That is actually a pretty fair amount of workload being taken off the player. It’s just been so normalized over the years that we don’t really consider it anymore. Even DBM is pretty powerful and has forced the devs to make fights more complex and create new mechanics. For better or worse.
Normalized over the years? It been a thing for over +17 years, is virtually impossible to separate raids from having addons like DBM, is not like it suddenly appear and made the game change 5 years ago.
People getting better is what forced the mechanics to get more complex, any time an addon is too powerful they have broken it to stop it from getting out of hand.
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Yeah, that is exactly my point. DBM has become so normalized that it’s not even treated like an addon anymore. It’s basically inseparable from the game and so fights have to be developed around that. The same thing has happened/is happening with weak auras.
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How long! have you been playing. Boy I hate this new victim mentality ‘ban what you don’t like’ … addons have been in wow for more than a decade, and they have even made the game play even better incorporating the most popular addons into the game coding.Just DON’T use addons if you don’t want to!
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I don’t do much above LFR… and I like all my addons …thank you very much!
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You speak of things you hardly understand.
Most WFR raiders work full time jobs or are students, very few play WoW for a living.
Aside from the actual WFR event, they don’t require their raiders to commit to the game full time & are very flexible.
Raiding is not something so impossibly difficult that requires this nonsense post, it’s choreography that requires repetition & even casuals can clear mythic with a bit of dedication.
You really believe Blizzard makes raids around addons? Thats ridiculous. That has nothing to do with the raid difficulty.
There have always been insane mechanics in raids. And to say fighting Razageth was insane mechanics, nothing comparable to past raids in past expansions. In fact raids in Dragonflight are so much easier than any other expansion.
It sounds like you aren’t living up to your expectation of gameplay and blaming addons for your performance
That is absolutely ridiculous. Blizzard doesn’t build anything around addons. If anything it learns from them to better improve gameplay.
Do you watch videos before you go into a new dungeon or raid?
Yes they’ve said as much
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Up to yourself really. I personally could play just fine without them. But iguess that’s what separates the good and the wish they were good
Agree. Most these complaints seem to come from those who struggle with the game and therefore blame it on addons instead of themselves
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It’s not about rotational complexity at all, it’s about having the information you need to execute the rotation. The way Blizzard displays (or doesnt display) information to the player makes the majority of specs impossible to play properly without addons even if the rotation is “easy.”
There are some specs, like Retribution, Fury, and Havoc, that have nothing to track but cooldowns and procs, and the stock UI works just fine. But those are the exception.
Take an easy spec like BM Hunter. The entire spec revolves around keep maximum uptime of 3 stacks of Frenzy on their pet. There is no way without addons to track a pet’s Frenzy stacks in the vanilla UI. People using the base UI rely on “Frenzy stacks = Barbed Shot debuff duration”, but that stops working the moment your target dies or you need to swap targets or there’s too many enemies for monitoring the stack level + duration of a single debuff in an ocean of nameplates.
To play Feral Druid properly, you need to empower bleeds, overwriting lower powered ones and avoiding refreshing empowered ones. There is no way to monitor bleed empowerment in the stock UI – literally you cannot play Feral properly without an addon.
The list of things that you really ought to have addons tracking is endless. Here’s just a few examples:
- Suppose you are playing Demo Warlock. How do you monitor how many imps you have for implosion, a core part of your AOE? You aren’t going to count all the tiny imps. What about how long they last so you know if you can hand of guldan one more time?
- You aren’t going to know if that Nether Portal you opened is still running when it’s somewhere behind you, and that thing running requires a changing rotation while active.
- Some of these are problems with the way buffs are all thrown together in the buff pile where Mark of the Wild and your food / flask and dozen other raid buffs bury important info like…
- how many charges of Demonbolt do you actually have banked for movement? the stock UI shows you an alert that looks the same at 1 stack or 4 stacks.
- Prior to the patch 3 weeks ago, how was affliction supposed to track Dread Touch stacks, the primary buff they track for all dot damage?
- Major cooldowns change ability priority for mages. How is a Mage tracking Temporal Annamolly procs?
- How does a mage track icicles? Are you counting those little tiny icicles over your characters head in combat?
- How does outlaw track Roll the Bones outcomes?
etc, etc.
TL;DR - even though most specs aren’t complicated, most specs require addons to be played properly, period. The game either doesn’t show you critical information or displays it in a bad way.
DPS who don’t use weak aura rotation addons might feel they are fine. The truth is either they are playing one of the few specs that truly doesn’t need them, or they are playing content where proper rotation isn’t relevant, or they are playing with other people who, like them, are playing far below proper rotation execution and thus don’t notice the discrepancy (or worse, think they’re good compared to someone else who is also executing improperly).
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W
I would say you guess wrong. Addons don’t make a player better.
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Totally agree with you, I have been saying this since 2007, it is a form of cheating and shouldn’t be allowed, I don’t even care to try and raid because to me its just soulless number crunching and that doesn’t appeal to me. The 1% are not the heart and soul of this game and never were and it’s time we stopped appealing to them.
Blizzard makes the rules, as long as they say is fine it is not in fact cheating.
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I don’t buy the reasons why players supposedly need add-ons.
I have never had a problem with DoTs because they are displayed. I have never had a problem with imps because experience tells me what a clump of 9 imps looks like compared to clump of 6. I have never had a problem with tracking my icicles because they are displayed.
Do you count each dot on a die when it’s cast? Or do you know based on the pattern what number was rolled? Players will never develop this important sense for their respective classes or their environment if they rely on add-ons to tell them. Add-ons create learned helplessness.
Combat is not so messy that you can’t see what you need to see. You DO have time, even in PvP and Mythic content. You DO have time to swivel your camera quickly to see your Nether Portal. You CAN develop a keen sense of time necessary to know when to check what you need to track. You even have time in combat to breathe and center yourself. You will never know this if you only use add-ons.
You also have time outside Azeroth to practice math and percentages so you can better understand the DPS on your screen and what that number tells you about stacks, what your rotation needs, etc.
WoW content is about situational awareness. Learn it, practice it, love it, understand it. Add-ons stunt this vital skill.
Add-ons aren’t cheating. But they will always place an asterisk after every achievement you “earn” with them.
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This is very true, how can others guild compete with Liquid/Echo when they have a whole team to create their owns WA/Addons during the RWF (+ the half-billion golds they spent on every race)
They obviously also have the skill and are the best in the world, but all those requirements do not allow others guild to have a chance, very sad
That’s an astonishingly ridiculous broad brush you’re wielding there.
I’m a super casual who doesn’t do instanced content I can’t solo.
The reason I don’t raid (or run dungeons) isn’t because of difficulty. It’s because of GO GO GO, and toxicity. I don’t find that fun, and there’s plenty of other content I do enjoy.
I don’t use DBM nor WA, and yet I do just fine in open world event content.
My addons are:
- Auctionator
- Rematch
- Battle Pet BreedID
- Pretty Reps
- Handy Notes
- TomCat’s Tours
- RareScanner
- TomTom
- World Quest Tracker
Would I like it if all those were part of the WoW UI that I could choose to turn on or not? Sure. But there’s not a lot of incentive for Blizzard to make those when they already exist, and none of them have to do with combat.
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If you do nothing but lfr, it doesn’t matter what you use.
You really think this is my main?