Elkano's BuffBars
EBB provides groups of (mainly) statusbar style indicators to show (de)buffs currently affecting your char or some other units (focus, pet and target). For the player, it can also show indicators for temporary enchants placed on their weapons.
For over 20 years, EBB has been a mainstay for both long-term and returning players (at least some) and reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
Two-in-One Download
For Classic WoW, the addon uses its older 2.x code base, for Mainline WoW (Retail and Forever) it is now based on Blizzard's AuraContainer; all in the same download file.
2.x based on UnitAura
Version 2.x was a total recode, initially based on the Ace2 framework, later ported to Ace3, which became necessary in order to support some of the longtime wanted and suggested features. It has served well for ~19 years (since June '07) and made it possible to show different groups of bars which can be configured in many ways. Each group can be assigned an individual look and filter settings. After setting up a group, its anchor can be hidden by alt-left clicking a bar or the anchor itself in order to lock the group in place.
Due to changes Blizzard made with WoW 4.x it's no longer possible to cancel buffs without the use of secure frames.
EBB v2 thus limits cancelling of buffs to out-of-fight since using SecureAuraHeader would have required a major code restructuring.
This will be coming in a later version.
3.x based on AuraContainer
This is once again a complete artisanal rewrite, which became necessary due to Blizzard making auras secret in combat. This also gave me the push to include some features I already wanted but never included before. And you can cancel buffs in combat again.
Layouts can now be shared between groups, support multi-line/-column alignments, and give you way more options than before. But it can also just look the same as it used to.
What did suffer from the change of underlying technology are some of the filter options, as Blizzard has intentionally broken those.
And I haven't added localization to v3, yet. So most texts are in English besides a few strings reused from the game client.
Settings
The settings can be accessed via chat (/ebb), LDB icon, or simply via the game settings.
Other Infos
In order to get additional bar textures and fonts for EBB simply install e.g. SharedMedia which is available for download under https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/sharedmedia
If you have bug reports or feature request, create a ticket: https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/elkbuffbars/issues
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Posted Feb 10, 2026In reply to StrangelandTV:
Turns out that when I did the partial fix fr sorting, I had a small c&p upsi 😅
Debuffs should be working again in r218.
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Posted Feb 11, 2026In reply to Elkano: cool thanks, looks to be working now. Are there issues in combat though? I don't seem to get any buffs or debuffs working properly when in combat. Either don't see new ones or existing ones are just the wrong time.
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Posted Feb 4, 2026so happy to see updates, thanks bud
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Posted Feb 3, 2026I keep getting this error on login and the addon doesn't work.
1x ElkBuffBars/EBB_BarGroup.secrets.lua:39: attempt to perform indexed assignment on local 'ElkBuffBars' (a nil value)
Locals:
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Posted Feb 5, 2026In reply to Toptek:
That would indicate one of the files didn't load correctly.
Was there another error shown? especially regarding ElkBuffBars.lua
Are you using the normal version with embedded libraries (some of the libraries wont load as stand-alone addons anymore in midnight as they weren't updated but still work fine embedded)?
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Posted Feb 3, 2026Would there be a way to put time remaining in to minutes / seconds as quickly looking its a pain to work out how long left currently :)
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Posted Feb 3, 2026In reply to Twist3d6907:
Still waiting on Blizzard to implement means for formatting secret times.
It's the best I could give you at the moment ...
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Posted Feb 1, 2026I'm so glad Elkano's still the best :-)
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Posted Jan 30, 2026TBC-Anniversary
22x ElkBuffBars/ElkBuffBars.lua:385: attempt to index field 'db' (a nil value)
[tail call]: ?
[ElkBuffBars/ElkBuffBars.lua]:385: in function 'OnProfileEnable'
[ElkBuffBars/ElkBuffBars.lua]:305: in function <ElkBuffBars/ElkBuffBars.lua:304>
[C]: ?
[Ace3/AceAddon-3.0-13/AceAddon-3.0.lua]:66: in function <Ace3/AceAddon-3.0/AceAddon-3.0.lua:61>
[Ace3/AceAddon-3.0-13/AceAddon-3.0.lua]:523: in function 'EnableAddon'
[Ace3/AceAddon-3.0-13/AceAddon-3.0.lua]:626: in function <Ace3/AceAddon-3.0/AceAddon-3.0.lua:611>
Locals:
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Posted Jan 30, 2026In reply to westi_de:
22x ElkBuffBars/ElkBuffBars.lua:217: attempt to call global 'GetAddOnMetadata' (a nil value)
[tail call]: ?
[ElkBuffBars/ElkBuffBars.lua]:217: in function <ElkBuffBars/ElkBuffBars.lua:213>
[C]: ?
[Ace3/AceAddon-3.0-13/AceAddon-3.0.lua]:66: in function <Ace3/AceAddon-3.0/AceAddon-3.0.lua:61>
[Ace3/AceAddon-3.0-13/AceAddon-3.0.lua]:494: in function 'InitializeAddon'
[Ace3/AceAddon-3.0-13/AceAddon-3.0.lua]:619: in function <Ace3/AceAddon-3.0/AceAddon-3.0.lua:611>
Locals:
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Posted Feb 3, 2026In reply to westi_de:
Use the r215 beta for TBC
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Posted Jan 30, 2026In combat!!!
331x Blizzard_FrameXMLUtil/AuraUtil.lua:53: bad argument #1 to 'unpack' (table expected, got secret)
[tail call]: ?
[C]: in function 'unpack'
[Blizzard_FrameXMLUtil/AuraUtil.lua]:53: in function <Blizzard_FrameXMLUtil/AuraUtil.lua:33>
[tail call]: ?
[ElkBuffBars/ElkBuffBars.lua]:1190: in function 'ScanData_UnitAura'
[ElkBuffBars/ElkBuffBars.lua]:954: in function <ElkBuffBars/ElkBuffBars.lua:951>
[C]: ?
[Ace3/AceBucket-3.0-4/AceBucket-3.0.lua]:69: in function <Ace3/AceBucket-3.0/AceBucket-3.0.lua:67>
[Ace3/AceBucket-3.0-4/AceBucket-3.0.lua]:83: in function 'func'
[Ace3/AceTimer-3.0-17/AceTimer-3.0.lua]:57: in function <Ace3/AceTimer-3.0/AceTimer-3.0.lua:50>
Locals:
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Posted Jan 27, 2026# Status Update 2
I've just uploaded an initial Alpha that should no longer throw errors.
As expected, this comes at the cost of a lot of features.
So you might want to copy your profile to a new one and disable e.g. some of your groups if you relied heavily on filtering.
You can grab the Alpha here: https://www.wowace.com/projects/elkbuffbars/files/7537041
But make sure to read the changelog 🫣
Regarding the coffee, while I appreciate the sentiment, in this troubling times there are likely still a lot of people near you that are way worse off than I am for various reasons (maybe even you yourselves or some of your loved ones). So please put a smile on their faces instead, first. 🥰
On a side note, I'll likely not have much time to work on this for the next week or so.
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Posted Jan 28, 2026In reply to Elkano:
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I temporarily vibe-coded patches that fixed the sorting for me again and changed the timing so it shows me hours, minutes, seconds in the condensed format, seems to work well for now, but will look forward to your proper beautiful fixes eventually instead of these ugly hacks I have now! :)
This is the addon I almost missed the most when I was forced to use the default aura icons haha
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Posted Jan 31, 2026In reply to ahnberg: Oh go on then, care to share this information with the rest of the class? :D
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Posted Feb 3, 2026In reply to wellhyper: This would be nice :P
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Posted Jan 27, 2026Appreciate the status update, thanks Elkano! Looking forward to using your great addon again.
Thanks so much for the time you're putting into it.
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Posted Jan 25, 2026Really appreciate all your hard work in continuing to support this wonderful addon.
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Posted Jan 26, 2026In reply to Johnny_Utah71: I completely agree. <3
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Posted Jan 24, 2026# Status Update regarding 12.x / Midnight
As I have written in r215's change notes, that file is NOT ready for Midnight, it just came with the TOCs to allow loading it. And any time there are secrets involved (and a few others e.g. debuff colors) it will break and error.
I'm currently trying to do some initial fixes to have a version that will at least not error (e.g. in combat), but the whole _secret_ stuff can be a pain.
It seems that my current local development version is working (or at least not erroring) but I had to disable large parts of the functionality to get to that point. There are also still a few aspects that block me from releasing it as-is right now, but I'm working on it ...
This will also only be a temporary quick fix as the current way the addon works would no longer all for any sorting or filtering at all, even not the new means Blizzard gave us.
I intend to do a partial rewrite and restructuring of the code later (in order to keep classic on the legacy code and move 12.x onto the newer APIs), that should allow me to use Blizzard's new _tools_, but that will take a while. Hopefully before Midnight releases so I can also play... 🫣
Sorry that the addon is currently not in a usable state (not the first time in its 20 years though 😅), we'll get there!
Thank you for your attention on this matter 🤪