Assuming nothing that breaks the TOS, but are there any UI/map/QOL mods you swear by? Anything that'd make life easier for newer or returned players. It would be amazing if there was something that'd improve weird FPS lag I get at times, but I feel like that's an engine issue since my PC is quite good. Something to clean up the text boxes would be nice. Hard to read NPC chat when it's flooded with so much other nonsense. Map improvements, targeting improvements, etc. Heck, even graphical updates if that's a thing. Like texture packs.
UI mods are a thing. I use a few of them to get rid of the extra "tabs" and use the classic spell gems. They are a double edged sword because they get broken and cause problems loading the game. They are also due to be migrated to a new system over the course of the next year. You can tweak the in game graphics settings and turn some things like "grass" and "shadows" off as well as spell effects,etc. Press control + O (options) and explore the display tab and advanced display button. First thing I would explore is creating a few new windows ( or tabs ) and using the filter ( right click the window title ) to send specific types of information to different windows. You can also filter out a lot of stuff by just turning it off. Press control + O (options) -> chat and turn off stuff you don't want to see. Other than that there really aren't any "mods" like you would have in WoW.
Some of the text box filtering I dont fully understand. For example, I kept trying to move notifications like, "Kobold leaps at you, growling as it attacks" but it seemed stuck in general chat options. There has to be a cleaner way to set it up so I can read NPC dialogue without having to sift through a ton of other notifications. As for shadows/grass/graphics, why would you turn all that off if you have a powerful PC? Does the engine itself just not handle it well?
I have four main chat windows. #1 - Guild, tell, ooc, raid, emotes, etc. This is the one I pay the most attention to. #2 - my hits/damage against others. I set it to show just numbers. Its a tall / skinny window. #3 - spam window. this is were I redirect all the stuff I can't or don't want to turn off by don't want to see. #4 - the everything else window which has stuff like others hitting me, damage on me, npc chat, etc. I raid so I turn all all the eye candy I don't need because I want to have he highest possible frame rate / lowest lag possible. I also will parse raid DPS and look at raid performance, emotes, etc. which is why I have a "spam" window that takes the stuff I want logged, but I don't care about seeing.
I believe those notifications all go to the say filter (though it's been awhile). There is no way to separate those. Once you've figured out which filters have which text in them, you can choose to turn off many of them, or change their colours in the options window (Options --> Chat tab). Some of the filters are well-sorted, and some (Say, Other, etc) are badly sorted with no way to split the nonsense from the stuff you want to see. It's been my longstanding opinion that everything in the Other filter should be split into their own filters, or moved to more appropriate filters and it should be killed - but... the devs continue to let it live on. Turning off DPS filters will affect your DPS parsing (see Kizant's parser below); most people simply move them to a spam window like Windance suggests. I'd also suggest turning on timestamps in your chat windows (there's Timestamps options in the right click menu when looking at chat filters). As for grass and graphics, if you have a powerful PC it's fine. As for shadows, they were badly implemented and cause a ridiculous amount of lag. 99% of the player base plays with those off for very good reasons. As Windance pointed out, many older UI mods are broken and don't function. We're slated to have a new UI engine to test any day now with a port from the current engine to the new engine being performed through the rest of the year. If you're curious about UI mods, most are found here: https://www.eqinterface.com/ For maps, people tend to either use Brewalls' (https://www.eqmaps.info/) and/or Goodurdens' (Good's Maps Pack). You can have both installed: EQ Folder --> Maps --> Brewall folder with map files; EQ Folder --> Maps --> Goodurden folder with map files) and swap between them in-game through a dropbox on the map window. With exception to custom target rings, available on EQInterface, and setting your own target keys in the Options Window --> Keys tab, targeting improvements are only available in programs that violate TOS. All of the graphics utilities that I'm aware of are against TOS. Some widely used text parsers for various purposes include GINA (https://eq.gimasoft.com/gina/), Kizant's DPS parser (https://github.com/kauffman12/EQLogParser/tree/master/Release), and Soulbanshee's /outputfile parser (Soulbanshee's Parsers vNext). Discord (https://discord.com/) has various EQ communities from the official one, to the ones hosted for guide websites (EQResource, FanByte/ZAM/Allas), to class discords, to guild discords, to open event discords on various servers (usually open raids), as well as one or two hosted by custom UI creators with more UI mods than published on EQInterface.
I'm not sure how graphics, as in Texture packs as the OP mentioned, would be against ToS. You would have to re do them every time that you patch the game, but there isn't anything that making things prettier that would be an issue. The problem is more likely to be how to make sure the game displays things as intended.
Utilities like Reshade are most definitely against TOS. These are what is more commonly used for "graphics update mods." Anything that injects itself into the game is against TOS. A package of textures, if even available somewhere, used the way you describe would be tedious to maintain but not against TOS.
A lot of people use the mod GINA for EQ which helps with what you mentioned. Hopefully the big UI update in April has a mods section.
