Map Paint
Every dungeon runner knows the moment. You round a corner, stare down a hallway, and ask yourself the oldest question in Azeroth: have I already been down this one? Map Paint answers it. This lightweight addon turns your dungeon and raid maps into a sketchbook, letting you draw bright cyan trails over the exact paths you have explored. No automation, no guesswork, just your own marks showing where you have been and where you still need to go.
Whether you are farming transmog in old raids, hunting a rare spawn, or simply trying to survive a maze-like layout, a few strokes of cyan can save you minutes of confused backtracking. The addon is deliberately manual, which means you stay in full control of what gets marked and when.
What Map Paint Does
At its core, Map Paint is a manual map highlighter. It does not track your movement, and it does not automatically mark cleared rooms. Instead, you paint the route yourself, and the marks stay visible until you remove them, log out, or reload your UI. That permanence is the point: you can plan a farming circuit, mark every side room you want to hit, and follow your own breadcrumb trail without relying on memory.
- Paint directly on your map: hold Shift and drag with the left mouse button to highlight a path.
- Bright cyan highlights: your routes stand out clearly against the map artwork.
- Separate marks for each floor: switch dungeon floors without mixing up your highlights.
- Undo: remove your most recent stroke on the current floor.
- Clear Floor: wipe the current floor while keeping highlights on other levels.
- Reset all marks: start fresh before your next farming run.
How to Use Map Paint
Open your map with M, hold Shift, and drag with the left mouse button over the paths you want to mark. Release Shift to return to your normal map controls, so panning and zooming work exactly as before. If you make a mistake, the Undo and Clear Floor buttons sit at the bottom of the map window, ready when you need them.
Prefer typing? Map Paint includes a small command set. Use /pathpaint to show instructions, /pathpaint undo to remove the last stroke on the current floor, /pathpaint reset to clear highlights from every floor, and /pathpaint status to see the addon version, current map ID, and drawn highlight count. The shorter alias /ppaint works just as well.
A Few Important Notes
Highlights remain until you clear them, log out, or reload your UI. Leaving an instance does not clear your marks, so run /pathpaint reset before a fresh farming session. Also keep in mind that this version highlights the open map only and does not display trails on the minimap.
Map Paint for World of Warcraft: Versions and Compatibility
Map Paint for World of Warcraft is built to travel across expansions. It supports Retail as well as Classic, TBC, WotLK, Cataclysm, and MoP, so whether you are leveling through Outland, grinding badges in Northrend, or running modern mythic dungeons, the same painting tools are available. Addon compatibility stays consistent across these clients, which means the commands, the Shift-drag painting, and the per-floor separation all behave the same way regardless of which version you log into.
If you are wondering how to install it, the process is refreshingly simple. Extract the Map Paint folder into your World of Warcraft\_retail_\Interface\AddOns\ directory, making sure the final structure looks like Interface\AddOns\MapPaint\MapPaint.toc. Then launch the game and enable Map Paint in your AddOns list on the character select screen.
For players who would rather skip the manual folder shuffling, the foxygame.net launcher handles the whole process with a single click, and its built-in addon catalog lets you browse and install Map Paint alongside the rest of your UI setup. It also keeps everything updated automatically, so version compatibility across Retail and the classic clients never becomes a chore.
Who Should Download Map Paint
If you regularly farm old content, this addon earns its place immediately. Raids like Blackrock Depths, Dire Maul, or the sprawling layouts of classic dungeons become far less frustrating when your own cyan trail shows exactly which corridors you have already cleared. Collectors chasing rare drops across multiple wings will appreciate the per-floor separation, since upper and lower levels no longer blur into one confusing mess.
Should you download Map Paint if you only run content occasionally? Probably not, since the addon rewards players who repeat the same routes and want a visual record of them. But for anyone who has ever walked in circles through a dungeon wondering where that last boss was hiding, it is a small, focused tool that solves a very specific and very familiar problem. Mark your path once, follow it confidently, and spend less time second-guessing and more time looting.