Real hard modes for ICC - achievements for using no addons

[Kyrottas]

on anub you have to NOT heal people who are low health, otherwise anub will heal himself as hell. in addition, on anub 25 heroic FIRST tick of penetrating cold kills anyone except the tank in the raid because they are on 1.5-2k hp.

ps - i always smiling when i see dps' or tank' UI. they are using standard, they are using mods like *8 buttons and minimap and nothing more* and all of this. i mean that looks really cool, but YOU CAN NOT HEAL WITH THIS INTERFACE.
as a healer i have X-pearl, Omen (have to cast Salvation on some dps sometimes), recount (have to see last 3-4 seconds of everybody's death), quartz(have to see my ping to correctly hitting button), dbm (have to prepare my cd's or simply make pre-cast before boss casts Killing Spell onto the tank/raid), bartender etc...
respectable topic starter, i suppose your best raid achievement is *tribute to skill*-10 or *tribute to mad skill*-10 (or even the Fall of naxxramas!) or you are not healer. try to beat some damaging encounter as a healer without addons, using standard UI... it's impossible, except you overgeared the instance.

Healer here saying...

I use 2 bars, Pitbull, grid and aesthetic add ons. With BigWigs.

Healing is completely possible with as little as 2 bars, shit you can do it with no bars showing. Get a cooldown addon, keybind everything and remove the bars. You make healing sound like it requires 50 buttons, when tell me, do you have anything more than 25 on a bar that are actually useful at a given time for PvE?

[Grimreaper]

I Don't get some people. You want harder content? easy, make your own hardmodes.. there doesn't have to be an achivement!!!! the achivement system F'ed up at these places!!! if there is an achivement to kill NRB with 4 snobolds up, why not leave all of them up? Maybe leave mistresses and eternals up all the time (on hc cos on normal that is easy :P ), you say it would be harder without adds? disable them!!!!!! Stop QQing about ahrdmodes being Easy!!! Create your own hardmodes! there doesn't have to be an achivement for it!!!

If you want to check if im a scrub or whateva, go ahead..... Name and Realm are there.. Just for the love of god stop the hardmode being easy shi!


o/ Peace.

The problem is i want challenging content without knowing what comes next after it. Sunwell style, not ToC-"you have to see this 20 times on extremly easy mode before we'll let you do it the normal way"-style.

[Azyoulike]

The problem is i want challenging content without knowing what comes next after it. Sunwell style, not ToC-"you have to see this 20 times on extremly easy mode before we'll let you do it the normal way"-style.

/agree

Not unlocking the hard modes until we've done the easy modes is extremely weak. Just blizz trying to stretch out this patch to last until Cata I guess, but still - annoying.

[Paulosio]

Other than deadly boss mods/bigwigs, most mods don't make raiding easier.. they are simply convenience. For example I don't think having a mod that displays your inventory or shows your damage has any affect on the difficulty level....

Even mods that do aid my dps such as OmniCC is simply a UI change... it lets me see the CD's of my abilities more clearly so I don't have to push my face against the screen to see the slightly shaded cooldown fader of blizzards default UI.

So no.. 95% of my mods have no effect on the difficulty of the game and it would be retarded to have to turn off UI adjustments for some retarded achievement.

[FieryBull]

Wow all of the lame idiotic replys to this thread make you all sound like little boys that just got a swift kick in the nuts. You all obviously didn't play back in Vanilla and it shows. Im sure all you kiddies wouldn't know what to do if it wasn't for all the boss strat vidoes and addons im sure. If you need something/someone to guide you to get something done you should go back to school and request to be put into the "slow" classes and have teachers help guide you cause thats about as mind numbing as addons anymore. If you all wanna know what i mean ask an old time player how bad it was to farm all the resistance gears back in the day, ask how hard the 4 horseman really were back in the day, and ask how hard it was compared to the new "casual" WoW based content is
... blah blah blah ...

You mean back in vanilla where we had Healbot actually doing all the healing for us automatically with 1 button? Yeah, that was skill.

[Fornaw]

It would be possible and wouldn't require much of any RNG luck, there's something called "healer assignments" might consider looking into it. :P

So you make assignments before anub for all the possible ways RNG can choose 4/25 raiders (I think it's 4, not 5)? Did you know there are 12650 different ways to choose 4 random raid members out of 25? All the standard interface will tell you is who has the debuff, it will not tell you who is healing who, DBM drops raid icons on them, then you assign people to an icon. The next best option would be to have all the healers arrange their raidframes in the same way and require them to heal say #3 from the top, but all you've done is hindered their reaction time, and required more coordination time, for what?

Yep I use lots of addons, they vastly improve my ability to react to many different things. TBH I usually hover around #8 for dps, but when a boss needs to be kicked, or dispeled etc, my guild has me do it. I spent a lot of time and effort setting up my addons to display important info like that in such a way that I can react faster than the other 5 interrupters in raid, CONSISTENTLY. That's right, 60+% of the time I can react faster than a half dozen other people. That's my skill. Maybe you think you're pro because you can watch 4 CDs without addons, that's not skill. Come back and talk to me when you know everything that happened in a raid, who kicked what, who dispelled what, who healed what, who dpsed what, who got hit by what, and who used what ability when. When you can take in every piece of info and still do your job then you have completely trumped my addons for their ability to keep me informed, and I will admit you have more skill than me because of it. Meanwhile people who want to be better at this game research addons which improve their situational awareness, and get better.

[Offhand]

For those of you claiming to have "played in Vanilla", you all seem to have forgot when healbot literally choose the target and heal cast for you. Aaaand as of my posting this, Vorend already beat me to it.

I'd gladly raid with the default Blizzard UI if they made it customizable and not some giant, blocky, clicker-friendly piece of crap like it is today. Blizz defines what is and isn't fair play with third party add-ons. By that logic, content is balanced around all availible add-ons, leaving the better players to concoct the best setup for their own playstyle. The OP is basically asking everyone to swap their mouse and keyboard and play left handed.

I don't understand why some people think add-ons are bad. Certainly, at the very least, they contribute to WoW's success by allowing to play with a UI that's not total ass.

[Gron]

Blizzard designed encounters for many years so its next to impossible without addons. This was more true back in BC times, less true in WOTLK. The game endgame raiding was designed 100% around the expectation that guilds will use addons (addons were side-effect of too hard content, however the raid mechanics of oneshotting raiders if you made a mistake pushed everyone to use addons to make the encounter more predictable and reliable).

Still, don't forget that when you were going to Trial of Grand Crusader heroic 10 or 25, on Northrend beasts, when last boss charges, in the first few weeks very few guilds could do that - because mostly of latency issues, where it was impossible to move out of the way of the charge since you had +250 ping.

This was nerfed later.

Same with all other raid encounters - addons made Blizzard life easier by not having to finetune an encounter, release it, and see how it goes, rely on addons to help raiders.

[Offhand]

Beyond DBM, what great advantage are conveyed by add-ons? I've seriously heard people say that they think add-ons are cheating and that third party add-ons break the ToS, and all add-on users should be banned. I'm sorry but this kind of weird technophobia actually exists in a video game.

Everyone has pretty much agreed that DBM/Bigwhigs is the only "necessary" add-on. Do any other add-ons provide such a grand advantage? I can't really think of any. Would the game be any easier if the Blizzard raid frames were more customizable? No, because everyone is already using functional raid frames.

The OP is certainly a dps, and a technophobe.

[Shiira]

As a dps death knight the only addon that I use that actually makes a difference is my rune addon, and if the default one was less terrible I wouldn't even need that.

As Offhand said hard modes are balanced with the assumption that you are using any kind of ui modification currently available. Blizzard have shown that they are willing to break addons if they consider the functionality unintended so making a point of hamstringing yourself doesn't make any sense.

[kronpas]

With pleasure, next time I raid with her I will make sure to take a screen shoot of everything she does and link it to this same thread for you to see. Considering she also beats all healers as disc most of the time I wouldn't doubt her skills. Don't forget WoW has its own raiding bars where you can see buffs and debuffs.

The default buff bar is horrible, as it allows little to none customization. I dont need to know most of the buffs/debuffs on my raid, but specific ones that can take the lives of ppl in my raid. Thats why Grid with some effort put into configuring it trumps over default raid frame. Why hurt yourself starting at the pooly designed bar trying to figure out which buff is it, instead of grabbing some decent addons?

Also, if your disc priest beats all other healers in raid, your guild are really bad :-\