Hey Friends! Over the last few days I have been posting an awful lot about Elder Scrolls Online. The game is in a great state and honestly has been for years, and now that I have a pretty regularly group of friends playing it has improved my enjoyment immensely. However all of this screenshot posting has lead to the inevitable question of “What mods are you running?”. So this morning I thought I would take a few minutes to talk about a few of the ones that I find most important for my personal enjoyment. However before we go down this road there are a few primers that you need to understand about Elder Scrolls Online addons.
Probably the first step if you choose to go down this path is to install Minion which is the addon client of MMOUI/ESOUI. This is pretty much the last remaining viable addon patcher with any real support for The Elder Scrolls Online and it is going to be your best friend for resolving any potential issues you might find along the way. Addons with ESO are way more the wild west than they are in games like World of Warcraft. The addons themselves are not updated nearly as often and as a result you end up using them in an outdated status way more often. The positive however is that the Elder Scrolls user interface does not update nearly as often nor does it have quite the penchant for breaking addons as the World of Warcraft one does.
When it comes to downloading addons, my personal preference is to click the “Find More” tab at the top of the Minion client and then search for the addons I am looking for that way. If your preference is to manually install addons then you are going to need to navigate to your documents folder, wherever that is stored on your system and within it there should be a folder structure that looks like this: “Elder Scrolls Online\live\AddOns”. One positive about the way addons work in Elder Scrolls Online is that you can fiddle with them while the game is loaded safely and then get your new changes by hitting the /reloadui command afterwards. This bit comes in really important when it comes to debugging why specific addons are not working.
From within game you can access a list of the addons that you currently have loaded and this is going to be beneficial because every so often the Minion client does not correctly install prerequisites and dependencies. For example at the suggestion of my friend Accomp, I installed the EasyTravel addon which in theory is supposed to allow you to jump to a nearby guild member in a specific zone and bypass travel fees. However I noticed this morning while sitting down to write this piece that I was missing a dependency, which gave me the ideal opportunity to talk about this problem. How I fixed this was to open up the Minion client and click the “Find More” tab and type in the name of the missing library, aka LibSlashCommander in this specific case. From there I was able to install this library and upon typing /ReloadUI the problem was resolved.
Addons as a whole for The Elder Scrolls Online are a whole lot more fiddly and slightly less predictable than they were in World of Warcraft. If this brings you pause then you might just be better off sticking with the default interface. I’ve installed addons in the most questionable of manners in the past for games that barely supported them, so for me it was second nature to get this up and running. The whole point of all of this is to make sure you are fully aware of what you are getting yourself into. The addons themselves cannot do any permanent harm to your experience that cannot be resolved by simply turning them off or uninstalling them however.
Bandits User Interface
The addon that becomes most noticeable when viewing my screenshots is my general Action Bar/HUD/User Interface replacement. There are a large number of these available and I have tried and probably the two most popular are AUI and LUI with the later being a pretty WoW-Like experience with Deadly Boss Mods style callouts. My personal preference however is Bandits User Interface because it is what I am used to and most comfortable with. For me personally it seems to be the ideal blend of configurability and information with the least amount of distractions. This addon is effectively the spiritual successor to Foundry Tactical Combat which was an addon suite supported the long defunct Alpha/Beta powerhouse site the Tamriel Foundry.
The thing I like about Bandits is just how easily configured it is. When you open your settings menu you will see an entirely new menu item just for this addon that allows you to configure all of the specifics on how exactly this behaves. Generally speaking if there is something that is annoying you, there will be a configuration option to turn it off or at least change it slightly. This addon suite began its life as being PVP focused, but evolved into being my ideal interface for the game in general. It also includes a number of simple automation tasks like the ability to repair each time you hit a vendor and those sort of simple quality of life improvements. It is a little slow to update but so far I have had no problem running it in “outdated” mode.
If you have ever used Gatherer in World of Warcraft to track the resource nodes as you collect them, then you are going to be pretty familiar with the basic functionality of Harvest Map. The idea is that as you roam around the world and collect resources, these nodes are being added to your map filters so that you can find them in the future easily. Going further than gatherer, Harvest Map puts little augmented reality sprites on your map when you get in range of them allowing you to veer just slightly out of the way to get those you would likely run past without paying attention. It might be a bit busy for you personally but I personally like knowing roughly where I have found nodes before in the past. Tamriel Mapping Project gives you a number of prebuilt filters loaded with node spawn information, essentially giving you a head start on finding things in the wild.
This one is an entirely personal preference but I enjoy it greatly so I am sharing it. As this game has grown in size I have personally found it harder and harder to sort out which zone is which on the large overworld map. The end result is this busy nonsense the forces you to vaguely remember which area of the world each zone is in. I did fine for years but wound up having to click into zones anyway to sort out exactly where I wanted to travel to. Votan’s Tamriel Map replaces all of that mess with a nice simple easy to read zone boundary map with the capital city of each zone highlighted below the region name. Sure you still have to click into the zone before you can teleport to a wayshrine, but I was doing this already and now it simply makes it much easier for me to find where I was looking for.
One of the things that I do not love about the default Elder Scrolls Online inventory is that it is menu driven. Years of playing World of Warcraft and Everquest before that have made me extremely visual when it comes to an inventory. Inventory Grid View comes to the rescue if you also suffer from this affliction and it does exactly what the name states, organizes your bag and bank into a grid with rarity coloring around the outside of the icon. This image is also technically showing off Tamriel Trade Center but I think I am going to have to delve into more detail on that one with a close up segment of the screen.
At the bottom of my inventory item tooltip there is a section that starts with TTC Suggested. One of the weird things about Elder Scrolls Online is that there is no centralized auction house. I will probably go into Guilds and Traders in a future post, but suffice to say it is a distributed network of individual Guild Traders. Tamriel Trade Center is a website and series of tools that attempts to glue together all of these independent guild trades into something that is searchable. This functions by relying on both an addon and a system tray application that is constantly feeding Guild Trader activity and receiving updated pricing data. So the ring in question that I am hovering over has had a total of 2688 listings and based on data it is indicating that the sweet spot for moving this item quickly is somewhere between 2274 and 2843 gold. Largely I use this as a general indicator of whether or not an item has enough third party market value for me to mess with trying to save it and sell it on a guild trader or if it is something I should just vendor/deconstruct for materials.
So Many Addons
This is by no means a complete list of addons that I am currently running, but instead I largely focused on some of my personal favorites. My friend Accomp runs significantly more Addons than I do and has an updated list of what he happens to be running at any given time. So if you are curious I would check that out as well. The main reason why I am not posting a complete list is that right now I think I have multiple addons that are trying to fill the same role and as such in the coming weeks I am going to try and whittle those down to the minimum number of addons needed. If I actually do this thing I might post an update to this list with a full accounting of everything I happen to be using. For now however this should be a general starting place.
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