FF14 devs just keep doing your thing because my god

[Penthea]

- Better Add-ons

Honestly I'm so glad I don't have to deal with add-ons anymore. Blizzard are VERY lazy when it comes to updating their ui because they can rely on third party developers to do it for free with add-ons. This isn't good because third party software isn't QA tested by Blizzard which means they are prone to being buggy, and no keeping your add-ons up to date isn't enough to escape problems.

I can't even begin to count the amount of times I have experienced issues while doing content because someone's add-on stopped working correctly. 10 minute raid boss pulls reduced to nothing because someone's add-on bugged out which lead to a wipe. Delays on pulls because someone's add-on stopped working correctly. Someone uninstalling add-ons mid raid because they saw that a particular fight is far more demanding on their pc than usual so they need to purge some add-ons to get some fps back. This didn't happen every time I raided but it was rare that we went a full lockout without some manner of add-on delay happening at least once.

Never mind how having add-ons made me dread patch day. Instead of logging in being excited about new content I would log in thinking "oh god what's broken this time". Sometimes add-ons would break so badly that they made other add-ons also malfunction, and then I'd have to remove each one by one to find which one was causing that domino effect. And if that was an add-on I absolutely needed for raiding then I would have to hunt for a replacement if I had a raid that day and hope it would suffice.

Sure a person could say "if you hate them so much why did you use them?" and the answer is: I had no choice.

Not only was I doing content in which having specific add-ons was mandatory and it was like this almost across every raid team, the base ui is so crap that I had to get other add-ons just to be able to play my class effectively.

WoW has been around for 16 years and you still can't move your action bars with its base ui. You still can't move most individual elements. You still can't resize most individual elements. So many of the options we take for granted in other mmorpgs, including this one, are completely absent from WoW's base ui. Blizzard's sheer laziness with keeping their ui up to date forces so many players into using add-ons, particularly raiders.

So yea everyone is entitled to their opinion but personally I'd rather deal with no add-ons and play a game that gets regular ui updates that I know won't randomly bug out, than play another game that rarely gets ui updates so you then have to rely on third party software to bring the game up to date and then deal with the issues that come from a lack of QA. Sure you get more options with add-ons, but that can also mean more problems. I don't miss dealing with that at all.

[ItMe]

Honestly I'm so glad I don't have to deal with add-ons anymore. [Snip for space]

This sounds very interesting, but as someone who never got into WoW I'm super lost lol.
What are these add-ons and how can they be basically mandatory for some raids?

[Rae88]

This sounds very interesting, but as someone who never got into WoW I'm super lost lol.
What are these add-ons and how can they be basically mandatory for some raids?

For example Blizzard essentially designs raids these days assuming the playerbase is running Deadly Boss Mods, which tells players what's coming next. Players often run with something like 40 addons and when one breaks it's annoying to diagnose

[Ralph2449]

What are these add-ons and how can they be basically mandatory for some raids?

Some addons like bigwigs are needed since they assist with showing timings of boss abilities but that is as far as I go, I ve been on guilds though that demand a number of addons, one that shows a tab with instructions the RL writes on, one that could show specific numbers on certain mobs, one that the "elite loot council" vote on who gets loot so they can take away your loot if it can be traded and you arent a priority player, some even ask for one that does ridiculous screams and sounds if an ability is casted which I always avoided since it caused more problems than actually helped. And for many guilds those are mandatory, so you either have them or you are gone.

And the fact that blizzard is too lazy to implement UI and other forms of customization so you are gonna need an addon to move around your bars, an addon for a better minimap, an addon for bags, an addon for menus, an addon on for certain event indicators and more and more and more.

It definitely gets tiring the amount of addons you need these days

[Shougun]

This sounds very interesting, but as someone who never got into WoW I'm super lost lol.
What are these add-ons and how can they be basically mandatory for some raids?

The unfortunate thing is the addon most people are afraid of is "mostly" here in FFXIV, tied to a concept that many (in the higher end community at least) are aware of. So we've ran away from much of the QoL of addons but only in the shadows have we ran from the actual addons people are afraid of (parser and DBM).

It is true though that WoW did some silly things too.. like they'd for no good reason break your setup and that could take an hour out of your day, make you regret using addons then lol. Sometimes the author broke their own addon. It was like running a highly modded android, maybe vs FFXIV being an iphone that just works.

There were some truly amazing QoL addons, addons that let you make and share quests with others (some restrictions of course), or crazy goofy ones like you could play snake or peggle in the game (a game in your game XD), that I still miss but I do want to give SE credit in that they've added many over time (their search feature for example has come a very long way and reminds me of some mods I had to install just to have similar features that are basic in FFXIV now). I still wish they did a remix job to their map system though, I would very quickly install an addon for FFXIV's map if it was not to be an issue with ToS. (And I don't mean for radar or something, I just don't.. like it lol, the transparent / image in a box gives me a sort of 'beta, still a WIP' vibe [like it's literally an image viewer built into the game, loading png files, rather than being a 'map' I open for adventures).

To the lack of Blizzard's credit there are some basic features that they seemed to not care to add since you can just do it with addons (although I do wish FFXIV would be inspired by the in game calendar and the clickable quest links). So pro and cons, I think just calling it android vs iphone is enough to get a clear picture of the situation. Stuff just works here, and often a lot of built in features you don't have to go out of your way to enable or turn on, but if you wanted to go crazy you'd have more room to do so with WoW (and sometimes it would all break and you'd have to 'play addons' rather than play the actual game).

[Penthea]

This sounds very interesting, but as someone who never got into WoW I'm super lost lol.
What are these add-ons and how can they be basically mandatory for some raids?

So back in the early days of WoW raid bosses were far more simple to now. This was due to Blizzard still being relatively new to mmo boss design and also because of add-ons. In the beginning there were only a handful of add-ons but as time progressed they became commonly used, one of those being boss add-ons. What they do is put timers on the screen showing the queue of boss abilities giving you plenty of time to know exactly what was going to happen and exactly when. Unsurprisingly this made bosses easier to do so in reaction to this Blizzard had to make bosses harder because an enormous chunk of the raiding community were trivialising them with add-ons. Eventually it got to the point that any remotely serious raiding team used boss mods.

And this created a vicious cycle. Players use boss mods to kill bosses faster so then Blizzard creates bosses with the use of those add-ons in mind so that they remain challenging even with add-on use, which means you actually need to have a boss add-on to be able to do the content in a timely manner.

Having a damage meter was mandatory in every team I played with. Not only because they showed dps, but they also showed who died of what and when, what cds were used, who got debuffs, who cleansed them...so much useful information that is a lot more accessible than going through WoW's version of fflogs.

A threat meter is often mandatory so you can ensure that you never pulled aggro off of the main tank by accident. I don't know if this is still the case now but back when I played it was a lot easier for dps to get aggro mid-fight than in FF, so most dps needed to have one especially if they had high burst damage.

Some guilds used player generated currency to divvy out loot. You bid on item drops and you accumulated that currency with raid attendance. As far as I know loot is personal now in raids, (loot is automatically and randomly given to players by the game, you don't roll) I don't know for sure if it is because I never needed to check as I had no intention of raiding when I briefly played again, but if this is the case now then add-ons that managed that are no longer needed.

Some bosses have certain mechanics that have add-ons specifically developed for them. If you're in a competitive team you're expected to use every edge possible to ensure faster kills, so if a boss specific add-on was helpful in clearing it faster you are most times expected to have it.

So the above is what was typically mandatory back when I raided. In addition to this most players needed additional add-ons to make their ui more suitable for the class and role they played. And as I mentioned before in WoW's base ui you can't even move your action bars. It was pretty rare to find someone who raided regularly who didn't use add-ons to make their ui make sense for what they had to do.

Sometimes the author broke their own addon. It was like running a highly modded android, maybe vs FFXIV being an iphone that just works.

Yeap sometimes the dev for the add-on would update it and break it in the process, which was very frustrating if you had a raid before the add-on got fixed, so you had to find an older version of it to roll-back to before it was broken or try to find another similar add-on that worked.

The worst was when you found a great add-on and then after some time the dev, for whatever reason, stopped working on it. If no one picked up that project then you would eventually have to stop using the add-on because as time passed it would become more and more out of date which meant a higher chance for ui errors. And sometimes you can't find another similar add-on that do the things you need from the other add-on...so then you just have to deal with being without something that improved your experience in the game.

Is FFXIV's ui perfect? Absolutely not, but because SE update it regularly and its base ui gives a tremendous amount of options for players to tweak the layout to whatever suits them best, you can still do high-end content without your ui getting in the way of your combat performance.

Personally the only thing that's missing for me is something small about the focus target pane. I wish it showed the target of the focus target...but that's it. Aside from that one small thing I don't ever feel like I need an add-on to be able to play the way I want. FFXIV's ui options fulfill every other need that I have, and that small thing it doesn't has very little effect on me. I can easily deal with not having it, I would just prefer to have it.

[ItMe]

[a beautiful answer]

God, I can't imagine how hectic this must be now after so many years of attrition against the players.
The "we'll give you something you can't trivialize" of it all also helps me understand WoW's ever more consuming push towards high end content.

For your UI to just break...
Needing to bring your own UI element for even something as simple as loot distribution...
what a nightmare.

[Liam_Harper]

So back in the early days of WoW raid bosses were far more simple to now. This was due to Blizzard still being relatively new to mmo boss design and also because of add-ons.

Honestly I believe it's more with how gaming has evolved and the impact the internet has than just addons. In the past raid bosses with 3 mechanics worked fine because we were all essentially nubs (in a nice way). Very few people read guides and information was harder to come by, you'd just stumble through, put on whatever gear you scraped together and it was plenty because everyone else was in a similar boat.
Nowadays information on literally everything is available online and people tend to be competitive and want to be good at things, so they research and use this information for almost everything, from dungeon tactics to rotations to where to find items and so on. Thus gaming as a whole has evolved to be far more complex to keep players with all the information suitably challenged. It's also a reason why the divide between the casual who doesn't read up things and the serious players is so wide. Even FF14's bosses, with no addons, are probably even more mechanically complex than WoW's at endgame. I've seen WoW heroic raid bosses summed up in 5-6 lines where Savage bosses are usually several pages. It makes games more complicated to develop too, anything you produce will be analyzed by the player-base and flaws or imbalances picked out almost immediately.

In one way it has positive sides too. I personally find bosses with a whole range of mechanics and factors to watch out for a lot more interesting than 3 mechanic target dummies. Once you've had a taste of advanced raiding and in-depth strategizing, it's hard to go back to simplistic gameplay. Information being available isn't necessarily a bad thing, research is an important part of becoming good at many things in life. I like gaming that tests the limits a bit.

[LisSquid]

I've seen WoW heroic raid bosses summed up in 5-6 lines where Savage bosses are usually several pages.

Not to be rude but it's because WoW's savage is mythic. Normal is meme tier, heroic is for the casuals, and mythic is for statics.

[linayar]

Not to be rude but it's because WoW's savage is mythic. Normal is meme tier, heroic is for the casuals, and mythic is for statics.

It's fascinating to me as an outsider seeing different people try to make comparisons, and I suspect sometimes from people who are also outsiders like me or only doing one of them and then guessing on the other. That said, I'm not making any judgment on your own comparison because I don't really know the answer myself, but I have seen different comparisons made.

From what I can tell/remember, I do believe that, in the current tier, where Savage and Normal/Heroic came out in the same week, Savage and Heroic world first took around similar length of time from their respective release. I don't know exactly what can be concluded from that except that difficulty between WoW and FFXIV may not be as simple as lining up different difficulty tiers.