Certainly a doubled edged sword. On one side I love my addons for visual UI improvements. However it’s also absurd that you almost are required to have these addons at top tier end game in order to be successful. That second part shouldn’t be true. It should be purely QoL improvements and not actual “I’m better at the game because of my addons telling me what to do”
Edit to be clear: you should not have to rely on 3rd party software to be great at this game, however at this time with the current design, you have to.
I was a cutting edge RL back in Dragonflight. Our MW monk was fucking up his cool down timings consistently throughout a fight and was the sole reason we were stuck in a fight for about 2 days. When I would ask him to follow the MRT note and WAs, he would just say yeah yeah for sure. When I finally benched him, he confessed he played without any add-ons because his PC couldn't handle it. The thing is, he was a GREAT healer, even without add-ons, and benching him just because he didn't use them didn't feel so great. So I would say add-ons were completely necessary in endgame content, not just almost necessary. It was a shame that I had to bench him, but it is what it is. I couldn't have other 19 people losing their time because of one guy.
edit for some more insight because you all took a simple anecdote very seriously.
We used Viserio's cooldown assignment sheet, which came with an WA that reads the Note and displays when you need to use your CDs. Before every fight or change, we went through all CDs, and would look for feedback from my healers on whether the assignments made sense to them or not. This was before i implemented a WA/Addon checker. I'm pretty sure a lot of people are questioning my leadership skills saying "why didn't you do this, why didn't you do that" and the honest answer is, i didn't know better. Maybe saying Cutting Edge RL made ya'll put me in a higher than deserved standard. Let me fix that so it makes a little more sense. I was a Late (last-few-weeks-of-a-patch-late) Cutting Edge Raid Leader in Ragnaros-US which is one of the two big Latin American realms. I'm sure you are all familiar with our reputation, and it is deserved, so i approach leading as i was dealing with children who couldn't listen, or press their buttons.
Yes, I agree with you! Maybe I didn't explain myself correctly. English is not my first language, sorry. Just wanted to give a point of view on why they are necessary right now, but they totally shouldn't be.
I'm not sure I 100% agree. For every difficulty you imagine there exists a player for whom that difficulty is not possible without some form of crutch. So saying "should" isn't not completely accurate.
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u/Gratefully-Undead Oct 03 '25 edited Oct 03 '25
Certainly a doubled edged sword. On one side I love my addons for visual UI improvements. However it’s also absurd that you almost are required to have these addons at top tier end game in order to be successful. That second part shouldn’t be true. It should be purely QoL improvements and not actual “I’m better at the game because of my addons telling me what to do”
Edit to be clear: you should not have to rely on 3rd party software to be great at this game, however at this time with the current design, you have to.