Without addons, the skill gradient would skyrocket. Like how good would a healer have to be to heal penetrating colds without big blue icons numbered 1 through 5, or how aware would your raid leaders have to be to keep track of all the encounter timers while playing their character. Lots of easy fights would become hard ie muru or algalon. They’d have to notice the little boss emotes in lucida sans font or wahtever default chat is for darkness of a thousand souls, with all the fireblooms and shield orbs and random crap going out. And that’s just Classic, where’s it’s still 100% feasible. Some fights after classic might actually be impossible. New players will never get in even more severely than they don’t get in already.
Actually kinda interesting though. See how much mastery you’d actually need to play at a high level without addons. Especially arena… prolly just a handful of AWC level players who have live tournament experience with addons banned.
But more realistically, people would just start using companion apps if addons were banned.
First of all, I know how to use addon, and do use them.
Second of all no it is not ridiculous if everyone is expected to do it. It is only ridiculous if no one is expected to do it because an addon does it for them.
As the other guy mentioned it is a skill issue. Take something else that isn’t WoW.
In League you can play with a lock or unlocked camera. Most players play with a locked camera because it is easier to play that way and less things that actively have to track on the screen. However, those that play without a locked camera have a massive advantage over those that do due to the increase of information they get. Likewise if in WoW in a no-addon situation, you refuse to look at your buffs and debuffs “because it is difficult and ridiculous” that is a skill issue. You are refusing to use the information available to you.
Third, the game is entirely playable without them. It always has been. Making information more visible for you because you don’t want to look at the top right… doesn’t qualify as “unplayable”. If you want to talk retail that is a different case specifically for high-end raiding because those fights were designed with the use of addons in mind making them required.
Fourth, my stance was to make Weakauras and ElvUI part of the base game if you were going to remove add-ons because those two effectively cover everything that would be “needed”. Elv covers UI customization and Weakauras covers pretty much everything else from arena frames, to making important buffs and debuffs move noticeably, to boss mods. The only real thing not covered is the TSM users.
99% of groups I’ve ever joined don’t ask for gearscore and the few who do I just link a hard mode item and say “come inspect me like a true classic player if you need proof”. Works 100% of the time. If it doesn’t just link a fake gear score with pvp gear and 100% of these idiots will fall for it, it will be really funny.
Ya know… If you had of made this post 3 years ago I would have argued with you about it…
Now days I have come to the conclusion that the addons and even certain macro are killing the game because they enable some really shady stuff and in a lot of ways harm how the game is played and remove the small amount of skill required to play it almost entirely.
Basically anything that can even partly automate a function should be eliminated. Everything from Weak Auras to Macro that can in any way shape or form enable you to target and cast, target and heal, target and buff, target and execute ability in a single step is bad for game play.
Addons that I don’t mind are addons that just move the normally presented default UI information around so that you can better see it without looking away from the target.
Its highly unlikely that Blizzard will ever curb stomp the addons problem as they should, but if they did and they killed off all the botters, hackers, cheaters, RMT… this game could be really damn good again.
Addons are not bad. Blizzard ways to deal with them is bad.
They should have taken the opportunity with years to add more addons to the base game so you felt less the need to add them while restricting more what they could do. Which is why not adding quest helper to the game was kinda stupid.
I don’t think macros are bad, in some ways some classes like warriors felt designed with them in mind. Nobody will swap weapons manually. But for issues like those they often have fixed those in the futur expansions which is the way to go for me.
Also the have added focus just to be able to target and cast stuff without having to change target. It’s completely doable without too much efforts once you know how to setup your abilities to be used with a focus.
I don’t care if Blizz wants to block Gearscore as it doesn’t affect me. But add-ons in general? Hell no. QoL add-ons like dominos and bagnon for example are crucial. I also use Spy, and I’m still annoyed that Blizz reduced the range on that for all the crybabies.
Spy is arguably one of the addons that shouldn’t be allowed from what I know of it. You shouldn’t just be notified when someone stealth around you… that is the entire point of stealth…
Sure, makes the game better for the few of us left playing wrath / retail…
But as a result the game is in decline. I would rather Blizzard give us a default version of Gladius and Tidy plates with the stock UI, disable all forms of target macro entirely and every single addon no matter how much I like them if the population of players will increase
The reason for Tidy plates and Gladius are simple; its what players can easily understand at just about any experience level once they learn some basic ability skills.
Wow is a fun game, but the barriers to entry are too great because addons that grant advantage are crushing the life outa new players who are core to a game.
I actually don’t have any issue with addons but trying to get friends to play wow for the first time has proven impossible because “its all too much”.
I was able to get a few to try out Classic Era, players i met in later expansions and they took well too it, but with Wrath its just addon / macro overload for them.
That got me thinking that addons are the problem, and the stock UI needs help.
You could make the same argument about things like auto kickers or auto rotations. No, not all addons should be allowed just because “it’s the way people want to play”. OSRS has shown us what that’s devolved to.
In a competitive place like PvP, they are pretty much necessary as is. They should do it like they used to with Arena tournaments and use Default w/o any.
So they should remove all macros because a tiny proportion of macros needed to be removed? lmfao
Nobody said that? Blizz breaks addons they don’t like.
I guarantee you this is bannable already, so what do you actually want?
What does this even mean? There are weakauras that suggest the next button to press. There’s nothing that actually presses the button for you, that I know of.
I mean, I play a rogue and it’s not like you can see the player who is in stealth. It doesn’t take away from my ability to engage from stealth in any way. Both people using Spy have the same advantages as the other.