There’s a WA that blocks all the Evoker legendary announcements. That alone makes WA a must have
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Again it’s just a learning curve for them. I think a lot of these mechanics mentioned are good designs and interesting. The issue is Blizzard simply doesn’t give enough time to figure it out yourself in a realistic manner. If any one of these mechanics gave you like 5-10 more seconds (or whatever number) to figure it out, yes a weakaura would still be better, but now the difference is getting to your spot 5-10 seconds early with the WA to continue dps’ing as opposed to blowing up or failing to spin the room or whatever.
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Or, they could make their own built-in WeakAura engine, maybe in collaboration with WeakAura devs, including some built-in templates people can use.
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I agree. And I have WA installed. I have not used it once this raid tier tho. So there is that.
Or really felt the need to on normal difficulty.
Some mechanics are quick, however the big raid wipey ones seem to be a bit more forgiving this tier than SL
Those steps apply to almost every single important addon.
Every addon requires you to know it exists, figure out how to get it, actually get it, and many of them require supplementary data and configuration.
This includes:
- DBM or BigWigs for raiders
- DBM or LittleWigs for dungeon runners
- TomCat Tours and Rare Scanner for casual open world people
- Gatherer addons for the farmers
- ElvUI for people that want a UI that’s better designed
I think you’re overstating your point a bit. Weak Auras is not mandatory, but if you are going to raid heroic or harder, you do need one of - Weak Auras, DBM or BigWigs (pick one). Of them, WeakAuras is the most powerful and most customizable, but out of the box DBM and BigWigs do far more for your raid success with far less setup. You can raid heroic with just one of those addons set up properly.
The problem is not “WeakAuras/DBM/BW are too good.”
The problem is “Blizzard encounter design is frequently too hard without it.”
Play any other MMO game and boss mechanics are less over the top, very clearly telegraphed, and don’t require you to watch boss guide youtube videos before the pull of people who have already reverse engineered the encounter. No other game requires mechanic timers so you know whats coming next or when to move. Every other game does a very clear job showing the area-effect where damage is about to land.
Blizzard doesn’t do what other companies do, and to some extent that’s a stylistic choice. By not properly painting the ground when a boss does his front, the frontal attack looks better/prettier and less like flashes of neon-floorpaint every few seconds warning us about what’s going to happen. By accepting that the community is using timers and warnings, they can design more elaborate and interesting encounters than any other MMO.
But in doing so, they have essentially made such addon-aid mandatory for success at harder levels.
While I do think DBM or BW are a suitable replacement for most fights (some exceptions like the Among Us encounter), not playing with Weak Auras is straight up not playing your best.
There is no one in the game parsing 100’s on Mythic and probably heroic without using WeakAuras to better visualize their damage rotation.
If you are playing without ANY rotation weak auras as a DPS, you are 100% playing with a handicap and are not doing the best you could be. Period.
Now to clarify - Weak Auras is not the problem there. Blizzard giving every other spec a moderately complex rotation and poor visualizations is the problem.
Imagine playing a mage without a ROP aura to know when you’re in range of the rune? Playing a warlock and not knowing if your next cast or the one after will be within your madness / dreadtouch / nether portal window? Playing a hunter and not knowing how many seconds are left of your 3-stack barb shot on the boss because you swapped to an add? Etc.
Blizzard fails the community by placing buffs that you need to be acutely aware of somewhere off to your upper right in a pile of other buffs that last for 30minutes to an hour.
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and heres the rub. blizzard is designing content with addons like this in mind. There is no reason for them to add things to teach players mechanics while these addons exist.
Weakaura isn’t needed ppl just choice to use to. Didn’t even know what weakaura was until shadowlands and i only use it for making proc effects more noticeable.
just like a car isnt needed to go to work. you can do things without it, but the advantage it provides is pretty significant.
the one thing I have always had a point of contention with in regards to Weak Auras is that you can audibly track another players buffs/spells, etc. Where it removes the need to pay attention. I miss the days where you had to time your spells properly and needed to know how long X spell lasted from your target, now you just wait for the voice to say Divine Shield up
I don’t use it. Probably never will.
I’m sorry, but this is the EXACT argument used by people to defend in game stores and paid cosmetics in the past. And look at where we are now with that garbage.
It’s not a requirement to play the game, but you would be shooting yourself in the foot and stonewalling yourself if you ever wanted to do anything other than casual WQ’s or heroic dungeons.
The “problem” would be the same, though: that in-game interface would necessarily be too complicated for most people to use.
Lemme fix that for you:
It is not a requirement to play the game unless you are a CE raider or a top 0.1% M+ player.
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I don’t think so, the only CE boss I’ve ever done where I really felt like WA was mandatory was Mythic Queen Azshara.
Everything else… meh.
I think it’d be a lot less fun without WA, though.
Only addons I use are recount, dbm.
I wouldn’t care if they banned all addons but I would miss recount because I like to see my name at the top of the meters for a nice ego boost 
I don’t think Blizzard is the problem, beside a couple of obvious exception almost every boss from the past 3 expansions give you plenty of time to do old fashion call outs.
It seems like the mythic community still prefer to use WA to streamline the mechanics, at least that is my experience and what I seen on streams/videos.
WAs does much more for the average player than the top players in terms of skill adjustment. The whiners that rail against WAs are under this misguided belief that it is the single biggest factor for what separates them from the top players. But it does not play the game for you at all. WAs can’t turn you into a top player. The best players would still be the best players without WAs. In fact I don’t think there would be a huge drop off in their performance.
I don’t think it’s a problem. One of the main reasons I couldn’t stand FF XIV was the lack of customization for the UI.
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Which are the topic of all these threads every time it comes up though. No one cares when WA/BigWigs spams chat and automarks someone when they have something like a dispel on their head or when they have a debuff on them that counts down in chat.
People only care about these addons “doing to much” when it pertains to these edge cases like your fatescribes, azshara dances, or whatever.
If you can do it with a weakaura, you can do it with a separate addon. So unless you’re trying to remove all addons, nothing changes.