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Comment by Pesthuf | Hacker News Reader

>- You have to prepare properly. Not only bringing all the consumables you'll need for raiding, also knowing what the boss is gonna do.

But that is, regrettably, also the case for retail. You are expected to spoil the dungeons and raids for yourself by reading up on everything the bosses will do, before you first enter. Nobody has the patience to go in blind and figure out their own strategies. And you're also expected to use addons that will tell you exactly what to do and when.

That's what made me lose interest in the game. You're not the player. The addons are. You are doing the one thing they can't: Press the buttons for them. You're the input device. I hate this so much.

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For modern WoW, even in dungeons (M+), if you can’t follow a perfectly executed “script”, nobody is interested in grouping with you. You don’t really need a stack of addons but an encyclopedic knowledge of maps, mechanics, strats, affixes, etc and the current meta is the norm and expected.

It feels barely related to D&D tabletop sessions or classic fantasy anything and more like a group Mario 64 speedrun or something.

Is that even a new phenomenon? The notion of a MMORPG "raid" as a highly orchestrated event was already well-established 15-20 years ago (recall the infamous "Onyxia Wipe" recording, for instance). It may have even predated World of Warcraft; older MMOs like EverQuest had similar dynamics.

Raiding in original WoW covered a wide spectrum. There were a tiny handful of hardcore cutting edge raiders, some who wanted to be those cutting edge raiders but weren’t (that Onyxia video), super chill raiders who were 2+ major raids behind and mostly used raiding as an excuse to goof around in Ventrilo, and everywhere in between. My guild fell in the last of those categories and it was fun.

While being “serious” became more popular in raiding over time, prior to M+ that mentality never came to dungeons. Up until its addition those were more of a go in with whatever ragtag crew you could gather together and have fun kind of thing, which has sadly has mostly been supplanted by solo content in modern WoW. There’s little content that requires a group and is low-stakes enough for the social or fantasy aspects to take precedence over the competitive ones.

> For modern WoW, even in dungeons (M+), if you can’t follow a perfectly executed “script”, nobody is interested in grouping with you.

For low key chill groups it's not true.

Never found one. Tried to get back to the game during Dragonflight, geared up 5 classes and tried to do M+ with randoms.

99% rejection rate and I was better geared, did more damage and died less than those who rejected me.

WoW became a kindergarten. Youngsters waiting for boosts. Meh.

No modern addon lets you play the game for you, except maybe Hekili which displays your optimal damage rotation (but even that's a massive crutch). Addons such as DBM and WeakAuras all provide information that can be learnt manually with skill/experience (and some top players use minimal addons), but by design can't control player actions. It's more about reducing cognitive load.

The main difficulty with modern WoW is not standing in the fire that kills you in less time than human reaction speed, and using defensive abilities if you're taking damage that can't be avoided.

I'd push back slightly on the idea that top players use minimal addons. During every RWF push, almost every top team has a dedicated resource solely for the purpose of making custom WeakAuras for different parts of each boss fight. During the last cycle, I think I saw Max call for no less than two or three dozen breaks just so folks could make sure their WAs were in sync and on the right version.

Granted I'm cherry-picking RWF where people are severely under-geared at first, but I think it does offer a relevant microcosmic example of the state of addons in retail WoW. They're more or less required for the competitive side of most "hard" content these days, even for the most coordinated of groups.

(EDIT: I wanted to add that in no way do I consider this "playing the game for you". It still took the aforementioned teams like 2 weeks to clear Nerub-ar Palace, and the largest chunk of that time wasn't even on the last boss, it was on Kyveza)

Mythic raiding/RWF/literally the best of the best is a massive outlier. Blizzard themself didn't seem happy about Liquid actually having to develop custom WeakAuras for that.

Oh I totally agree that I think its not great for the game in terms of balance. As a dev, I do enjoy being able to make my own custom addons, especially as a healer. But I think a push towards less addons in the game will help its casual accessibility big time.

This is an issue even in Mythic+ where missing a single kick means you likely wipe your group and if its a pug they probably all leave the key afterwards (the latter is a separate community issue, but exists nonetheless). If Blizz in the future is forced to assume that most players dont have kick addons that tell them which party member has a kick up and a timer/alert to tell you when to kick the caster mob, then theyre also forced into improving the UI to help the players know that information without external assistance. Or even better improve the mechanics writ large so that arcane knowledge is less zero-sum when you dont have it.

Not a chance in hell you can clear mythic simply pressing buttons based on add-ons. There’s a huge learning curve and skill requirement until you’re overgeared. Otherwise you’d see PUGs getting CE when most can’t reliably clear heroic until late in the patch.

Mythic is probably as hard or harder now than it’s ever been. (Minus unkillable tuning of course). They’ve removed complexity that made things “difficult” in an unsatisfying way and we have lower ping now, but “add-ons do it all for you” is a silly take.

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