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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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