There are definitely many areas, especially in complicated combat, where addons make it much easier.
There are areas where the UI is lacking, where it’s hard to track what you need to do in an encounter, etc. Or audible alerts when there’s an interruptible cast.
But except at the very highest levels of play, it’s not all that bad to play without them. Especially with the current state of the UI. It’s not the UI we had in Wrath.
My feeling is that things are going to find their own level and it’s going to be fine. If people top out in keys past a certain level that enough of the community thinks is too low, they’ll adjust. If the specs are too simplified, they’ll adjust.
I mained Hunter starting in BC and I’ve seen widely varying levels of difficulty for the class throughout those many years. At one point any movement and any cast could interrupt your autoshot, and people prided themselves on maximizing autoshot uptime, but at the same time in BC, the BM “rotation” was (steady shot x infinity). In Wrath is was Arcane shot and ~4 steady shots. Meanwhile for Survival people worked to keep the charges of Explosive Shot from overlapping each other – you couldn’t just hit the button three times fast, you had to space them out or you’d lose one or more of them because they’d overwrite. And lets not even talk about the Hunder dead zone and melee zones.
By MoP, Survival had so many buttons to push that you literally couldn’t use all your damaging abilities in a rotation. Then they pruned in WoD, and of course revamped Survival completely in Legion. Some fun niche things disappeared. You could use a tactic to take down relatively huge rares by positioning your pet at your max range and ping-ponging the mob back and forth between you and the pet with Distracting Shot and Feign Death (helped if there was terrain to force the mobe to take an even longer path). But then Distracting Shot was gone, and you couldn’t do that anymore. Life went on.
Meanwhile, in early Wrath, Bestial Wrath was such a long-lasting and powerful cooldown it was crazy. If you went deep enough into the MM tree you could just reach the talent (forget the name) that allowed you to reset all your long cooldowns and you’d have something like a full minute in Bestial Wrath at a stretch – which lasted, what, a couple months, until they nerfed it. Then later in Wrath they nerfed Bestial Wrath even more. Today it’s pretty much a shell of what it was, but that hasn’t made the spec. less fun. On the contrary, it made it less of a one trick pony (cue the “BM is braindead” comments).
Demon Hunter wasn’t fun for me when I first tried it, but it changed quite a bit in BFA and when I picked it up late in BFA, on a whim, I had a blast with it.
Things always change. Sometimes you like the changes, sometimes you don’t, but they’ll keep changing and Blizzard will keep adjusting.
Contrary to the belief of some, the game isn’t run by sadists whose only pleasure is ruining your fun.
