ExpansionGlow

Every item in your bags and bank gets a colour based on how many expansions old it is, so you can tell current-expansion loot from leftover clutter without opening a single tooltip.

How items are graded

Items are sorted into four tiers, measured against whatever the current expansion happens to be:

Current-expansion items are left unmarked. Your bags stay quiet, and only the older items draw the eye.

Because the tiers are worked out relative to the live expansion rather than being hardcoded, everything re-grades itself the day a new expansion launches. Nothing to update, nothing to reset.

Or one colour per expansion

If four tiers is too coarse, switch to per-expansion colouring and every past expansion gets its own colour instead. Battle for Azeroth, Legion, Warlords and everything older stop sharing a single "old stuff" colour and become individually identifiable.

The list builds itself from the expansions the client knows about and uses the game's own expansion names, so it stays correct and extends itself as new ones ship. Current-expansion items stay unmarked either way.

Two styles

• Tint — washes the item icon with the colour.
• Outline — draws a coloured border around the slot and leaves the icon completely untouched.

Options

An in-game panel under Escape → Options → AddOns → ExpansionGlow, or /expglow:

• pick between age tiers and per-expansion colouring
• a colour picker for every tier and every expansion
• tint opacity
• outline width and distance from the slot
• switch any individual tier or expansion off
• reset to defaults

The panel only shows the controls that apply to what you have selected, so the expansion list and the outline sliders appear when they actually do something.

Slash commands cover everything if you prefer typing — /expglow help lists them.

Where it works

Blizzard's own bags and bank need no extra addon:

• the default bags, both separate and combined
• the character bank and the warband bank

Replacement bag UIs are supported individually:

• Baganator
• Bagnon
• BetterBags
• ArkInventory
• ElvUI's bags and bank

Each one gets its own small file that does nothing at all unless that addon is loaded, so you pay nothing for a bag addon you do not use. Other bag addons built on Blizzard's item buttons are picked up automatically.

AdiBags is not supported, as it has been unmaintained for some time.

Built to stay out of the way

ExpansionGlow draws only textures it creates itself. It never touches the item quality border, upgrade arrows, the new-item flash, search overlays, or corner widgets belonging to other addons. The tint is drawn above the icon art but underneath the quality border, item overlays and the stack count, so nothing already on your item buttons gets covered up.

Each item's expansion is looked up once and remembered between sessions, so opening your bags does not re-query the client for items it has already seen.

A note on untagged items

The game reports no expansion at all for a large number of items. In tier mode those read as "four or more expansions back", which is broadly true. In per-expansion mode they are indistinguishable from genuine Classic items and land under Classic, which is a more specific claim than the data supports — the options panel says so next to the list. If it turns out noisy either way, switch that one colour off and the rest keep working.