Thanks for the reply man. So I attempted to do all the things you said and I still have no idea what I am looking at honestly. The WoW client I downloaded just seems to be..different from what it is supposed to be? I can play on Anathema fine and my shaman is level 20 so I have no idea.
This is what I'm looking at inside the folder where my wow.exe is located: http://imgur.com/a/3g0Q1
The first image is the folder everything is located in, 2nd image is what's inside the Data folder, 3rd image is what's inside the Interface folder, 4th image is what's inside the addons folder. I did click 'properties' on each addon folder (sw_stats and damagemeters) to uncheck 'read only'. Required admin to do this and I did it. The WTF folder doesn't exist anywhere in these folders. It seems to me there are actually a lot of folders missing from this particular vanilla client that should be there. WTF, Cache, etc, none of them are there. I'm not really sure how it works, but it does, so I didn't ask questions and just said 'fuck it, it works, I'll use it'.
As you can see though this is now causing me serious issues when attempting to use addons. Should I just try a new client download or something? Totally lost on what to do here.
EDIT - So I just went back into my addons folder to check their properties to see if they were no longer 'read only' after unchecking the box and apparently it didn't take. I gave it admin permissions when I did it but all the folders within the World of Warcraft - Classic 1.12.1 (Stormrage) folders are still checked as 'read only'. I'm apparently unable to make any changes at all to these folders even with admin permissions? I am so lost right now.