Much of the information that you can get from an addon is either difficult to get due to human error or embarrassment, or would simply cause more Vent clutter than is necessary, leading to important callouts being missed.
Administrative
EPGPLootmaster: For those of you that use EPGP, EPGPLootmaster is a graphical way to streamline the loot process without having to maintain a detailed spreadsheet. It provides windows for the raiders (giving them a box that looks more like the Need/Greed system they’re familiar with) and a window for the master looter showing who bid what, what each person is wearing in that slot, and automatically sorts their names by available EP. Raiders don’t have to install EPGPLootmaster to use the system, but they do need to install it if they want to see the graphical interface. Otherwise, they will have to whisper the master looter with their choice and the master looter portion of the addon behaves as normal according to what was whispered.
RaidInviteOrganizer: This will allow you to automate some parts of forming a raid. You can automatically invite people via a checklist and click “Mass Invite”, which invites them all and automatically converts to a raid, or you can choose the Keyword Invite, which allows them to basically ask for an invite by whispering you a particular keyword. If you choose the Keyword invite, once you’re whispered that keyword, the addon will automatically invite that person, convert to raid, and so on.
Buffs, Debuffs, and Cooldowns
One of the most important components in defeating an encounter is keeping track of things like cooldown usage and who’s buffed. See this post about consumables to be reminded why buffing does matter.
RaidBuffStatus: It’s always important to see who’s slacking on their buffs, who isn’t fed, and who forgot to use their flask. RaidBuffStatus can report in /raid, /party, or on a dashboard only you can see what’s missing on whom. It reports more than just food and flasks; it can report on missing auras and seals, who’s AFK, and even provide tank taunt warnings during the encounter.
It is ready to use with no configuration necessary, and will only detect buffs missing when the composition has it available (for instance, it won’t check for Blessing of Might if there’s no Paladin in the raid).
Hermes: A personal favorite; this is a cooldown or “raid wall” tracker. Sometimes it’s hard to coordinate whose cooldown is up when in Vent, and it causes a lot of Vent clutter, especially when one person uses it too early or too late. Hermes can help you keep track of everything, even if your raiders don’t have Hermes installed. It has several methods of display: it can show cooldowns both available and unavailable and their cooldown duration if unavailable, it can show only what’s available (cooldown is ready, in range, not dead or DCed), or it can show only what’s unavailable and how long until it is ready. It can show you in the form of sleek bars (which I use) or it can show icons. It can be put anywhere on the screen and resized/recolored to your liking. It can track any spell, and it can even be set up to track things like trinkets or other custom cooldowns.
Since I began raid leading, I found Hermes to be incredibly helpful in cooldown management, especially for planning cooldown rotations or for when cooldowns aren’t used quite as planned (someone dies, DCs, uses it at the wrong time, etc). It also saves me from having to memorize the cooldown duration of each ability and which raider is bringing which cooldown. This is especially handy for cooldowns that you must spec into, as Hermes will scan talent trees for those abilities.
Decursive: Debuff tracking and removal. As a raid leader, you have enough to worry about, so if you’re also tasked with dispels, this addon can come in handy. It takes up an extremely small portion of screen real estate and can also help with CCing mind-controlled raid members as well, allowing for easy targeting and choosing the appropriate CC for the class.
Boss Mods
Boss mods: our favorite get-out-of-the-bad addons. I require DBM or its equivalent in my raids, and I strongly suggest that you require it from your raiders. I don’t care if the rest is stock UI; with the complexity of encounters nowadays having timers is an extremely strong edge in competitive raiding.
Deadly Boss Mods: The de facto standard of boss mods. Deadly Boss Mods (known better as simply DBM) provides boss ability timers, warning messages and sounds to get out of the bad quickly or OMG INTERRUPT THIS NOW NOOB, and screen flashes to get your attention to important events. It is very customizable and can even be used to create custom timers (called “pizza timers”) which can be viewed either by yourself or shared with the entire raid—handy for break timers.
GTFO: This is a “don’t stand in the bad” addon that lives up to its name and provides obvious sounds and visual aids to get out of the fire (or lava, or void zone, or death glare). In most cases, you’ll be warned before you start taking damage. This addon is best suited to newer raiders whose situational awareness isn’t that stellar, or for people whose computer graphics are turned lower, as some stuff to avoid isn’t always visible or clearly visible for these people. GTFO can be used as a complement to DBM or BigWigs.
BigWigs: This is a direct competitor to DBM. Like DBM, it has sound and visual warnings, ability timers, screen shake (as opposed to flash), and things of this nature. It, too, has pizza timers, so don’t let that awesome ability sway your decision on which addon to use. Personally, I haven’t encountered a large enough difference between BigWigs and DBM for me to suggest one over the other and it’s largely personal preference in appearance and configuration at this point.
TargetCharms: This is a lightweight addon that eliminates the need for that annoying little Blizzard raid panel on the side of your UI. It gives you quick access to world markers (those glowy beams you place on the floor), ready check and raid marks (skull, X, square, etc). It can be resized and reshaped to fit into almost any custom UI.
Who Stood in the Fire?
A crucial part of leading a successful raid is performance evaluation. Luckily for us, there are a few addons to give us the information we need to make informed decisions on how to improve the raid’s performance.
Recount: Performance addon that monitors an extremely wide variety of things related to raid combat: damage done and to whom, healing done and to whom, absorbs, dispels, deaths, damage taken, interrupts and so on. It can tell you how much of a player’s damage is coming from its pet, step-by-step breakdown of exactly how a player died and the healing they did or didn’t receive before their death, how much of someone’s healing is coming from X ability, and so on.
In Wrath, Recount used to have an issue with showing absorbs due to the way the combat log displayed them, leading Discipline priests to appear much lower on the healing charts relative to other classes. This has since been fixed and all absorbs now properly show both under Healing Done and the special Absorbs menu.Please see this guide for details on how to use Recount to its fullest as a raid leader.
Skada: A direct competitor to Recount and performs almost all of the same functionality. Unlike Recount, however, Skada uses a lot of separate modules that need to be installed individually rather than having the whole package at once. This is both good and bad; it’s good for memory, because it’s only recording the components you need, but it’s a fair bit of addon maintenance having to manually install and update every module within Skada. A lot of comments I hear about Skada rave about its memory efficiency (and to be fair, Recount can be a hog) and its visual appeal. It has a more streamlined look to it than Recount.
EnsidiaFails: This addon gives messages in raid or party chat when someone fails a mechanic. This can be anything from standing in the bad, to failing to interrupt, to not moving from a mechanic, and so on. It has three methods of reporting: during combat only, after combat only, or both during and after combat. The default method of reporting is both during and after combat. It will report both fatal (see: Engulfing Flames on Ragnaros) and non-fatal (see: Brushfire on Alysrazor) failures.
I hesitated to install this for a long time, but now that I have, I’ve noticed my raiders despise being mocked by an addon and correct the problem much more quickly than having me manually notice each fail. It is also helpful in those instances where the situation ends up being ‘wtf he died in 2 seconds’.
Fatality: This mod is similar to EnsidiaFails; however, it only reports what people died to. This is suitable for people who want EnsidiaFails style functionality, but with less spam. It can be configured for use with almost any channel, and will report the very last hit someone received before they died.
Healing Addons: Not Just for Healers Anymore
Raid frames should be a core part of a raid leader’s UI. They allow you to see who’s alive and who’s not, what the average health of the raid is at (and therefore if any cooldowns are needed) and things like that. However, while the current Blizzard raid frames are certainly an improvement over their former incarnation, I find the default frames to be woefully lacking in resizability, customizability, and buff/debuff tracking.
Therefore, it’s time to break out the healing mods. The mods I suggest are intended to replace the standard Blizzard frames, not to be used side-by-side (see my rant about UI below).
‘Healing addons? But I’m a DPS!’ you may think. The reason why I suggest healing addons is largely because of customizability. All major healing addons allow you to see debuffs related to the encounter or the player, any buffs that you’ve opted to show, current health, incoming heals if enabled, personal cooldown usage (such as Shield Wall) if enabled, and things of this nature. They are highly configurable, flexible, and can have their appearance altered to fit well in almost any UI.
Some even allow the use of DPS abilities and debuff-cleansing functionalities similar to Decursive through them. For instance, Healbot will allow you to use Misdirection or Righteous Defense through its frames in the same manner as if you were casting a heal on that person.
The three major healing addons currently out there are Grid, Healbot and Vuhdo. Which one is better is often hotly contested among healers and subject to lots of personal opinion, so I’ll try to keep my rundown of the different addons brief.
Grid: This addon presents its raid frames in neat little squares, and usually shows the frames black when the target is at full health, with their class color showing the deficit. Grid is much like Skada in that a lot of functionality comes in individual modules which have to be installed separately.
Healbot: This addon is what I personally use for healing. It is simple to configure, makes buff/debuff tracking easy, and can be adjusted for use on almost any character (see the earlier example of DPS and tanking abilities). It can also track raid buffs, and allow you to apply them to the raid via the frames if you enable it.
VuhDo: This displays raid frames similar to either Healbot or Grid depending on how you configure it. It is ridiculously customizable; in fact, the addon authors added a wizard to simplify the process for new users because initial set-up was overwhelming.
A Side Note About Your UI
Part of the job of the raid leader is to be aware of as much of what’s going on during a raid as humanly possible. Therefore, if your UI looks like this: 
…chances are good that you’re not really seeing everything that you could or should be seeing.
Instead, now that you’ve installed 50 new addons, try to arrange your UI so that you have as much screen room as you can manage, like this:
Notice how you can still see everything important, and yet you have much more visibility as to what’s actually happening in the raid.
You will have to make special considerations, of course, if you don’t have a widescreen monitor. My first suggestion is to play at the highest screen resolution you can comfortably view. Then, zoom your camera out to get a good view of the raid, and finally, try to resize your addons so that they take up the smallest amount of room possible while still doing the job they were installed for. A raid frame addon does you no good if the entire thing is 100×100 pixels wide and you can’t read anything on it.
I hope this guide—although lengthy, I admit!—has proven useful to you. Thanks for reading! -eternal
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