Good luck doing Azshara’s decrees or Fatescribe’s runes without communication and addons. Most fight are probably somewhat doable without addons, and I’m sure the top guilds would still manage, but with the current boss design, the majority of the current mythic raiding playerbase wouldn’t stand a chance. When you have things like spell queuing where the boss just delays his abilities based on a ton of different factors, it’s really hard to manage raid cooldowns when you don’t know what’s coming next or if it’s coming at all.
That’s why saying “block all addons” is just stupid because frankly, the default UI is utter garbage for keeping track of buffs and debuffs, let alone stacks and durations.
I don’t think you realize how much is actually being tracked and improved by your addons. After playing for years with addons, it’s easy to forget how much you wouldn’t be able to properly see, or see at all, on the default UI. The majority of them are really just massive UI improvements.
Subs started dropping with every bad decision, but how bad is it now? WotlK was a lot more accessible for everyone, even Cataclysm was.
The problem what created this is: They listened to “the community”. By community I mean they listened to hardcore raid guilds and pro pvp’ers. This is what we have now.
A game for hardcore raiders that can farm their raid equip by buying arena boosts (pvp stuff), having three alts to rush through content, farming mythic+ for even more gear and later selling boosts to pay their subs.
“The community” never had a say in that.
PvP is completely dead because gearing for casuals is horrid and pvp gear is hidden behind rating. So you either buy a boost or you get stuck at a certain range where you get farmed because you lack skill and gear.
Same goes for raids. Why would a casual player raid through LfR, normal, hero and even try mythic? You have to clear every raid for weeks just to gear up.
And you do every boss three times with a slight change.
As I still raided “hardcore” we had at least 100 tries for Lichking normal and we were freaking happy after killing him. Imagine having to do this fight 300 times before you can even think about going mythic - while doing all the other bosses over and over again.
That’s just not working for casual players.
What Blizzard is doing is giving people like Ion (a hardcore raider) what he wants and he is making a game for method, echo, liquid etc, not for you, me and the rest of the 1 million people that haven’t left for FFXIV or GW2 or Lost Ark.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. If you are stuck at a rating you only have to get better to stop being stuck. Especially early in the season where even the honor gear is as good as the last season’s maxed out conquest gear.
legendaries and all player power can be acquired without putting up the slightest effort. the entire storyline and every instance is accessible (albeit time gated) to everyone regardless of…well, anything really.
Git gud it is? That’s proven as untrue and always was. Didn’t work in BC where they introduced it, didn’t work in later tries.
When was pvp huge? When they had options to easily gear for pvp. Cata and WoD for example.
You can’t overcome a gear disadvantage with skill. Never worked.
Literally yes. If you’re unable to gain rating when we’re at a moment with minimal gear disparity then you just need to get better.
Maybe it never worked for you because you are not good enough. Last season my alt mage got to 2400 rating with Challenger gear, and there are all the time countless examples of players that are way better doing the same with even more extreme gear disparity.
that’s what I’ve been doing so far. if your expectation is to be accepted into “fast run gg zerg rush oneshot 300+ ilvl” type of groups and farm 11/11HC every week, then that’s a problem with you.
And you did this on your own without your core group you normally run dungeons or raid with, right? And you didn’t save the items you needed on a full geared main?
Because that’s not how where majority of the players are right now.
How make “countless” youtube examples sense? I mean the people that try and fail don’t make countless youtube examples of it. What you see is the “small fraction” that does. And my bet is that 90% of them is carried by friends or people that are already geared.
The same when you get back into your guild after one year and they carry you through content.
You said you can’t get rating if you don’t buy a boost.
I say it’s not true and that if you are good enough, base conq gear + the upgrades you get as they are available is enough to get to any rating bracket until you can get maxed out. You say that it’s not true, but many proved that it’s absolutely possible with video proofs if you aren’t going to believe anything else, which is my point from the beginning: if you are good you will get rating, the gear thing is just an excuse.
But taking away from mythic raiding isn’t going to solve any of your issues. They haven’t added much extra for “the 1%” (I hate using that term), but they did neglect the casual part of the game.
I am totally with you on the part that casual content is not good at all, and I am very much for improving the gearing and rewards for the casual community, but if you’re more interested in taking your frustration out on hardcore players by taking away our part of the game instead, then I have no interest in debating this with you.
Once you come up with improvements for casuals instead of only invalidating the hardcore part of the game, we can have a chat.
I’ll start:
There shouldn’t be an ilvl cap on M+ valor upgrades and the gearing needs to be deterministic
Tier sets acquirable from outside the raid like the Creation Catalyst is a good thing, but should have it’s own progression path for all types of content and should not be time gated. By all types of content I mean open world as well.
Raid bosses up to heroic difficulty need to be balanced to be doable by pugs with minimal coordination, but still be challenging enough for individual players to warrant being labelled as heroic difficulty. Leave proper group coordination for mythic.
Open world content should have it’s own, proper, and engaging gearing progression, but the acquired gear should be aimed at open world gameplay so that those who don’t enjoy it don’t feel pressured into doing it. I.e. there shouldn’t be a piece of gear that is BiS everywhere.
Now you’re adding something new. Without communications. I never suggested raiding without communication. It’s a MMO, ffs.
As for addons for those specific fights, I don’t recall using one for Azshara. I think we had a WA for Fatescribe, but it was mostly people saying things like ‘I can do [colour]’ and ‘need help with [colour]’.