Seriously, how is someone supposed to form a route and know what to pull and avoid if they never looked at outside info? M+ has been in the game for about 10 years now and there’s no % on mobs, there’s no guided blizzard route that gives a bit of detail what the route entails. Anytime a player has to look outside a game is a colossal design failure. This just hit me as I’m going to sleep.
I think they’re working on solutions to this now with the UI improvements they’re bringing but it could be so much better.
it’s called playing the game and getting good with your class.
M+ is literally the same thing as lfg, norm, and herioc in terms of the dungeon itself.
You know a dungeon well enough, you can do it without addons.
People have gotten too lazy with convenience and have forgotten that this is a completely skill-based game.
Does it take a long time?
yes.
but that’s what seperates skill from bumbling idiot who read a guide.
You’re confusing skill with information not being conveyed to the player. Dota 2 is a completely skill and knowledge based game but the game gives you ALL information to succeed. Playing against a hero you don’t have a clue what they do? You can click on them and read their abilities right there in the game so you know what to expect.
Seeing % on mobs isn’t convenient, it should straight up be in the game by default because it’s a core part of the mode. It’s not making the game easier but it’s presenting more into so players can make better decisions.
There’s indeed a lot of information that’s available through MDT that would be great if it existed within the game.
With that being said I think most tanks just learn by doing. Unless you’re incapable of learning you’ll memorize which abilities do what and how they can be countered, and which routes gives a good percentage to the mob count.
If you don’t use addons in competitive play, you’re missing almost all critical events in every pull. You can overgear it up to a point, but you will hit a wall where obvious misplays will just kill you and wipe the group.
I would say for reasonably competitive content you’ll spend as much time looking at stuff out of the game than in the game — routes, logs, UIs, guides, etc.
And this, along with many replies, have become conditioned to WoW requiring outside info to be decent at the game. Any other game in existence and this would be considered the best example of horrible game design. Not giving the players enough info to succeed on their own accounts without having to waste hours just figuring out things that should be common sense info to the player.
You don’t need a route to be decent at the game. Its an optimization feature like anything else. If I want to be min max in a game like Last Epoch, I would also use an outside build/guide/tutorial video to learn more about how I can improve. The same goes for routes. If you are betting on Blizzard to incorporate a better route system by default in the future than rank 1 players mapping their own routes and testing things, that is a losing bet. Just get a 2nd monitor and throw their route up.
That’s the point of his post. You shouldn’t need addons to tell you important things like mob %. The game should tell you already. It’s wild that the game will tell you another player’s ilvl but it won’t tell you how many mobs you need to kill for enemy forces.
I think there’s two different things to talk about.
The game is lenient enough that you can learn your way through stuff, do suboptimal things, and perfectly time/accomplish lower level content.
If you were to actually do this especially when pugging though, I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a very hostile experience. Imagine going into Priory as a tank and you just choose to go right, or pull packs that are considered suboptimal - your party members may not react well to that. And that’s underselling the possibilities. Stuff like that will probably tank the completion of your groups, even if your group is theoretically able to still complete enough, and inhibit your progress.
By contrast, you can do this with your group of friends and have a happy, jolly time. I wouldn’t be surprised if you get past +12’s.
I feel like they’re talking more about the practical experiences with the former rather than what’s theoretically possible in a safer, controlled environment like the latter.
A proposal that the game should provide people all useful information so that they have a better experience, aren’t likely to get flamed/harassed for just learning their way through the game, and will still succeed or fail based on actually learning the game and playing the game well, seems like an objective benefit. I certainly can’t see any downside.
Indeed, it would be great if blizzard made addons part of the standard features. Are you and everyone else willing to double or triple your subscription fees to fund that though, or would it be alright that they allow addons by third-parties free of charge instead?
It takes time and money to create all these features, and after you’ve created them you’ll have to maintain them. Later on you must create new features as the demand suddenly appears for them. That’s why what we have today is a good thing, the wow community itself helps wow players and assists in developing and improving on the game by creating addons (free of charge).
I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather have blizzard focus on releasing content and keep the price we have today, rather than making their own version of already existing and available addons. If I want them to do both, I better be ready for the sub fee to hit 45$ soon enough.
Tldr:
Yes, it would be great if some addons were standard features.
No, I don’t want blizzard to waste time and money to re-invent already existing addons when I can just get them myself already.
First, looking at it from the point of view of “making addons part of the standard features” is coming at it from the wrong angle. The point is to design with the approach of actually fully completing your design, and ensuring your design conveys the important importation to your users/players. That requires skill and vision to do it correctly the first time, it’s not about spending more time to do things inefficiently.
Secondly, Blizzard is part of a multi-billion dollar corporation who’s making money from various different avenues and boasting profits. The idea that there’s some tradeoff that involves doubling or tripling sub fees to be able to afford such development is patently ridiculous. If any thought from that angle were to apply, it’s that Blizzard making decisions to cost-cut, lay off QA, etc., is the origin of issues such as this in the first place.
Hell, we’re in 2025 and several UIs for the aspects of the game including around M+ dungeons are just shoddy, or even buggy.
It’s also a weird angle to take since the point of being paying customers of a subscription service is to ensure that you get the adequate value for the sub that you pay, and lay down the demand for what that should be. The idea that polished features would be an addition that requires paying even more to compensate is a very weird relationship to have with a business.
Thirdly, identifying that the state of the base game needs to improve, and they’re looking to ensure that people are less reliant on addons for basic game knowledge is an initiative that is acknowledged by Blizzard, and they’re making several plans to address various things about it. This is an example that falls squarely within that vision, so IDK why you’re running defense against it.
These are all entirely within Blizzard’s control. They should be designing features in such a way that they’re easy to maintain, and they control the demand. When talking about mob count in M+ for example, they created the design where mob count is a relevant statistic, they created the dungeons and how relevant mob count is within them, and they created the times that apply, the UI, etc. The “demand” that exists comes directly from Blizzard and how they designed their game; it’s not some externality they couldn’t anticipate or modify.
The idea that these two are mutually exclusive is silly.
Even more so because as content goes, by any previous indications we’ve had to speculate from, the factors that would gate/hold back the pace of release of content depends on teams that are unrelated to developers providing information like this.
That also leaves room for blizzard to decide what is and isn’t important, rather than the players (which decides today through addons). Yes, it would be lovely to indicate each mob % in m+. No, I don’t think blizzard would provide something even half as good as MDT if they got tasked with it.
No, the idea that it wouldn’t come at a cost (it may not be double or triple sub fee, but it will be at a cost) to re-invent something that already exists, that a lot of players are currently using, and that they are using without it costinf blizzard a single cent is what is ridiculous. There is no financial gain in building their own weakauras, DBM, or Elvui for example. It’s only a big financial burden, both to create and maintain, and wouldn’t give players anything they don’t already have.
You get what you pay for, and we have the same fee as in 2004. We get way more bang for our buck now compared to then though, and it wouldn’t have been weird if the sub fee had increased along with inflation.
True, and I think they’re doing a pretty fantastic job with it. For example, I mainly focus on m+; by no means do you need any addons to play m+ in the higher key ranges, even though they help. Indicators are getting clearer, and a lot of information is well conveyed. I agree that there are some pretty big “minor details” that they can work on, and I think they should, but I absolutely don’t want them to try to replace addons. For example: let me know the trash abilities and their mob % in the dungeon journal. A pretty minor change that would be nice to those that insist on not using addons. I absolutely don’t want them to create their own MDT though, as there is no need for that.
It’s not so much that I’m running a defense against them giving us all the tools relevant for the content, it’s that I don’t see a need for those tools as they allow us to fetch better tools from other resources. If they want to give me a hammer and a nail to do a job, sure, but I’ll still use the nailgun from my trusted third-party source. It just seems redundant to even bother making me that hammer and nail.
It’s not, everything comes at a cost, and that cost is managed through a budget. Depending on how many wheels you think blizzard “needs” to re-invent, that cost will be making a bigger or smaller dent in the budget.
