Say what? Do you actually know what automated means? Apparently not.
I find DBM, for example, to be a huge help. My eyesight is not what it was and I often don’t see the boss starting some action because the letters are so small. But my DBM has a voice system where the thing the boss is about to do is provided to me vocally. This is a QoL thing and nothing more. If it was provided by the game and it worked as well I’d be happy to go with the core UI and not have DBM. But it doesn’t.
In a car you can choose to drive a stickshift and shift gears yourself, and disable your speedometer so you have to manually figure out how fast you’re going. But is having a speedometer and tachometer in a car a cheat? How about those trip computers or virtual cockpits that provide all sorts of info about how your car is doing, what your shift points are, when the maximum torque in your car is being achieved in each gear, or how many miles you have to go till you run out of gas. Or an automatic transmission that stops you from overrevving the engine. Are those cheats?
The cool thing about driving is people can drive either these days. As long as they are enjoying themselves driving the car they paid for, who’s cheating who?
just…play wow without addons if you’re that good my man
There’s a warning that most online games have that says “Gaming experience may change during online play.” That’s what all that is about. Because online you play with all kinds of folks - good, bad, experienced, inexperienced, hardcore, casual. It’s understandable that some folks might get mad when playing with others they don’t deem to be satisfactory for any sort of reason. The cool thing is, they control whether they keep playing with those people or not. Nobody’s forced to play with anyone they don’t want to play with, whether that person is using addons or not.
I see a lot of people mentioning raid addons but I think the only red flag is Blizzard making fights around Weakauras. I believe if your ability to complete a fight is solely based on a weakaura then that’s a massive issue.
Right. I’m happy to listen about specific addons needing “nerfs”, but I don’t think EVERY addon is problematic.
There are some really awesome cosmetic addons that don’t tell me what to do nor how to play.
The only addon, I ended up downloading, while I was still leveling up my first Vanilla Classic character was TRP. Otherwise, I got to 60 without using Questie. Now, I have Questie. I just wanted to do it, at least on one toon/the first one, to see if I could do it, and I did.
Yeah! I think addons have great potential to add your own personal flair to your UI. I still remember…I think it was a Priest? On the World First Garrosh kill video and dude was rocking MLP on Weakauras I think? I thought that was hilarious.
Add-ons that do things like make things easier to read, change font or colors or make information more clear aren’t the issue.
Add-ons that literally say, jump, move here, do this, do that and predict exactly what to do are un-needed.
What Blizzard needs to do for fights is make incoming mechanics direct and clear. If boss is about to do a frontal cone attack, there should be a built in clear indicator like a glowing cone shape that appears over the ground where you should not stand.
My enjoyment of this game would drop significantly without addons. A lot of them simply present information to me - through the UI - in a way that’s more comfortable than the standard UI to take in… if that makes sense.
Can you give me a specific example of such an addon and how it’s useful?
The only current fight I can think of where such things are useful is the dragon captain in Soleah’s Gambit, since it’s the only way to know when the breath is halfway through its cast so the tank knows it’s safe to run out without the dragon tracking you.
Do I have bigwigs? Sure, for that. But I turn everything else off; it’s simply not useful.
Addons that say things are useful to me with my impaired executive function, short term memory loss, and ADHD. They make it so my co-tank doesn’t have to wear the brown pants if I zone out for a few seconds.
WeakAuras is a terrific example of a great addon, but all WeakAuras does is display information.
So in the downstairs phase for Anduin, for example, I use a weakaura that shows (a) our remaining time downstairs, and (b) how much we’ve built up Anduin’s energy.
The remaining time is a tiny debuff in the top right of our screens, and you could check Anduin’s energy by setting him as a focus and looking at his health bars in the shadow realm.
But having both displayed as 1 unit is much better in terms of UI, so I use it.
It’s not the players’ fault that Blizzard’s default UI is vintage 1970’s technology.
A streamer told him to have that opinion. 
Speaking only for myself here but DBM, Bartender & Bagnon are really useful for me.
DBM keeps me from making things harder on others I’m playing with, helps me know when to use my interrupts.
The other 2 help me with configuring my UI so it doesn’t spazz out on me.
So I like them. A lot. Those are the only one’s I use though.
I have nothing against addons and use many myself, but can you help me understand this?
Don’t cast bars on nameplates take care of when to interrupt, for you? I don’t understand why a boss mod helps, there.
(Do enemy nameplates not show cast bars by default? I haven’t used default nameplates outside of beta in well over a decade, so I have no idea…)
By default, cast bars only show that it’s casting something, and whether or not it can be interrupted. DBM/Bigwigs help by highlighting the dangerous cast(s)
My experience with DBM is that it shouts that everything is a dangerous cast, and you just get spammed with its “ZOINKS!” sound effect relentlessly. 
A good example of is the Jailer fight. The Ruins of Damnation mechanic. There was a WA written to tell you where to go if you got hit with the mark and which hole to jump into. Saw the video on it and literally tagged the players with like “Bomb left” and essentially would change based in where they were going.
Yeah we tried that, people didn’t like it though so we ended up free-forming it, instead.
I don’t use nameplates so Idk what those do. DBM works for what I do ingame, which isn’t really that much for the most part.