It will be right decision to “Ban all addons” if we have merged ingame alternative of some addons.
For example, RP is mostly based on addons, from simple RP profile and text, to more complicated player’s items, which is basically uses same structure and workflows as ingame items.
And considers how deeply have addons taken root in the game, it will be colossal work to do, overwise, as people mention above, we will get weak skeleton of main game.
But yes, i agree, i don’t play latest expansion, but i anyway use addons to play and enjoy old content, which make me think: “Do i play game or i play addons?” sometimes.
For example: I need to do some achievements, i go to wowhead and there is coordinates where i need to go, do standard game have those coordinates? -Nope, only ingame pin is the latest invention in this kind of things.
i mean if you can count your diminishing return in pve/pvp and can read mechanics and understand basic fundamentals you can play game w/o addons idk the only time from my pov i’d need them is to track 2 minutes which i could arguably do myself roughly based off my own cd usage if i really wanted.
they dont need banning tho cause most people dont even look at them let alone use them, myself included. that and some classes arguably can play the game without them too.
I would be in favour of removing addons IF it was paired with a MASSIVE UI overhaul.
I mean things like getting your buff timers out of a tiny icon in the middle of a dozen others, and having them be tracked somewhere sensible. We have proc highlights now, that’s a start, but there’s too many uptime classes that just don’t have any visibility of what’s going on without addons.
But since I don’t think Blizzard will ever overhaul their UI, I don’t want addons banned.
People are somehow mad that people create weak aura’s for bugs in specs. Like when getting max ‘tiger palm’ stacks on mistweaver SHOULD make black out kick glow on the actionbar, but they broke that in this expansion. And nobody cares because we use a WA now for it.
Back in Vanilla, the class designers worked with the UI designers to make important procs not only visible with action bar highlights, but with visual “overlay” graphics in the center of the screen. E.g. for fire mages and their hot streak buffs, or druids and the clear-casting buff. But I think Blizz basically stopped adding UI overlays because they got lazy and figured the addon community would do the job.
The problem is specs now have so many procs it isn’t doable that way. Lets get back to mistweaver; you want to show at least (the current visible like your firemage example) black ox proc, the cooldown reset of rising sunkick, instant vivify, jadelighning buff, and the black out kick maximized.
Classes got ‘a bit’ more complicated than in Vanilla.
But monk is overall a buggy spec. Like this black out kick glow on the actionbar was added somewhere in season 3 in DF. And then TWW hitted and it probably got removed by whatever crap version control or spaghetti-code. I literally made a WA on the spot of blackout kick on my actionbar with a glowing blackout kick icon. So i mimmick the normal behaviour.
It is making the game to die!