Quote Originally Posted by TheRealQuah View Post
ACT does not have the function to make you aware of mechanics before there is any visual. It's just an advanced calculator. There was a mod out there that could do what you said, but within days, a ton of people got banned for using it, and they changed stuff in the game that completely broke it so it wouldn't work.
This isn't actually accurate; a lot of times, an MMO will have to send data to the client ahead-of-time so that the client knows which animations to start and such, and if something is parsing network activity and people learn what that particular data represents in that particular fight, they could certainly add early callouts. (That said, I've been in groups where a raid-caller can recognize a mechanic a full second or two before the caller in another group can based on just the beginning of an animation, or a difference in sound effects, so there's going to be variance in that stuff even without third-party tools in use.)

The thing you mention about an addon that they shut down/broke was actually with regards to waymarks. Specifically, the game did not previously have a way to save some marker presets (which can be very important in raids), and there was a third-party tool that would let you save markers, and then place them automatically. A lot of statics used that, simply so they had a way to have standardized markers.

And that wasn't really an unbalancing factor, nor (demonstrably) one Square-Enix cared about at the time. Sure, you saved time at the start of raid because you could click one button to put down your waymarks, instead of having to sit there for five minutes while someone carefully set them up by hand. It wasn't like it was going to wildly unbalance the raiding scene.

But then I gather some folks used the same method of setting waymarks to make triggers that would swap the markers around mid-fight, based on reading-ahead-of-time network stuff, like mentioned above. So, I guess there was a program which would change the raid markers per-mechanic without requiring anyone to call-out or think, allowing everyone to execute on stuff by just blindly following those. That, Square-Enix didn't like (rather understandably), and so they blocked it by making it impossible on the server side to change raid markers while in combat.

(And they gave us five in-game marker preset slots while doing so, since the functionality for setting them up outside of combat was useful.)

Admittedly, I feel like five isn't enough presets for folks who run a lot of content regularly, so I know there are people out there who still use the original "let me store as many raid marker presets as I want" tools -- I've raided with some of them. But you can no longer change the markers mid-fight, so it got rid of the move-them-automatically-for-the-mechanic tool that was the thing actually causing problems.