World of Cluttercraft?

Recently I was shown an interesting article in Wired that featured World of Warcraft. The piece mentions how much customization is available in WoW and highlights a handful of common addons that are used by WoW players to enhance their playing experience. Among the ones they list are a couple that I use, like Catrographer and Ventrilo.

The screen they show with the covers the entire screen with interface elements, which happens sometimes, but isn’t the main experience of WoW. First of all, there aren’t many times when you’re going to have to worry about casting spells and looking at the map while you are browsing the auction house. It did get me thinking, though, about how much time I spend in WoW while not even paying attention to the graphics going on in the background. I’ll be crunching numbers trying to figure out which piece of gear to use for a 16% hit set versus a 13% hit set, looking at AH to find out how much it might cost to gem an item to get my meta gem activated in both sets, and I sometimes have trouble finding space to open some of the larger interface elements while still being able to see everything that I need to. Another example is when I have my achievement pane open for a list of recipes I need to make while browsing my cooking window to figure out if I know the recipe and looking at my bank to find the mats I know are in there.

There are some addons that help greatly with this, but there are others that just add to the clutter. I’m going to cover a bunch of the ones that I use in the future, but for now I’d like to ask what you think. What is your take on addons? Is WoW too cluttered or do you want more windows? Do addons just make it worse or do you use them to make your UI more streamlined? What addons are essential to you? Drop a line in the comments to chime in.