Must have: (things that really should be base game features)

• Advanced Filters
• Votan's Search Box
• Deconstruction Junk Marker
• Crafted Potions
• Personal Assistant
• Inventory Item Borders
• Multicraft
• Roomba

Really nice to have:

• Azurah
• Skyshards
• LoreBooks
• Lost Treasure
• Lazy Writ Crafter
• Awesome Guild Store
• CraftStore
• Spent Skill Points
• Dressing Room

General combat-related:

• Combat Metrics
• Lilith's Group Manager (for the death recap feature)
• Lilith's Lazy Hacks
• Action Duration Reminders
• JoGroup

Dungeons/Trials:

• Code's Combat Alerts
• Dungeon Timer
• Raidificator
• Raid Notifier

I play with a good number of addons, most that just increase quality of life and save time.

• AlphaGear - an absolute must have since my two most played characters are a healer and a tank. Being able to swap skills/gears with a keybind makes switching to a build for solo questing much simpler.
• Votan's Minimap - I get lost. A lot. The minimap helps me (at least somewhat!)
• Craftstore - So much QoL that feels like it should be included in the base UI.
• Awesome Guild Store - Even with the latest official update to guild store searches, AGS has much more functionality and is still pretty much required for me to sell things on traders.
• Lost Treasure - Survey and treasure maps are still somewhat of a chore, but LT makes it far less painful.

I do use others as well but could play without them if required, though I would miss some of the functionality. The above though...they're pretty essential to my enjoyment.

Hallothiel wrote: »

I do understand that some of the ones you mention are more cosmetic but to read that there are ones that do all your writs for you, or tell you when to dodge roll or basically fight your battles for you - what’s the damn point?

Addons that do writs and similar things - they remove unnecessary tedium. Memorising writ patterns (I'm sure you know that the order in the quest is different than the order in the crafting UI for some of them) and scrolling+clicking through the UI is mindnumbing and boring. I mean, I could do that (and I have done it for a long time), and let my ESO play time be dominated by the tedious stupidity of playing a UI window. There are people who play Paradox games, so clicking around unintuitive UIs does have its fans ;D , but if I could actually do stuff in-game, that would be a better use of my time.

An argument could probably be made for the second kind of add-ons. They usually just enhance the game's sometimes ... obscure telegraphs, but they can be quite helpful. Otoh, I'm quite convinced that difficulty in a game should not be the result of opaque and deliberately vague information to the player.

I have yet to find an add-on that fights my battles. Or even comes somewhat close to that.

P.S. In Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, you can have ~250 mods active at the same time. That is rather restrictive, I think. ;D

Hallothiel wrote: »

@Lineleah

Sigh. So how come us console plebs can managed to do all that stuff without needing add ons to hold our hand and show us how to play.

I do understand that some of the ones you mention are more cosmetic but to read that there are ones that do all your writs for you, or tell you when to dodge roll or basically fight your battles for you - what’s the damn point?

because addons do NOT in fact play the game for you? that's again the point. they do NOT , i repeat do NOT play the game for us. they merely save time and remove some of the tedium. you can still do the tedium if that's your thing.

the game itself tells you when to dodge. addons just make it more obvious, but guess what? NONE of the addons actual dodge for you, you HAVE to do it yourself. writ addons, we say that they do the writs for us, but generally, they speed up the process of them. that's it. etc etc etc. addons perform 2 functions. they either costumize appearance. or they save a little bit of time. there is nothing NOTHING virtuous about hitting the same button over and over and over to refine 2k+ materials you just gathered. for example. most games actualy have multicraft functionality as baseline. i have no idea why ESO doesn't but I have to question why would someone consider something as mindless and tedious as that and things like it... actual play.

but hey, if dealing with tedium gets you to feel superior to pc players.... whatever floats your boat.

Bouldercleave wrote: »

srfrogg23 wrote: »

Aliyavana wrote: »

srfrogg23 wrote: »

Sylvermynx wrote: »

They can't be considered "borderline cheating" if the game principals themselves allow them.

Now that said - I can see how someone on console could feel that way. But that's on MS or Sony....

They absolutely can be considered to be borderline cheating. I literally just did it. I'm still doing it.

You get access to information that people without the addons either don't have or have to spend much more time looking for. Particularly when talking about the addons that provide pricing information about the guild traders.

Besides, they cheapen the experience. They eliminate the sense of discovery in a lot of cases or give that unfair advantage. Not to mention when they break after an update or just flat out corrupt game data.

Nope. I'm not using them and I'm not impressed by anyone that does. They should all be banned.

I don't like something so therefore it should be banned for everyone

If it's not an official part of the game and it gives people an advantage over others who don't have it. I mean, do you really think that's ok?

Simply put? Yes.

ALL PC players have access to the addons, so they are really not getting an advantage at all. We don't compete across platforms, so that argument is a non-starter.

If everyone has the same access to the same addons, who is getting an advantage? it's fair across the board - so no it's not cheating and I'm perfectly OK with that.

Mmmm not really. There are addons that only the author and his friends have. Mostly pvp addons. Miats was a private addon for a long time. I’m pretty sure there are even more that are custom made and never shared.

I’m not saying all addons are cheating, AND there are some “cheating” addons, if the definition we are using of “fair” is availability to all.

Bouldercleave wrote: »

Interesting, I didn't know there were addons that weren't public domain.

Depends entirely on author. Some dedicate to the public domain. Some release under GPL, MIT or other free software license. Some release under non-free license. Some keep their add-ons private.

max_only wrote: »

Mmmm not really. There are addons that only the author and his friends have. Mostly pvp addons. Miats was a private addon for a long time. I’m pretty sure there are even more that are custom made and never shared.

I’m not saying all addons are cheating, AND there are some “cheating” addons, if the definition we are using of “fair” is availability to all.

Regardless of whether an add-on gets published or not, the API is available to all. Hence anything an add-on can do, private or public, anyone has access to. Then it becomes a debate of whether it's fair that certain (programming) skills can give you an edge in-game.

COMBAT RETICLE:
I play on a 4K monitor and the damn cursor gets lost all the time.

- Awesome Guild Store (currently for me only cuz of known/unknown motif finder)
- Combat metrics
- any UI addon with minimap included

those are must have for me

map pins
minimap
raid notofier
LUI + BANDIT
lazy writ creator
master merchant
pledge calendar
dustman