FF14 devs just keep doing your thing because my god

[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).