^ This. This change allowed middle-ground options instead of the “all or nothing” approach Blizzard has taken with regard to fights like Lords of Dread, Star Augur, etc.
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If it was that simple then raiders wouldn’t be using WA.
Why wouldn’t they? People who do solely World Quests still get value out of WA.
It allows for an aesthetic improvement to the game experience regardless of what content one is doing or at what difficulty.
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The value of weakauras is that it lets you customize where information displays on your screen.
If Blizzard had actually done a good job with dragonflight’s “UI revamp” there would be no need for weakauras.
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WA is far more than that which is why they had to develop around it and causes this mechanics bloat issue on even trash mobs
Your thought process is intentionally malicious and antagonistic. You aren’t seeking to understand, you’re seeking to be right.
Blizzard, at a time, considered addons to be a regular part of their game, and thus decided to design the game around addons. Over time, under this philosophy, the game became overly complex and convoluted, and thus the game began to require addons in order to play it.
The community complained that this was an issue, even top Mythic raiders were saying the game shouldn’t be designed around addons and they would love to see the game have the clarity necessary to play the game without addons. The game was constantly being compared to FF14 because of FF14’s lack of addons in tandem with visual clarity, but Blizzard didn’t listen until the disaster of a raid tier that was Sepulcher happened. It was so ridiculously difficult for absolutely zero reason other than “addons exist so these mechanics are okay because a weakaura will be made to manage it for the raiders in tandem with MRT/ERT”. It was so obvious to see how horribly designed Sepulcher was that even Blizzard could no longer deny there was an issue anymore.
So, during Dragonflight beta, Blizzard publicly stated that they will be shifting design philosophies. They explained it is impossible for them to remove addons from the game entirely as that would be too dynamic of a shift and the game, admittedly, does not have the clarity necessary for them to remove addons. They further elaborated that they would be slowly adding more UI and clarity updates throughout the course of Dragonflight, with UI/clarity updates already launching with Dragonflight’s pre-patch and initial release, and even more coming in 10.1. Vault of the Incarnates was designed with less complexity than previous raid tiers, and Abberrus is designed with even less complexity than Vault of the Incarnates. With Abberrus’s less convoluted mechanics and visual clarity, all mechanics having extremely bright and obvious colors/indicators, they can remove the ability for addons to interact with certain mechanics.
CE/HoF raiders don’t care if the addons are removed if they don’t need them. The issue is that, as the game stands, addons are necessary. Blizzard knows this, they admit to this, and they are actively working to correct this. It cannot all be done at once.
No one is offended by its nerfs or removal. Even CE/HoF raiders are satisfied that this is being removed in tandem with Abberrus having the most visual and mechanic clarity any raid tier has ever seen. The approach to Abberrus is entirely different than raids have seen before, where there is a clear cycle of trial and error, and visible progression, as you learn how the mechanics interact with the environment each individual pull without the need for an addon. This allows for them to remove the addon’s interaction with specific mechanics, because it is no longer needed to understand the mechanic.
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Are you seriously trying to argue that trash mobs got harder because of WA, which has only ever been increasingly restricted since WotLK, and not because, say, M+ exists and the playerbase, up to 16-years-experienced, wanted more challenge and having trash not just be Netflix-and-zergable helps in that regard?
Seriously?
Or the main reason the game has more complexity these days:
Because people have gotten better at the game.
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ppl are going to riot. risky move 
blizz being ballzy these days. not sure if its for the best but one can hope lol
Nobody’s going to riot, this is a trivial change.
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I would seriously love for the base UI to make DoT effects and their various buffs/pandemics clearly and cleanly visible on nameplates instead of needing Plater.
I actually played the game without Plater until this expansion and my gameplay was immediately enhanced by being able to actually read my bleeds on multiple targets.
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The worst thing about playing beta is that addons don’t work on the start, and the base UI is just a miserable experience.
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No one is going to riot because the only people it would “negatively” effect (CE/HoF/RWF raiders) have spoken out about wanting this change, and the people that are positively affected by the change have been begging for the change for years.
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KUI (w/ Stanzilla) simp here, but same.
And the thing is I can easily imagine what would be (to me) even better ways to handle all that than what those addons currently manage, but default our nameplates are still decades old ideas that were already well behind addons of the time in terms of functionality. They’re pathetic in terms of functionality, and really damn ugly.
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i hope youre right. we lost 3 raiders in a week so im a bit doomer-pilled 
Since it’s come up a few times, I thought it might be interesting to talk about WoW’s DBM vs. FF14’s mechanic telegraphs. As others have said, DBM isn’t telling raiders anything that they don’t already know. When the boss says “I’m firing a laser beam” and winds back to fire a laser beam, DBM saying “move out of the laser beam” isn’t exactly ground-breaking information.
What others have been saying though is that FF14 doesn’t really need something like DBM because they have better telegraphs for their mechanics, especially for players who have never seen the fight before. That’s largely because FF14 uses extremely standardized iconography through all of its fights. AoEs always use the same exact orange circle marker. Stack mechanics always use the same circle with arrows pointing to it. What I find this leads to is that FF14 very rarely experiments with mechanics that can’t be quickly and clearly communicated via their established iconography. Since those mechanics are almost universally positional mechanics, FF14 end-game tends to be more about learning the script of a fight and positioning yourself accordingly to not die. It feels more like a dance with specific steps than planning a WoW raid does. They even have a specific animation for an incoming tankbuster so you can use externals if you want to.
And for what it’s worth, when you get to end-game Savage content… a lot of those AoE markers go away or rather they don’t appear until a half second before the attack comes out so by the time you see the marker, you better already be out of the way. So what you’re supposed to do instead is look at the boss’ cast bar, look at their pose, and use that information to determine where it’s safe to stand. Which is basically the exact same information WoW uses to telegraph its boss mechanics. I’d even say FF14 is even more ambiguous as a lot of AoE attacks will use the same name but a different pose on the boss to determine their shape. So you need to be familiar with the different ability animations in order to succeed. WoW generally doesn’t do that and has a different animation for every attack.
A lot of ink has been spilled about certain computational weakauras that exist for certain boss encounters. But I think there is a fundamental misunderstand of how…not that sophisticated these weakauras actually are. The vast majority of these weakauras are doing the simple task of checking whether or not a debuff is present on a character, and then either assigning you a direction to move (Kurog Grimtotem for example). There really isn’t any intelligence here aside from “If debuff present after boss spell cast, run right, else move left”
These weakauras really aren’t doing absurd amounts of computation that many people think. At most they are checking to see if a debuff is present, and assigning a positional Boolean, or they are, before assigning a position, checking a Method Raid Tools note to determine a priority.
Weakauras are powerful, but they aren’t doing super computer calculations and playing the game for you, you still have to react correctly to information, and play accordingly. There is a reason that still few people obtain Cutting Edge, despite all these tools existing, the content is still hard.
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Honestly I find discussions about “the 21st raider” to be more interesting. For those who haven’t heard the term before… it refers to the practice of having a 21st member of your raid group in your voice chat who is watching the fight through another member streaming… and this 21st raider is basically the shot caller. They’re responsible for making the snap-decisions of “McStabby go left, CoolBoyMage go right.” When endgame raids get so complicated that it’s not feasible to ask any of the raid members to bear the extra focus burden of having the broad situational awareness required to make those calls, having a 21st raider who focuses on that entirely becomes a much more attractive solution.
And honestly I think you can take both sides of the issue on how much of the 21st raider’s job addons should take. Common example is on the first phase of Razageth, when 3 people are marked with Static Charge, we have 3 ground markers in 3 different spots showing where they should all go. DBM automatically marks each of the 3 players with one of those markers when the mechanic happens so that they just need to go to the matching marker. Without DBM, if you wanted to pursue the same strategy, you’d either have to have each of the marked raiders on their own decide which marker to go to (which would be super chaotic and more often than not create hesitation and overlap) or you’d have a raid leader who’s job it is to tell each marked player where to go every time the mechanic happened, which would mean you’re either asking one of your raiders to shoulder a lot of extra mental bandwidth, or you’re bringing a 21st raider.
For the sake of the actual players being marked with the mechanic, I think the difference is negligible. In both cases they’re just going where they’re told whether the thing that’s telling them is a shot-caller or DBM.
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here we go again… they are going to once again try to break a mod that originally ignored the game functions itself…DBM originally was an external program not a mod. we used it in BWL and blizz finally just allowed it to be incorperated. instead of like the game it was originally used for. personal prediction… Blizz will break that functionality and the mods will find a workaround even if its eventually run it as a third party program.about every other expansion they do something to break DBM and dbm fixes it eventually.
It’s hard to say that addons like DBM and WeakAuras are ignoring the game functions when Blizzard is in direct control of what these addons can and cannot do. These hook into the game using Blizzard’s API, which is basically a library of functions that addons can use to do… whatever it is they do. If the API allows you you look at a certain buff’s duration, then you can use that information to do whatever you want. If the API does not grant you access to that buff’s duration, then the addon can’t do anything about it.
Blizzard can at any time they wish change the information obtainable through the API. They’ve done it in the past (which is why DBM can’t make a radar for you to avoid Wrought and Focused Chaos anymore) and that’s basically all this change now is. People who think that this is the first step of Blizzard’s war on addons are frankly delusional. The rule has always been that Blizzard will support addon functionality that they like and break addon functionality that they don’t like. Over time the API has always evolved to become more restrictive, not less. But ultimately the reason why addons like DBM and WeakAuras have stuck around for so long is because Blizzard is fine with their core purpose.
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