Are add-ons really that important?Follow

My rogue could live fine without them, but when I'm healing on my paladin, I think I would be lost without healbot. :P Pallypower isn't vital, but its one of those nice to have ones because it makes the job much easier. Recount is just for fun. I still run Omen, even though tanks don't worry about people going over threat anymore.

I think this is a matter of which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did decursive cause the game to be designed around its existence or did decursive come about because the fights demanded it? I believe it's the latter, because the first real raid (and lockout, so UBRS doesn't count) boss ever put in the game, Lucifron, had a major component of his fight be raid-wide debuffs that had to be removed from everyone. I played as a mage back then, before decursive came out, and it was absolutely stupid. The fight consisted of me waiting for him to cast the debuff, and then sequentially remove it from 2 groups by hitting a hotkey, clicking on a unit frame, and repeating over and over and over. The main thing I'm glad that decursive did was show exactly how stupid of an element that was to put in a fight.

There are some addons I just love, but I tend to run without any at all (with permission from raid leaders) since my laptop's performance is weak even without anything extra slowing things down. As BM I rarely even get close to pulling threat, and the built in threat warning works fine for me--feign death makes everything easier. And normally someone else has DBM and does raid warnings, so there's no reason for me to run that either.

When I get a new computer, I am going to have fun trying out a bunch of addons and making things pretty. :)

Need. At least as a healer.

Sure, I used to heal 25-man raids in BC by pulling raid party frames out onto my screen. I could do that again, but I won't. Grid makes everything so much better.

And then Clique and Decursive finish it off. I do 95% of my healing by clicking on Grid now. The only things I do otherwise are judging my target and casting beacon on my focus. Those are action bar clicks.

But I still love Grid+Cliquewhen I'm not healing. I've given Hysteria a Clique macro, and it helps me try starting in Arena.

Guess I should have added some more in-between options since everyone is dogpiling the gray area between "use" and "need." I didn't want to overcomplicate things. =x



I have no idea what "trees and ship" means. And I wasn't aware of exactly when Decursive came along because I've never played a class that can make use of it (in a true raid environment.)

Still, regardless of what you say about Lucifron versus Decursive, I'm sure it was annoying but it wasn't completely necessary. The problem was that when you could just push a button to make stuff happen, the game designers had to make things more challenging, and so we ended up with situations like Noth's curse where if you don't remove it in X seconds, Bad Things (tm) happen. Fights like Chromaggus were excessively over-the-top, and personally I think that part of this is because the designers knew that Decursive would have made it trivial to deal with otherwise. Even when you get partway into Blackwing Lair, you can see the influence that several mods people designed -- and I don't just mean Decursive, but also the precursors to mods like DBM. Fights where things happened on timers turned into synchronized swimming matches...not that that part has really changed any.

You can certainly argue over the game design and if the eggs for those chickens was really all that good an idea. Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense on an intuitive level that bosses wouldn't just deal AE damage, but also AE status effects. The fact that they required dispelling from everyone on the raid in a rapid fashion was perhaps the place where they failed. Dispelling on my priest while I played that character (up to but not including actual raid content) never really bothered me, perhaps because I played a cleric in Everquest and cross-healed a ton by constantly assisting the enemy without the benefit of a "target's target" window. So even multi-group battles didn't phase me, but I could see how having to deal with decursing 15 people constantly would get just a wee bit tedious.

If I ever lost the ability to stare at AtlasLoot for hours on end, I don't know what I'd do.

Let me keep grid and deadly boss mods, if you must you can take everything else. I would be screwed without these. I use Blizz UI but I have extra bars along the top with spells bound to my F keys.

Grid I use to track renew, track druid HOTS, track aggro, track incoming heals from other healers, track things I need to remove and easily see health of ALL raid members. I still use the 1,2,3,f1,f2 etc keys to cast the spells grid just enables me to be more efficient in seeing where to cast and faster in reacting. I click the name then click to cast. This works for me. I also use it to track who is in range before I buff and to see when hunters FD, when dps die or when someone get DCed.

Deadly boss mods helps me to keep an eye on the health and status of my raid members while still being able to easily see things I need to compensate for like when the raid will get web sprayed, when loethebs healing bar will lift etc.

The others just make my life easier but I can live without them (chatmod, easymail, auctioneer, ackis recipe list) I have omen but as a healer I never use it. I have it enabled when I am dps though as I am still learning to control my aggro. Recount I have but more so I can monitor my overheals and see roughly how my dps compares.


Edited, Mar 22nd 2009 6:28am by ysabellstohelit

I see Your point. First time I maxed a char I did it without Questhelper or Carbonite. I could definitely live without them. The only thing they do is do my alt+tab and research alla/thott for me.

But if I had to use default UI and functions only I would be seriously screwed. Some addons give me information without which I couldn't function as well in dungeons/raids. Omen is WAAY better then built in threat meter. I raid lead sometimes, it tells me who can push harder, who has to ease up and so on. With recount I can pick up slackers. Thanks to bartender all my buttons(mainly used to track cooldowns nowadays) are conveniently in one place. Custom char frames let me check health bars in much shorter time.

It's one thing to use addons to save time (quest helper, atlasloot) but some of them really help to get your performance to another level.

As a healer I am definitely between the depend and need... only with my beloved x-perl though. I'd have to say it would be impossible to heal without it or an equivalent. I mean, how many people actually heal (competently) the upper level instances/raids with an unmodified UI?

As for my other toys, I don't really need them to function, but they make my gaming a bit easier.

It may not have been my best analogy ever, but look at it from a game design perspective.

The players need to cross a large body of water. There are plenty of trees laying around. The players construct ships with them and use it to cross the water. The game developers are going to assume you have a ship later, so they construct puzzles that flat-out require you to have a ship.

"Horribly designed fights with lots of curses" came first. After that point, the developers kept designing encounters that worked like Lucifron (i.e. really stupidly) because otherwise effect removal was completely trivial. To use a totally different analogy, it's like building an RTS that requires (and gives the player access to) the ability to Nuke It From Orbit early on, then leaving them with that capability. The only way to make it harder is to either restrict the nukes (read as: 2.0, remove Decursive) or design fights so that you need the nukes (read as: Chromaggus, Noth, or a coordinated attack by Cthulu, Lucifer and Kerrigan. Exterminatus inc.)

Anyway, if mods were truly purged the default UI would need to be massively better than it is. They can keep it in the current form primarily because anyone who finds the (large) limitations in it can switch to something else, and they incorporate bad versions of things like SCT or SimpleCombatLog into the game itself.

Add-ons I have and may use:

Cartographer (for hunting Blood of Heroes)
DBM (makes Naxx even easier)
Omen (only use for a few fights, I usually have no problem with threat and I can't find a good place for it on my screen)
Auctioneer (Used to use it, great for enchanting)
Enchantrix (same as above, used to use)
Group_Calendar (was to be used for scheduling raids, but never really took off)

Really, the only ones I use are Cartographer and DBM. And I hardly use the first and don't really need the second.

Required? No. Plenty of games work just fine without add-ons.

One reason Blizzard is so successful? Yes. The ability to modify one's UI to provide a gaming environment individually tailored to each player's specific personal preferences is a huge selling point for the game.

For myself, a head injury left me with a number of vision problems. An add-on like DBM that allows me to focus on the fight while getting relevant even information in a non-obtrusive, but centrally located sight is the only thing that enables me to engage in raid events. I play a healer. I do not have the physical ability to look between my chat box, my grid box, and the fight and process all that visual data. I need to be able to focus on as limited an area as possible in order to play in a complex raid AT ALL.

So, if it were not for Blizzard's UI's, I would likely not be playing this game. I'm not the only one. That has nothing to do with 'cheating' encounters or making them easier. It has to do with straight playability.

I need add-ons. I need them. The game would not be the same without them and I would most likely not continue to play if they were banned. Being a console gamer myself, the world of mods and addons is really what is keeping PC gaming going as an industry. I think it would be a downright shame to take that away especially when the PC community is so brilliant in that aspect.

Thank you that is all.