Complete PvP Addons Guide

Which addons are PvP-essentials? Which ones help players reach better performance in PvP? Which addons can make your life easier in Cyrodiil & battlegrounds, and are there any specific addons that can help newer players improve?

In this guide, I’ll be answering all of these questions, by sharing with you all my personal favorite addons list for PvP. Whether you are new to PvP, new to the game, a returning player or a PvPer looking to see if there’s any important addons you’re not currently using, this guide is just for you!

The Essentials

There are many addons that I personally find useful and helpful for the ESO PvP experience, as the base-game UI is quite lacking at times and there’s a lot of information that isn’t displayed by default.

Some of these addons, however, are more essential than others, and provide a lot of useful information without taking a lot of resources to run or harming performance. Here are my personal Essentials:

Action Duration Reminder

By: cloudor

ADR is a fantastic addon for buffs management. It helps you view which of your buffs are active and displays the remaining duration for each without taking any screen space at all, by adding a duration text to all the currently-active skills on your bar. In addition, it has an option to add an “off-bar” element to your screen, to show you the remaining duration for the abilities that are slotted on your 2^nd bar, that isn’t currently active.

ADR has many additional features that helps it’s users take notice when specific buffs run out, and is super customizable.

Definitely recommended to use for any new players who struggle with buffs management, and even for experienced players. I personally still use it 7 years after starting to play the game.

AP Meter

By: Ghostbane

AP Meter is simply the best addon out of the many options that exist, to track your alliance points gain. It has a compact and easy to read display that shows you your Alliance Points earned per session, the session’s duration, and even states in which location you are registered on the map, to help you determine if you are within a keep’s tick range. In addition to all of those, AP Meter provides many relevant features, such as tracking your progression towards your next Alliance Rank, displaying statistics about your AP gains, and more. It supports chat notifications, and even allows you to set Alliance Points goals and track your progression towards them.

Combat Metrics (CMX)

By: solinur

If you’re an experienced PvE player, this addon should be familiar to you, but it’s just as relevant for PvP gameplay as it is for PvE. CMX provides an incredibly detailed combat log that keeps track of previous fights and engagements and allows you to view the full information of each of them, see the order of casts and actions that happened throughout it, and get a lot of analytical information about it. If you ever died and couldn’t figure out why, had issues sustaining and couldn’t understand what’s draining all of your resources, or anything of similar nature – CMX is your solution to that.
However, it’s important you make sure to enable the addon to work in Cyrodiil and PvP without going into Light Mode in the addon settings, as that option is disabled on the addon by default!

Greyskull

By: Ghostbane

Greyskull is the best way to keep track of your Weapon or Spell Damage. It adds a neat, small UI piece that displays your existing damage stat at any given moment. You can set the addon to display different colors based on the amount of damage stat you have every moment, the make it shift colors throughout a fight to give you a clear and easy indication of when you are fully buffed and ready to deal damage and when you better wait for a different moment to deal your burst, without having to look at each of your active buffs. Greyskull is fully customizable, from size and colors to damage amounts and stat tracking. It even allows you to set a render limit of your choice to make sure it uses just as much processing power as you want it to, and doesn’t harm your game’s performance!

Miat’s CC Tracker

By: marlonbrando, dorrino

This great addon adds a movable UI box that displays any Crowd Control effect that hits your character as it hits it, and the remaining duration on the CC effect. In addition to Crowd Control effects, it supports the display of multiple AoE (area of effect) ultimate abilities’ icons, as any of them hits you.
Due to ESO’s very inconsistent display of CCs and AoEs in PvP, this addon is an essential – as it displays the status your character is currently at, even when the game itself fails to display critically important animations.

Open World Specifics

While many combat-related addons are useful in most PvP environment, some are more useful in Cyrodiil and Imperial City only, as those have a lot of mechanics that are unique to just them:

CyrHUD

By: sasky, aldericon, baertram

CyrHUD adds a unique UI element to the screen which displays each flagged keep, resource or town – and those that are under attack or are being sieged. This information is especially useful and valuable if you are either a newer player who needs help figuring out to which location to go, or if you are trying to farm Alliance Points and want to have an easy way to determine which fights are about to end and which fights will be lasting much longer.

Quick Compass

By: zen, tiddlyplatypus

As the name suggests, Quick Compass is a nice little addon that adds a small movable compass to your screen (alongside many small additional Quality of Life features). This compass is really small and compact, and helps you figure out what direction you are looking at in every given moment without having to take your eyes from any part of the screen you’re meant to focus on during combat, and without disappearing when your character is dead, unlike the base-game compass. This addon is especially recommended for players with very large monitors, or players who play in organized groups and constantly need to pay attention to directions.

Votan’s Minimap

By: votan

Votan’s Minimap is one of my favorite addons. As the name suggests, it adds a small minimap to your screen, which is fully scalable, movable, and most importantly, doesn’t take a lot of resources to enable, and doesn’t make your game lag or lose FPS unlike the vast majority of minimap addons. In open world PvP, the minimap can help you figure out at ease in which direction you should be going even while you are in combat, without having to open up your map.

Useful PvP-Specific Addons

Here are some additional useful addons that are not quite essential to use, yet can provide great benefits for specific players who want additional features for PvP:

Alliance Buddy

By: minceraft, jnslevin

Alliance Buddy is a larger, elegant way of displaying your alliance rank and your progression towards the next rank on your screen.

Cooldowns

By: g4rr3t

While ADR is my favorite addon to display your skill buffs, your sets buffs and uptime display is shown best using Cooldowns. This addon adds small icons to your screen that indicates when specific sets or buffs are active, when they are in cooldown, and how long you must wait before you can use their effects again.

Kill Counter

By: mikethecoder4, ayantir, casterial, drummerx0

Kill counter is one of the old-reliable addons of PvP. It’s been used by a huge portion of the PvP community for many years now, as it provides many unique and valuable features. It displays your kills, deaths and their ratio on your screen by default, but beyond that, it keeps track of fights and statistics of your PvP engagement, and displays them in a unique screen that it provides, alongside many others extremely relevant features.

Useful non PvP-Specific Addons:

Many addons are not PvP specific yet has a lot of value when used in PvP environments. Some of those are more relevant than others, but all of them are very much recommended:

Azura

By: kith

Azura is an addon that allows you to shift the base-game UI pieces around the screen, in a way that is more comfortable for you. If you use many addons that have new UI windows displayed on your screen, some parts of your UI might get too cluttered. Azura helps resolving this issue by allowing you to move your UI pieces around, in addition to many additional features it provides that help you display information on the screen in many customizable ways.

Dressing Room

By: dividee

Dressing Room is my personal favorite addon for gear and skills management. If you have multiple setups for the same characters, such as PvE and PvP setups, or solo and group setups, Dressing Room is a great addon for you as it allows you to save and name each setup, both the gear and the skills you use for it, and load them up by pressing just one button!

Inventory Insight

By: manavortex, assembermaniac

If you have many characters, and tend to lose your gear pieces, Inventory Insight is a great addon for you, as it lets you see items in the inventory of your other characters, as well as items that are placed in your bank and guild banks. This addon is very helpful when you’re trying to gather a build, or move a gear set from one character to another and are afraid to lose track of some items.

Author’s Choice

This last addon is not a PvP specific one, but one that I’ve been using for many years now and I find incredibly relevant and useful:

LUI Extended

By: artofshred, psypanda

LUI Extended is a MASSIVE addon that completely overhauls the base game’s bars and buffs system. It provides many different modes and ways to display your resources bars, as well as target’s health bars, and the buffs and debuffs of yourself as well as the enemies you fight. LUI is fully customizable and enables many different UI setups, that are hand made by yourself for yourself. This addon is quite complex, and setting it up can take quite some time, but if you have the time to dedicate to it and wish to make your screen look just perfect before you jump into a fight, in a way that organizes all the information as clearly as possible for you to read and notice throughout the fight, this addon is perfect for you.

How to Install Addons

There are two ways to install addons for ESO, either manually, or using the program Minion.

I personally recommend using Minion very much. It’s a super helpful lightweight program that installs, uninstalls and updates addons for you very quickly and very easily.
To download Minion or learn more, click here.

The other method of installing addons for ESO, is finding them on ESOUI, and installing them manually. For an article about installing addons manually from ESOUI, click here.

Summary

This was my personal list of my favorite addons to use in PvP environments. Some of these addons I only use in specific scenarios, and some I always keep active, but I found all of them worth the mention.

If you have any questions, suggestions, or feedback, please feel free tor reach out to me either via my discord server, or by tagging me on Twitter.

Thank you for reading my complete PvP addons guide, I hope you found it helpful!