I don’t think you can, but I don’t think that’s a problem. If the mechanic is designed such that communication in a manageable timeframe some might reach for automation in that way but many won’t. Look at mekkatorque in BoD for example.
I think private auras are fine as long as they can design boss fights that aren’t reliant on WA but they failed some bosses miserably from BfA to TWW:
- Ovi’nax’s egg breaks
- Azshara orders
- Mythic Smolderon’s orbs
- Mythic Fyrakk’s intermission and Shadow Cage
- Mythic Lihuvim’s weird matching game
- Lords of Dread’s Among Us mechanic on all difficulty, this mechanic had no business existing on all difficulty.
- Mythic Echo’s Volcanic Hearts
- The jailer bombs
Mythic Archimonde in WoD introduced the mechanics that required some forms of WA and Wrought/Focused Chaos was the most complex addon has gotten in response to a mechanic.
The jailer bombs were on the whole next level to Mythic Archimonde. The jailer bombs where you need to assign half the raid to specific positions in 4 seconds or you wipe. Blizzard started designing impossible bosses with impossible mechanics without WA.
I will always call this one out because I think this was genuiely completely fine. People were just so put off by Mythic Echo that the mere idea of seeing another private aura just caused mass revolt. The time was lenient enough, the fight was overall quite simple, and it wasn’t hard for players to delegate.
Smolderon orb is the type of thing I want to see more of if we’re going to expect communication as a part of a mechanic. Low background noise, low learning curve.
Echo of Neltharion’s Volcanic Heart mechanic should never live in its original form. Ovi’nax egg breaks as private aura was the first PTR iteration and that should be enough to prove that. However, they were happy with egg breaks mechanic and gone live in its original form.
Jailer >>>>>> Echo before nerfs > Ovi’nax > Lords of Dread/Fyrakk are what I would rank stupidest WA bosses. Jailer was easily the hardest wow mechanic of all time and it was 1000% impossible without WA. Blizzard should design better than these bosses
There’s hardly any fights that ever needed add-ons to do mechanics… I literally only ever use dbm/wigs for timers to plan healing cooldowns/ramps etc.
It’s only overcooked mythic raid fights that have absurd coordination checks that require ridiculous weak aura solutions to help solve.
Like, every boss there’s like a cast time, and you see them casting the thing, or there’s a swirly. You know what happening if you’ve learned the fight or read the abilities like c’mon what are we talking about??
They should design a UI that doesn’t require addons. Improve the nameplates, improve the party frame, improve debuffs display on toons (integrated weak auras), …
I’m cooking a whole thesis on this situation that I hope to post soon.
This game leans on casts bars and debuff icons like a drunk at a bar. And it communicates them about as well as one.
The visual queues and a players ability to read and decipher them are genuinely embarrassing.
The in game graphics are so pathetic that it takes three pages of dungeon journal entries to explain how something is expected to work.
It’s jam packed with spells that can connect with zero indication. It’s using the same tiny handful of spell-casting animations associated with each model rig and trying to telegraph totally unique abilities with incredibly vague names like “Final Harvest” or “Molten Metal.”
Those names mean nothing without reading what they do in the dungeon journal. Clearly players are not learning from them while doing them, and that’s the crux of the problem. So many players can’t even tell what went wrong that they don’t even know what to correct and I don’t blame them anymore.
The encounter design in this game is propped up like a decaying zombie by external sources. The ingame cues are so bad as to be laughable and it’s no wonder players suck at this game. It sucks at conveying practically anything through it’s animations and resorts to asking us to mouseover and read 3-second long buff/debuff icons that occur during high intensity portions of fights.
It’s a total disaster that they’ve turned into a development philosophy. They have been grossly negligent in their attempts to make readable encounters and I think it’s what has us in this mess with M+.