Coloured Enemy Nameplates

Improve combat awareness with this lightweight addon that enhances the default Blizzard nameplates with custom colours for boss and lieutenant targets, mana-using enemies, and tank and pet threat, providing clear visual prioritisation in combat.

Nameplates for DPS/Healers:

• Brown: Lieutenant: elite or rare enemies slightly above player level
• Blue: Hostile units that use mana
• Purple: All other enemy nameplates (would be default red)

Nameplates for Tanks:

• Brown: Has secure threat on a Lieutenant (elite or rare enemies slightly above player level)
• Blue: Has secure threat on a hostile units that use mana
• Greeen: Other units that you have secure threat on
• Orange: Threat warning / losing threat
• Red: Lost threat

Customisation options

• Use the defaut colours, or pick your own. 

Context aware

• Choose when to apply re-colours:
  • Always
  • Just in dungeons, raids, delves and other instances
  • Never

Other options

• Non-target nameplate dimming; Set non-target nameplate visibility between 0 - 100.
• Display tank-style threat coloring on enemies even if you’re DPS or Healer.

Why this addon?

I’m a simple person. In a dungeon I want to easily see who the “BIG” enemy is so I can target it and let cleave handle the rest. I like Blizzard’s default nameplates, but wanted an easy way to see priority targets in Mythic+ without replacing the entire nameplate system.

Designed to be simple, lightweight, and minimal using simple logic to check a units level and/or threat status relative to the player. Ideally Blizzard will add this functioality natively in future!

Can you recolour casters?

Kinda? I'm tagging enemies who have a mana bar so that they can be re-coloured but this won't catch all casters. Bigger/better nameplate addons like Plater or Platynator are your best option for advanced features, they use more complex scripting and logic to identify casters and other special cases. I’m intentionally keeping this project simple and using simple stuff Blizzard officially supports. 

Can you add my requested feature?

Probably not - but leave me a comment. I had ideas for caster recolouring & highlighting mobs based on other conditions, but its mostly restricted by the Midnight 12.x API. The ways around that involve hacky solutions which I don’t want to build or maintain. If Blizzard opens this up in the API later, I’m happy to revisit it.

Can I use your code?

If you can make this better, go for it and drop me a link! I've learned a lot recently, but I’m no LUA/addon wizard and I’m sure it could be improved. This was built with Lua basics, digging through the WoW API wiki, Claude and ChatGPT to fill in the gaps and a whole lot of trial and LUA errors.

Attribution is apreciated, or if you’re feeling generous buy me a coffee.