Can we just have the Wrath of the Lich King Raiding Scheme?

[skaterger]

This is one thing I don't agree on necessarily. Addons are nice, yes, but addons like Deadly Boss Mod exists because people were not willing to learn to watch the mechanics themselves. It did promote laziness, but with PUG's in WoW, it just felt like a necessary evil sometimes. An MMO is well designed when you have less desire to use addons. In FFXIV's case, the only time I have wanted the addon feature to finally arrive is for a built in DPS Meter, which has 20 threads of it's own.

This. But when you allow third party addons developed by the community to be part of your game, this is what is to be expected. People will always try to make things easier, as seen not only by bigwigs/dbm but also addons like powerauras. I never knew anyone that raided hardcore in wow not to have these 2 addons. I hope that stuff like dbm and powerauras will never make an appearance in ff14.

1. It's not necessary to have a big flashy red icon to show firestarted/thundercloud procs. The default UI is more than enough
2. You don't need anyone announcing twister/divebomb/voice. Just watch the cast bar.
3. You should never need to look at your hotkeys ever while playing. 90% of your focus should be on raid awareness and what is going on around you.

People have gotten so accustomed to using these tools that when they don't have access to it suddenly, it seems like they forgotten how to play. I honestly think this could be one of the reasons of the low skill cap of players in this game. The only addons I think worth having are like you mentioned dps meter and UI/raid frames addons like xperl and inv/bag management like altoholic.

Addons hardly "coddled" players.

They didn't coddle players, but they made it significantly easier. If not it wouldn't be mandatory for raiders. Bad players will be bad, they will die even with dbm, but for your middle of the road raider, it made it much easier, so much so that when they are deprived of it like in ff14, they suddenly start finding they are unable to cope. Raid awareness is 1 of the most important skills of raiding and dbm negated much of that.