Do you still need ElvUI in WoW Dragonflight?

World of Warcraft is a well-established 18-year-old game that comes with a series of preset settings that are more than fitting for the game’s fantasy and lore. Although the game offers tons of useful assets like toggling nameplates, binding your keys to your likings, customizing your raid frames, and so much more, the WoW community has always yearned for more useful tools to not only customize their UI but also to help them with increasingly demanding dungeon and raid encounters. This led to the birth of addons, additional tools that serve different purposes—from reducing the number of clicks during intensive auction house sessions to warning you about the incoming major boss mechanic.

For years, the favorite addon in WoW has easily been ElvUI. ElvUI has allowed generations and generations of gamers to customize their UI in both retail and Classic WoW. Even though Blizzard Entertainment has been updating the default UI, ElvUI has stayed popular in the community since it allowed you to customize almost everything, from raid frames to the general appearance of your UI.

On Oct. 25, Blizzard launched the Dragonflight pre-patch that, among other things, brought HUD UI revamp. This, expectedly, sparked discussion in the community if ElvUI is now rendered useless since Blizzard’s iteration of HUD UI customizations principally functions in the same manner as ElvUI. So, you’re probably wondering if it is time for you to finally let go of ElvUI and move on to the Blizzard-created HUD UI editing system. To help you decide, we’ll discuss the biggest differences between the two and conclude this with a final verdict that talks about if you really need ElvUI now. 

What is ElvUI?

ElvUI is a WoW addon designed to help you customize your UI to your preferences. The entire point of ElvUI as an addon is to give you as many customizable features in one place and, therefore, reduce the number of needed addons. Although ElvUI has been handy for moving the elements around your screen, setting it up for the first time is definitely a challenge, especially if you’re not well-versed in how addons function. Still, the sheer amount of customizations the addon supports is simply stupefying–totem tracking, pet tracking, mini-map customizations, and so much more. 

Blizzard-introduced HUD UI changes 

At first glance, the default UI received a complete overhaul. Blizzard’s goal with this overhaul is to modernize the current UI to be up to the standards of modern WoW and finally give players the ability to customize their UI via game settings. 

So, you can now enter Edit Mode and, similarly to ElvUI, move every element freely. If you need help with learning exactly you can customize your UI, you can find a detailed guide here.

Other than the ability to create your own unique UI that is specifically designed for your needs, Blizzard also introduced an option to merge all of your bag windows into one bag. On top of that, Blizzard included an icon selection for macros, equipment sets, and guild banks that now supports a drag-and-drop system. There’s also a new mouseover cursor for NPCs that offer Campaign Quests. Thanks to this change, you can easily recognize the mandatory quests you need to complete to continue with your Campaign progress. 

The biggest differences between WoW UI and ElvUI

Dragonflight’s Edit Mode is, on the one hand, easy and extremely intuitive to use since all you need to do to start editing is open your settings by pressing the Escape button and then clicking on Edit Mode. Once you turn on Edit Mode, you’ll see movable action bars and additional options you can toggle if you want to include them. Besides that, whenever you click on the movable element, a window will pop up with additional options to help you customize that element even more. If you’re not that well-versed in customizing your UI, Blizzard has created two default layouts you can use. And if you’re a veteran in that field, you can always create a new profile from scratch and edit it. As a final touch to all these changes, Blizzard added a Search bar to your settings so that you can easily navigate through all of your options and find a specific feature you’ve been looking for.

On the other hand, ElvUI is packed with customization options that give you the freedom to customize every aspect of the UI you ever imagined. Since ElvUI has tons of features you can edit, it definitely demands more advanced knowledge of UIs to use it. So, it’s definitely not beginner friendly addon. Although you can find a lot of ElvUI customization guides on the Internet, it defeats the purpose of the whole easy-to-use-and-easy-to-customize spirit. Other than that, ElvUI is one of the biggest addons you’ll find whenever visiting CurseForge on any similar website providing addons for WoW. Since ElvUI is such a big addon, it often tanks your computer performance, making the game slower and unreactive at times. Even though you can get used to this, it’s still one of the biggest problems this addon has, largely because no one likes FPS drops or unreactive UI.

Final verdict-Do you still need ElvUI?

Unquestionably, both Blizzard’s and ElvUI’s UI edits have their flaws and advantages. So, with this in mind, giving a definitive final verdict that explicitly states which one is better is impossible since it will largely depend on your preferences. On the one hand, Blizzard’s UI is easy to use and understand, and it allows you to customize the basic elements of your UI. On the other hand, ElvUI offers a wider variety of customizations at the price of tanking your performances.

So, if you used only some of the features ElvUI offers, if you’re new to the game, or if you don’t like to over-customize your UI, Blizzard’s UI editor is definitely a way to go for you. 

And if you simply can’t part with ElvUI and adore the sheer amount of options it offers, we advise you to stick to this incredible addon that eased your life throughout expansions since the Blizzard UI editor can’t offer you such a wide variety of options.