let you magically withdraw items from one character to another.)
Ah thanks for the clarification! I was under the mistaken impression that it was an overhaul of the item menu itself. I assume thats the case with the skill window addons and such.
Great list. I'm probably not quite ready for a few of these, but I'm definitely planning to get into some of the ones I'm not already using. One note for people who are new to using addons:
Here are a few of my favorites that you didn't include in your list:
These are good ones. I use Votan's Keybinder and Search Bar, I forgot about those. The Addon Selector, I don't use it but I have friends who love it.
Wait - BeamMeUp just discovers all the wayshrines in a zone when you show up there?? Really?
I don't use Assist Rapid Riding for two reasons 1) it's redundant with AlphaGear, you can (and I do) just make two identical AlphaGear setups except one has Rapids in a skill slot, and 2) the automatic feature of ARR is notoriously unreliable, and you often get stuck with rapids on your bar when you don't want it
The way it works is a bit confusing -- it will scan your current zone for guildmates to travel to, and then it will 'attempt' to travel to each of them but immediately cancel the attempt. It takes just a few seconds. This may unlock new wayshrines for you to travel to, as long as there were guildmates near them and you haven't already discovered them. Obviously the success of this depends on you having more guildmates in a given zone, and fewer already known wayshirnes. On new alts in popular zones, I've had it instantly unlock half of the zone's wayshrines for me. But I've also had times where no new wayshrines were unlocked.
The other thing to note: It won't actually 'discover' them for the purposes of in-game achievements. You will need to physiucally travel to each shrine for that. But it does unlock shrines for porting.
Here's two small addons I've found I cant live without
Auto Recharge (And Repair) Is another invaluable addon I feel. It allows you to set a threshold % for weapon soul charge and armor degredation where upon passing the addon will automatically recharge your weapon and repair armor pieces (Assuming you have soul gems and kits available)
Weapon & Spell Power Tracker - Adds a small easy to move UI window that automatically tracks your weapon and spell attack power as well as weapon and spell critical chance.
Do you know if it repairs armor while in combat? If so it'd be worth it for me (Alpha Gear already auto-recharges weapons in combat)
I’ve not noticed any messages in my chat box which would suggest combat has ever prohibited its functions, so I’m leaning towards yes. I haven’t had to endure the tedium of cycling through my armor pieces to apply repairs since I installed it. Out of curiosity what actually happens when armor breaks?
Actually I looked into it and I can say with certainty that yes it can Infact repair armor mod combat. It comes as a separate option which by default is disabled but can easily be enabled.