Spooncraft

There have been some really nasty fights on the forums lately when it comes down to the topic of mods and addons and their place in raids. Specifically where Blizzard reps are saying that sometimes you don’t need tons of mods (I agree with them) to beat an encounter. Frankly the only addons I use for raiding (or that I require of my guild) are Deadly Boss Mods and Omen threat meter. Everything else is just icing.

I need Bagnon because I cannot STAND having to sort through that many bags with the Blizzard standard setup. I could go on with this tangent but I’m really here to bring to light something Drysc posted earlier today.

No, I think we assume that those who are working on the extreme endgame PvE content are going to be doing anything they can in order to help increase their chances for success. By both embracing the UI mod community and their addons, as well as assuming that players are going to be using them to great effect versus our encounters, we have to design encounters that assume their use or the encounter is trivialized by those on vent, those with a countdown, those with a threat meter, etc. Once a lot of the guess work is removed with mods we have to raise the complexity beyond what a mod can purely assist with. I think at this point we’re forced to assume everyone is using mods to great effect versus our design complexity, which in turn forces everyone to use those mods. It’s probably somewhat debatable what mods are required and where, but it’s certain that we have to take them into account, lest the game be trivialized.

UI Mods have become an integral part of the game for many players, and we’ve been extremely pleased with the amount of customization and information they’re able to provide. We’re continually working to assess and implement new UI features, many of which have come straight from the community, to help ensure that the default UI is as full featured as possible while remaining uncluttered, clean, attractive, and easily approached. (src)

Here is deeper in the thread where we start talking about a built in threat meter that could stand alone or be used by Omen type mods that parse the information with 100% accuracy! DROOL!

I never said we weren’t looking into implementing a threat meter, in fact I think at BlizzCon it was specifically mentioned we were looking into implementing a threat meter.

However, our implementation of a threat meter wouldn’t be nearly as robust as what everyone is using now, but what it could help do is provide more accurate information to those mods that could use it and parse it out for everyone that wants greater control over it. (src)