wow was always second job even in original classic dont think it was not. I play retail , classic sod and from my experience so far classic is more grind that retail will ever be.
But no matter what type of wow u play , u will never have fun if u play alone. For wow u need friends to play together and then no matter do u have all enchants, buffs , addons etc it will be fun!
But if people r anti socials ( as they r in this game mostly ) they will never have fun and start blaming all other things so they would not just admit that problem is lying in themselves!
Let me give you an analogy, you can throw the ball in your back yard however you like with your son (playing with irl friend for example), but then if you join a bunch of guys having fun on the local football field, you are expected to abide by some rules, like playing with your feet only and aiming for the goal (thatās having questie in overworld questing), or you can join local dads sunday league (raid) where you are expected to come in sports clothes and football sneakers and have some vague idea about team play and a bit of stamina (basic raid addons and cheap consumes and wbuffs), or you can join 3rd league or your local equivalent, then you are expected to have some modicum of talent and come to 3 training sessions a week and be outfitted in team colors (speedrun with full consumes, buffs, and you at least looked over your pull route and when to pop what) or you can be actual professional footballer (join beef bar and compete for world first while getting a salary and sponsors).
Then the no addon guy comes to a guild raid and the weirdo dad comes to sunday match against the other village, and starts grabbing the ball with hands and bodychecking enemy team and actually heās 4 beers in and just wants to cause a scene. Thatās you in a raid with no addons. Obnoxious jerk. (Iām not calling you names personally, just how it feels to have a no addon, no wbuffs person in raid)
Yeah you can do whatever you like, more power to you, but donāt be mad if the team playing football tells you to go do it somewhere else, even if the field is technically public space.
I donāt THINK it was not, I KNOW it was not. I played since 2006, and onty lately the āsecond jobā mentality has spread to other than the sweaty guilds.
Maybe I has been totally in the luck but this mentality:
is a thing I never met before Classic launched ā¦ I stopped playing in BfA, but before that I went all the way.
The first ever raid in MC I joined in summer of 2005 had like 4 or 5 mandatory adons, mandatory voice chat (but you only spoke when adressed by a raid lead or your class lead, no banter) and an arcane loot system that was some mix of dkp and zero sum that was tracked by guild notes and on a guild web forum.
All the following guilds I joined from vanilla to Cata when I quit was some form of the above, plus you had to fill an extensive application and write a cover letter to get in. One even had weekly performance meeting in some RP location to discuss how we can improve our collective raid performance and to air any grievances. That is what wow is to me, always was. A serious game that is your second job. Thatās what made it different from all the silly kid games I played before. If anything, things have gotten way too casual in 2019 classic, you just ping some officer on discord, link your logs and thatās it, any weirdo with blue logs and no social skills can get in without any vetting.
I just joined a guild in Vanilla. I saved someone from being et by a boar, he invited me, and I just played. Loot was on a āwho needs thisā base, and then a /roll to decide who actually got it. We were encouraged to have a backstory and write it into a long dead web-page. Later I met Guilds with applications, but it was more like: -Yeah, this officer knows me from earlier. -Welcome aboard 
It was social, fun and laid back, we had Ventrilo for speak, but I typed, as my mike never worked, and we had lots of jokes and banter, written and spoken. Some of the guys had addons (healers mostly), but not all of us. And yes we spend 5 hours in Auchindoun first time around, but we had fun, and that was what we wanted, not a second job ā¦ maybe because we were all a bit older, with spouses, kids, jobs and so on, WoW was our place to goof around.
The guild crumbled in Cata, when more and more had many kids, better jobs ect. And where we tried to have two raid groups up and running, one laidback, one sweaty.
This fun and cameraderie while playing and clearing slowly, is what I miss today - where I actually have MORE time to play - but still I do not need a second job, I need fun and relaxation.
And back then, with more realms, and more realm types WoW was many thing for many people. Now itās mainly for the āsecond jobā-types, what with megaservers, shorter phases, crazy good connections and crazy good addons.
I think weāll never have the diversity back , we had back then, unfortunately. This suggestion for a no-addons-realm is a bid for how to bring back fun and goofiness for those of us that had this in 2006.
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you are being ridiculous.
Does some guild requires you to have DBM, some yes, not all of them, and certainly not the majority.
And DBM is often the only required addons for those guild (typically willing to advanced in PVE at a reasonable pace). And very often, if you prove you can do mechanics without DBM, no one bothering you about it.
Youāre painting a picture darker than it truly is. One bad experience is not representative of the community at large.
In general, iād say the best addons are the one you want to have in order to enhance your experience, not the one imposed on you. No one has ever imposed weak auras on me, but it often one of the first addons i install because i want to. And i do my own weak auras tyvm, to monitor a procs, a cooldown, replace the cast bar or add a swing timer.
Every retail guild requires plethora of addons. DBM/BigWigs, Weakauras with packs of badly written auras, MRT are few ones, commonly used. I played quite a few of them, most of them being casual. Iām absolutely sure that almost every guild that sets foot in mythic raids, requires addons. Not minority, not majority, but 100%.
I donāt have experience with many Classic guilds, but I have big doubts itās any different here, because players are the same.
We are not the same players, as the once that play retail though. I would say a minority of the playerbase plays both retail and classic.
my bad then. I was talking about classic and a bit of private servers. In my defense, you would admit this is classic wow forum. Itās an honest mistake to make.
You may be right, i heard retail raiding is very demanding. I wouldnāt know about it. I find classic community is more laid back than what i hear for retail. Letās see if the cataclysm/MoP crowd does not āretail-ifyā classic wow too much.
So far I played in two classic guilds which are quite casual and every one of them require addons. DBM, Pally Power, Tranq Rotate, Classic Heal Prediction, threat meter.
My reasons to use add-ons:
- To see available low level quests (feature available in retail)
- Handle auctions
- Iām a merry user of gw2ui this time around (bag management available in retail)
- Track HoT effects as a druid
And some reasons to support it:
- Track buffs - the default icons in the corner are often lost (as a BC/WLK mage, instant cast appears there) - available by default in retail
- Join groups without experience - You canāt really expect people to invest time to learn raids this late into history, neither before hand nor through continuous wiping. Dungeons are fairly easy and tanks / healers usually know their stuff, you just follow marks. Raids are slightly above in difficulty.
This last one is a bit funny. Ideally the game would be designed to teach the player about what to expect from bosses (a combination of spells used by trash).
āAvailableā was not the word I would have chosen here. Available means to me āUse it or not, whatever you likeā, but in Retail these things are force-fed to you - at least as far as I know. This is the main reason I love addons - I can opt out of using them.
But this is neither here, nor there. THe topic here is neither: āWhat addons do youl like, and why?ā nor: āWhat is your opiion on playsers using/not using addonsā, but could we please have a realm without addons, just for those liking this. I am for freedom of choice, so of course I support this server, but I doubt Iād be playing there, as I use addon(s) to hide Blizzās changes from 1.12 to now - Iād like more, but cannot find any.
This is why my first answer in this thread was:
I think it could be fun - something like a HC server - only with rezzes.
I tried to present that there is a range of addons. While many enjoy the challenge of actually paying attention to clues during the fight, there are many add-ons that would essentially make this suggestion dead on arrival.
I could have said: stupid idea, wonāt work. That one is not much for discussion 
Having read the first 20 or so posts, this thread is mostly about DBM & Co, more generally (non-party) combat log parsers.
Also, it means that if the default UI would sort these basics out (which the retail once does, hence the mention), it would be easier. For example, with the LFG tool, I donāt need Bulletin. Without, I donāt even consider making or joining groups on Era.
My view is that Blizzard created a barebones UI to access their gaming backend and then outsourced its development to the players. A genius move overall, because the players know the most valuable features, as well as their design choices. Dismissing all that might go further behind than intended.
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Yes, and all of those things ought to be in any UI worth calling itself such by default. It just shows what utter garbage default ui is that it requires 5 addons to make it usable.
I am all FOR addons - as I want the freedom of NOT using them, or only using the bare minimum, I deem necessary.
This is why
This would be my nigthmare, and one of the reason I do not enjoy Retail.
Having threat management be a core mechanic of about 90% of your group fights and having no indication of threat in your default UI was definitely one of the development choices of all time.
Letās just agree to disagree. I am a stickler for choices in UI, playstyle and just about any other aspect of WoW. I LOVE the bare bone UI of Classic, and never used anything else. But I am not against addons to let others have the UI etc. as theyād like it. My biggest problem is that thereās no addons to reomve all the extras from newer expansions.
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I donāt think we disagree at all. Iām all for you having an option to play with the UI as it was in 2005 or whenever. And I will play with 30+ addons and another 20 weakauras. We are just sharing/describing our very different preferences on a forum.
The fact you can modify the ui is one of the charms of wow. You can play default, or construct your own from bits and pieces made by other players, or even write parts of your own, if you are into that sort of thing. Iāve long since accepted the fact you have to set up bajilion addons as a part of making a new character. Player made UI is much better anyway, like the quest ui from wrath has nothing on modern questie.
Yes. we agree. Thanks.
Well they are not going to ādisable addonsā that will never happen. Neither will they ever make an āaddon free server.ā
So the best you puritans can do is suck it up and not use them.
If they stopped me from being able to modify my UI Iād probably stop playing.
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