Quote Originally Posted by Jynx View Post
Pretty much any information that invades the edges and center of my screen is intrusive to me. Perhaps it's just me though, I don't want my party member screen to take up a massive chunk of the left side of my screen.
I don't think you are quite grasping it... I have 40 people's health bars in that box. That is the WHOLE BG's health frames. If I was raiding, it would either be 10 or 25, which is much smaller than that. It's not simply a party's frame, it's the whole freaking raid's frame.

While I admit re-aranging the screen would make it look 10x better it's still far too much information for my tastes. If I need to "Know" tower timers and need a UI addon just to know them then something is wrong. A developer shouldn't be adding content that requires the community to add a UI addon just to be bearable.
Obviously no clue how WoW works. Towers take a few minutes to cap. If I see a huge horde of people running to the tower and there's 10-20 seconds left until my faction takes it, I can jump down and run away. If it's more, I need to stay and defend. It's not required, though not using timers is the same level of stupidity as not using macros. Do you have to have them? No. Though you're pretty inefficient if you don't.

You're looking at PC MMOs through the looking glass of XI/XIV/multiplatform MMOs. It is simply more efficient to have your playerbase use addons and slowly add them into the game at your leisure than to try to tackle every angle possible. Raidframe UIs were popular, so Blizz added their own eventually.

Then again I'm sure it would be possible to do with a normal UI isn't it? Or has WoW become so dependant on custom UI's that anyone who doesn't want to use them is left in the cold because they are playing the game the way it was intended to be played...
You're making a critical error. WoW has not been meant to be played with the custom UI and no addons since around Vanilla/BC. Starting in WoTLK, Blizzard started designing elements of the game around the majority using addons. The minority who refuse to use them don't get invited to raids anyway, or at least most of the don't. And no, it's not possible to have tower timers with the standard UI, nor recount, nor any number of things.

PS3 players are going to be shunned as if they were all loldrgs back in the early days of FFXI if UI mods turn to be a "Required" staple of the PC atmosphere. I'm sure I'll do fine without UI additions I'll learn the timers without a popup box to remind me, I'll use the normal party interface to view my party stats, I don't need a parser when I'm playing I can parse and check the stats AFTER the fight, I pray I don't need 600 random icons scattered around my screen (Probably all bound to some inane hotkeys).
Again, looking at WoW through XI/XIV glasses. XIV will never become like WoW because combat is way too slow. WoW's combat is constant casting, constant key presses, constant moving out of the fire, constant situational awareness. Now, can you tell me anything that happens in XIV that requires situational awareness other than what you're fighting? No, you can't. Imagine if every boss fight was like Ifrit. You're constantly having to move out of the fire, constantly having to pay attention to him dropping pillars to DPS down, etc. THAT is how WoW is. FFXIV will never be like that. Most Ifrit posts I've seen already complain about "animation lag" from his ground move killing people. It's not "animation lag" it's people not moving their asses out of the fire, because they're not used to having to be aware of situations like that. I fought Ifrit a few times, and not once did I have a problem moving out of the cracks on the ground. Didn't have an add-on telling me to do it either, so that argument that WoW addons make it easier is null.

People use DBM because it is too much to juggle to watch your cooldowns, watch for fire spawning under you, watch for range if another player has a bomb-type debuff, watch for threat, watch for boss abilities, watch for buff abilities popping up from players or if the boss has a unique mechanic, watch for adds, etc. You never have to have as much situational awareness for that in XI/XIV, and never will be specifically because it is nearly impossible to do without addons. WoW doesn't have to limit itself to only have boss mechanics that people can do without addons, because 100% of the community has the option to download the addons. XI/XIV never will have that option due to PS2/PS3, thus SE can never tune boss encounters to be like WoW or any other modern MMO.

It's good that we will have the option, but I think I'll opt out unless people can make some UI elements that I find are less intrusive than current ones, or perhaps just aesthetic changes.
That's fine, and your choice. However nearly all addons in MMOs are customizable and you can set them up however you like.

What I'm worried about is PC players gaining a immesnly huge advantage over the console and vanila UI players, stuff like "Healbots" and whatnot don't really ring as "Fun" to me.
It's clear you don't understand what "healbots" are since it's called "Healbot" and has nothing to do with a bot. No matter how I explain it, you're going to complain about it, because you already have your mind made up that it's a horrible addition to a PC only game.

Healing addons such as Healbot and Vuhdo(what I personally use) take away the standard party/raid frames and consolidate them into a box that you can customize the height/width of. These addons allow you to keybind your healing spells to the mouse, along with combos, like Shift+left click, etc.

Normally, with the default UI, I would have to take my mouse, go to the person I want to heal, click that person's unit frame, then click/keypress the healing spell. These healing addons streamline the process. They take out the unit frames and just show the healthbar. From here, instead of having to select who you want to heal, you simply press the same healing spell while your mouse is hovered over the healthbar, or you click on the bar with your mouse to use the healing spell you have bound.

Ex. I want to use Chain Heal on my Shaman to the tank in the party.
Default: I have to select the tank by clicking on his unit frame in the party window. Then I have to click chain heal on my toolbar or hit my keybind for it.
Healbot/Vuhdo: I mouse over the tank's healthbar, I hold alt and left click (my personal keybinding for chain heal).
Grid+Clique: I can either mouse over the tank's healthbar and press a keybind that would be the same bind as in the "default" example, or I can do the same as the second example.

Combat in WoW is much faster paced, hence the need to streamline aspects like this. You simply do not have the time to highlight each player you're healing in a raid. FFXIV will never be like this, because there is no need. Like XI, damage isn't being done to your tank every .5 seconds like it is in WoW. You can easily toss a cure out, then wait 5 seconds before having to toss another one out. Combat simply is slow enough to warrant this type of gameplay. Addons only become mainstream when they start becoming needed. That isn't because the players have no skill, it's because things happen to fast for human response time + cooldowns to be able to keep up, or there are too many things going on at once to keep track of all of them without assistance.