This Is Why Blizzard Will NEVER Ban Addons in WoW

[@Preachgaming]

HUGE thanks to the Weakauras devs and Echo's JustWait for helping us with the research on this interesting subject and being so open with us on how this all works. I hope this gives you a bit of insight into the history of addons in World of Warcraft and why they'll probably be sticking around. EDIT: some additional clarification - in the diagram at 18:18 this is intended to be illustrative of what would happen if just the combat log would be disabled in how it links to other addons, Addons do also make use of the API as well and will often do both depending on the addon. What do you think, are addons a good or bad thing for WoW and should they be removed? Drop a comment and let us know.

[@kimaclaret]

Initial thoughts based on title and this comment alone: I don't foresee a future where add-ons are removed from WoW. Even if they went and added every popular add-on as a base feature of the game, as they have with some, the community is so used to being able to customize their game with this and that, I did think it will ever be enough. Just think of how many people have been using something like DBM (or a variant) for so many years at this point that it is almost (and maybe is) a requirement to have it. In my mind, add-ons are a part of the game, for better or for worse. That said, I cannot express how happy it makes me to not have add-ons in FFXIV. The hard line taken definitely has its faults, though I understand where the devs are coming from, but I appreciate how the game is able to be designed because of it. I don't have to pay attention to this or that because it's all laid out. No weird sound alerts because there are sound cues built into the game in a way that makes sense. Stuff like that. Then again, I'm a normal content enjoyer at this point, so I'm sure others may disagree.

[@Dudewithhat9531]

Now they are letting bots pay for the entire company too, allowing them to run so rampant it ruins the game.

[@HH-hd7nd]

Everything you presented here is a strong argument why addons MUST be forbidden. Addons are destroying the game, simple as that. They are also poisoning the playerbase. Someone dealing less DPS than others even though the damage should be similar when looking on gear, class and spec is often because one of the players is using an addon (like Tellmewhen for example) that gives them an unfair advantage and the other player playing without addons. This leads to players being toxic to others even though all they do is cheating. What Blizzard can do is what they in fact should do and ban addons once and for all. Things like damage meters could be included in the standard UI.

[@UnicornStampede]

Our hc raiding guild decided we would attempt vault of incarnates without using add-ons, after many of experienced the fun of it in ff14- we finally cleared it this week. What was interesting was, as soon as we killed Raz, we called it on WoW until 10.1. There was more relief, than joy in killing Raz and clearing the raid. I'd certainly never raid again with Add-ons, the entire experience is more fun, but it's interesting to note our friends in other guilds breezed past particular fights because they had add-ons, whereas we absolutely struggled, which was a tad disheartening.

[@Fiercesoulking]

Add-ons aka mods are to make your life easier and your game so they doing exactly what they are meant for. Yes mods are usually a thing where the devs let the player do whatever they like WoW is not such a game actually no MMO is . All those games end up very causal games which are much more successful then MMOs in general(think on Minecraft). From my experience MMOs have a tendency to have a difficult creep in general because players a trained over time on all kinds of mechanics and to make it challenging they make it harder and harder until hardly any players can catch up. In Gw2 you can see this in the fractals Sirens Reef & Twilight Oasis when you compare them to the old fractals very good.

[@BriGuy77711]

When the entire history is laid out like this, it becomes a lot clearer why FFXIV is so strict about addon policing. It really is a slippery slope that you can't walk back once you fall down. Thanks for this great perspective, Preach!

[@Byron804]

Which is kinda funny considering FF14 has all of these addons in the video anyway, and square can't ban them unless you record yourself using it.

[@Colaschnittchen]

@@Byron804 its less about cant, but wont.. yet. They might be stricter and use programs and detect the use off addons in the future

[@HawkEyeTS]

@@Colaschnittchen It will be extremely sad if the players refuse to listen and they end up having to implement something like anti-cheat to enforce it, because that will almost certainly also hit the mods that help deal with high ping, or add accessibility support, or just do things like replace their (currently) low resolution textures with something higher quality. What these people flaunting addons in Ultimate raid kills don't consider is they REALLY don't want to fuck around and actually find out, because the actions the devs will need to take with so many of these being client side will have to be overreaching to work properly. It's just amazing to me how this tiny percent of players is already being catered to, and they can't help themselves but keep pushing the patience of the devs. Personally, I would rather see the Ultimate content disappear and that time/money be used for more broadly playable content than for it to stick around and require killing all customization as a result.

[@Colaschnittchen]

@@HawkEyeTS true. thats probably the reason why the havnt done it yet.

[@Aerensianic]

@@HawkEyeTS ? That is pretty bad take imo. No more ultimates? Seriously? FF already caters heavily toward broadly playable content and you want to hit raiding even harder? What a vast overreaction to some minor addon drama that comes and goes every ultimate tier. SE will *never* put in software that reads what is on your computer. Raiders aren't going to ruin anything (and if you are so keen to point fingers what about those visual mods that got flaunted by someone buying a literal bill board to advertise their event?).

[@jobo5300]

Problems begin to emerge when addons are not simply displaying already available information in a new way, but instead processing that information to create new intelligence which is then fed to the player.

[@throwaway5656]

arguably: filtering and emphasis on specific type of information can already be considered as some form of processing -- let alone projection and/or transformation of information.

[@cavajason]

It's too far gone, Blizzard has effectively allowed addon developers to do their job for them for years, 90% of blizzards UI improvements were addons for years before they got adopted by WoW itself. Addons in the most basic sense are a player created solution to flaws in the game's ability to display information in an effective manner.

[@aeo-gard]

Pretty much; addons and mods always exist because of one simple thing: there's something a player wants that the dev isn't fulfilling, so they make it (or use it) themselves. Sometimes it's cosmetics, sometimes it's complete overhauls, sometimes it's stuff that gets way out of hand, but at the end of the day it's the developer's job to see what their players actually want from their game and invest in doing a good job to make that happen if they can. I feel like it's just far too late for WoW in this regard and the most we could ever hope for is a slight reduction in the mandatory pvp/pve endgame addons, but that's also very unlikely.

[@DavramZu]

Using addon developers as a crutch (which has been happening) is not good, but completely disallowing them is also bad. SE somehow has banned addons entirely and yet manages the entire system worse than Blizzard does by using an honor system.

[@KyokujiFGC]

Not just that, but if you removed all the add-ons on WoW, then it becomes a game with some of the worst visual clarity around. Every mechanic in FF14 or Lost Ark is very clearly telegraphed or marked, whereas a lot of stuff in WoW is very very difficult to see without add-ons. Top players even have weakauras that make noises when certain attacks happen because the telegraphs are often difficult to see in the sea of effects and other junk. For example, some very dangerous frontals have oddly transluscent cones that can be very difficult to see if even one person is casting, while other mobs will leave small swirlies underneath giant packs of mobs that are essentially impossible for melee to see at times.

[@Nightstalker314]

"Flaws in the game". You say it like it's a lack of QOL when most addons that get "used" are about dumbing down the player requirements.

[@alihorda]

Not just about flaws. The taste of players differ and addons help.

[@lillbrorsan]

I honestly want Blizzard to experiment with a raid tier (or a boss) on the PTR where it's all designed to be done without addons, clear attacks, telegraphs etc.

[@Boingcat]

They also have good enough cooperation with raid guilds, that they could ask them to test it without addons (weakauras etc. - obv. general UI and DPS meters would still be available) and probably get them to agree with it - just to get a feel for it.

[@ShadowSpanSpb]

just check current tier, you dont need addons even in mythic

[@AeriFyrein]

What would be even better, is if they actually hired a good fight QA team, and tested a tier entirely in-house without having it on the PTR at all. And, y'know tested it properly so it wasn't massively borked like most of them have been, even with all the testing done via the PTR. Then you'd actually get a proper World First Race, since everyone would be starting on an even playing field for knowledge of the fights, and the fights wouldn't have to be nerfed/fixed halfway through the race.

[@Boingcat]

@@AeriFyrein You know this is the most reasonable take, which is why it will never happen 😢

[@janah6473]

@@AeriFyrein Literally everyone who is anywhere near serious about RWF raiding has access to the PTR testing. Youre coping if you think THAT is what holds guilds back.

[@Ochatach]

Most attacks and abilities bosses and mobs do in FF14 and other games are usually VERY good telegraphed so you actually see that an ability is about to happen in a particular spot, whereas in WoW they have been kinda slacking with a lot of it, and especially now in DF where you have bosses that obscure your vision like the dragons in Ruby Life Pools or Raszegeth in VOTI with their wings. Sure it's 'realistic' that wings would block your vision but it makes for poor gameplay and leads to just frustration.

[@Kittsuera]

And there is no consistency between the stack telegraphs and the avoid ones.

[@ExValeFor]

I'm not sure it's realistic that the wings obscure your vision from above, given that 'realistically' you're not watching from above

[@Main_Protagonist]

I hate the bird in algethar for this there is always gusts and fire puddles inside its model :(

[@Kittsuera]

@@ExValeFor there are a lot of other spell effect over laps which makes it unclear what you are supposed to do without an addon. do you stack for thundering clear so you dont die? or do you spread so you dont die to quaking? also fire going out. wind blowing you around. healing aoe down. never mind Volcanic nocking you up into inhale because you needed to be in the griping hands puddle, which hides the volcanic effect fairly well.

[@wapniak666]

​@@Kittsuera how does an addon helps you with clearing or spreading for thundering/quaking???

[@charnotaurus2665]

God that sudden Vent noise awoke a level of buried memories I didnt realize was there.

[@luxorien]

I liked the QoL add-ons in WoW and even the customization you could do with weak auras was such a great addition to the game, so that you could arrange information on your screen in the way that worked best for you. The downside (which I didn't realize until I played FF14) was that I never really learned the boss fights. I just stood where DBM told me to stand. And I had to do that or I was wasting the rest of the raid's time. (And everyone had always done the fight before me because I only played a few hours a week, so it felt really rude to make these people who could do the fight in ten minutes wait twenty minutes for me to figure it out). I think it's the social pressure to use the add-ons that makes it problematic. And I get it: why make the game harder for yourself? Why take hours to try to get 10 or 15 people to learn these mechanics when an addon can cut that time down to one or two pulls? When I was younger, I thought these add-ons were great because it made things so much easier. But these days it makes me wonder: what is the point? Just to get to the loot? If the boss fight isn't inherently fun, why I am I doing it?

[@OWnIshiiTrolling]

It seems like the issue isn't with addons, but with not being there for progress. I never really learned bosses well if I was only there for farm, but did learn those where I was present for progress, using the exact same addons. But I would also say that I was just motivated to learn the fights, and read what the mechanics actually did. It's up to the player to decide if they want to know what's going on, in the end. Blind progress, with or without addons, is probably one of the best trends that there currently is. It really makes you have to think about what you do.

[@Trapphus22]

I always learn the fights, even the mechanics I don't deal with. That's jsut how I do, I look during pulls and see what is happening, how the mechanics are interacting with players and eachother and what they are actually doing. When I raided mythic we used A LOT of weakauras and addons. It made it a lot easier. You didn't have to rely on dbm timers for cetain things, you didn't have to rely on your eyes looking at 15 different points on the screen in 5 seconds to determine where to go. But I always learned the fights because that was fun and I put in a lot of effort into optimizing the fights. (Mythic Sylvanas intermission you could have a group of hunters just soak one group of arrows with turtles because they were far away enough from the rest of the raid so they wouldn't die) The problem isn't addons per se, it's part of it, but the players are also part of it. Players can't really learn fights. They expect to know the fight before they even step in it and just get their shiny loot (normal and heroic raids). This is so insanely clear from an ex-CE raider that is now just chilling in HC. Having to do 15 pulls on a heroic end boss is seen as horrible, where you would usually spend around 180-250+ pulls on Mythic end bosses. Heroic and normal raiders just don't have the patience. So, get rid of the addons and what happens then? Those same casual raiders can now no longer see anything of what happens durign the fight. It becomes pretty much impossible to kill mid heroic bosses. Bosses like Fatescribe, Xanesh, Mekkatorque would become impossible for many normal and heroic guilds and pugs. Without completely changing a large part of the playerbase you can't really do anything about addons.

[@s1os2s3]

I do not know how it is possible for you to not learn a fight when DBM is teaching you the fight. The boss start facing you and yells "bla bla bla" and has this cone in front of him -> DBM tells you to move. You learned what to do when the boss does that. I cant understand for the life of me how you cant learn anything when DBM teaches you. I read what each boss does and I know what to do. DBM/BW shows me when to do it so I can plan my cds. You even have guides to tell you the best tactic.

[@OWnIshiiTrolling]

@@s1os2s3 Playing according to DBM doesn't require you to know how any spell works, or how they interact with each other. Figuring that out is entirely optional.

[@s1os2s3]

@@OWnIshiiTrolling And that is entirely the fault of the player if they dont look to learn. Boy, how people like to dish out faults to anything but themselves.

[@Nightstalker314]

Regarding Paragon's Archimonde strat: The devs were expecting players to form some kind of circle (If you look at the way the mechanic functions it's the first strat that came to mind back then (at least for me)).

[@ScenetheUndead]

Goes to show sometimes people are going to overthink things in an innocent way. In hindsight a circle makes perfect sense (And I dont doubt even before this was public knowledge at least one unknown guild formed a circle lol)

[@Loomx5]

I get that. Its literally what you ended up doing with the addon after all. But the problem is by splitting it off to 2, 4, 6 people etc and not the whole raid on lower difficulties, you're training people to react to the mechanic differently. So by the time you're at the mythic one where the mechanic was clearly designed for, people are being weird about it and can't work out that they're just meant to be in a circle now.

[@ic3t3ap3ach]

thats what i thought after i saw the method way 😂 but as long as they have the money to develop stuff it maybe easier for them and they have more boss uptime than thinking what they need to do. Look at current mdi players. only audio visual notifications for all kind of stuff.

[@LurkingAnon]

In reality, it's the same song and dance that plays between Blizzard and the Addons. People come up with a nice QOL addon, Blizzard later implement its functionality into the core game. The most simple way of actually "getting rid of addons" is just to implement the core features into the game but that is simultaniously also the issue because often when they do implement some of those features, they have certain settings that are lacking. For example I would have liked to use the Personal Resource Display feature instead of my standard buff tracking weakauras, but because that resource display is tied to your character position and not to a static point on the screen, it simply became unusable for me if I was turning the camera at all. The ball is just in their court to optimize and visualize the same info the addons are pulling from.

[@szymusiek22]

If blizz implement it correctly then I am all in. I just don't trust them to do this. I was "I can modify UI so it will work as addon I am using? Great". In reality it didn't do all I wanted so I am still using bartender (that bar changing function). And bonus for giving me random errors due to changes even now >_

[@Sourman1545]

I woulds get rid of most of my addons if i had their features in the game. There is no reason blizz cant have a default damage meter, same goes for the ui just let me move adjust the size heck even the color of the back ground on my spell bars and ill drop bartender in no time. The ui is getting there but only about 25% of what bartender and other ui addons offer

[@mpales9431]

This is an enlightening video that not only gives prime examples but also a scale of degree of add-on usage instead of a black and white yes/no add-on statement. Add-on usage happens everywhere, whether permitted or not, but it is fair to see how dramatic of an effect it can have on the game-devs - something players who only care about themselves rarely consider.

[@bjorn0411582]

This is an excellent, addition piece to "Why its rude to suck at world of warcraft" a video that is much more critical of addons, but ultimately also deems that addons are good and should remain. Addons can be invaluable to many players, with hearing deficiencies, having spell names pop up visually instead of having to listen to the voice line, can be a huge difference, or the opposite, having DBM Say in its robo voice "range 5" can be what makes or breaks a players ability to raid with cooked eyes. Not to mention the entire other spectrum of play with RP and the like, the addons for that are near essential to organise RP conventions and rules across such a wide game. But the frank reality is also that, due to the nature of these addons, it has fundamentally changed the social fabric of the game. Addons are so insanely powerful, that now any fight designed without them in mind, would be piss easy, so Blizz has to design fights with them in mind, its not impossible without them, but the disadvantage youre put at because of this, makes it incredibly difficult to succeed, widening the gap in skill. To the point where said social fabric, expects you to use them, and not using them, can easily be what makes or breaks 90% of your social interactions in world of warcraft. Were stuck in a "damned if you do, damned if you dont" situation. Crack down on addons and youre crushing entire populations of your playerbase, from the RP'ers, to the ones who _need_ addons to play effectively. Dont crack down, and youre stuck being an asshole for not being good at the game. Seriously, I implore anyone and everyone, whos interested in this topic, to watch "Why its rude to suck at world of warcraft" it goes way deeper than I ever could.

[@cattysplat]

You are denying reality if you think many of these mechanics can be done at harder raid difficulties without addons. These mechanics are designed with the intention that players have the addon installed, something you literally say yourself. This is the issue, not having addons is seen as griefing by WoW raiders because it is the bare minimum for modern day raiding, not just culturally but mechanically.

[@princessjello]

​@@cattysplatyup thats exactly what the video that OP is referencing says :/

[@pwnedsocks]

@@cattysplat I tanked mythic argus without addons, after weeks of progress of course. it is possible, but it is a lot harder.

[@harrylane4]

@@cattysplat that is literally the argument made in OP’s video recommendation.

[@TheYoungtrust]

Blizzard should be making it accessible, not a 3rd party.

[@natebroadus8474]

I felt it--the moment I stepped into FFXIV, had no addons, and could do EVERYTHING. I have some now, but it's all QoL stuff. I don't use a single addon for any content and it's glorious. In fact, FFXIV retaught me how to watch the boss for cues... I know, watch the BOSS?!! But it's so much more engaging to have to pay attention to what the boss is doing, what he/she is casting, if the atk is coming from the boss's left or right, while staying on my rotation and looking at the environment to see if that has any tells of an incoming attack. This vs an addon telling me, and me mindlessly moving to my assigned spot. Addons started out innocently in WoW, but became this Pandora's Box full of horrors that will require an incredible amount of courage for Blizz to root out (like if they had the balls to go zero tolerance, I would be absolutely amazed). That's why I support FFXIV going zero tolerance on the addon issue. They cannot bend, because one concession just leads to someone taking it further than the addon originally intended, then the next one goes further, until you get the clusterfuck that is WoW's addon albatross.

[@cgibbard]

How information is presented by a game is often a large part of what a game is. Player attention is an important and limited resource and how players direct their attention over time and in response to what's happening in a game often makes up for a large portion of the difference between a beginner and an expert player. So it's probably quite dangerous to downplay the impact that rearranging that information can have. More specifically to this situation, what gets written into the combat log is up to Blizzard too. If they only want players to have particular statistics, and not details about what's happening live, they could compute the statistics and write those into the log at an appropriate time, rather than immediately recording every event. They could design UIs that are closer to what players would like to see, while striking a balance with what limitations they'd like to impose on information available. It's likely still possible to claw back control over anything they'd like to, especially if done in stages to manage player expectations gradually, it's just a matter of whether that's where they want to focus their developer time and effort.

[@BeastlyCold]

Organizing chaotically presented information into a clearer way through a weakaura doesn't do anything besides help you know how to execute a mechanic on a given pull. The fact that there is a weakaura that is presenting this information in the first place means that, by definition, you solved the mechanic. That is where the utility of WA comes in. It resolves a mechanic that is already understood and resolved on a pull-by-pull basis instead of having to dedicate brainpower to resolving it for every other pull. The skill comes in during the actual execution. This is why you can't hand a set of handholding VOTI weakauras to just any set of 20 players and expect Raz to die. It's also why you can't hand someone Hekili or any other rotation assist and expect a 100th percentile parse.

[@ridleyroid9060]

I am an FF player and this is a fascinating video, watching that laser mechanic is really not too dissimilar from something like monitors in top or NA in p8s just in recent raids. It is a really intriguing story of players versus the developers, one that happens even in FF without addons (finding braindead strategies for mechanics in ways that were certainly either not intended or are somewhat exploitative), and how that has been prevalent for both of these 2 games.

[@Mythricia1988]

I guess people/players will basically always seek the path of least resistance to beat a mechanic, no matter what tools are or aren't provided by the game for doing so.

[@Zhienerich]

I actually thought you would talk about Emergency heal / Heal monitor first, that autointerrupted your heals if they would overheal more than your set threshold and that you could set to auto target lowest hp raid members

[@EloquentTroll]

That's neat, but honestly Healbot is doing a lot more than that

[@Nokiya]

Because if addons weren't present then blizzard would have to spend resources to actually make bosses telegraph attacks via animations and whatnot instead of just relying on timers.

[@HawkEyeTS]

This. Blizzard's game design is practically unreadable without addons, and often a visual clusterfuck on top of that. I cannot count the number of times they will have just some random colored circle appear with no indication of what it does until you've either died to it, or looked it up in the adventure guide or some online guide. Comparatively, I play ever new boss encounter in FFXIV blind and while there are occasionally some tricky variants on a mechanic, almost all of them are immediately recognizable due to establishing consistent visual indicators for the types of effects they use in raid design. WoW's LFR difficulty shows precisely how bad their visual design is, because that's the group of people unlikely to have boss mods installed, and they fail over and over at any mechanic remotely complicated until enough "mercy" stacks are added to the raid to just overwhelm it.

[@Valvad0ss]

i do like this perspective and would be interested to see blizzard do a no addon raid to try and see how it goes just so we can all see what they've got.

[@aeo-gard]

@@HawkEyeTS Yeah it's super weird; progging on WoW fights always feels like bashing your head against a wall if you're NOT using said addons that basically tell you how to solve mechanics, simply because the default info given often feels inadequate Yet the default info we're given for XIV fights feels like just enough to instantly recognize certain mechanics and patterns, but you still need to follow through on execution and/or recognition. There are fights in XIV that I completely forget or had not done before but managed to get by just by understanding the visual language of the game as a whole.

[@lost1head]

They already do. But animations and voice lines can't beat icons and texts appearing in the middle of your screen.

[@Nokiya]

@@lost1head they do bare minimum. Look at xiv with how they announce and animate attacks vs wow

[@jsjsjsjs]

Archimonde and Azshara are the perfect examples. Addons are an arms race - tools get more powerful and encounters become increasingly computationally complex as a result, to the point where they become extremely difficult to impossible without said tools. I think YoshiP's stance draws from the experience that despite the many benefits to be gained, the eventual trade-off to the player experience & skill development is not worth it, and it is difficult to draw up an enforceable policy where certain types of 3rd party tools are allowed and others aren't. Even the most innocent cosmetic mods can come with malware, and no company wants to be associated with that mess.

[@theoperator3712]

"the eventual trade-off to the player experience & skill development is not worth it" Are we talking about the same YoshiP here? Last I checked he and his team were too busy dumbing down jobs(especially tank & healer) to possibly care about player skill development.

[@Shiirow]

@@theoperator3712 people whine so much about 'dumbing down' because they are morons who think needlessly convoluted means 'hard'. theres a little phrase I like to throw out when I see people crying about dumbing down... and thats _easy to play, hard to master_ because something thats easy to understand doesnt mean its easy to play, especially when you add in all the other elements of the experience.

[@theoperator3712]

@@Shiirow I can assure you from extensive experience, there is nothing hard to master about Warrior in Endwalker.

[@SenpaiXcore]

@@theoperator3712 The job itself might not be hard to master but going into the hardest content with a team where a mistake by anyone could mean a wipe - this is the level of hard to master. Using the right things at the right time. Take a monk dps for example. It is fairly easy to learn but apply said mechanics of the job into an evironment like P8S or an ultimate and the entire difficulty curve goes up by a lot.

[@owenwells7692]

@@theoperator3712 for you maybe, but you are not everyone in this game who plays as a warrior.

[@klaskent]

After raiding in FF14 and Lost Ark, I found the light of having no addons during raid encounters, and the fun in having a smaller raidteam.

[@xplorethings]

The part of "nothing we can do" isn't entirely true. In fact even back in Cataclysm they attempted to add mechanics that did not appear in combat log, like Sinestra balls - they would fixate on you, but the only way to tell was a laser beam going to your character, without getting any debuff or such. In light of that, you could literally do the Star Augur pairing, just don't give players the debuff. But, the Sinestra experiment was widely unpopular, and they have been weary about doing it since. Mythic Mekkatorque is a more recent example, and again, it was rather unpopular. Truth is most people just want to do these things while feeling like they are getting away with cheesing it.

[@marioparnass6152]

Completely agree, I always think about Cenarius, it was hard to see who it was following and you had multiple going at the same time, is not a good idea to make things hard to track/see you for the sake of making it harder and I'm glad they seem to shy away from those type of mechanics.

[@mw2984]

Hmm I would say the issue lays more into the fact that this was not the norm and because of that players felt off guard by that. Thats why it was so unpopular.

[@HarumiYu]

The problem with me about WoW and add-ons will always be the fights being created around Add-ons, assuming everybody will have it, the fact that is mandatory always bothered me for the endgame.

[@Emidretrauqe]

If it's mandatory, then it means they're not a mod...

[@ic3t3ap3ach]

true can someone tell me how to solve lords of dread without the nameplate vote addon with a 20-30 man raid size

[@Jaigarful]

Its also worth mentioning Maiden in Tomb of Sargeras. That fight had a random assignment element (Fel or Shadow) and in phase transitions you had to have people spread through 6 lanes. Weak Auras was able to output who needed to go where exactly on the fly.

[@GbrBy]

That said, you could walk in the gaps between the orbs to resolve that mechanic, and not need a Weak Aura

[@RaddyC]

Fantastic video, I didn’t know anything about the history of addons. I’ve been playing FFXIV for about 8 years now, doing savage and ultimate and I started WoW last year. I was curious about WoW’s raiding so I joined a guild and we did vault of the incarnates normal. I watched a guide for each fight and all of them seemed really straightforward. The first night I could raid with the guild we were on Kurog and what happened absolutely blew my mind: He has a simple stack mechanic. Two people get marked with large AoE’s and the raid needs to split evenly to soak the damage. We tried it blind twice and wiped both times. We had to download a weak aura just to tell us who to stack with. I told my friends in 14 about this and they thought I was making it up. Maybe this guild was just super casual but it blew my mind that something as simple as two stack markers had to be offshored to an addon. WoW raiding is fun but the requirement of using addons like DMB that literally tell you what to do in order to join any raid takes away all the fun for me. I don’t see myself ever getting into WoW’s raiding so long as things like weak auras or dbm are around as they are now because there’s no point. At that point I’m not fighting a boss, I’m following a spreadsheet of instructions that just pop up in the middle of my screen

[@ncorg]

You tried the lowest possible denominator and just assumed that was the entirety of wow raiding. Try getting into a CE guild, or even a Hall of Fame one so you can experience bosses before the massive nerfs meant to make them accessible by the most incompetent type of player?

[@MichaSennin]

@@ncorg Why? Get into a Guild that demands even more addons? No. This is what a casual/new player would expirience. Your argument doesnt change the OP core problem. Its the same, the addon even tells you more on higher difficulty lmao.

[@ncorg]

@@MichaSennin op is using the argument that he plays the hardest content the game he mains has to offer. In order to get a feeling of wows counterparty he played not only on the easiest difficulty but also extrapolated his experience to the rest of the game. For someone that actually knows what top end content looks like, addons does nothing more than display information for you in a different manner that blizzard does. The decision making, preparation, execution, coordination, resource assignment and group composition is still entirely on the players and thats what difficult, not memorizing a bunch of useless timers to dance around the room like FF demands of its players. Furthermore, op is not a completely blind new player, as the group he joined might have been. They are someone with almost a decade of experience on a game that very much copied/inspired on WoWs core combat philosophy. So at the very least he have a really good sense of what to expect and how to learn from the gameplay feedback. If anything this only shows his ignorance of not recognizing the lowest, of 3 possible difficulties as a gateway for completely inexperienced players or straight up dishonesty in order to farm internet empathy on the biggest circle jerk of online gaming. But surely no one would lie on the internet, right?

[@RaddyC]

@@ncorg No, michael is right. I had no intention of going hardcore in wow at all. I just wanted to have some casual fun and try out another mmo. My complaint isn't "wow ez bc addons lmao". My complaint is that something as simple as "split into two even groups to soak damage" had to be offshored to a third party UI element to do all the work for me aside from just holding the A/D key. And I suspect that were I to join a heroic or mythic group and said "hey, i don't have DBM or Weakauras and I don't want to use them" I'd be kicked. My complaint has nothing to do with the encounter's difficulty at all. It's that WoW's telegraphs are so vague that addons are needed and the community is so used to addons to solve mechanics for them that it removes a solid chunk of what I find fun in other mmo's.

[@Justagamerl]

Blizzard deliberately called on a generation of gamers to learn lua and fix their mediocre UI for them with very good addon support from day 1.

[@FeelsGouda]

If you want to know, what It's like to specifically fail and die in an encounter, without having access to a comabt log, I suggest you go play Path of Exile. This is basically one of the biggest gripes people have, if you die, all you can do is guess what actually killed you. Of course, it is not as important as in an MMORPG, but it can be rather frustrating.

[@naejimba]

In my opinion, players will come up with a solution if it isn't simple enough to get a large group of people to deal with it consistently. That isn't always bad. Some mechanics are needlessly convoluted; for instance, I'm not looking forward to the "bite" mechanic on blood queen in Wrath Classic. It's one of those mechanics where you plan it out ahead of time, but it could just so happen someone else gets bit first and then you have to try to adjust the order, on the fly, as your playing, remembering what everyone else was supposed to do to figure it out. And if someone bites the wrong person? It screws up everyone else in line. It isn't something "fun" to do... it is something I dread when it comes up because of how easy it is for someone to screw YOU up. Having to coordinate on the fly is where I take issue. Having a SINGLE person (or maybe 2 or 3) have to respond and do something complex and it's random when it happens? I take no issue. Have a fight that takes a lot of coordination, but it's the same every time? I have no issue with that either. IF we want something that is both complex AND takes a lot of people coordinating together perfectly, I believe it should be very easy to see visually.... so like the addon that showed symbols and you had to match I think is preferable to the original mechanic. Now, if you have players at the very top end that this is not difficult enough for, then change it in the most difficult version. They can deal with it, the average person playing the game CAN'T do so consistently; most people don't want to admit that but that is the truth.

[@EndOfExistence1337]

Part of the problem is with raid size as well. In FFXIV, the raid size is only 8 players which is a lot easier to manage.

[@mastercats]

The problem hear is mechanics have to be complicated enough that it's still a challenge with add-ons. If they removed add-ons than the wow devs could use less complicated mechanics, or the wow devs could add in other in game tools to make the difficulty manageable. In FFXIV if they had add-ons a ton of the fights would trivial. Wow has the opposite problem. There are mechanics that are useless to have in fights because add-ons make them pointless.

[@khinzaw77]

@@EndOfExistence1337 FFXIV has a 48 person savage raid with decently complex mechanics and a similar but slightly easier 56 person raid.

[@robertrouthier2603]

I can't help but feel like so many of the issues with wow in the last few years are directly related to the increasing importance of the race to world first (and to a similar, but lesser degree, the MDI). Add-ons were never as big of an issue as they were until the racers had literal add-on developers in their teams designing add-ons for them as they competed.

[@ic3t3ap3ach]

funny thing mdi stream uses omnicd to track interrupts and cds and details for damage 😂 2 fucking addons because blizzard is incompetent to develop something for the game. I know its cheaper for them and this will be always their excuses

[@empressjessica5020]

you speaking the real truth all the youtubers/streamers and also the anti addon crowd refuse to admit and thats exactly the problem. it aint addons tho from time to time one comes up but it was this race race race for fame that triggered a huge tidal wave in all this

[@davidlazerz8564]

I can respect FF14 for not wanting anything but their experience for the players as designed. Thats a valid way to develop a video game experience. I also appreciate how WoW has always allowed an INSANE amount of customization for the player. Mounts, Transmogs, Mods, etc. etc. all made it so almost anything I didn't like with WoW I could almost certainly change or at the very least minimize so that my experience interfacing with the game was how I wanted.

[@Emidretrauqe]

Is there any way to customize my way to a friendly community?

[@EdBurke37]

We also can't ignore the accessibility argument for add-ons. People who are hard of hearing or are dealing with vision loss often use add-ons to make up for their disabilities. Taking away add-ons that "trivialize" encounters for able-bodied people punishes the disabled for doing nothing wrong.

[@atelierbagur3831]

This is something that is difficult to compromise but like you said, if it comes at the cost of 'trivializing' for people then we cant have them be present. Its a hard pill to swallow but maybe some games arent meant for everyone, including people with disabilities. You cant expect every single person to cater to the needs of the few irl as it isnt fair for them too. The only thing that can work is to design fights where vision and hearing isnt much required to complete but that in of itself is hard to work around for making varied difficult challenges when those two aspects helps create some of them besides the basic "memorization".

[@xbree_]

Agreed. Game devs should should build games with features for accessibility.

[@EdBurke37]

@@xbree_ I still remember when the original version of colorblind mode was introduced way back in Wrath. I was so excited, I pictured someone a lot like what we have today with different sliders and choices to customize the output. Do you know what the original colorblind mode did? It out the word "epic" or "rare" under an items name to let you know it's quality.

[@Shiirow]

@@EdBurke37 because thats what Blizzard deems important, if the hamsters cant tell which pellet dispenser they need to press, they will stop engaging and leave. gotta make sure those who are colorblind can chase the same purple pixels as the rest of the playerbase even if you cant see the color purple.

[@bosssavage3325]

That’s why the game devs include these things into the base game. Very bad point.

[@johnercek]

"for eight years - the addons were pretty innocent"- we didn't make it a year before the nude addon was nuked (it made everyone look naked on the endusers screen) . there was a big purge in the first year of addons that affected the appearance of the inworld. RIP old decursive

[@Retro64_]

The problem with addon-on is that they are considered a necessity now especially in raids, sure you can do it without them but you'd be at a disadvantage and that's the problem! New players coming in to the game barely knows about addons like damage meters let alone stuff like weak auras and they are instantly at a disadvantage regardless of skill for not using them and that's not a good place to be for the person or the game.

[@savuflorin6242]

Thing is if you re a new player, a weak aura would be the last thing that keeps you at a disadvantage

[@Emidretrauqe]

@@savuflorin6242 It's a long list, and the meta chasing would be at the top. No mods to play the game for you, just a community of toxic neckbeards.

[@RealTaIk]

I can understand mmos allowing it at the beginning because you probably won't have everything in the game the players want to have, but after a while they should have figured out what they themselves like to have implement in the game and later on disable addon usage.

[@wapniak666]

It's literally impossible

[@Nymfwood]

I think WoW has passed the point of no return a long time ago with addons. In FFXIV, it feels atleast clear on what the markers and indications feels clear enough to understand what is going to happen and what needs to be done. In WoW, you normally just get a debuff with a very small tiny visual effect attached to it, which does not make it clear on what it entails. Or if you get a circle on you, it is not clear on if this is something that needs to be soaked with others or you gotta move out from the group. You only find out until its too late. For me it feels like FFXIV solved the need for addons, by making mechanic markers visually clear on what they mean and what is going to happen, while in WoW its just tiny small visuals that gives next to no information unless you hover over the debuff and read it. Or simply let it go off and figure out what it does, by the consequences it brings. You know how a stack marker looks like in FFXIV, or a how a tank buster visual marker looks like. As well as attacks being telegraphed on the ground with a clear visual animation, and it feels well visually informative enough to put 1 +1 together. It has always felt like the use of addons in WoW, has mostly been a way for us to plug the holes in the boat that blizzard sends us off in. There has been a small change with Thundering Affix in M+, by making it visually clear what debuff you have on you, which is a trend I hope continues forward. Timers on it, on the other hand, is still not visually clear and weakauras plugs that hole with letting you know when it is about to run out. FFXIV does not need addons, as they made the visual feedback clear enough to nullify the need of addons to begin with from day 1.

[@Emidretrauqe]

Damage meters are not innocent information. It's there to turn a cooperative event into a competitive one. Within that simple change of dynamic is the difference between a cooperative playerbase, like FFXIV, interested in providing help to each other, and a competitive player base, like in WoW, interested in beating each other.

[@elixwhitetail]

This has little to do with addons, but seeing Azshara's Queen's Decree mechanic I immediately thought of Argath Thadalfus' commands mechanic. He's from Royal City of Rabanastre, the FFXIV Stormblood raid introduced in 4.1, two years before Eternal Palace. I was _certain_ it was a case of FFXIV borrowing from WoW, but not this time. And that makes for an interesting UI discussion, since Argath's mechanic is completely solvable using only the graphical tells provided by the game - which are pretty distinct, even if they don't 100% spell it out (it's not the most obvious that disobeying the order to run around specifically means standing close to the boss and not moving or attacking). If only WoW's visual design language and telegraphs were better.

[@cattysplat]

The Ivalice raids are probably the closest thing FF14 raids come to the clustertruck nature of multiple mechanics not clearly displayed going on at once, which is similar to heroic/mythic WoW raids, which is wild considering they are meant to be casual content. They are so hard and confusing even experienced players quit out the moment the duty finder puts them in.

[@semiramisubw4864]

Bro pls dont make me member the thunder god in rabanastre.. When it released and we ran it.. we wiped until the timer runned out, 3 times in a row on this mofo. But still an cool fight which had a cool scale of power to it.

[@niikokun5326]

@@cattysplat Huh. Back when I first ran the Ivalice raids, there was definitely a learning curve, but the mechanics were definitely clearly displayed. It still followed the usual boss theme of 'introduce mechanics one at a time, then start mixing it up'. The only mechanic that took some figuring out in the blind runs was Mateus' Unbind phase, dealing with the water spouts, as you needed three raid members to enter them together to soak them up before the ice maiden danced through them. Other than that, all of the bosses have mostly standard mechanics, requiring one to either dodge telegraphs, soak towers, or to react to boss animation tells. And yes, Thunder God burned up most of our first timer... but it wasn't unfair.

[@elixwhitetail]

@@cattysplat Ivalice isn't that bad, outside of a few mechanics that catch people out by surprise such as dodging the figure 8 or what exactly the commands require you to do. When it first launched it was very challenging content but now even Trashmal, Bringer of Salt, isn't typically a run-decider.

[@AeriFyrein]

@@semiramisubw4864 The funny thing is, Cid is now one of the *easiest* bosses in that raid series, after the stat squish and various nerfs over the years. Mateus and Hashmal are now easily the two hardest bosses, since people actually have to consciously do their mechanics properly after the squish. Yiazmat can sometimes be a bit tricky 'cause he's at the end and a lot of players start to lose focus by that point. Everything else? 1-2 decent players per group, sometimes even less, can carry the whole raid without issues.

[@TheCloudofWar]

I have zero desire to ever jump in a game that tunes content to be difficult for those WITH addons to such a degree that it becomes utterly insane with default features/adjustments.

[@Necropheliac]

I think it's really, really cool how the WoW user interface is so extensible. I don't care if it makes encounters easier or harder. Just play the game and enjoy it for what it is. If you don't like addons, don't use them. If you can't get in the guild you want to be in because you don't use addons, then why do you want to be in that guild? People play the game in different ways. There's enough people in WoW for you to find a group of players who are compatible with how you play.

[@xxJing]

Seems like the only solution is to build fights around tight timing where success isn't reliant on solving the puzzle but on being able to perform the solution. You can use a calculator to solve a math problem but ultimately it's your fingers that have to press those buttons.

[@Rhob81]

Addons are needed in WoW, not only for boss fights but to be able to play the game. It's beyond me that, even after the UI overhaul, you can't still detach the enemy cast bar and put it anywhere for example. And don't get me started on buffs/debuffs, yes you can move them now but I'd love to be able to filter the trash from the useful ones, cause WoW just likes putting a myriad buffs on you for some reason.

[@thetruestar6348]

That’s the issue

[@ic3t3ap3ach]

this!!!!!! it is sooo bad! I tried to use it but couldn’t find a solution for me and the min scaling is 0.64 something which is extramarital big on my screen. with elvui i can scale the ui at least down so i dint have massive frames on my screen 😂

[@aceazzermeen4857]

Kind of missing the guldan weakaura that could draw arrows between nameplates. Don't remember for what mechanic, but it was a thing.

[@XVailleZ]

Few more fun "honorable mentions" Weakauras that actually caused blizzard to intervene from recent memory. Pieces auto solver for lords of dread that instantly showed who the 2 ppl were in the amongus phase. Automatically shouting if you had the phantom that had to be dispelled on huntsman in karazhan during season 4 in sl. It was the reason why blizzard ended up just literally deleting the mechanic from the fight for the shadowlands version later in the season.

[@ic3t3ap3ach]

and why we needed addons? because you could see the ghost only with a zoom lens. And this was before they changed the visuals. And shortly after that they deleted it from the boss

[@empressjessica5020]

it was among many reasons they removed it. they stated. "complex issue for random groups" " visually obscure for some players" "critical error if mishandled by first 2 reasons" and by this trio of issues a aura was produced that erased it from purpose" but even with all that said and done it was a dumb mechanic in a fight that already had real things going on, it was just bloated addition to the fight that really only served as an additional layer at a time in wow when players and their classes were the strongest ever in wow (legion)) in SL this was not the case but even then it was rendered null. axed

[@pillarsofsnow7940]

My biggest problem with Add-ons is that the dev team doesn’t need to improve the broken parts of the game because add-on makers will do it for them for free

[@TheRadPlayer]

Blizzard wouldn't pick up the pieces left behind by the thousands of volunteer add-on creators, you would simply be left with a hollowed-out game. If they want to remove addons, they would first need to show, for once, that they care about making constant, iterative improvments on their UI and back-end.

[@TheAssirra]

@@TheRadPlayer Which is exactly what they did in DF though. the new UI is a massive improvement and a great first stepping stone.

[@israelquiles9127]

@@akaria6359 ARR's UI has been scaleable and almost completely moveable from the beginning of 2.0. WoW JUST implemented this feature (and poorly at that) in Dragonflight, which was wild.

[@God__Emperor_]

Resources are limited. I'd rather they be spent on content and leave the fancy ui stuff to add ons.

[@TheRadPlayer]

@@TheAssirra Yeah, and it only took over a decade of people using full overhaul UI addons for them to do it. Addons are perfect for this, as it's already a case of user customization.

[@redmagebr]

Just like to add that the combat log is not *that* vital, and there are ways of locking it up without ruining the entire ecosystem. The things that would break from removing combat log access are things such as addons that react to combat log events ("unit casted X successfully", "how much damage is everything doing", etc), but it wouldn't break that many things, because there are APIs to deal with everything else. You don't check for buffs through the combat log, you just use the buff API to get the information, you don't need the combat log to create party frames, to see spell cooldowns, all of this can be accessed directly. I'd imagine there are ways to break the bad combat log addons without messing with most others. For instance, blocking combat log reading in-game would just lead to people developing external programs that read the .txt directly, kind of how it works in FFXIV, but you could instead just have the combat log save after the fight was over - that keeps functionality in there, but only after combat has ended - damage meters could be able to get this information while out of combat, you'd get to upload your logs, etc. All in all, I think it's fair to say that the popularity of WeakAuras has pretty much destroyed WoW's addon scene. In the past, you'd have mostly general use addons that fit multiple things at once, so that was mostly fine. Creating addons from scratch was hard work, so people would design things to solve lasting problems. WeakAuras made it far too easy to create simple (and bad looking) "addons" that can be so specific to the point they only cover a single mechanic. The thing is, once you have millions and millions of players, it's kind of guaranteed that someone somewhere will be so annoyed by any specific mechanic that they will design a WeakAura that kills it, and once you have someone design a weakaura for each and every mechanic, they all die. And then you can share these directly in the instance chat so that everyone gets it. imo, information addons are how they are supposed to be, but them existing suggests that the developers screwed up with how information is presented - getting information should never result in a fight becoming trivial. The problem is addons that take decisions. "Go here", "do that", this is bad. And if addons are able to get the information, then they can also present the solution. imo, it'd be better to lock it all up and make sure that information is presented clearly in-game without the need for addons.

[@Coaltergeist]

Fun fact; Final Fantasy XIV ARR was going to launch with a full LUA API for addon development like WOW has, but it mysteriously vanished from the final release. I read an interview where Yoship mentioned this one time but I can't for the life of me find it again

[@Zierohour1]

In my opinion, as someone who's been playing this game since Ice cream time, I don't think there is anything wrong with addons, and they shouldn't go anywhere. If you're an addon purest, there are games for you, which is fine. Wow lets us tinker with it. That's part of the magic of the game. Leave it alone.

[@Maximusrex4575]

I remember Decursive, and I also remember being very unhappy with our healers in OG Naxx when it was a total cluster because despite knowing for a long time it was going away almost no one started practicing getting by without it.

[@MianoraStonecrow]

I don't play WoW anymore, but i remember how annoyed i got towards the end, by having mechanics be more and more ridiculous and annoying. And Add-ons were contently a huge cause for that. I personally only really wanted the UI stuff for giving the game a visual face lift (make my bags, Life/Mana Bars, my Debuffs, my Abilities frames and Fonts to look pretty), cause i really dislike the base UI and UI Design is a huge deal for me. For example i CAN NOT play Path of Exile, cause the UI is so hideous to me. So if they would've gotten rid of Raid-Add-ons, to make the fights make more sence again and be more fun, i would've been all for it. Having to look at 50 different elements to figure out WTF is going on was just annoying.

[@davidflieger4879]

I remember doing Onyxia's Lair and Molen Core before voice chats and one could say that voice chats changed raiding along with addons. Everything was done by macros in chats set up for specific classes and particular call outs etc until addons were made to take that out of the players hands. Most players now would shit a brick the way it was done back then lol Before the "voice addons are around since the beginning", nah they weren't, voice chats in gaming became popular once folks started getting in to the end game raids. I'll also point out a lot of the addons created back then were actually implemented in to the game and some of those modders became game devs, not just with Blizz

[@Shiirow]

theyve let the genie out of the bottle, they cant decide twenty years down the line to suddenly want to cram it back in.

[@Emidretrauqe]

WoW is the epitome of doing things because you can.

[@huntersmith9344]

I wish Blizzard would move towards making the meta be turning your UI off. If its not an obviously discernable visual effect it gets cut or the spell gets a new animation.

[@Opharg]

As stupid as it sounds, if FFXIV had an addon-api as controlled as WoW has (obviously to the needs of FFXIV), this would have never been as big of an issue. As it stands now, community tools have FF completely open, and you are free to do basically anything that you want with it. It's basically a hacked client, which is really rare for WoW, even if it would give way more tools. There actually is an AVR-esque hacked client available for WoW, but as the general focus is on allowed addons, people don't even go look for them and developers tend to stick to the "legal" avenues. Combat addons are basically a USP at this point and designing with them in mind is the devs job description. And they've been doing better and better jobs at designing fights that don't require or allow computational Addons/WeakAuras to help, with the current limitations that the Addon API has gotten over the years. In fact, I don't think there is any in the current tier. There was one for Terros, but it turned out unnecessary, and another one for Raz p1 bombs, which is actually counterproductive to use. Not having Addons like BigWigs to put sounds on stuff and display information differently would be a reason for me to quit. Overhauling my UI and making Class WeakAuras in my style is part of the enjoyment and if I'm in the mood for it, I will spend easily 30-50h on it over a week or two.

[@Emidretrauqe]

Every time I think about Dragonflight being more casual friendly I just remember that this is a spreadsheet game down to the core and my interest passes.

[@ColdCassidy]

its just as Pikaboo said about pvp and addon usage, when addons are used the experience becomes scripted, everyone making the perfect play based on the addons reaction and without addons much more mistakes can happen but the gameplay plays out based on the players reaction and it goes dynamically

[@lost1head]

Thank you for this video. Judging by the comments to that other video so many people (I assume mostly those who never played wow) dont get that: 1) Addons were in the game since the beginning of WoW and are supported by the game, it's not just devs not doing anything about a completely external third party software. 2) Blizzard actually cut down their functionality throughout the years. It's not "free for all anything third party goes" kind of thing. If a third party software could increase camera distance like that FF14 did people would get banned as well. 3) Most WoW players enjoy addons and removing them would upset wast majority of the player base. I would be perceived as "catering to the 1% of tryhards and elitists".

[@israelquiles9127]

We get it. We understand it. We just don't think the mechanic visual language and UI should be SO POOR that players and modders have to fix the game for them. You know it's bad when certain add ons are REQUIRED or else you'll be kicked. So it's promoting (and has from the beginning) 'why bother fixing it, players will fix it with a mod' development mentality.

[@calumbell2276]

@@israelquiles9127 You can make far more interesting fights when addons are allowed in the game

[@willteresuka1104]

@@calumbell2276 You can make even more interesting fights when addons are not allowed in the game

[@jibbawatt1209]

actually "catering to the 1% of tryhards and elitists" is what is happening now. The top raid teams have an in house addon developer / power user that makes stuff on the fly. A raid member can literally say during the world's first race. "I need a weak aura to do exactly this", and some dude will work on it in the background during the race. I have used addons for all my WoW playtime, but would welcome them being gone from the game completely.

[@calumbell2276]

@@willteresuka1104 I disagree, the skill level of players is objectively higher when they have addons. Imagine playing without a dps meter you will have players thinking they are doing great damage and know their spec when they just dont.

[@knotlessknot1827]

Addons really are a double-edged sword in WoW. In the last 3 years i have met so many people in this game who are "mythic raiders" but don't really know what is going on in the game because they simply play weakauras simulator and not WoW. As soon as their weakauras are bugged or just don't fit what the raidleader assigns them to, those players are screwed and start to behave like blind chickens as soon as a mechanic happens. "Red was always left so i went left with this debuff" is what the excuse sounds like then. Players are not even looking at their character or the environment of the encounter anymore which is so sad to me. My new guild recently started progressing Dathea mythic and when i downloaded the weakauras they told me i need for this fight i instantly deleted them again because they just were too much since i like to keep boss encounters raw and simple so i can actually play the game i love. In the RWF environment this is of course a different story but honestly the high end teams all have that guy who is a big brain at creating weakauras. I would hate to play WoW with the standard UI since i built my UI by myself and did not simply copy paste some UI from wago or a streamer. I put effort into it to not have anything overloaded so i can play the game but also not having to look to the top right of my screen to see if i have any proccs or debuffs. I think as far as there is not an addon that plays the game for the player, it is in his/her hands to use whichever customization.

[@nihzit8185]

Tbh I ignore DBM most of the times because my guts already told me that it's about time, it's just a nice taunt reminder when my brain is somewhere else... Nothing my co-tank couldn't do in voice. But what I noticed is preferences in UIs. While a good friend of mine has it all in icons I am more of the bar type. Nearly all my WAs are bars or just icons sometimes with numbers if I have to manage charges, because I realized that this is what works best for me. So what I prefer while using addons is that you can customize the UI to your brain. Icons, bars or numbers? Visual or audio? People process information in different ways and no other game without addons managed to respect this. If I could deal better with audio cues for CD comming off CD or starting/running out I can do that in WoW. That's the big chance I see in Addons. Unfortunately there'll always be the chickens, even with addons... Just had a priest a few weeks ago, was calling raza knockback 2 seconds ahead, then the cast came and went through and he got knocked off because he stood at the side of the boss then complaining nobody warned him... And yes he's using DBM/big wigs and he got a raid lead doing calls and he stood wrong the entire time for no reason (my failure on not calling that earlier). We had several players coming at him while I was speechless for a moment because of his insanely rude and false blaming... For a second I thought he's joking, he must be... (He wasn't)

[@BeastlyCold]

I don't agree with some of the criticism leveled at addons, particularly weakauras. When a weakaura tells you how to handle a mechanic (azshara, jailer, etc), I really don't see how it takes more skill to do that same mechanic without the weakaura. It's simply organizing the information that is already available to you in a much clearer way. The fact that you can generate a weakaura in the first place that offers the solution means that, by definition, you solved the mechanic. The weakaura simply helps you KNOW the solution for that particular pull instead of having to dedicate brainpower to resolving it for every other pull. To my mind, the measure of skill in raiding isn't based on just KNOWING the solution (what weakauras does). The skill is entirely about execution of the solution. That is why you can't hand any random group of 20 mythic raiders a set of VOTI weakauras and expect Raz to be killed. It's also why you can't hand someone Hekili and expect them to parse in the 100th percentile. Mods cross the line if and ONLY if they literally allow you to ignore some important aspect of the game. Weakauras does not do that. It just displays already available information in a more preferable way. Lastly... I find it interesting that the gigantic, color-coded telegraphs on the ground, the soak circle telegraph, the line soak telegraph, the tethered telegraph, the flare telegraph, and more from FFXIV aren't leveled with the same type of criticism that weakauras receives. Is it just because it's coded directly into the game? Is that a meaningful difference?

[@FightForFin]

This last part is a great point actually for those who argue that wow addons are playing the game for them. Does this mean then that ffxiv.... the game is playing itself? Well ofcourse not, you still need to act upon the information that is presented to you... which is what 99% of wow addons do, change the way information is presented to you. Obviously as always, there has been outliers on some addons, which were discussed in the video, and blizzard has removed them. (And yes blizz should still work on making mechanics more visible or such, etc.)

[@eanmichael8898]

Decursive still exists, and it works in the way it did before. I use it on my holy paladin and it's beyond amazing lol. Glad they brought it back.

[@kubi0461]

One of the most enjoyable things about FFXIV for me is that I can just load up the game, log in, and start playing. I never need to check for add on updates or run into any addon errors, etc. I can just play the game. I also wish WoW bosses did a better job of clearly identify what’s within impact range of a mechanic and what isn’t. I’d also like clearer differentiation between long term buffs/rebuffs and short term ones that are part of an encounter so that it’s easier to quickly see where the encounter-related debuff/buff is that I just received. And in many fights there’s too much going on at once and without DBM I’d have no way to pay attention to everything without missing important things. Also.. for all that is holy on earth can they make it so that interrupts don’t go on full cooldown if they didn’t interrupt anything? So frustrating to try to be helpful and interrupt important things only to time it with someone else and both our interrupts get on cooldown.

[@The-Lost-Librarian]

Nostalgia on that old Decursive addon, was so amazing. Came back years later and was very confused it didn't work the way it used to...so sad. I think addons should be allowed, but the blizz team should really be focused on designing encounters, regardless of difficulty for players that use none, including voice chat as well. If you've been in LFR, you know the chaos that occurs. Everything should be way more telegraphed, easier to see, and know what is bad and what is good. Also, fix, or better do the zones on these mechanics. So many times you get hit by something that you aren't in visually, but the game says you are.

[@adammarktucek3177]

I think it's more confusing to figure out add-ons than to just figure out what the game wants you to do.

[@bravepotatoe7513]

Getting everything set up is definitely a chore and sometimes pretty confusing once that's done tough it's much easier to play the game

[@Knives7777]

i think thats a "you"problem

[@cattysplat]

99% of WoW players just go through a list of most popular addons and install them all. There is no thought involved.

[@Emidretrauqe]

@@Knives7777 It's also a "me" problem. And I'm willing to bet there's a third...

[@jaded-harper]

details/plater/weakauras/big wigs/lil wigs. basically all you need when it comes to actual combat. ive done up to +25s with the bare minimum ui so its not like you absolutely need intrusive addons unless you are a world first raider. there is an app called curseforge where u can download all of them in under 2 mins. its really straightforward. installing mods for minecraft when i was 12 was harder tbh lol

[@Ephelle]

I have some trouble with staying focused on and parsing purely visual information, so having an addon just say things out loud for me is a huge help. It doesn't have to tell me what to do with that information. I just like to have the information in an audio form.

[@perkulant4629]

I use minimal addons, weakauras and details being my two favourite ones. Would miss details the most, since weakauras can be overcome by learning encounters better etc.

[@perkulant4629]

oh and i'd miss clique alot too!

[@mesmerising4253]

weakauras is literally the biggest offender in addon argument, its not minimal

[@semiramisubw4864]

@@mesmerising4253 depends on which WAs you use. Thats the point. I have an very old laptop and much WAs and addons would rip my FPS apart, i personally play minimalistic but tbh i still play raids like i did when i first started WoW and learned the bosses completly beforehand. TO this day i know any mechanics from the bosses which i played and cleared.

[@perkulant4629]

@@mesmerising4253 it is if you just use one weak aura pack :p

[@bearrington2024]

@@perkulant4629 It blows my mind that the default UI has both "you can use mouseovers to cast spells on nameplates but bind it to the hotbar" and "we have a separate hotbar that can bind spells and macros to mouse buttons" but you cannot use the default UI to cast spells on nameplates using mouse buttons

[@Stopskii3]

They got rid of AVR, but HudMap was still working. So instead of altering the image projected based on camera angle and such, it just overlayed a flat 2d image of a large transparent minimap, but it still had all of the same features of circles and mechanic identifiers for placement. I used hudmap extensively in ICC on private servers.

[@thecaneater]

18:00 Interestingly enough, most of the early mods in FF14 relied solely on the combat log. ACT was the main one. Not only was it the dmg meter, you could also set it up kind of like Weak Auras, just without the fancy visuals. It reads spell names and can do callouts and timers based on them, because FF14 fights are just that scripted and timed out.

[@jordick8427]

Personally I don't like combat addons such as Weakauras or DBM/Bigwigs, because you NEED those addons if you want to do raids. Blizzard could just ban such addons and make the boss encounters in a way that wouldn't have to rely on addons in order to make sense of it. Like, take a look at Monster Hunter games for example, where players have to learn and memorize the monster's mechanics in order to defeat them. Now, I'm not saying that Blizzard should copy Monster Hunter games. But they could do something similar where players have to learn and memorize the boss mechanics and patterns in order to defeat them, instead of just watching the timers and do what the ADDON tells them to do.

[@LordBufu]

The biggest issue i have with add-ons, is the same issue i have with certain content, as soon as it becomes mandatory ill start to dislike it. Regardless of why its become mandatory, as there is a point to be made about what add-ons add, that should have likely been part of the base game. The biggest difference that makes me lean into FF14's approach, is that i dint really feel the need to install anything there, where as in WoW i was literally told (despite having it already) to install x/y/z to be part of certain content (not even high-end content either xD). And that is not even considering how many people have likely not played WoW without add-ons (hardly)ever, and will likely be lost without them as a result, because of how 'accepted' add-ons are by both blizzard and the community. I'm not against add-on\mods\etc use, i have use them heavily in many games in various ways, but i personally did have the most fun in games without them 🤔 And i feel like that last bit, is overlooked to much by many these days, as the focus is mostly on completing content asap rather then enjoying the journey/challenge itself.

[@cattysplat]

Addon culture is so tied into WoW's playerbase it's impossible to remove without them screaming and crying. Like children who have never had the training wheel removed off a bike, the fear to try without help is most of their argument.

[@G33KSP34K]

We had addons tracking cc durations when they weren't visible back in Vanilla. Addons have been abused since day 1 to gather more information than you are immediately suppose to have.

[@jdubz8173]

You wouldn't need addons if you just had bosses with clear telegraphs like in FFXIV. Taking a step to standardize common raid actions (stack, separate, etc) and ensuring they're visually clear is basically what Blizz has to do to make addons pointless. Then after they've applied that to all or most bosses in the game, no one will really care if they exist or not. It's to the point to where I can only really enjoy raiding with an addon and that just tells me the game is doing something wrong.

[@wapniak666]

They are very clear telegraphs in vault And the game would die without addons

[@jdubz8173]

@@wapniak666 compared to FFXIV, they are not as clear. And if that's true, then the game should be dying now. The no-addon experience is the default, so most users are using it at least at first.

[@Sumtingwong1969]

Ct_Raid assist has a feature for healers back in 2005 vanilla. You could set heal parameters for your heals (min amount of missing health for heal to finish). So if someone sniped your heal target. Your heal would auto cancel. I didnt have the macro for decursive, but the addon just displayed all the names for me on the screen in a drop down and just had to click the names.

[@cattysplat]

Decursive genuinely automated when it came out. You just hit 1 button and it did the work. Only when it got banned did it change to a UI list to click.

[@Sumtingwong1969]

HealBot in TBC was originally similar as well wasn't it? i know a big chunk of that one was automated as well.

[@wapniak666]

​@@Sumtingwong1969 healbot in tbc was already broken, basically a UI raid frame

[@VulpineDemon]

WoW bosses are designed with add-ons in mind. You can't just remove stuff like Weakauras and expect even great players to just perform the same way. It would have to be on a new tier, and the bosses would have to be designed to be easier. I use Weakauras to condense class/buff/debuff info forbetter eye tracking, and some class stuff that is a pain in the ass to track with the default buff bar.

[@nezunskyfire292]

QoL addons being added to the core game is honestly the best way forward, BUT Blizzard will also need to make said new features actually worth a damn. The bare bone function that we got with DF has been nice, but it's just that, bare bones.

[@ic3t3ap3ach]

they changed nothing 😂 everything was the same but now you could move them around. wow such a great improvement. things we could do with addon since day 1?

[@Phleshhh]

Wow with no addons kills the game. Its a fact people like their addons for anything they do from collecting to raiding etc. You take that away from people they will not be happy at all. Personally i could kill boss's with default ui i did it for many years but 95% of the people i know who play wow would never give up their addon's. I reckon many people would quit wow without them and the game will die a quick death.

[@God__Emperor_]

I would 100% quit if they banned add ons. I don't raid anymore buy use so many for everything else.

[@Keira_Blackstone]

Part of the reason I quit WoW was because I was tired of being expected to maintain 27 different addons just to be able to interact with the game properly. So their existence is a brick in the wall of reasons why I don't see myself ever going back, but it's fine to have games that don't necessarily appeal to everybody.

[@Emidretrauqe]

@@Keira_Blackstone Exactly. It's why I get so bothered when Ion says that WoW is a game for everybody. It's so obviously not.

[@DeDaDoDu]

@@Emidretrauqe If downloading an addon manager is too much for you, then you weren't gonna play anyway

[@Emidretrauqe]

@@DeDaDoDu More to my point.

[@shrubninja6444]

"-if you were even alive back then, to 2004." And I immediately whither like I've just seen the ark of the covenant. Thanks for making me feel old, Mike.

[@James_Johnson79]

I’m fine with addons but I do feel like blizzard uses them as a crutch to avoid making improvements to the UI and damage telegraphing.

[@tessa8484]

Good information in this video but all I could focus on was remembering those epic 10fps battles on our lousy Walmart PCs from the background video lol

[@thewu910]

Overall, I’d be happy to do away with add-ons that directly help with raids and dungeons, but Blizz would have to adjust these stupid mechanics. I’d like to keep my UI add-ons, however.

[@keithb6344]

That means they also have to rewrite the way addons work. The API would need a rebuild.

[@thewu910]

@@keithb6344 big true.

[@TheFrantic5]

I remember "The Crazy Taxi Arrow" (as my small group of friends called it) being such a hot topic back in the day. Autoquest would just calculate the most efficient route for you. Turn your brain off, put on music/podcasts, and grind the day away.

[@erifwodahs5298]

I miss a lot of stuff in FFXIV from my WoW addons, especially with some basic stuff which should be there.

[@Spika94]

I would personally vote for no addons, because it kinda kills my joy of raiding. I raided Heroic SoO (Normal, I guess it was called? before mythic was a thing) and Highmaul and Blackrock Foundry, but after my guild broke up I stopped raiding entirely. I *hated* DBM (I had to use it though), and I never used Weak Auras or any of that nonsense. It is all so cluttered, and it feels like these addons play the game for me. If the game is balanced around 3rd party modifications, aka "addons", then I don't really have an interest in raiding. It becomes a game of who has the better addons until Blizzard decides what is going too far. We are at the mercy of 3rd party developers at this point, because who can actually beat these raids without DBM and all that stuff...

[@pumirya]

I played a lot of other MMO‘s in addition to waterfall craft and you can very well make a quality game with quality and game content that doesn’t need 20 add-ons. With all due respect to all those who will push back on that take, I ask you to consider that you and I have been conditioned to think WoW needs add ons at end game to be good when the opposite can be true.

[@rogoth01themasterwizard11]

it was at the end of wrath that elvUI was born also, the first iteration was massively memory hungry so it didn't have massive uptake early on.

[@theamazingfroboy]

I've play quite a bit of both WoW and FFXIV. I would say I enjoy raiding far more in FFXIV because of having to actually LEARN the encounters is far more enjoyable then just following the DBM voice over lol. That's not to say I dislike Raiding in WoW, it's just a less enjoyable experience. It's like painting free-hand or by numbers. Both are fun but free-hand is always more enjoyable.

[@Emidretrauqe]

I really wonder how WoW made it as far as it has with this much reliance on third party addons...

[@RuneFToftlund]

Emergency Monitor was the shit for healing back in 2005, but that was also changed. It basically showed you a list of who had lost the most health and all u had todo was mouseover them on the list and click your healing spell.

[@cattysplat]

I remember early healbot just had a macro that automatically targeted and cast the best heal on the lowest health person. It wasn't great automation but the laziest healers used it until automated addons were banned.

[@markup6394]

I think you just cant trust people/players. If you let them, they will min-max the crap out of everything. In FF14, people lament that there are not hidden paths or anything in your regular dungeons - and the answer is: if there was a faster path, if there was a way to skip mobs, players would use that path over any other, and forcing other or new players to do the same. The more freedom you grand, the more it gets abused. "Give a hand, and they take your arm", sadly thats the way of things. I'm not saying SE's stance of "no add-ons or bust" is the best solution, but it is also the most sensitive one. You yourself said, that in WoW add-ons started out with innocent, minor improvements. And, as was to be expected, they hopelessly got out of hand. Now try and get that djinni back into its lamp, why dont you. Which is pretty much impossible unless they do a clear cut like SE - and I dont see them do that.

[@Allyane_AK]

There's a game development concept related to what you are saying that has been mentioned by Ion himself. Players will almost always choose optimal over fun so game developers have to "protect" players from their own tendency to ruin the game for themselves through bug abuse, and certain types of min max.

[@Tyiriel]

I think that when comparing FF14 to WoW, the information being displayed to the player by the game itself is quite different. FF14 loves to have clear lines and circles showing you that you're not supposed to do this and that, while WoW LOVES to have the wipe mechanics be difficult to coordinate inside of a fight without some kind of aid. Classic example of a wow wipe mechanic is for everyone to be stacked up and 6-8 people receiving a debuff that needs them to spread out very quickly, perhaps to one of a few identical objects in the room. Without any visual aid or automatic "yell 1/2/3/4/5" to decide which direction people should run to, doing this mechanic consistently is pretty much a lost cause unless your team is INCREDIBLY coordinated.

[@Nightstalker314]

FF14 has one major advantage to WoW: It's bland enough to deal with anything. No talents and gear that is almost irrelevant. You can tune anything better for this lack of variety. Especially as Evergreen content with very little fault tolerance.

[@HaruSOSBrigade]

My personal subjective opinion is that weak auras have dumbed down the mechanical aspect of the game so it basically becomes a "who can do the most damage" game (more then it normally was). Damage was always important, but never required. But today heroic bosses like Heroic Raz have a huge dps checks with no real mechanics to worry about. So if you cannot DPS well you cannot raid... so the game no longer tolerates bad players and hence you cannot bring people up. In addition you have gearing through mythic plus which forces raid tuning to expect you to have higher ilvls then what the raid drops... so bosses never get easier and have no rewards. Beyond the ability to say "I did the raid" there is no actual reason to run a raid. WoW is just mythic plus and damage meters, and I hate it.

[@Emidretrauqe]

Exactly my feelings.

[@ic3t3ap3ach]

timers are tight in m+ and in raid encounters. without that you would never know who is the weakest link in the group. sadly we need this information in current wow. I would enjoy a more casual experience of course but not possible atm. With damage you can skip stuff! heal less and sometimes it is neededto beat the content

[@HaruSOSBrigade]

@@ic3t3ap3ach But that is the point. We don't need timers, they just add them and push out most of the community from running end game content for no reason. This is why over half the community plays classic, because they do not like new content design.

[@ic3t3ap3ach]

@@HaruSOSBrigade the devs design their shit to be hard. i did a cos before weekly reset and some people cant even interrupt and do basic stuff. without details i would never see that for example that half of my team sucked. after 50 wipes i left the dungeon. I tried to teach them what they need todo. called for interrupts, do mechanics, jump on first boss etc. without those addons this game is uonplayable. they pushed it with hc raiding and m+ to this.

[@HaruSOSBrigade]

@@ic3t3ap3ach But that is a circular loop in logic. The game is hard so we need add-ons... we make the game harder because people use add-ons. The loop needs to be broken so we can just enjoy the game as a normal game rather then a "I wanna be the guy" rage game.

[@marioparnass6152]

Current raids in WoW have a ton of telegraphs, most mechanic have a mixture of a few things like cast bar, energy bar(boss does something when depleted/full), the boss yells/emotes or a debuff that has an effect around your character. Knowing what is going on is not the real issue in WoW, the biggest problem is that addons now tell you what to do, instead of having people do call outs is now being controlled by a weak aura.

[@s1os2s3]

That is an issue?! It is a blessing. I can plan my Tyrant and Portal accordingly. I can focus when and how I can use my Demonic Portal and Demonic Gate + Soulburn. I can do everything better and faster and makes the fights enjoyable.

[@Terrados1337]

If a game needs addons to be playable that's either bad UI design or... bad players tbh. Considering that 50% of players in every game need an addon to tell them to pull down their pants before taking a dump, I am willing to put 50% of the blame on them here. People be spending 12 hours setting up weakauras to pump 12% logs and still stand in the fire. Completely banning addons prevents innovation. How many addons have been integrated as features? But having raided during WoD I can feel the devs pain when a really cool Boss is neutered by oh idk... Iskar assist? Or how archimonde was intended to have players stand in a circle to avoid the lasers but people used an addon that calculated everyones position in Realtime so the mechanic basically didnt exist? That wasnt fun at all.

[@Boxedwaffle]

could make it so that you can't access combatlog data during combat. if you want a middle ground, you can do that but allow an exception during combat for your player's initiated events only (applying/tracking your buffs, debuffs, etc.).

[@ic3t3ap3ach]

true and they could implement a own damage meter if people like that. but that will never happen.

[@YourSooFakeSauce]

I would legit just stop raiding. The way this tier was, I don't think it would have been too terrible not to have have addons... but F that for mythic. I'm sitting here thinking about how Council M would go with the aids circles. Even with DBM, WA, and the raid lead shouting it out, people stiiiill spread that shit in melee. Idk, I'd drop raiding all together. It would be different if the game had always been like that, but the one thing I have hated about other MMOs, is the lack of addons. Default MMO UIs suck, the bars suck, everything sucks. Shit can't be resized. Ew. Disgusting clutter. I'm done rambling. I know your poiint wasnt about graphical stuff... but either way.

[@porkjuices8365]

They knew 100% they were not allowed and they still decided to try for world firsts using them anyway and were somehow surprised when the consequences of their actions came around to bite them in the butt.

[@wackyzap1304]

Raid encounters aside, even the class rotations are too complicated without addons. I remember trying to play Survival in Legion and having multiple DoTs, resources, Moongoose Bite stacks, buffs, debuffs and cooldowns to keep track of, on top of paying attention to what the boss is doing.

[@misumi6312]

Yeah flash concentration was a bit rough for holy priest in shadowlands without a weakaura to track it. Being fair, after enough time you basically got a muscle memory for it but not having the weakaura as a casual or a new player to the class would have been very hard.

[@youtubedeletedmynamewhybother]

Yea trying to play Aff lock in AoE. You need a decent nameplates mod and a decent blacklist of worthless debuffs. Anyone who says otherwise enjoys pain and suffering recreationally.

[@bershkaber2934]

Innocent versus nefarious addons is completely subjective. Also just because FF14 says they don’t allow addons doesn’t mean any of their player base doesn’t use them.

[@Emidretrauqe]

Likewise, just because addons are required in WoW doesn't mean all WoW players use them.

[@HT-jj5sx]

Add-ons have never been a huge pet peeve of mine, I think it's neat to see what people can build. I'd say that the RL cash involved in the World First Race is way more of an issue.

[@Emidretrauqe]

As someone who has occasionally tried raiding and M+ for fun, the addons just turn the game into some kind of bizarre control board. The game quite literally becomes about the HUD more than the game.

[@OutlawViIe]

Probably a daft question Mike but, have you tried to progress a tier in WoW, without addons before? For science and in the last decade.

[@TheRadPlayer]

Everyone I know that plays FFXIV plays with all sorts of "illegal" addons and mods.

[@aeo-gard]

Everyone I see doing that though just gives their characters huge tits or a damage meter instead of actually anything that affects gameplay itself though. And that's a lot of huge tits.

[@ferraris1006]

They can play, but not stream it

[@harrylong2796]

The only add-ons I use are a nameplate add-on (just for visual), Gladius for visual and trinket track, Omni CD to track ally cooldowns, big debuffs to show a big icon when people are CCd and battleground enemies for RBGs. All of this are things blizzard should add to their standard UI, they just show information

[@fade9004]

Great video Mike! On this topic I would ask why do these raid mechanics even need to be designed so complicated that you need these super crafty addons to help you get through them? A tiny portion of the player base can down mythic bosses even given all the addon tools available to them. Why is so much effort going into designing content that a fraction of the player base ever gets to see? I want to see Blizzard strictly limit or completely disable addons and then design a raid where the team doesn't have to constantly make every mechanic in such a way that addons can't nullify it. It limits developer creativity having to design around such things. Also would like to see Blizz get rid of epic BOE items altogether and figure out a way to kill split raiding. "Race to world first" isn't much of a race if only a handful of teams can afford to spend a hundred million gold buying items to give their raiders an advantage. This isn't to say that their might not be a big skill gap between teams but how will you ever be able to accurately judge this if one team goes in with a far higher ilvl than another?

[@ivantheninja2100]

This is the only tier where I've actually done mythic, so sample size of one or whatever, but I didn't really need WAs this tier. The only WA that I looked at during prog was the Dathea one for how much power the adds had. Maybe this is because I did some savage content in FFXIV but I just instinctively knew when the abilities are coming based on current resources and cooldowns. And any ability that I didn't know the timer on, it wasn't a necessary thing to track.

[@wapniak666]

>The only WA that I looked at during prog was the Dathea one for how much power the adds had. and you dont even "need" that because im pretty sure default UI boss frame already has that information, and realistically only a raid leader needs to know that

[@Soulessdeeds]

The people who want addons removed from WoW are blindly asking for WoW to end lol. You turn off addons in WoW and people will simply turn off WoW. Addons make the game playable and for many people. Addons upgrade the game from the base version.

[@MrBobbyBrown2006]

It goes both ways. Do you really think Blizzard would have thundering in Mythic+ if addons weren't available... no. That in particular would be a nightmare to constantly deal with, with no addon. You would have players literally just stop doing Mythic+ or stop playing in general because it's too much of a job to manage, not fun. Thundering exists because there is an addon to track it. They balance each other.

[@Emidretrauqe]

Yes, and maybe they can just have holes in the game for our characters to trip over that we can install an addon to fill! It will create a new harmonious balance!