This....Basically looks like the current HUD. Everything is smooshed together because of the low resolution, but ultimately I don't see anything significantly different as far as combat information goes.
Printable View
It's sad people are so adamant about the need to use Addons/Mods, how sad is it that people need these to do end-game content.
Except this statement simply isn't true because a truly vanilla experience means not using ACT whatsoever. This, in turn, means you can't maximize your DPS for something like Dragonsong where the enrage is so tight a single DPS death can be the difference between getting passed Estinien or wiping to Revenge of the Horde. And this is from high level players pumping out as much damage as possible. Which they only know how to do because of the aforementioned third party program and a website to parse that data.
Living Dead: Six years
Blood Weapon: Four years
Afflatus Lilies: Two years in Stormblood, and another five months in Endwalker after they screwed them up, again.
Monk changes: Six years, followed by an additional year of completely overhauling the job
Machinst: Despite three separate buffs in Endwalker alone, it's still the weakest DPS in the entire game. And it's been among the worst since late Stormblood
Healers: Three years now and counting since the entire role was lobotomized. Or to borrow your dismissive responses: "Just do Ultimate " - Yoshi P
Forgive me if I'm not holding my breath on how long it'll take for them to actually implement any of these plugins. If they even do so properly. Keep in mind, we're still limited to five waymarker presets when a plugin can offer hundreds.
You don’t need them. That this argument keeps being thrown around highlights how little those wielding it understand what pro-add-on players are even saying in the first place. Either they aren’t reading or they are choosing not to because of “reasons”.
No one that has proclaimed support for third-party programs of ANY KIND (read: all plug-ins are different; not all of them are blatant cheats/botting scripts; some are literally just calculators or UI modifications or shaders) has claimed that any of them were needed to clear high-end content; instead, some raiders desire to have additional avenues of feedback that the game does not offer while doing said content. This could be as simple as wanting vanilla ACT to wanting something more like Cactbot or Trig.
Unfortunately, that is all too common on here when you bring up things like third-party programs. There are 100~200+ page threads on parsers alone that span years where people just deliberately misconstrue arguments/erect strawmans at every possible chance.
They said they have proven it can be cleared internally, I don't know how they approached it however.. it is possible that they went phase by phase instead of doing the whole fight in a row. That said.. isn't it because people got so much better due to such things that they saw the need to make something this hard? I'm sure they took into account how people cleared previous ultimates while designing this one. They also take into account people on consoles.
It just may be insanely hard but since they claimed for it to be clearable and proved it to themselves.. I don't think you can claim it is impossible nor that mods are absolutely necessary.
Edit:
Let's imagine they messed up and that mods are indeed necessary to clear Dragonsong ultimate, in that case it would be a design flaw and the fight would need to be nerfed in one way or another. In such situation what you should be asking for would be the nerf, possibly UI enhancements as well. Never mods.
I feel you on how hard it can be to track some things in the current state, I am hopeful that whatever they do to the UI will help on that regard.
The devs have their own version of measuring damage if that's what you're wondering, and their own tools obviously to keep track on what happened. I'd believe it'd be done phase by phase else it'd take incredibly long. But it could also be how they've known before hand and it could be all in 1 go, making tweaks along the way. Or both in some form.
I never kept track on it being people asking for it to be harder but I somehow vaguely remember Ultimate was were devs go ham on mechanics and push the game to the limit while making it still possible.
I don't think it's necessarily people asking for it to be harder but instead them noticing how fast people clear previous high end content (or not) and then creating new content with that in mind, imagine a crazy world in that the community had cleared TEA in one day (crazy i know), wouldn't they then just go even crazier on difficulty than what we have now if that had happened? That's my view on it.