So for context I have played a lot of mmo’s over the past 12 or so years and wow has by far some of the worst telegraphing and visual gameplay language I have experienced. The game relies so heavily on addons like DBM to tell players exactly what to do that the actual way it is implemented in the game is neglected (same reason it took blizzard over 15 years to give us an UI update).
Most of the time gauging how big aoes actually are is hell because everything just has to be a swirly with no defined edges which is absolute hell when trying to play as a melee character wanting to stand just on the edge of the aoe’s so you can continue dpsing.
There is also no visual language to tell WHAT the swirlies are actually gonna do when they hit you, are they a slow? are they a dot? do they apply stacks and if so can you actually tell what the stacks are doing by watching the game alone? do they explode and oneshot you? do they knock you back? Are you supposed to stack and share the aoe or spread it from the group?
I recently had a break from wow during SL and played FF14 in the meantime and even as a new player there going into encounters blind for the first time 9/10 times I can tell how things work just from playing the game and watching it. The important stuff is easy to read and understand and the less important things are still allowed to be flashy and sparkly.
Funny because I used to be in a decent raiding guild and never used DBM or any other add on once and the visuals were never a problem, always felt people massively overblew how important DBM and other mods were. Thought the visuals were fine and that using add ons was just people being ‘‘i r pro gamer’’
ESO - same like WoW.
GW2 need addons / no chance for have some.
FFXIV - most of addons will ban you - but those addons is usefull.
LOTRO - have addons, usefull, non used by community to much.
Destiny 2 - don’t need addons but its because everything in game is simple.Addons should be usefull but community don’t make addons.
Etc.
Where did you seen a game without addons from MMORPG genre?
Plus, as a Casual wow player, I started playing ffxiv back then and beat the hardest bosses on extreme and raid difficulty. The game is easy to read but it’s very simple and you get bored with it.
WoW at least sometimes makes me track down what IK gave me for 100k dmg and why and learn the mechanics that way.
DBM is important because of its features. It simplifies gameplay. And in many games, players can’t play without it because they are new to the game or have never seen the mechanics before elsewhere. So it speeds up progression in raids or mythic instead of having to learn mechanics incrementally. Those who have had dbm for years can tell you a DBM message before dbm itself reports it …or an addon that makes people call for a raid
ESO has much better readability
GW2 as well literally everything is orange ground markers, super easy to see. the game needs no addons.
FFXIV much the same, also needs no addons to play.
cant speak for LOTRO cause I never played it.
Destiny 2 is barely an mmo, its just a multiplayer pve shooter.
Yeah it is pretty obvious it was always bad so people made addons and everyone using addons kinda just led to blizzard never improving it (again, just like the UI).
I don’t have much of an issue figuring it out and reading the adventure journal basics for dungeons or lfr serves me well enough. I don’t use dbm. For M+ and such probably because otherwise people REEEEE. Thus I don’t bother.
Got to disagree with FF comment, I only knew what to do by following everyone else and half the time got slapped but was playing Paladin so survived. Some raid bosses are just INSANE.
If an addon is super popular, it means the community approves the QOL/functionality added by it and the game devs should work to implement it to the base game
I find that WoW used too be like that, but not anymore.
I havn’t used DBM since whatever expansion was before BFA, and my guild was top 10 to bring down Castle Nathria HC on my server.
Although vanilla - cataclysm was a nightmare without DBM
To be fair I’m definitely noticing improvements. Even in prepatch they fixed up some colors and such to make them better visible. Feels like they’re setting the base up. There is a defined stack marker already that I’ve seen since sanctum of domination if not earlier. There’s the bright swirly that always means bad.
But on the other hand there’s a big circle that can be positive or negative with no way to distinguish unless you’re aware what it does. There’s also this evoker skill(preservation spec), where they throw a bronze spell that moves the way frozen orb does that in the middle of uldaman can look like yet another mechanic to dodge. And I’m guilty of dodging it every single time :’)
Please just give me the option to turn off allies spell effects like RIFT did. Some casters add more visual clutter than if you pulled the entire dungeon at the same time.
