In order for players to make decisions, they need information. Most of that information comes from intuitively moving our cursor above various objects or people in WoW. We get a box that pops up showing things like name, faction and hostility level. The tooltip can be customized with various addons to show even more information then the default UI gives us.

Mailtips

This is like the preview option in normal mail clients like Outlook where the entire message doesn’t have to be opened. Are you expecting stacks of items often? A simple mouseover of your incoming mail displays the total amount of each item attached.

Corpse (also known as _Corpse)

 

For the corpse campers out there, have you always wondered if that player has logged off or is just waiting around for you to leave? Check out Corpse! It doesn’t use the /who command. Instead, it utilizes the friend system to detect if the corpse of a player is offline, online or AFK. In battlegrounds, it’ll report class and factional information on mouseovers of corpses.

lolTip

lolTip’s another tippy addon that features class color names, levels (along with the color of difficulty), talents (if possible) and who that mob or player is targeting. It displays health values but it doesn’t appear to show the level of their mana.

The only downside to lolTip is that there’s no in game configuration option. Everything has to be managed outside of the game as you have to manually edit the core.lua in order to change certain settings.

TipTop

I used this for about a week before switching to TipTac. It has a strong border around it that can distinguish the class of your target (very neat feature I like). As with some of the mentioned addons, there’s also the ability to customize the background, colors and textures of the status bar. If your target is AFK or DND, it will display that if possible. Rare mobs will also be signaled.

CowTip

This is another tool tip addon with powerful customization features (just look at the different ways it can be styled). It’s not married to the mouse either as it can be locked onto any location on your screen. You can attach conditions on when to hide and when to show the tooltip. What’s unique about CowTip is that it utilizes the DogTag addon library system. Because of this, it allows an unbelievable amount of indepth customization. If your target is at full health, you can display the actual number (like 105.7k). If the target isn’t at full health, you can display the deficit (-45.3k). Or if the target uses energy, rage or runic power, display the values as a percentage. If the target uses mana, display the actual numeric amount.

TipTac

This is my preferred tooltip addon. It displays an amazing amount of information in compact space. Sometimes it can be difficult to separate the relevant from the irrelevant. On players, it’ll display buffs and debuffs with the rough time left above the frame (which can be customized). It’ll show health and mana among other important information. On bosses, it’ll show the health, the target and who is targeting it. Yes, you can anchor it to your mouse or to a certain location your UI.