An Angry Rant About Addons…
I’m annoyed, pissed off and slightly dissapointed in two bloggers – Vonya of The Egotistical Priest, and Matt of World of Matticus – whom I’ve usually found to be founts of good information and sense. You see, in the last two days I have seen posts by both extolling the use of blizzard UI and telling everyone that if they use addons and can’t heal otherwise then they are terrible, horrible healers (and people, probably). This might be a slight exagerration, but nevertheless…
Guys, really, I want to see something of higher quality than ‘nahnah I can heal this way so I’m better than you if you aren’t able to do this too, here’s a flimsy argument’.
*Rolls up sleeves*
Now you might think this is trivial. But wait until I tell you why.
“My HealBot is not working properly. I can’t heal without it.”
As you can imagine, that sent a nasty surge up my spine. Here’s a Paladin. He’s been assigned to main tank healing. And he can’t heal without his Healbot? – Matt
Yes, and I would have done the exact same thing as that Paladin. You might be able to heal via your raidframe, if you have had some practice or you might think ‘well, he can just target and heal that way’ but you have to understand there is more going on here.
If I had to do this I would have to do the following:
Pull my raid frames up, get all of my spells onto my bars (which, if we’re talking no addons here means all the totems I might need too as they are part of my healing), make a focus and main target and hope to hell noone needs de-cursed, de-poisoned or de-diseased as, if they’re not in my group, my raid frames won’t be set to show it in any way I can quickly look at.
Sounds great, I’m sure that won’t take less time than reloading my addons… All of this, and I’d be less effective than with a setup I’m comfortable with.
Both Vonya and Matt say something similar about addons breaking:
Addons will break or error out on certain fights. Sometimes updates will come out days or even weeks later.
Would you delay raiding because a key addon you need isn’t available? – Matt
I’m saying that if you can’t heal WITHOUT them, then you’re crippling yourself, AND you’re crippling your raid. What happens if a new patch comes out that breaks your beloved addon? Do you just stop raiding until it gets fixed? – Vonya
I agree with a commenter to Vonya’s post, Shatter, who says
In a way it’s like saying “If you can’t walk to your job, then you shouldn’t drive to it. You’re crippling yourself because maybe one day cars will no longer exist.” – Shatter
Absoloutely. If my addons all completely and utterly break with no hope of recovery on the next patch I’ll get those raid frames out and I will spend a few hours customising them to show the information I need. I will then go into some pvp matches and test out this new setup and only then would I commit to raiding or grouping (this all if I could not find a similar replacement addon). I will not go into a raid situation, which requires spatial and ability awareness distracted by an annoying or sub-par UI – especially as I’m usually in the role of assisting the raid lead. That is the point at which the addons are in the way of the actual game.
About the only thing I agree with Matt on is this:
Check your addons before entering a raid to ensure that they’re working properly.
Check your addons are working and that you know how to use them comfortably. On the note about customising raid frames I have to point out something…
X-Perl is a unitframes addon – that means it replaces my target window, group window, and raid windows. …
In additon, X-Perl is set up to fade out any characters that are out of healing range for me (so I don’t bother trying to heal someone I can’t reach, a common problem any healer who’s ever done Gruul can sympathize with). It also highlights the group member in blue if they have a dispellable magic effect, and yellow if they have a dispellable disease effect. – Vonya
So, let me get this correct. You use an addon (XPerl) to show you simply, and effectively, which characters have low health, need cleansed or will take overheal. Also mentioned in the post is a hot tracker. Oh and you use visual heal to track how much you’ll overheal and who else is healing?
In what way at all is this different from using grid? This is exactly what grid does without clique. So what happens when XPerl breaks and doesn’t work? Your whole argument is made invalid with this. XPerl is not default blizzard frames any more than Grid is.
I credit my Nostromo with the majority of my “success” as a healer – it allows me to shave my reaction time down to a miniscule amount (and it removes my clicking-on-buttons problem completely). – Vonya
So, I see… it’s totally cool that you don’t use many addons and you feel this is a good thing but, wait! You use an out-of-game device which makes using click-casting easier?
I will reiterate your points once again just in case anyone wonders why I am slightly irked by these posts.
I’m saying that if you can’t heal WITHOUT them, then you’re crippling yourself, AND you’re crippling your raid.
- Vonya
Good healers use addons to heal. But great healers don’t have to rely on them. – Matt
I do realise both Matt and Vonya did not likely mean their arguments against the abuse of addons to be taken so negatively and probably hoped that it would induce a positive trend in making people see and understand that healing without addons is entirely possible and ‘might’ help you become a ‘better healer’ but their arguements against addons really don’t impress me.
As a secondary note, I seen a lot of comments along the lines of ‘I need a low number of addons for CPU usage etc.’ – you might want to look at how much CPU time XPerl guzzles down its hungry maw before eschewing other, more lightweight options.
If you decide that you’d like to include some Addons to help in your healing, do so with your eyes wide open.
- Vonya
I agree with this. Please be aware that this is not a ‘you should use grid and clique or healbot etc’ post. I use grid because it presents me the information I want in a way I like. Choose what you like and find comfortable to use, absoloutely, but do not be swayed by some argument which says you are a lesser healer because you use one addon over the other or if you cannot heal using the default unit frames. Blizzard themselves have pointed out the suck which is their unit frames for healing purposes.
I also ask that you at least try, for some reasonable time, to use various different addons. I’ve tried standard UI, Grid, XPerl, Pitbull and Grid and made my choice but when I started using each, they felt clunky and hard to use – especially if you’re not sure how to set them up. Give them a few days, a week if you possibly can, before deciding you dislike them.
I don’t know why I’m such an angry little dwarf this week but I am so you’re going to have to bear with me (or ignore me, both work ok). I’m posting this now before my rage simmers down because I know that if I wait I won’t post it for fear of offending someone and I do want to get my point across, even if it is stated in a somewhat aggressive manner.
Eh… /hug
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Aurik, you know I love it when you’re angry! :P
I can see you’re POV with this, and also Matt and Vonya’s. Personally I wouldn’t raid without my Nostromo as I’m so used to it now that it would take some time to get used to using the keyboard again – not something to do in a raid!
*gives Aurik a cookie and a hug*
[...] refreshed my zeal for this topic was a post on /hug where Aurik discusses his take on some recent blog posts from other bloggers. Before I dive right [...]
Wow, I read all three of your blogs regularly…and I was a bit shocked to see such an angry reply to what I took to be a very innocent and common-sense protest against people who come to rely so exclusively on addons that if they break they can’t raid. I don’t think they were saying “nahnah I can heal this way so I’m better than you if you aren’t able to do this too” at all.
It is absolutely true in my opinion that you are doing yourself and your raid a disservice if you can’t play the game without the admittedly amazing addons that make us so much more effective. I play a shadow priest and use tons of addons…I don’t play nearly as well without them, but I think that I could if I had to. On that note…maybe someone could write a helpful post about how to get things like diseases/dispels/etc for 10/25 man raid to show up in the default UI in case of emergency?
Vonya didn’t attack Grid or say “Haha, I don’t use Grid, I’m better because I use XPerl which is totally different” or say anything that her use of Nostromo would make her a hypocrite for. She doesn’t use many addons, that works for her. Others (like me, and maybe you?) use more…that’s what works for us. The point is that if they break at a point where an immediate fix isn’t available (no raid leader would begrudge anyone a /reloadui or a quick enable/disable, would they?), we should still be able to do our jobs.
The only comment I think might deserve some unction to be taken against it is “How you spend your money is your business, but I think it’s very sad indeed to reduce this glorious, multi-faceted, complex, and brilliant game to a single button press. To each his own.” I agree with the statement as written, but I disagree that the use of addons like Grid/Clique/Healbot/whatever necessarily reduces the game to a single button press. The game is what you make it.
P.S. The mod Ampere makes it very easy to enable/disable mods without logging in and out of the game. I highly recommend it!
Personally, my take on healing mods is that I’m slightly afraid of them. I’m a big user of mods, but oddly I don’t seem to use any that contribute to my healing effectiveness. I use my good old raid frames, set the Blizz raidframe UI to tell me if someone is out of range, and keep an eye on debuffs myself.
I’ve recently started using Decursive – but even that scares me occasionally. That being said, people who use ‘helpers’ are no less healers than I am. Although, to play Devil’s Advocate – one of our healing Paladins really annoys me when he suddenly lets me solo heal because one of his addons breaks down. Which has happened! Dx
I don’t read Matticus but I did get the “I’m better than you” vibe from Vonya. So /cheers to you for posting this.
(Why is my comment breaking…)
Lyss: It is a personal flaw of mine that I cannot make an argument against something which is not an ‘angry rant’. Anything else becomes a moderated monstrosity which sits delicately on the fence and, whilst it may be full of information, it is usually not full of what I actually think or truly feel on the subject.
I know, full and well, that the posts were not meant ‘badly’ I even mentioned as much, but I do find that the subject matter irks me and thusly a rant is born, complete with tongue-in-cheek or sarky comments throughout.
One of the problems with Matts post was, in fact, that he mentioned having to wait ‘a whole ten minutes’ until someone sorted heir mods. 10 minutes is, to me, reasonable to have someone at full efficiency, but apparently not in Matt’s eyes, which was part of the reason for my disagreement with him.
Whethr people do or don’t use addons is not what this is about,it’s about being told that I am ‘crippling my raid’ if I cannot use anything other than grid by someone who uses XPerl to heal in an almost identical manner to grid.
Softi: *noms cookie*
Rosi: /hug Each to their own – if I thought I could heal better with te standard UI I would but I can’t so I don’t. I had to do it in beta and it made me want to kick puppies with frustration. Decursive is a weird addon, I tried it for a while but I didn’t like having to use up scren space for it :)
Awl: /hug Thanks. Breaking? :o
Aurik, while I agree with your points almost completely, your tone sucks.
See? I could have written that in a much less insulting and confrontational way. And so could you have. It would have strengthened your arguments considerably.
Instead, you come across as the little boy who was told he can’t have dessert tonight.
And sorry, my friend, but I’m not buying the argument you present in the comment above. Three words: Sleep on it.
Calm down, and present your arguments civilly. Your credibility will zoom.
Kes, you may be right, but here it is and it won’t go away. I stand by the ideas and comments herein. Damnit, I don’t have any dessert tonight and you just reminded me of it!
I honestly find it hard to disagree with people in my blog most of the time and delete a lot of posts because of that. I shall endavour to fix that, though, honestly. I did so many years of historical fence-sitting that methodology is stuck in my hind-brain.
I’m afraid I can’t be swayed by the issue of credibility, though, I have none in my own eyes and never will.
[...] Slashhug (/Hug) posted kind of a rebuttal to both posts, where most of the things I idly thought at the time were [...]
I can heal without my addons. I’ve done it, though I don’t LIKE it. My groups have been adequetly warned first in those cases, and know what they’re getting into! But it’s easier to say…spam heals on the MT, than to raid heal without addons. That would be my quibble with the originally posted sitation with the paladin.
I don’t like everyone being so reliant on addons, but I don’t think we should be bashed for using them, either. Especially for healing. It’s a hard enough job as it is!
I’d DPS without addons in a heart beat though (disclaimer: BM hunter). Tanking is…also doable, but woe betide the souls who pull aggro constantly without Omen.
[...] on addons essentially makes you a bad healer. Naturally this set off quite a reaction, and both Aurik at /hug and Lassirra at The Hunter’s Mark (who has a healer alt) both wrote a rebuttal. I suggest [...]
I agree with this. I had a bad impression from the two articles too. I didnt use healing addons while leveling but I can’t imagine raiding these days without healbot (or an equivalent like grind). The blizzard UI used to be a misery once you went past 5.
I think there was a time (quite long ago now) when it was possible for a healer to use healing addons in such a way that the addon did all the work. I’m thinking back to when addons were able to use conditionals and addons like Healbot would/could make the decision to cast a Flash Heal or a Greater Heal, not the player. Those days are long gone and regardless of whether you use Grid/X-Perl/Clique/mouseover macros/a keypad or a G15 keyboard you have to understand how healing works, YOU make the decision on what spell to use in any given situation. All the addons/hardware are just icing on the cake, tools that enable the healer to process the information and act on it in a way that suits them. I’d be amazed if there’s a healer out there that uses a completely unaltered UI, whether it’s bars, unit frames or something.
[...] The vitriol that followed: Lass’s Response. /hug’s Response. [...]
The way I see it… I know I most efficiently heal with the addons I use. I’ve been told I “cheat” by using Healbot. There’s an elitist attitude toward addons for who the hell knows why. I also know that in BC, I found a major problem with Healbot. If I disconnected and reentered battle as soon as I connected, my healbot would be totally wonky. I’d have no heal bars. More than once I had to quickly, in a fight in MH, pull out raid frames and do my damnedest to heal on the spot. I have my basic heals keybound for some unknown reason, but I know it’s not my ideal. So I started running with CTRaid loaded, but not turned on so I could quickly turn on the raid frames and swap things.
I rely on healbot because it makes my life easier. I like the way it makes me UI “feel” and I like my functionality with it. But I also know that Healbot could, can, and does break occasionally. So having a backup plan is definitely worthwhile.
I don’t know about anybody else, but I’d rather raid with someone who efficiently heals with whatever addon they choose than with some egotistical purist who thinks they have to heal ONLY with the blizz default UI and therefore has no real functionality.
I WoW naked. Well, maybe topless, at least. I have a bare-bones sort of approach to mods. I use only the few things I feel I need to be a good raid leader and a good healer (and now a good dpser.) Does raid healing with very few to no mods make me a good healer? I don’t think so. I just *am* a good healer. And that has come through a lot of hard work, experience and research on my part. It has very little to do with the mods I do or do not use.
My co-guild leader is also an amazing healer and she uses mods out the wazoo. She has also helped some of our not-so-hot healers become better through the use of mods. And that works for them. As long as mobs die and tanks don’t I don’t care if you use a Magic 8 Ball and a bowl of tea leaves to heal.
I havn’t read Matt’s post, I may tomorrow when the feathers have settled. But I think the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If your raids go well, if your tanks stay alive, you don’t have mana or aggro issues and everyone is happy, then you’re a good healer. No matter what mods you may or may not use.
That being said, I truly brilliant healer will know what to do when everything goes pear shaped. And that includes your mods failing.
I can see the whole “cant raid without it” and I can see the whole “you can play without it” thing but once you get to a certain point in pve, it just makes more sense to have the addons. I find this personally relevant with my action bars. If I cant use bartender to display all my bars I feel that I am totally not doing anything at all productive. I have gotten to the point where I can use key bindings for lots of the very repetitive spells that I use but ask me to use demon seed in a group, I wouldn’t know what it was without bartender showing me all my bars at once.
I wouldn’t go “I cant raid tonight ‘blah’ is broken” I would more likely say that I need about 15 minutes to find a working replacement of some sort or to set up my ui in a more helpful way to play.
*yeah, I know that there is no healing class with any demon seedy spell. It is the only thing that came to mind that was even close to an actual spell name that I could think of quickly.
I use grid, pitbull and a ton of other addons (mostly fubar things for information)
The problem is that the Blizz UI couldn’t be _worse_ for usability if they’d tried. It’s laid out to allow people to look at the pretty scenery while they’re questing, not for a raid healer to stare at 10, 25 or 40 unitframes for four hours straight.
On the one hand: relying on an addon to be able to heal at all is bad. On the other hand, we rely on a hell of a lot of other things to be able to raid, and some of them (eg ISPs) go down way more often than your average addon. I agree that one should be as prepared as possible for playing sans mods, but I also agree that it’s unreasonable to expect someone to be able to shrug and go ’sure, I can keep going even though my UI is totally borked, I only have to heal one person, right?’
Heck, if my action bar mod broke suddenly in the middle of a raid, it’d take me 10 minutes just to set my default bars back up and redo all my keybinds.
I have to say that I think this post is completely unwarranted.
I read both Ego’s and Matt posts, and I didn’t find anything to get that upset about.
Matt getting annoyed about the Pally was a bit extreme for me, but I’m not as hardcore as most (I haven’t even set foot into Naxx), and I can see his point that, in a guild situation where you know a raid goes at a certain time, you need to make sure you have everything together well before the run starts.
But, I don’t think either post was attacking anyone who uses any addons, especially since Vonya then went on to list the addons she uses. (see? I call it logic!)
What they were saying is, if you are ‘incapable’ of filling your role without addons, there might be a problem. I use Xperl and a few other addons, but if they broke 30 seconds before a Heroic (or back before WotLK before a raid), I could still heal.
Now, I’m pretty sure that if there was a totem pole of healer-ness, I would be supporting a lot of weight, so I assume most more-capable healers could too. But, I’m sure there are a few that, if they lost their addons, would flounder and fall on their faces. It is at those people that I think the post was aimed.
I don’t feel like either was an attack on anyone that uses addons.
I think you missed the mark on this one.
I agree with you, Aurik.
Which would Matticus have preferred?
Five-ten minutes to redownload an addon?
Or ten to fifteen minutes setting bars up and disabling the wonky addon?
Just found this post via BBB.
A dissenting opinion to the topic at hand, but I’ll try to not be inflammatory (or even misconstrued to be so).
My biggest problem with using a whole host of addons is that there are certain things that each addon sets out to achieve. Most, I grant, do a very good job of it. However, a lot of them cause problems for the user during certain circumstances.
In 10man naxx, for example, when our tank wiped us at least 10 times because he had disabled his pet bar and couldn’t release the understudy, that was a problem. He couldn’t even figure out what was wrong, because he had downloaded a suite of ‘recommended’ addons and installed them all at once. We should have stopped attempting, but each time, he would find something else that might account for it, fix it, and tell us that the problem was fixed.
Perhaps this is his own problem and not the fault of the addons themselves. But the mentality of “Go install this. It will make you better” is fallacious if you don’t take the time to customize each addon you install, so you understand what, exactly, is going on. And telling someone that they should install 4 or 5 at a time doesn’t give them the chance most players need to figure out the limitations of each.
I, personally, use a minimalist approach because of this. All of the major heals I use are bound between 2 and 8 on my keyboard, which I can reach with one hand, pinky on the ‘w’ key, and the only addon I use is xPerl, set to show when someone has a dispellable or curable debuff. I don’t watch overheal. I manage it on my own, thank you. However, even in the default frames, you can set it to show those debuffs. The only difference is that it is slightly messier.
Do I contradict myself? I don’t think so. I know exactly what I have installed does, and how to get along without it. I don’t think that it’s unreasonable to hold others to the standard that I hold myself.
[...] the topic of healing and addons. Now, from the egotistical priest, the world of matticus and /hug came a whole slew of information, thoughts and ideas. Now, as someone who has run the gamut of no [...]
/wave
I find this a very interesting blog about the use of healing and add on use :)
The issue about addons is more about what people are using them for. Many people use addons for very different reasons such as they hate the Blizzard UI, want to move bars to other location, hate the raid frames or they hate having bars of cast macros/scripts which generally simplify having to bar change in fights.
In the round all an add on does is use game information and present it in an more pleasing way. Many addons such as perl are just raid frame replacement which is actually grids main role.
Lets take grid and clique as two examples..
Grid is a raid frame replacement which basically lets people know if people are taking ago or getting damage and debuffs. Theres incoming heals, mana …well pretty much anything you can configure it to do..Its versatile and not memory hungry and imo much better than perl or AG raid frames. Can you do the same with Blizzard Ui that you can do with Grid, mostly yes but lets face it the blizzard UI is just plain rubbish looking. I manage to use it ok in the Alpha and Beta with the standard UI and the normal macros but i just got fed up with bar swapping and generally having the annoying raid frame there. Its rubbish looking and reminds me of when i started playing this dam game in 2005 bleh.
Now onto the next one Clique.
All clique does is replace the need for a a load of macros with modifiers..simple.
Rather than having 15 or so mouse over macros key bound to mouse or keyboard clicks you have an easy to configure interface do it for you. You can easily mirror ALL the stuff clique does with keybinds and macros which are all basic blizzard stuff. It just makes life easier period.. im all for reducing repetitive strain injuries :P
So what happens when all goes south…
Good healers adapt.. if you ui dies you cut an past a simple mouse over healing macro pick your key rotations /spells mac a mouse over macro and use blizzard UI Job done. Tbh this should have been in place before the raid or what ever you are doing.
On the matter of “your rubbish if you cant play with Blizzard raid frames”.. i have this to say. Wibble
If the UI dies and you have to use the Blizzard raid frames it will always take a little time to get re-adjusted to it thats just a fact of life and people need to appreciate this. It doesn make you a better or worse player if the tools you use suddenly change. A good analogy of this would be tennis….Stay with me here..
Most of the tennis players today have access to the greatest racket and sportswear technology available . What would happen if you took away the technology and gave them 1920s tennis gear.
Well quite simply they would take a time to adapt and would still be damn good tennis players..Its about knowing what to do.
My point is, that people simply saying if you cant play with the Blizzard Ui then you not worthy is a little harsh. Its a case of how quickly you can adapt within specific timeframes. As the example that was used if a Paladin who is MT healings UI dies…. well the other healers or what ever class fill the gap its about being aware in raids and not sitting there spamming renew, Prayer of mending heals and COH. Even the Blizzard Ui bugs and people have to adapt.
If my UI dies in a raid i can easily spring blizzard raid frames and continue where i left off but it may take me 2- 5 mins to reconfig stuff back to a config i would be happy with. /shrug I can still heal people by doing it the old way, in the mean time i have a very able bunch of healers covering my backside whilst i do config stuff. It called team work *cough*