While I think sometimes dbm can be a little overbearing and kill some of the thrill of new fights, I appreciate having it as well as the adventure journal. Blind fights are great, but when I returned a while ago, I appreciated being able to have relative understanding without holding others back.
Good news is that it can’t carry or help people clear fights they shouldn’t be able to; lfr nzoth proved that haha
The problem is fights are created to be annoying like that because of the addons or they would become too easy.
I love how useful they are but between addons and online guides the fun in raiding and games in general has really died down for me.
Drest
I hated that fight with the fires of a thousand suns.
and Xanesh. any fight with an instawipe mechanic like that simply isn’t fun.
Agreed. There is good reason why actual base UI raid warnings have been improved and stepped up to imitate DBM warnings over the past years.
Sure you aren’t going to get timers, or debuff warnings, but other than that it is pretty much still there.
The base UI notifications are sufficient to raid even mythic bosses, along with reading the adventure journal.
My pet peeve is when people ask for harder fights because people that aren’t them are clearing it in 1-2 weeks and that doesn’t align with their opinion on how long it should take top players to finish something.
I’m not currently mythic raiding at a higher level since mop, but i’d rather not have to do 2000 pulls because we had to stretch the world race out to 1 month tbh.
When it comes to addons though, as many have pointed out, they just do what Blizzard is unwilling to do; show information well.
As for people wanting to go in blind, I’m sure a lot of us did used to enjoy that. But now if I go in blind to a soakfest fight or a stack/unstack fight we’re just going to be quadrippling our pulls until the final dumb dumb clicks.
yep, this is dumb. the people who throw their hands up and declare the expac over or too easy because the best of the best of the best cleared the raid.
unless you’re going for famed slayer, it doesn’t matter when anyone else clears the raid.
I think that the community does a great job with 3rd party info, sites like thotbot always existed. Thousands of people put out addons, guides or videos. It makes the game and community better. No need imo, for blizzard to take over that creative space and I like that they let the community flourish for itself.
Also when you’re wiping due to one person’s mistake, because that’s how fights seem to go these days, I can’t think of anyone who would just sit there and wait for this one guy to get it and not want to shove a guide down his throat or bench him.
It is absolutely possible to yolo some bosses with just a quick glance at journal or running it on a lower difficulty if you mucking up won’t wipe the raid.
The guide is just another learning tool for people who learn that way. In a casual guild you can go the “learn by doing route" but you better friggin get it after your first or second screw up…
Yeah… not really. My guild has already posted guides on our Discord that we’re expected to read prior to our first raid. We’re not even planning to go Mythic, but that’s just how the game is played now.
I’m very thankful for DBM, I learn very slowly and if not because of those support addon, I could never ever step on a raid. Of course I don’t raid mythic or anything, I just like to go with my husband and his buddies on Normal and Heroic sometimes, and I promise you I’m terrible, I do try my best and addon help me a lot by telling me where to go and how to not kill my friend anytime I show up in raid! 
So tell me how you will walk in and one shot every mythic boss just Becuase you saw some testing footage and fat boss talk about the testing they did and talk about how they think phases will work based off reading the dungeon journal.
As an ex raid leader/caller f no. DBM is a blessing, especially when pugging. This isn’t Zelda.
There is truth to this statement. To the point that blizzard has been experimenting with mechanics which addons like DBM cannot track. The root mechanic on Cenarius back in the Emerald Nightmare raid did exactly this.
And I believe blizzard said that they have to come up with more interesting and complicated mechanics because of these addons when they did an interview about the mythic version of the Wrought Chaos mechanic from Archimonde in HFC.
That being said, personally I feel like these addons have been a positive for the game. Mythic raiding in WoW remains to be one of the hardest PVE gaming experience for MMO’s, if not the hardest period. Which challenges players to be better. Having access to timers is fine and all, but they just track the abilities CD. There have been bosses in the past that have a set of abilities that have their CD’s reduced over time. To the point that you can get some crazy overlaps (thus making a dps check). An example is Garrosh Hellscream where all throughout his fight, abilities have a lower CD the more times they are used. Making each phase a dps check, as it should be for the final boss of an expansion. Another example is G’huun with how Phase 1 snowballs extremely fast if you are slow on the orbs (especially on mythic). Having a timer of when the next set of adds spawns means nothing when you get 2 dark youngs, 2-3 blightspreaders and a crap ton of eye stalks at once.
A more recent example is Queens court. While not noticeable on LFR, normal and recently heroic, the degrees come in faster and faster after each rotation. On mythic it is easily noticeable as you get back to back degrees, which keeps you on your toes as around one third of the room becomes a death zone which rotates based on which degree is up. Leave the fight for too long and you get overlapping degrees at once, as the death zone also enhances either the strength of the degree, or its duration.
Then you also have to factor in bosses that have an RNG element to their mechanics. For example the giant tentacle placements for Carapace of N’zoth (and a lesser extent the eye stalks) randomly spawn on all difficulties excluding mythic (as they come in at the same time on mythic instead of different times on heroic. On normal and LFR, you get no eye stalks). So you could have an eye stalk near the door leading to the next phase (they always spawn around there), then the next second you have a tentacle all the way near Wrathion. Typically these kinds of mechanics I actually hate, as it can lead to a wipe due to a loss in effective dps, which comes down to simply RNG placements instead of players skills. However they are there simply because addons like DBM simply track abilities cooldowns. Not when they are going to be used.
Personally I would like to see less fights that have mechanic placements be completely RNG based. Always hate it when you kill the eye stalk on heroic carapace, then the tentacle comes out all the way near Wrathion, so then you have to run (or use cape) to get there, then run all the way back to the phase 2 door to kill the next eye stalk. Wastes so much time.
You do realize that the playerbase has gotten massively better at the game from those vanilla-times right? I dont think people grasp the overall increase in player ability since those times.
I mean 5 man dungeon trash packs have more mechanics than Vanilla bosses, much less the 5 man bosses themselves. One of the reasons everything was so hard back then, was because people were clickers, casuals, and generally just bad at the game. My buddy was in a realm first guild with his gf/wife at the time. I remember watching her click shadowbolt like once a minute and then randomly dying because she never moved. And she was a “top” player on my server. In the best horde guild, going for realm firsts. Entire raids were filled with players like that.
So yes, nowadays people clear raids super fast, but thats because people are MASSIVELY better players than they were back in the day. Its like League of Legends. Pulling off an Insec on Lee Sin was considered a Pro move in like season 2, or at least high ELO. Nowadays even a Bronze/Silver Lee Sin can Insec you. The general skill level of the playerbase is vastly higher.
Yes and no. I think there’s too much reliance on outside material rather than discussing tactics/trial and error. When was the last time you actually had to discuss using perhaps an unorthodox strategy to defeat an encounter rather than what someone else told you was the one and only way to do it? It’s much rarer now than it used to be because people are letting others do their jobs for them.
I think that Blizzard can and should lower the need for boss addons by adding more telegraphing and less reliance on timers; the entire reason why boss mods are so prevalent is because abilities come at intervals with little or no warning so you need to prepare by having a timer tell you. If more bosses had that Blizzard raid warning type message (e.g. “Boss begins to cast [Bad Spell]”) it would lower the need for having boss mods to tell you it’s coming because there would be clear telegraphs.
Look at a game like say Final Fantasy XIV. It doesn’t have boss mods but doesn’t need them because the bosses telegraph their attacks in such a way that you don’t need them (and people are more likely to communicate about specific things). IMHO that’s the direction Blizzard should be going, instead they seem to be of the mindset well these addons exist so we don’t have to do it since they do our job for us.
Not really. Guides are still posted WELL before the raid actually opens and most guilds expect you to have studied them or risk getting benched.
I will say this I think is a problem. There’s too much “datamined” knowledge that removes actual discussion and puts the emphasis on “homework” before something is even done.
Agreed. I’m curious to see what the effects would be if Blizzard put some kind of temporary ban on guides for a while. Like say for the first month of a raids release no written or video guides could be put out.
To be honest I think the game would be better if A) they blocked the APIs and B) they didn’t allow datamining. I mean, the base UI isn’t perfect but it really has everything you need built in to it by now. The nameplates, map, etc. are pretty serviceable. I don’t think we really need as many addons as there are anymore.