penfold1992 wrote:
i just dont understand what addons are in terms of what they do for wow.
i dont play WoW
Think of them as add-ons like in firefox.
Most of the useful addons take whatever that's already available in game and presents them in a much better way. For example, without any addons, you can track the amount of damage you're dealing on a mob by just adding up the numbers you see that pop up. It's a very tedious process that hardly anyone would want to do for each mob or boss. There are addons that take advantage of this information and can do the calculations for you, and can even compare your DPS to other people, be it on the same party, or on the same raid group.
It's not cheating as Blizzard allows them to a certain extent:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/policy/ui.html