Obviously opinion based here but, I feel like DBM/BigWigs just ruined raiding experiences. My favorite experience was doing Lich King on release because there wasn’t anything in DBM or Bigwigs. They didn’t put the fight on the PTR, so people couldn’t script it, or even data mine it.
Personally, I feel that if you don’t know a fight, or are just learning a fight in a raid, be it normal, heroic, or mythic, you should wipe to it. I feel like DBM has caused fights to be overly complicated with loads of garbage being flung around. I didn’t raid at all in BFA because my progression raid guild disbanded in late Legion, and I just couldn’t be bothered to find another guild, so I don’t really know much about the fights in BFA outside of the world first race. Having played with the raids in FFXIV at a high end level, I can say it’s better than WoW, but effectively becomes a dance instead of being about teamwork.
I have been levelling characters through Wrath dungeons, and I find it hilarious how many times I watch people die to one shot mechanics because they don’t know the fight at all. On the other hand, mechanics that were near impossible to heal through previously are now easy to heal through with CDs, and that’s depressing to me as well.
I guess I just want dungeons and raids to be difficult at their core rather than dungeons being difficult because of adding arbitrary affixes to them, and raids become easy if you’re not the first 100 raid groups to enter them on launch day because strategies are blasted all over the internet and DBM/BigWigs just pull from the data.
This is definitely a side effect of those addons. I agree that from WotLK onwards raids became stupidly difficult in order to remain challenging for “cheaters.” The challenge used to lie in puzzling out the mechanics and strategies required to win the fights. Now that addons and YouTube videos hand the strats to you, the only challenge remains in platforming. Raiding these days feels more like playing Super Mario Brothers than like playing WoW.
I don’t mind the mechanics or the addon themselves because it’s nice to have a call out for those of us that are admittedly a little less on our toes than others.
What I don’t like are the video guides that everyone and their mother takes as the gospel and one and only way to do the thing. Can’t tell you how many people have chewed me out while tanking even a normal dungeon for pulling an extra pack and “wasting everyone’s time” or tanking the boss against the wrong wall.
Not sure how much thought you put into this, but this:
Seems to be in direct opposition with this:
Without DBM/BW we would back to vanilla/classic raid design in which anyone with a pulse and an IQ higher than 100 could easily clear content within hours of release due to simplistic mechanics. Classic/vanilla raid design is a trivial joke.
I just cant really picture a difficult raid boss that doesn’t require you to effectively multi-task and make split second decisions on the fly. Xanesh’s soccer mechanic is pretty cool, but its a gimmick.
I also highly disagree with this. FFXIV’s raids are cool and cinematic, but very straightforward. The combat is extremely similar, slow and straightforward. WoW raids are mostly the same, but everything is happening much faster.
That’s why I strongly prefer WoW raiding. FFXIV is slow in all aspects.
I wish bliz had a way to disable these kind of addons when in a dungeon/raid. Or having the fights more random but that causes issues in itself. What I would like to see is future bosses having more than 1 attack pattern, or even weaving between different attack patterns to try and throw off these type of addons.
That would be nice, but it unfortunately would not solve the problem. I think the only solution would be to ban the addons entirely and create a built in system similar to what they did with the adventure guide explaining the fights.
Yeah my idea is more of a like a ai actually dynamically changing a bosses mechanics (still within a given allowed list) to how a raid is reacting to the fight. Seems like a far stretch.
I remember when DBM came out. Was at the end of pre-BC and my mage’s old guild were just banging our collective heads off Razuvious. It was a one of our priests who suggested it because we were such failures with disrupting shout.
I hated it the moment I saw it. Oddly enough, I’ve been able to muddle through every raid that has interested me since on normal, and some on heroic, without having a single mod like DBM installed. (Or any addons, really) These raids aren’t many, since my appetite for raiding kind of died pre-BC. Honestly, a big part of that is the convoluted mechanics and graphical bonanza they feel every raid boss has to be now.
Man, I haven’t doubted a single moment since I walked away from any kind of real raiding. Good riddance to the experience and the people.
My fault, I’m multi-tasking.
AOTC isn’t difficult to get nowadays, even without using DBM. There’s always been strats for boss fights. The formula for Mythic keys is the most fun I’ve had in dungeons, since ever. It works really well imo.
Never played in Vanilla, though just looking at them, yes, I agree the boss mechanics were meh.
I agree with this, that’s why I’m here. What I meant is that it’s better due to the lack of addons so you have to pay attention instead of just getting an addon to blast a warning at you if you’re standing in bad or getting targeted by an ability.
I see many who are unable to do mechanics with the addons, to take them away would be a terrible experience. Vetting for raid members would be very strict and take too much time.
People may not like addons but blizzard creates these fights assuming addons will be used. Combat would change to even fit this. I like addons myself, I have known quite a few people who raided excellently without any use of them.
This should all be player attention. If the boss/raid design doesn’t give a warning like a voice line or a BUILT IN sound effect when you receive the debuff, or a cast bar from the boss, then it’s bad raid design to begin with.
This is essentially what turned me off raiding. Not DBM or bigwigs, or the influx of mechanics, or anything at all changing in the raids themselves.
… Just the community (and increasingly, my guilds’) insistence I watch some freaking datamined video and essentially study up long before the raid is even out, ruining the novelty, and a lot of my enjoyment of the raid just so we can make sure we can’t possibly fail, ever.
We inevitably did, so I really had to wonder if it was all worth it. Either way, being robbed of that mystery, and novelty of stepping into a new fight really squashed the appeal for me. Similarly with “practicing” in LFR.
It’s like if I read the strategy guide for a new Zelda game months before its release. I just … wouldn’t have any fun with it if I knew literally everything that awaited me.