Returning for first time since cata. Have just learnt about rotation helpers. This is cheating surely? It just seems like cheating to me. And apprently these days they design encounters around the presumption everyone is using add ons so you have to cheat in order to have a chance?
How they hell did this ever come into being? They should have started banning certain add ons years ago before they got to this level.
Itâs not cheating. Theyâre pretty awful to use.
ââThey are awful to useââ
Really? Because the reddit threads I been reading are full of people saying they have increased their DPS by 10-20%
From 60% of what they should be doing to 70% or 80%? 
Seriously, they are great for beginners, but not for people who have played a lot.
And if you think thatâs bad, wait till you see what DBM and WeakAuras can do!
There are people on reddit that say the earth is flat. Are you going to believe that too?
DBM was pointless back when I was playing in WOTLK, everything it told you the game told you througyh voice lines. Can you still get away with not using it now? I was in 2nd best guild on realm back then and didnt use or feel like i needed to use dbm once
âTimes Changeâ.
â Garrosh Hellscream
The devs, the competitive raiders, and the addon makers have had many generations of âguns vs armourâ evo;utionary selection since then.
Mythic Raids are vastly more complicated, the players are more sophisticated, and the addons are about to pass the Turing Test and take over now.
Have a look at any recent World First kill on YouTube, and examine the screen.
Its not cheating and barely worth it at all. Every class has maybe 5 main spells they use. You can learn to play a class in 30 mins with some common logic these days. Literally no need for rotation helpers.
I have seen many people doing an average of 3k DPS while the other DPS are at 20k ST and mor in AoE⌠So yeah⌠If that guy learns how to press a second skill with rotation helpers or finds his AoE abilities⌠His DPS will rise by way more than 10-20%⌠But if you know your rotation youâll know that all CDs are ready but you need to nuke the next group and not his one. The add-on doesnât know.
I doubt heâll be at the same level as others though since there are usually more problems to his DPS that just rotation. Had a mage spamming arcane explosion on 30 yard range a few days agoâŚ
Also: damage rotation is mostly pressing less than 5 skills in the correct order or if sth is flashing. Monkeys can learn that.
Those rotation helpers donât teach you to use the important things such as focus targets, stuns, interruptsâŚ
What is 20k DPS worth if the mob next to your target kills the group because heâs not killed quickly?
Question is, how good were they to begin with? Because +10-20% DPS from someone that is rubbish in the first place still results in a net negative compared to someone good and using a rotation helper doesnât help anyone get better, they then rely on using it, never improve and canât keep up without it.
Well, i prefer to just memorize the stuff.
Itâs easy to see when less than spectacular players use it.
They do decent dps, but stand in almost every single mechanic because all their awareness are on the addon.
I use hekili - its good for rotation. Even in wrath there are rotation addon -cclret etc.
Try to do raid without addons and have fun 
The best thing Blizzard could do is disabling any addon API in competitive environments, so raids, dungeons and pvp.
Would make content a lot harder and tuning it a lot easier.
I havenât raided since cata but back then I didnât use a single add on and I was raid leader of 2nd best guild on the realm. Everyone was saying they were necessary back then even though they werenât. Donât know if this is still the case but back then I knew when boss was using an ability because they had voice lines.
Back in days mechanics are easy. People are less skilled and not much pressure during fight.
As people become more skilled and used to handle many things with addons - blizzard design encounters keeping mind all addons.
They should do this. I want to raid but I donât want to use add ons, and from what Iâm reading they are essential nowerdays. (Although people used to say they were essential back in WOTLK even though they werenât so who knows).
Depends on your skill level, but other than a few outliers (Lords of dread in s3 of Shadowlands, or Archimonde in last season of WoD) if you have good situational awareness and memory DBM or weakauras are not required. It is something the playerbase blows out of proportion more often than not.
As a raid lead it helps a lot to know what abilities come ahead of time. There are some abilities you only have 4 to 6 seconds to react to and position. For those cases knowing when the ability hits helps.
They seem to fail to realise that people had to do the content without the addons to create/setup the addons 
What does that even mean? Could be world 2 or world 2000. Itâs an utterly meaningless statement.
Also, great, you know a boss is using an ability. With a boss mod a raid leader can tell people an ability is coming 10-20seconds in advance so they can get into position / save resources for burst damage / ramp up healing CDâs and so on. Is this better to listening to a boss emote as it happens? 
Like I said, neither myself nor most of the people in raid team used add ons and we cleared most of the content, they were never needed, they were just an accesory for people to show how sweaty and leet they were.