Could the Game Function Without DBM/BW?

[Obtuse]

Blizzard may well create boss timers, eventually. With them they've been able to tune fights much tighter because we, as a community, can see that the fights are feasible based on our mathematical calculations of how to do what and when. Blizzard would have to allow larger room for error. They don't expect you to have a boss mod but almost no one who plays at any competitive level would raid without one.

Question is: Could Blizzard come up with a 'better' boss mod? If anything it's the UI interface they're working on. I'm sure everyone has their dbm/bw somewhere different on their screen. Bars are different sizes, what information you track, etc. Making it possible to function as well as those two giants is going to be no easy feat. I still use the add-on Grid even though Blizzard has their own now. I just feel comfortable with it.

It occurs to me that those mods have existed for too long and there is little possibility of removing them without watching the skill cap drop significantly.

[Deadmedic]

it depends on the raiding lvl and how serious you take it, om lfr? it is not needed, in normal you could prolly have a whole raid full of ppl without boss mods and no vent be able to pull off a 12/12 clear, but it would take some serious time and alot of wipes to thing that would have been avoided with the use of boss mods, even just 1 person having it, in heroic, i doubt you could get past 1 boss without boss mods, now if blizzard changed the boss mechanics to be entirely visible and such like in vanilla, or even BC-ish, sure, you wouldnt need boss mods, but i would consider raiding in an environment like that to be very boring, (see SWTOR).

[SSJrapter]

If you need DBM/BW to raid you are not a gamer, you are a robot.

If you need a mod to scream at you to do something like a Pavlovian response you are bad.

Having a mod to make you better does not make you a better gamer/player, it is a handicap and makes you worse. There is not a single fight in the entire game since vanilla that has required you to have a mod or timer to do. This included back in TBC when there was not giant emotes in the middle of your screen to do things like there is today.

I run recount as my only mod, preformance monitoring.

[MoanaLisa]

Taking you literally: The game would be fine. Players I'm less sure about.

Taking you by what you meant: I think so but it would be a major adjustment for most players. There was a time before DBM and other addons like it were around where people had to pay attention to the actual boss instead of staring into a UI that resembles a heads-up display more and more as time goes on.

Most people hardly realize that just about every major move by a boss has something that clues you that it's coming up. Blizzard has also gotten much better at sending you messages about it as well. I don't know about heroic level raiding which I would think would be extremely difficult but those guys like it like that. Right?

[Cows For Life]

If you need DBM/BW to raid you are not a gamer, you are a robot.

If you need a mod to scream at you to do something like a Pavlovian response you are bad.

Having a mod to make you better does not make you a better gamer/player, it is a handicap and makes you worse. There is not a single fight in the entire game since vanilla that has required you to have a mod or timer to do. This included back in TBC when there was not giant emotes in the middle of your screen to do things like there is today.

I run recount as my only mod, preformance monitoring.

Also:
- Hide all buffs and remove the "dispel me" animations on enemy targets. They are crutches.
- Hide the debuffs on enemy targets again. You should know when to re-apply your own debuffs. It's a crutch.
- Hide all HP and mana bars and range checks on your bars. They are crutches.
- Hide the cooldowns on your spells. You should know your own abilities. Having the number there is a crutch.

[Griffter]

They design the encounters with the assumption that raiders are using boss mods, so disabling them would mean that encounter design would have to change. They could add more visual and audio cues for boss abilities, but they would have to make the encounters easier to some extent, and that would be a very unpopular change. At this point, I think we're just stuck with boss mods in WoW.

[markdall]

I got news for you, OP - we've had mods like that since Vanilla. Could the game function? Sure, but it wouldn't be WoW.

[nightfalls]

This thread is coming off of http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...9237026?page=1
in which the thread pertains to people picking 3 addons they would install if they could only have 3 in-game, and almost everyone in there listed DBM/BW in their list.

It came to me that Raiders and even PvPs/Arena goers are all carried by Deadly Boss Boss Mods or other alternatives like Big Wigs. I've been playing wow for over 6 years now and watching kills videos, live streams and even playing with various guilds over time, people just tend to yell at you if you don't have it installed.

The thing with boss mods are that you are able to see everything an encounter is going to throw at you before it even happens. PvP players know when flags are going to re-spawn and when objectives and mines are going to be captured etc.

Imagine a world without boss mods in which players would would to mentally keep track of the last time a boss did a certain attack or how long it has been since I started to capture the Lumber Mill.

In conclusion, do you think that DBM/BW is just a huge handicap to players when it essentially is doing all of the underlying work for you? Would you as an individual player be able to cope without the addon, like in a scenario where Blizz just said boss mods are no longer allowed?

I think I would honestly lose more from losing WeakAuras than DBM, assuming Blizzard broke such addon functionality.

That said as others have pointed out encounters these days are designed around boss mods, especially for the cooldown on boss abilities which you want to plan for in advance (rather than reactively).

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Is it wrong I don't know BW?

As for DBM, removing it would probably single handedly double the time to clear a raid for the first time. Especially for heroic guilds.

[Sierra85]

it would be interesting if blizzard broke boss mods, just to see the ripples through the community.

Remember that mod in ICC, AVR, that could paint in 3 dimensions inside of wow, and blizzard were like nah this is too much.

[Deleted]

I have raided Dragon Soul without addons for a long time, but after the 1st kill on Warmaster Blackhorn ( heroic ) I was kinda forced into a boss mode addon because of how many things I have to keep track off.
Blizzard had back then some sort of anouncements integrated in the boss encounter, and even if that was not that complex it kinda helped.
I will recognise that I had a hard time adjusting to this and at start even a drop on my dps output but everthing went back really fast, things went even bether then before. I can remember like 2-3 weeks after our Ultraxion HC kill that I asked on mumble if the encounter on was on HC as it seemed that Hour of Twilight is taking forever and not only that.
To be honest, what I will miss from DBM will be the pull timer or the break timer.

[Fhi]

I'm fairly dependent on DBM. I primarily tank and DBM has been immensely helpful for their timers. I can plan ahead whether or not I should use a cooldown now or hold off on it a little bit. I don't have any of the audio/visual cue though - it's a little too noisy for me and I stare at my debuff section on my screen a lot of the time so I know when I have X stacks of something.

[Deleted]

I raided all of Firelands Heroic when it was current, and all of DS Heroic without boss mods without issue. I didn't get a boss mod until I started tanking in MoP, because then you have bosses doing instant attacks that need to be cooldowned/timed with active mitigation. The game could function. They would need to telegraph those instants a bit more within the game, because there's just no way to stop it otherwise besides sheer luck/trial and error with counting.

I remember when boss mods got broke/weren't working on some of the TBC bosses right after a patch and everyone got on just fine then.