Update your addons for patch 11.0.1 before you play World of Warcraft tonight

The World of Warcraft pre-patch is extremely nigh, and no doubt a lot of you are raring to jump into your first taste of The War Within. However, if you use a lot of addons to modify your game’s user interface (or any addons), please remember that you’ve got another step to go through: updating your addons! Today’s patch is a major patch jump — from 10.x to 11.x — and with that it is guaranteed that your old addons will be marked as out of date, and almost guaranteed that a great deal of them will stop working, as Blizzard usually pushes big changes to the addon API (the way that addons talk to World of Warcraft and vice-versa) every time there’s a big patch.

Luckily, a lot of big addon developers have already been working night and day on getting ready for release, because they can develop their addon using the beta as a test bench — but there’s still no guarantee that something won’t be wonky or broken due to last minute changes (or addons that didn’t get updated). There’s also no guarantee that addons will get updated right away, so you might have to wait until later this week to use that one certain addon because it just hasn’t been updated yet.

If you experience any weirdness in the game — well, beyond the usual weirdness you expect on a major patch release day — try disabling your addons first, then turn them back on a few at a time until you can run down the culprit. Speaking from personal experience, I once had an addon designed to do something as innocuous as quality-of-life tweaks to the chat window break during a major patch release and suddenly none of my action bar keybinds worked at all.

In fact, major releases are the perfect time to do an addon clean sweep. Do you really still need all those addons? Are there some you can live without, as Blizzard keeps bringing more and more popular addon features into the base UI? Think of it like spring cleaning — you cleaned out your inventory, quest log, and maybe even your bank; why not try a fresh start with your addons?