New player to WoW and seem to be holding my own using the default UI.  Recently heard there were tons of custom UIs and Add-ons.  Wanted to know if someone could answer a few qs...

1. Where do I get or find these add-ons?  Are they centralized on one site and distributed across a bunch of sites?  Which are the best ones?

2. Do I need to worry about these custom UIs screwing with the game?  What happens when they patch WoW?  Does that mess up the custom UI?

3. If I like more than one is it easy to switch between them?  Or do I need to stick with one?

Being new, not sure what I'm looking for :-)  But if I had to guess I would say I would like to have my hotbars stacked at the center bottom of my screen (like I had in EQ2).  I would like the ability to move my UI around.  I hate when I open my character sheet and cant move it.  

Sorry if this comes off as an over-generalized question. Appreciate any pointers/sites/etc

Originally posted by darkhalf357x

New player to WoW and seem to be holding my own using the default UI.  Recently heard there were tons of custom UIs and Add-ons.  Wanted to know if someone could answer a few qs...

1. Where do I get or find these add-ons?  Are they centralized on one site and distributed across a bunch of sites?  Which are the best ones?

2. Do I need to worry about these custom UIs screwing with the game?  What happens when they patch WoW?  Does that mess up the custom UI?

3. If I like more than one is it easy to switch between them?  Or do I need to stick with one?

Being new, not sure what I'm looking for :-)  But if I had to guess I would say I would like to have my hotbars stacked at the center bottom of my screen (like I had in EQ2).  I would like the ability to move my UI around.  I hate when I open my character sheet and cant move it.  

Sorry if this comes off as an over-generalized question. Appreciate any pointers/sites/etc

1. There are several dedicated sites that offer most of the add ons for WoW. The two biggest ones I know of are curse.com and wowinterface.com. Curse offers a handy client that you can download for free and will keep track of your add ons, showing you which one needs updating and doing it for you with a click of a button. Highly recommended as so you do not have to mess with the files yourself, just search the add on you want, press "download" and the client will install it for you.

2. Not generally. Most Add ons are legal and will not hurt your game, but keep in mind add ons might not be designed to work with each other and might interfere and cause trouble then. As a rule of thumb, you can have only one add on modifying a particular aspect of the game. So if you have a raid grid add on, getting another one will prolly screw up something. Same for decursive type of add ons, recount types and so on. Luckly you can deactivate or activate add ons at the press of a button before entering the game, so recovering from these problems is very easy, just deactivate the bad add ons.

When WoW is patched, all add ons need to be upgraded or they will be considered out of date by WoW. Therei s a flag that permit you to load out of date add on anyway and most of the time a patch will not break how an add on works, but sometimes it might happen.

3. See above, as long as your add ons do not interfere with each other, knock yourself out. There exist also lots of builds, collections and stuff like that designed to work together or used as a framework. For example the Titan Panel add on is very popular and add you a couple of bars on top and bottom of your screen that can be filled with information, like how much gold you have, fps, lag and much more. Other add ons can use this function and add icons to show important information or access the option window of this or that add on.