21'st Man, The reason WA's need to go.

[ztkraptor]

It is the other way around. Because blizzard is trying so hard to counter top world guilds, all the rest suffers. Tools will exist regardless. But if the need (demand) to have such elaborate addons/wa would go down because of SIMPLER encounter designs, the supply will also go down.

Nobody forces blizzard, thats ridiculous.

They can easily block API calls for specific things and disallow addons.

See the one they stopped during the Archimonde Encounter that literally played characters for people.

[Corroc]

Do you not see the numbers that are appearing above their heads when wrought chaos starts? That's the position being assigned to them by the addon.

That number is just based on which debuff you had. Makes it easier to split the group. Other guilds were doing this https://youtu.be/Vx6ipbVOWvY?t=219

[Aurrora]

That number is just based on which debuff you had. Makes it easier to split the group. Other guilds were doing this https://youtu.be/Vx6ipbVOWvY?t=219

Dude, I raided Mythic Archimonde, I know all about it, and I'm telling you that Paragon is using an addon in that video that is dynamically assigning their positions.
If it was just about splitting the group the warning would only need to tell them left or right, it's instead assigning them a number corresponding to the position they should take in line. This was necessary to cut down on the time needed to find a position that wasn't on top of another person between getting the debuff and the debuff going off.

[Xath]

My first, and confusing reaction to this is...why would an addon, WA, have anything to do with how Blizzard designs their encounters? They don't take into consideration DBM or WA when coming up with encounters. And new players probably don't use WA or have heard of it.



That sounds like a "Max" issue and not an "everyone else" issue. I've had no issue leading encounters without WA and I rarely use it for anything. I can think of only two encounters in the last two raid tiers that I've even used a WA for. It's not required and people can get along fine without it.

Uh this isn't true they absolutely take dbm and wa into consideration when designing encounters there are many encounters that are so complex mechanically they would be near impossible even for top level players without boss mods.

That said I would much rather have interesting encounters than tank and spank snooze fest.

[Coldkil]

There's a feedback loop associated here.

1. Player creates addons to assist with encounter, thus making the encounters easier or sometimes trivial.
2. Blizzard must design encounter difficulty with this in mind, essentially rendering these addons "required"

Yes, but that's just the majority perception. I don't use WA - i have my cd/buff trackers because the default ones are useless, tucked in that upper right corner - because i find most of them just obnoxious and retardedly big. I know i could do them by myself, but i don't like the addon at all because i find it bloated of features. I mean, it's an incredible and super powerful addon, but i find myself basically not needing most of its features.

Modern wow encounters have most of their mechanics clearly telegraphed. If you watch the screen, everything that's needed is there.

Anyway, i agree that in the very top notch of competetive guilds, any advantage or thing that make the encounter easier, it's definitely a must. For casual progression, is not needed at all. Then we can discuss about "what if you use it you get better at fights", but that's another thing.

[Xath]

Right over your head buddy,

He's the BEST in the World, but admits its because of addons

thats the problem

No he doesn't rofl? He raid leads from the sidelines because it means he doesn't have to split his attention. He isn't raid leading via an in game addon he is raid leading via watching a direct stream.

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Thats completely untrue. I spent years main tanking and raid leading for my guild and my performance never suffered once.

It actually did though, I've done the same and there were hectic times in fights where I know my tanking output suffered because I was focused on making calls. Everyone's does even if you can reduce your attention needed to play at 100% level down to 25% of your total attention and spend 75% on raid leading that's 25% more you could be spending on raid leading. The 21st man approach for progression level guilds is absolutely the right approach but if you are getting kills weeks later it's not necessary.

[GnomeEU]

IMHO the main problem is encounter design.
In many mythic encounters I need to press my CDs and trinkets at a perfect time. Every try, or the boss won't die.
With the default UI you will forget when to press the stuff.

With weak auras I will press my CDs exactly at the right time even after 100 tryes after I long lost focus.

Blizzard said they will make encounters less dependant on addons, that was about 10 years ago. Nothing has changed.

[Alvito]

What else you want to get rid of? DBM? Raid markers? Voice chat?

It's all just "cheating" to make raids easier after all.

What did raids look like before we had all this? Go to Molten Core and have a look. Bosses had like 2 mechanics.

Monitors make the game too easy

[Qnubi]

What else you want to get rid of? DBM? Raid markers? Voice chat?

It's all just "cheating" to make raids easier after all.

What did raids look like before we had all this? Go to Molten Core and have a look. Bosses had like 2 mechanics.

People still died to these 2 mechanics. They still die even today to these 2 mechanics, with all the guides and addons.

[Kaver]

The fact the BEST raid leader on earth DOESNT PLAY THE GAME during progression proves I'm right.

Removing Weakauras would make the 21st man even more important. Because then they players would have even less capacity to know what was going on during the fights themselves.

Max says it himself: "A good raid leader thinks for the players so that they don't have to".

[Corroc]

Dude, I raided Mythic Archimonde, I know all about it, and I'm telling you that Paragon is using an addon in that video that is dynamically assigning their positions.
If it was just about splitting the group the warning would only need to tell them left or right, it's instead assigning them a number corresponding to the position they should take in line. This was necessary to cut down on the time needed to find a position that wasn't on top of another person between getting the debuff and the debuff going off.

Is the addon telling you where to stand or is the addon just assigning you a number based on what debuff you have?

[VinceVega]

WA is only needed for Mythic Raiding and high level Keys.

Hungering destroyer without addons in Mythic is just horrible and imho not doable.

In Heroic i do not know ONE boss you need WA for tbh. Everything is highly visible and easily found.
And a new player won't just jump into heroic. Given that there are ANY new players and not just returning ones.

The 21st man will always be soemthing on the higehst levels. Look at football. If i play with my friends i don't need seomeone in the sidelines keeping an eye on the whole game and screaming advise and stuff. The more you go into professional territory the more the trainer as an influence on the success of the game.

Just because you make the encounter less difficult and removing WA ( in turn making it BORING and easy by default ) doesn't mean the 21st man just vanishes.

[AeneasBK]

What did raids look like before we had all this? Go to Molten Core and have a look. Bosses had like 2 mechanics.

One of the more disappointing things about Classic was being told I should get DBM to raid. I didn't anyway, but still, kinda sad that anyone felt it was necessary for Classic raids.

That said, it would have been reasonable to make fights much more complex and still "ban" addons like DBM or Weakauras (from a design intent perspective at least, no idea how practicable that would be). The game had visual and audio cues for basically everything a boss does anyway.

[Specialka]

People still died to these 2 mechanics. They still die even today to these 2 mechanics, with all the guides and addons.

I do not play with these kinds of people.

[Biomega]

I didn't anyway, but still, kinda sad that anyone felt it was necessary for Classic raids.

I don't think anyone would argue it's NECESSARY. But it's a very easy way of making things a lot easier and increasing your performance, so if you care about min/maxing your performance there is little reason not to use it. If you don't care about the min/max then by all means do whatever you want as long as your group is cool with it.

In much the same way, WA or addons of any kind aren't strictly NECESSARY to beat mythic - but not having them adds a significant extra layer of difficulty.

They also work against certain forms of degeneracy. If, for example, we no longer had addons, world-first guilds would still do whatever they could to emulate the benefits of addons. Instead of WAs counting things down or whatever, they would for example have several people watching from outside, with stopwatches and notepads (or their equivalents) to manually keep track of things and call them out. There's no way to regulate that, and rather than "forcing" top-tier players into jumping through ridiculous hoops like that, allowing addons is a much more elegant solution.

[Qnubi]

I do not play with these kinds of people.

The delusion is strong in you, you literally raided with people that never ever even died once? So basically if your/their character had 1 life, you would still be around? hahaha

[Tradu]

My first, and confusing reaction to this is...why would an addon, WA, have anything to do with how Blizzard designs their encounters? They don't take into consideration DBM or WA when coming up with encounters. And new players probably don't use WA or have heard of it.



That sounds like a "Max" issue and not an "everyone else" issue. I've had no issue leading encounters without WA and I rarely use it for anything. I can think of only two encounters in the last two raid tiers that I've even used a WA for. It's not required and people can get along fine without it.

They definitely do take addons into consideration. They've talked about this in multiple interviews over many years.

And OP twisted Max' words to an insane degree to come up with his post.

[Specialka]

The delusion is strong in you, you literally raided with people that never ever even died once? So basically if your/their character had 1 life, you would still be around? hahaha

I do not raid with people that dies with a boss that has 2 mecanics like in MC (or even BWL for that matters).

[Tradu]

They've even said themselves they have to take that stuff into consideration.

There's two options: Simpler fights with no addons, or current fights with addons. As someone mentioned, Sludgefist is a good example of a fight that's not Vanilla/TBC levels of boring while still being understandable, but those bosses tend to be few & far between. I'd say Krosus in Nighthold also fits that bill, which was also a DPS check boss rather than a challenging mechanical boss.

I don't know what I'd prefer in all honesty. I think they're trying to somewhat dampen the all-powerful boss mods/WAs by having bosses with flexible spell-queuing in Castle Nathria, but all that's led to is bosses that have horrible fecking overlaps randomly that just shouldn't exist (Xymox & Council come to mind). The very concept of "stop DPS or we'll might force a stupid overlap" is horrible for farm raiding

This is the problem. They'd need to put a lot of effort into preventing bullshit overlaps if they were to make bosses more random intentionally(which I don't think they're doing, I just think that spell queueing is a terrible system for boss mechanics but they can't come up with anything better)

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It doesn't matter.

21st person RLing is not going to be a factor for anything but a TINY handful of guilds, competing at the absolute highest level. It's irrelevant as a concept for everyone else, and designing around it just because of the two guilds in the world that do it is a very questionable approach.

It made a big difference for us this tier. It allowed more comp flexibility and meant our (extremely good) raidleader could focus only on that instead of also having to play his character on the last 3 bosses.

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Maybe you should watch the video, he admits he wasn't good enough to do both and still get world 1st.

Which means we've come to a point where reading out addons at exact moments is more important than the game itself. If you can't kill a boss without addon's the addon shouldn't be in the game.

End of story.

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In actuality there were two fights where weak aura's could hold your hand completely this tier, both of them were so bitterly received by the raiding community blizzard had to change them.

Again, my issues are two fold, and none of them have anything to do with Max personally, I'm using him as an example because he's the "best of the best" and the best of the best, need someone reading out add-ons to be the best.

If you take the add-ons out of the game, suddenly Max doesn't need to be the 21'st man.

It's almost as if the way you become the best is by maximizing your chances of success by any means necessary. Having people outside of the actual raid doing the raidleading was an extremely obvious way to improve chances of success, and if anything it's insane that it took this long for it to really start being a thing.

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So you're saying I can't use whats available while still not liking it is? Grow up and stay on topic.

I think WA's and a lot of addons are basically playing the game for us right now, and encounters are being designed with them in mind, which in itself is a HUGE problem. The fact the BEST raid leader on earth DOESNT PLAY THE GAME during progression proves I'm right.

Did you know that many of the best military leaders didn't/don't run around the actual battlefield in real world battles?

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personally I'd be okay with all addons being removed.

If the default UI wasn't absolute dogshit, maybe. Addons have also driven every single improvement to the default UI, so getting rid of addons would make the default UI stagnate.

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All addons should be permanently banned from wow.

A game that needs addons, sims and 3rd party guides is a failure.

True, a game that people care enough about to spend hundreds/thousands of hours on creating tools, guides etc for is a failure. Definitely wouldn't want people to actually get invested in your game.

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Thats completely untrue. I spent years main tanking and raid leading for my guild and my performance never suffered once.

You're delusional. Your performance definitely suffered, because you only have so much mental bandwidth available. Being able to focus all of it on just your own character vs having to also call out things for other people inevitably means there's a difference in performance.

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LOL I wish needing to "let go" as a raid leader was my problem.

Hey, can someone do callouts for this fight for me?
*crickets*

Someone needs to handle Mechanic X tonight on this fight we've been doing for weeks, who can take care of it?
"well, I guess I can try to figure it out but I don't understand how it works"

Me: I'm going to be late Tuesday, who wants to handle invites?
"Maybe we should just cancel"

[I miss announcing a basic mechanic that you can literally see the boss casting, we wipe]
"your fault, you didn't call it!"

I love the people I raid with -- largely friends for many years -- but helping me out as raid leader is pretty much the last thing any of them have any interest in doing. In fact, anything that makes my job even harder is hilarious for them, so forget trying to actually delegate important tasks. There's a couple people I can count on if I'm really desperate but they aren't always available or/or get tired of being the only person who ever helps. (sorry if any of yall reading this, but you can't even argue)

I feel like my situation is as common, if not more common, than raid leaders who want to monitor and micromanage every task themselves.

Yes, if you've always called out that mechanic and then randomly don't, that's 100% your fault because you've conditioned your raiders to expect that callout and to be able to rely on it.

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yes .

they have have be too hard and overtuned for years now - since cata it was only worse and worse

there is a reason why WoLK was golden age of both game as whole and raiding.

because it was tuned perfecly.

after that it went downhill and so went game overall.

this is direct fault of catering only to top 5%.

CN is prime example of that - you have so many overlaps of mechanics even on hc that it makes many encounters simply not fun . also stuff hits for way way to much effectively 1-2 shoting you if you fuck up even once and many times you have split seconds to make decisions even in very hectiv sitations. very very unfun design .

There's 4 raid difficulties to choose from. Having one that's very hard is perfectly fine.

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DBM are just inverse combat timer...
Start a combat timer and then you learn by which minute X mechanic start etc etc...

Except you'd need to restart those timers on phase changes, or start separate timers on phase changes because some mechanics don't reset their CD.

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I was already in multiple top 50 world raiding guilds...
You would be surprised how mad some raid leaders get and how many people get replaced for not following the script.

And yes, you can make food just as good as a whatever star chef, so long as you have their tools(aka gear) just by following the script.
What do you think they do? Put a spell on the food? It is quite literally following instructions to make the food...
It is less about their "skill" and more about their tools that they have to accomplish the stuff.


Again, turn off the add-ons and I bet you bosses at this level don't die.
Its a problem because add-ons force blizzard to make fights more and more intense and hard because you essentially are playing against people following a script and don't really have a dynamic to it.

Yes, let's completely ignore their experience and skill in using those tools.

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IMHO the main problem is encounter design.
In many mythic encounters I need to press my CDs and trinkets at a perfect time. Every try, or the boss won't die.
With the default UI you will forget when to press the stuff.

With weak auras I will press my CDs exactly at the right time even after 100 tryes after I long lost focus.

Blizzard said they will make encounters less dependant on addons, that was about 10 years ago. Nothing has changed.

Pretty sure they've never said that. They've locked down certain parts of the addon API here and there, but they definitely haven't tried to make encounters less dependant on addons.

[AeneasBK]

I don't think anyone would argue it's NECESSARY. But it's a very easy way of making things a lot easier and increasing your performance, so if you care about min/maxing your performance there is little reason not to use it. If you don't care about the min/max then by all means do whatever you want as long as your group is cool with it.

In retail, sure, in Classic? Rofl.

In much the same way, WA or addons of any kind aren't strictly NECESSARY to beat mythic - but not having them adds a significant extra layer of difficulty.

Sure, but haven't developers been on record in interviews explicitly stating that they had to take addons like DBM and Weakauras into consideration when designing encounters since... Cataclysm or even earlier? That would at least suggest that their requirement is a lot greater, I know at one point they baked a bunch of WA stuff into the UI. Is there a mythic clearing guild that makes a point of *not* using them at all and still clears all the content when it's current? (Genuine curiosity, else I'd think it safe to assume that *every* guild clearing mythic raids when they are current is using bossmod addons and some form of weakauras)...

They also work against certain forms of degeneracy. If, for example, we no longer had addons, world-first guilds would still do whatever they could to emulate the benefits of addons. Instead of WAs counting things down or whatever, they would for example have several people watching from outside, with stopwatches and notepads (or their equivalents) to manually keep track of things and call them out. There's no way to regulate that, and rather than "forcing" top-tier players into jumping through ridiculous hoops like that, allowing addons is a much more elegant solution.

I can't really comment the whole "world first" race side of PvE hasn't ever really interested me but I'd argue that "who gives a toss what 0.0001% of guilds do to compete with each other" - allowing addons as an 'elegant solution' to a problem 0.01% of guilds would encounter, seems very much cutting off the nose to spite the face. But that's just my opinion, it's cool that the majority of WoW players want big glaring sirens and alerts from a 3rd party program to tell them their DPS boost ability has procced or the boss has cast a certain ability. It's just a shame that the game is tuned around them.

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Having people outside of the actual raid doing the raidleading was an extremely obvious way to improve chances of success, and if anything it's insane that it took this long for it to really start being a thing.

My guild was always super super casual but I still wanted an "observer mode" so I could occasionally raid lead from outside the group. Mostly on those nights in Cata when pickings were slim and we'd be running 2 10 man groups, being able to raid lead both at the same time would have been awesome. Also would mean I could give up my spot to someone else who really wanted it. Sorry, as you were