Don’t design around computational addons at all. Like they don’t even exist. Test mechanics without them and give computational addons no other thoughts. The advantage they would bring wouldn’t be able to exceed human tolerance or capacity then. This way mechanics stay sane and reasonable and there’s no need to nerf an addon. You could disable the computational parts of the API on PTR too maybe. Or just the few specific troublesome addons so that people test the actual raids. And not their software development skills.
Skill between mythic world first guilds who choose to use the addons would then come down to gear, talents, comps, and rotational strategy. And the raids would still be doable with or without the addons. The majority of raiders and average players would find raid mechanics much more suitable.
That said addons shouldn’t be able to play a character or click buttons. Afaik this is already the case.
Well said.
There was a recent blue post on wowhead about this, and I think it was interesting. They claim that they designed Lords of Dread and Hylbrande (1st boss in gambit) with the idea that it could easily be done without computational addons.
While it’s true that you can do it without addons, it’s undeniably better QoL to use them.
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For Hylbrande, I think this is true. It never occurred to me that you could just place the raid markers next to the consoles. We just do it on voice or sometimes pugs have a WA that people just click the order and it says it in chat. The raid markers is a super accessible and easy solution, I just never thought of it before 
Lords though… completely agree.
Also completely agree. But then, from a design perspective, how do you communicate these things without trivializing the design intent? I like the ping system mentioned in the post (so much that I posted my own thread about it here), perhaps adding context awareness for the fight to it. That still requires some player interaction to facilitate the communication aspect of it.
Other fights? I dunno… all I know is that the overall design and complexity of WoW encounters has been a large contributing factor in me playing the game for as long as I have. Some addons trivialize that… but other fights are exceptionally difficult to do without addons.
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I think their design intent is good, but they aren’t fully completing the encounter. They should be experienced enough to anticipate these problems, and just bake the solutions into the fight design.
Take the Hylbrande fight for example. The WA makes the entire experience better. You assign one player to click on the WA, and then other players that have it too will see where the orb goes on their screen.
Blizzard, like many other software companies, is just leveraging FOSS developers to do their work for them.
A lot of the time these discussions break down into 2 solutions:
I think there should be an additional argument that the fights that seem to require addons, or gain the most from useful addons, are fine. The problem is that Blizzard isn’t completing their encounter design. Baking in something like the Hylbrande WA is something they didn’t work on, and that’s bad.
EDIT: One more example. The Mists puzzle addon. In my opinion, and the reason why I use it, is not because the maze is complicated to solve. It’s 100% (for me, and I’d suspect others) because the icons don’t persist. As soon as you walk away, it’s hidden again.
I’m fine with the maze being solved by humans, you have to do it during the Mistcaller fight anyway. However I will often miss when someone walks near it while clearing the trash. Also I don’t think memorizing what the icon was adds anything interesting.
I would also say player interaction is skill based. So removing some of that through automation that just pops stuff on the screen without much interaction is counterproductive to the skill based competative style of play being aimed for.
That said, that information can be made visual, and should be able to be, through player interaction. In the case of the deaf guild.
Pings do sound cool.
I honestly don’t think typing colors in the chat is a skill that anyone wishes to hone.
No. You’re right. It’s just tedious.
Macros. Or encounter buttons. Or voting. Or emotes. Maybe add one more layer to the target marking system. Or raid marking system.
Forcing people to use chat is bad.
A layer of raidwarnig chat through a macro seems legit, than the raid leader drops the final mark or selects the target.
Or extra action buttons baked into the encounter for more communication related to the mechanics. For example two buttons. One to flash l, I’m red! To the target for example. So they could press their button. Obviously there’d be several options so you would have to think before pressing and find the right person to communicate too. Or people.
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Yeah I’m totally with you. When I watch interviews with the devs, I very often will see them say stuff like “we are really excited to see how the playerbase is going to solve this puzzle!”
Answer: it’s going to be solved with a weakaura or an addon.
They need to start working from this assumption, and either design the encounter with whatever the WA would probably due baked-in, or just be honest about their stance on weakauras (they are fine and supplement their lack of developer resources).
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For the most part WA is fine. It’s great. And having information end up in an accessible visual format is great. It’s also not hard to use WA or that hard to develop WA. It just shouldn’t be automated.
I also don’t mind them delegating development to FoSS projects or even subcontractors who are fans.
A dialigue box system with some assignable icons could go a long way to meeting some of these goals. Like the WA for voting. Wich is fine. Ppl still click to vote. I think the only issue is a human raid leader isn’t tallying them and picking a target. Its not that big a leap in skill or effort. Stuff like that could be baked into the game or WA. If a WA dev got creative they could display the votes graphically on the raid or with buff icons with a number of stacks for each vote, or something instead of automatically talling them. Or the more a player is clicked the more and bigger puddles of green goo bleed and drop around them. Etc.
That is splitting hairs at that point.
I feel like the depth that adds could be nice, maybe you got a guy who’s not #1 on the dps charts and is still decent dps, knows the mechanics though and is great at delegating. Gives them something to bring to a raid instead of relying on WA to do all of that.
Couple that with bosses that have decision trees with the mechanics they do allowing guilds to try out different mechanics that suit their comp better and maybe some RNG even so the raid leader has to figure out what the next mechanics are or what set is happening. Let them plug that into and broadcast through DBM or Method raid tools, or an in game feature, and I can see some really fresh and interesting interactive raids going forward.
Im a bit off the rails here. Sorry if that reads a mess.
I’ve got zero beef with the blizzard devs or addon ppl. Just theory crafting in my downtime.