If you're a brand new WoW Dragonflight player or a DPS that just can't resist those juicy instant Solo Shuffle cues, deciding to start healing an arena can be a very intimidating decision.  So you would ask "What's the addon that gives you text updates?", "What's the addon that indicates what spells the enemies are using, like the Tip the Scales and Dragonrage" icon that pops up?", so if you want to get to know the essential addons for new healers in Arena, you are at the right place. Here we give you the tools you need to begin tracking all the essential data in arenas by using add-ons - this is the first step to optimally trading cooldowns as well as outplaying your opponents as a Healer. 

Top 10 Best Dragonflight Addons For Healer Specs in Arena & Solo Shuffle

In this guide, we are going to take you through the 10 must-have addons for healing in Solo Shuffle or Arena. We dive the addons into two groups, the essential add-on group is the addons that will be used for tracking cooldowns Debuffs, and Buffs and the non-essential add-ons primarily use for quality of life customizing your UI like party frames and gathering some extra data, though they are non-essential, you 100% would not play without them.

Now that's going to be all for the default blizzard interface, let's start with the essential add-ons, you can open the addon window with Escape options and then select the addons tab at the top of the menu:

No. 1 - Ability Team Tracker

This addon allows you to track friendly cooldowns, you can pick and choose which ones are displayed and where, as a common theme throughout setting up these add-ons, you need to be careful because it's easy to track too many cooldowns so much so that you get overwhelmed. So specifically with the Ability Team Tracker, we suggest starting with just the essential defensive cooldowns for each class, and then as this addon becomes more natural in your awareness you can start adding in things like kick CC or maybe even offensive cooldowns.

The setup of this addon is really simple though, just attach it to the Blizzard Raid Frames and then adjust using the anchor offset X and anchor offset Y to get it to the perfect position. Also, we suggest using glow icons, so when an ability is activated it lights up and is easy to see, the easier it is to see things the better because there's a lot of information you're going to be tracking.

No. 2 - BigDebuffs

This addon is just plug-and-play so you don't need to adjust its settings at all. This addon shows the most important and debuffs on your friendly raid frames shows the most important buffs and debuffs on your unit frame and targeting frame. You also can have it set to show offensive active Buffs on enemy nameplates. There's a lot of customization you can do with all these addons though so please feel free to experiment.

No. 3 - Threat Plates

This is personally my favorite nameplate addon, it's visually simple and has a lot of customization that's pretty easy to use, granted nameplates are again subjective to your preference. 

Open Threat Plates, slash tptp, honestly even just the baseline of this is Pretty stinking good and then show enemy units players. And then this is the really important one which is totems, you're definitely going to want to show that Target-based transparency makes sure nothing is tracked and checked here. You don't want any of this stuff selected because it will make it so your target nameplate is like a thick color and then the non-selected targets are like a light transparent color. It just makes it hard to see who's who and where they are, this is actually an important one if you go to the health bar view up here at the top for names. You definitely want to make sure color by Target Mark is deselected that can be really confusing and then you're going to want to show debuffs on friendly, this is actually something really helpful here.

No. 4 - Omnibar

This is a classic addon that everyone knows about. This addon allows you to track cooldowns and place them neatly on a bar of your choice. We personally use it to track enemy kicks, CC and dispels. By keeping each of these categories on its own bar, it makes it easy to quickly glance over and see what they have on cooldown. You can also track offensive cooldowns with this, but instead, we use WeakAuras and GladiusEx to do so.

No. 5 - GladiusEx

This addon is all about enemy Arena frames, it shows you your enemies' ccdrs, it also shows their most important active Buffs are they currently under immunities and are they cc'd? You can also use it to track enemy cooldowns, it will also be able to see them casting and it will track their Trinkets. And the best part is it puts all this info into one densely packed area making it really easy to see what's going on with a quick glance.

No.6 - WeakAuras 

This addon seems really confusing at first, but as you get more familiar with it, it gets easier to use and its functionality and importance are undeniable allowing you to do things like track your most important bread and butter micro cooldowns and track active Buffs that influence your character's play style. We think arguably the most important function of WeakAuras is actually very simple all you have to do is import the Dragonflight mazarine CD's weak Aura, mess to set this up so that whenever the enemy uses a high-value cooldown like healing tide totem or death mark, text pops in the middle of your screen so you can immediately react as needed.

No. 7 -  Details

This is another plug-and-play addon, it's ready to go straight out of the box, and allows to track the damage and healing meters from your rounds. This is good for acquiring data and if you use the deflog feature it can be a great way to see who's doing those ridiculously huge crits, so you can properly complain about the right classes that need a nerf.

No. 8 - TrufiGCD

While we're talking about tracking our gameplay, we think it's worth mentioning TrufiGCD, this is the addon that streamers commonly use to show what abilities they're using in real-time. We think this addon is even really important to people who never plan to stream their gameplay, strictly because we find it very useful when reviewing our own gameplay.

No. 9 - Enhanced Raid Frames

This arguably could be on the list of essential addons because its functionality is so awesome but maybe it's a bit of a niche pick depending on your class. The main feature we use this addon for is it allows you to pick and choose specific Buffs and Debuffs and choose where they're displayed on your party frames. You also can use this addon to further increase the scale of your RAID frames beyond the standard Blizzard functionality by increasing the raid frame scale.

No. 10 - Sort Group

This is the epitome of quality of life because we have our targeting macro set to Mouse wheel up for Party 1, Mouse wheel down for Party 2, and finally, click the mouse wheel to Target ourselves. You probably hate when you visually get set at the top of the party frames or in the middle because it just feels counterintuitive for you, when you see yourself at the top you want to scroll up on your mouse wheel to select yourself. Now, this might not be a problem for some of you but if it is Sort Group is awesome. You can set it to have you always on the bottom of your party frames that way you always know that the person on the top of the party frames is a mouse scroll up and the person in the middle of the party frames is a mouse scroll down and yourself is always just pressing the mouse wheel button down.

Settings To Do Before Adding Healer Addons To WoW Dragonflight

Now before adding these addons to your game, there are just a few quick settings you should make in the default Blizzard interface. You can think of this as setting a strong Foundation because after you get the Blizzard settings right all the addons will fall smoothly into place, so unfortunately we have to start here:

• Change Party Frames - Go escape edit mode and then select your party frames, make sure you've selected use Raid Style Party Frames, this will make it so you can see debuffs and Buffs on your party frames in Arena. Additionally, we suggest dragging the Fram Width and Height to their maximum size to give the most room possible for important information to be displayed.

• Change Raid Frames - Go to escape options and then interface, now scroll down and select display class colors and show debuffs and make sure display only dispellable debuffs is not selected.

• Change Combat - Unchecking the personal resource display because you'll already be seeing your health and mana on your unit frame, as well as your health being displayed in your party frame so it's more important to have this screen space freed up for something else. Also under a combat tab make sure you have lots of control effects selected as well.

Well, those are the 10 add-ons we believe any new healer needs in order to be proficient when starting out, now actually getting them all set up is going to take time but will benefit your gameplay a lot!