impossible!

Or, you can organized your raid such that your healers can focus primarily on their group within the raid, and regard the raid, as a whole, as a secondary concern. No one knows what the encounters coming with the expanion will be like. Similarly, no one can say whether or not healing demands will be the same that they are now. Personally, I don't think we can judge the detriment of these changes until that becomes known.

Also, I think it's kind of absurd that some people are making the claim that Blizzard isn't aware of the effects that these changes will have. They're making it sound as if Blizzard took community-crafted add-ons into consideration when they designed their encounters.

edit:
Like I said above: can we really make the claim that the removal of these things is going to harm our ability to perform come the expansion? I think the encounters we'll be facing in a few months are more important than some are willing to consider.

 

enshula

Incoming:

Many many mods which tab target your entire raid constantly to achieve something simple. I already use the method for range checking and it now may become viable for things like decursing.

Looks like i will be upgrading my CPU.

Gratz blizz you just increased micro for people who refuse to buy new computers and do things like run vent on a seperate machine.

 

berg

Sorry just because you decide to have data presented to you in a completely unorganized and inefficient way does not mean I want to be forced to do the same.

My default UI has the entire raid on the left sorted by class, This view is not particularly great but it has its moments.

I then have 3 rdx windows.
Window 1 lists the 8 most damaged players(effectively emergency monitor).
I have different actions to click, shift click etc. I still decide which heal is appropriate based on the situation and the class involved.

Window 2 lists any mages/warlocks under 80%
This is for AE situations when I knew they can get punked at any time. On this window I only bind my fast heal at max rank because I know that slow heals will not save them in time.

Window 3 shows the tanks in the raid.
On this window I bind only my fast heal for emergencies and then my steady efficient heals. I still have to decide which heal is appropriate, it is not a frikken bot or anything.


This is how I choose to have the data presented to me. I find that it organizes the data in such a way that I can make better decisions but I still make the decisions. I can live without click to cast but now clicking on the people in my windows will do nothing since targetting is broken. So I can look and see "uhoh mage#2 is hurting and then I have to hunt for them to click them in the raid frames? That is stupid. All they have done is make it harder for me to act on my decision.

The blizzard raid frames are terrible. I know they have had a vendetta against decursive forever but this change breaks a lot of really good, and legitimate, mods that are not overpowered spam bots.

 

Kaacee

Hold on a second. Mods do not make people bad players. Decursive usually lets me focus my attention on healing, which in a lot of ways makes me a better player.

Like it or not, the end of EM type bars will be the end of quite a few healers, which are usually in short supply anyway.

Where is that joke wack-a-mole healer webpage?

 

Nite_Moogle

As much as I despise healers that do nothing but flash heal emergency monitors, not being able to re-order or filter targeting lists on the fly and removing dynamic assist windows is a huge kick in the nuts for pretty much everyone. I really liked that assist windows didn't require the player to know anything about how to script, and could be set by the raid leader. Having filtered lists of people that need curing is incredibly useful for some classes and losing that functionality is going to really hurt their effectiveness in fights that demand it.

 

Nite_Moogle

Mods can make acceptably good players out of players that normally have no business doing what they are doing. Virtually any click-to-have-your-heal-picked-for-you mod falls under this category. I don't think this change will drastically impact geniunely skilled players since they will adapt in some fashion, but it's going to widen the gap between them and the casual gamer that has used UI mods to increase his/her effectiveness.

 

LadyVex

I don't understand the aversion to mods. Some make things dumbed down, other things completely streamline and organize it. Everyday in order to do my job I have an organizing system so that I can keep track of things coming and going; without this not only would I be immensely more overtaxed but it's possible things would slip through the cracks if I misplaced it or were unable to find it easily.

Such is the way with healing. For the most part, priests are pretty minimalist simply because they have so much stuff to watch as is, they don't bother with a billion mods. But anything that will "organize" a "to-do list" is generally what we go for, and this change has the potential to make things vastly more complicated.

And yes, I do understand we are jumping the gun by speculating, and while I know TBC is going to change alot, it's not the second coming, so quit acting like we can't say word 1 because miraculously WoW becomes a completely different game in TBC. I know things will change, but I doubt playstyles will be absolutely and decisively thrown out the window.

I'm going to use an extreme example here, but specing holy/disc makes me more efficient at healing, so I shouldn't spec it because it will put me on a level i'm not normally at? What?

Things that are more efficient make a good healer better. I understand the taboo of it because it's third party, but I equate *some* of these mods like equipping a shield on a tank; it makes encounters vastly more efficient and less nerve-wracking. Skill for the most part has generally no bearing. You've heard the term whackamole several times during these posts for a reason: Dispeling and healing in a raid setting is very much this unless taken in hand and organized.

Although yes, i am very much against the mods that pick the rank of heal and cast it for you.

 

impossible!

With that kind of configuration, you probably have as many bars up within those windows [during phase 3 of Nefarion] as you'd have up for your entire raid in a twenty-five man group. :toot: At any rate, we're back to the main point of my last post, which is that you don't even know that this kind of mass management will be needed in the Burning Crusade. Twenty-five people is considerably less than fourty. Moreover, we do not know the kind of encounters that we'll be going up against.

I'm not going to resort to baseless speculation to defend my argument, so I'll simply reitterate tht I don't think we will be able to truly gauge the effects of these changes until we're in the shit, so to speak.

edit:
Just like I can't say they will, you can't say they won't. Regardless, I'm not saying that speculation and discussion can't occur, but rather that the mass hysteria that's come as a result is really kind of unwarranted.

This doesn't even make sense. He was referring specifically to mods that perform actions for the player, such as Decursive, and he's right. There were several players in my old guild that wouldn't have made it past their second raid with us had they not been using a multitude of add-ons.

Also, the difference between a shield and an add-on is that the shield is a feature of the game that Blizzard designs around, whereas the add-on is something written to provide the player with capabilities that were never originally intended.

 

kharen

Unless they're removing their own built-in raid UI, you'll still be starting at 25 raid frames.

They'll just be the crappy builtin ones, rather than well-designed, customisable ones that you can arrange and filter to fit your needs.

 

Iniliara

Totally agreed. About the only affected mods that I use would be Detox (decursive-alike), ora2 (for MT targets) and PerfectRaid (for raid frames). Assuming they don't go overboard with debuff-fights, the loss of decursive is a non-issue. Losing clickable MT targets is a non-issue, given that you can always click on the raid frames to target the tanks you see visibly on the MTs. About the only thing that I'll really miss are well laid-out raid frames like PerfectRaid. Though even that's still largely possible with some minor modification to the built-in raid frames.

 

Kaacee

No, those mods can make acceptably good healers out of poor healers. I can make an acceptably good mage out of anyone by telling them to spam /assist MT#1; /cast Frostbolt.

And who gives a shit about mods making players DECENT, really? Mods aren't going to kill 4HM, Saph, KT, or Nef. Ya, some of these mods let someone's girlfriend play a halfway decent healer in MC, big freaking whoop.

Look at the big picture for a moment. These changes aren't going to make a bit of difference at the high-end, which is where all the epeen is anyway. This is just going to kick the healers right in the junk with relatively little upside other than making some warlocks happy in pvp. GG Blizzard, create a game for the masses, unless you are a healer, then you can the 2006 equivelant of pong while you watch health bars.

 

Arketh

Not knowing anything about how Bots work .... is it possible that some of these changes are targetted against the Bot-farmers?

Blizz has indeed hated Decursive forever. This is apparent.

Right now, I use CTRA as my only mod - but that includes a decursive function. As things stand, Decursive is an essential tool because its very existence mandates massive debuff spam by bosses to have any chance of one of those debuffs sticking.

I would like to think that if Blizz can kill decursive and its spawn, they will then design encounters that do not include tedious whole-party debuffing.

............. OK. Sorry. I can`t say that again with a straight face. It`s a lovely theory, but reality calls.

But back to the original point, I am definitely in favour of anything that stamps on the Bot-parasites currently infesting places like Silithus (you know who I mean - the hunters with names created by slapping the keyboard).

Si Motis Transfixus

 

Revenj

Gentlemen, gentlemen... a lot of assumptions are being thrown here. And I am thoroughly confused.

Would appreciate if someone could clarify the following:

1) "I can live without click to cast but now clicking on the people in my windows will do nothing since targetting is broken."
"Not being able to target is the real screwjob."

Wait. How exactly is targetting broken? Apparently, the functions TargetUnit() and TargetByName() dont work. But... we will always have /target
So whats the problem here?
I am not experianced with modding, but cant mods simply use "/target" instead of the above 2 API calls?

2)
"..as a healer I rely very heavily on target of target's target to see what is going on"
After looking at Perl's TTT source code, it appears Targetting mods use TargetUnit() for TT and TTT.
Is there no workaround for this? Can we not use AssistByName(dfgdg)?

3)"It will break all click to heal mods (emergency monitor, Clique, etc.)"
How exactly will it break Emergency Monitor? As I understand correctly, some mods (RDX, Clique, Party Heal) have the functionality to heal a player by simply clicking their corresonding bar in a certain way (eg: Shift-Click = Flash heal. Left-Click = Heal 2, etc). This functionality will be broken.
But, will you still be able to click on a player's health bar (to target him) and then press a button on your keyboard to heal that player?
Essentially, a 1-click process is being coverted to a 1-click + 1-press process. Right?

So again - how does this break EM? Are you suggesting that you will no longer be able to even click on the health bars (EM bar, CTRA unit frame, etc) to select the player? If thats the case, then you are basically breaking ALL CTRA/RDX completely! I hope thats not true.

4)FastCast
I am scared. I am scared if FastCast will break. But the heart of FastCast is SpellStopCasting().
I understand the logic behind how FastCast works, so I dont know what or why it has anything to do with Targetting functions?
Anyone care to shed some light here?
I looked at the FastCast code and didnt see anything "strange".

 

Nite_Moogle

I'm pretty sure any good mage would take offense at the over simplificiation, that's like saying you can make a good healer by saying /target Yourtank; /cast heal, but I digress. The impact is much larger for healers than for DPS classes but there are mods that improve DPS classes in a similar fashion.
When you consider the staggering number of players in low-to-mid content guilds in the game that are likely depending on these kinds of players to fill their healing ranks, the already low number of healers that can do their jobs is going to be cut even further. That isn't a good thing. This is a very far reaching implication that will potentially have a very negative impact on the game for a massive number of casual players. If your guild is depending on a handful of healers to raid ZG and you discover that Johnny Paladin turns out to be an awful healer when his mods are gone, that's potentially debilitating. My guild is lucky enough to be decently far up the totem pole, but I cannot imagine trying to scrape for any sort of competent healing at the bottom of the barrel to get started anymore, and that's WITH these kinds of mods. At least with Castparty you had some prayer of turning a non-healer into a healer with a minimal learning curve. I've always believed that it was hardest to teach being a good healer, and this is not going to make things any easier.

 

Sancus

It's sad that the RDX loser didn't leak the full details of the changes and instead just leaked a tiny bit without explaining any of the new functionality based around these changes.

<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl

 

borat

these are absolutely retarded changes and I hope Blizzard changes their mind. Perhaps they think there are simply too many healers in WoW and all parties should consist solely of DPS classes?

Perhaps I have gotten spoiled but I won't play WoW anymore with the default UI, if they disable all the nice unitframes, raidframes, actionbars, etc mods then I for one won't be buying the expansion.

It just doesn't make sense to me, the last major change - where only one spell could be cast per "key down" - seemed to solve the chain-casting issues Blizzard had. Fine. Whats the point of disabling so much now?

and the china farmer bots don't use any of this, they use custom hooks into the wow executable that directly read/write memory values, for the most part they all run just stock blizzard UI so in fact these changes do nothing to them. gg.

 

Northerner

As a Mage primarily I absolutely hate this change conceptually and I am pretty sure I'll really hate it in implementation. I presently have Decursive bound to my 'A' key (ESDF move/strafe for me, so it is a very accessible key) and even with that I dislike the role in the relatively few fights where I have to perform it. I perform it with some degree of pride though because frankly, it is an important role and once I get the curses down, I can get back to trying to produce damage which is what I see as my primary goal. All I can really see here is that in addition to having fun new aggro managment challenges in TBC, I will also have overall reduced damage (fastcast gone), an exciting new whack-a-mole decursing minigame and the breaking of many if not all of my custom macros. Like I need the additional aggrevation or something. Still, I can only assume that this is considerably more annoying for healing/cleansing classes.

Dropping this sort of change into the game just at a point where every healer/decurser actually has a reroll option sure does not seem to be well-planned to me but time will tell. I completely understand that Blizzard never has liked Whispercast, Decursive and the plethora of healing-assist mods out there. I have absolutely no faith at all that this will carry over into encounter-design though, which is what these mods are designed to assist with.

 

Malan

What a well informed statement this is. You should know that statements like that aren't exactly smiled upon here.

For what its worth, Veni gave as much info as he had access to. He's not the one testing this, he's being handed some info from someone else. Don't shoot the messenger.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

hiro

I don't believe /target functions from within mods easily.
As such, what they are breaking is the ability to target anyone by clicking on anything other than a "proper" unit bar. Furthermore the RDX info specified that all "proper" unit bars have the following properties:

1 - You cannot launch any spell by clicking them, so you must "click+press" as you say.
2 - They are LOCKED IN PLACE during combat, so that you must play whackamole to identify anyone who needs healing or cursing.

This is very dissappointing to me as a raiding pally used to delivering tiny heals to many targets who needed it, and cleansing easily while I focused on things like WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING IN THE 3D WORLD AROUND ME?

All DPS classes get to play WoW, all healers have to spend a lot of their game time playing a very annoying version of whackamole, and this alleged change seems designed to enforce that uniformly.

Probably this is to make us hate large groups, since it is much easier to scan and respond to needs in smaller groups.

 

Kaacee

I'm not talking about good mages, just saying I can make a decent one by simply spamming assist and frostbolt. You just cannot create a decent healer by giving them simple instructions, there is just to much information. The idea of /target Yourtank (basically making them MT healers) seems attractive at first, but in reality most of the poor healers cannot adapt, for instance using higher ranks when other healers die. Decursive/EM helped mitigate that to some degree.

EM healing lessened the burden on healers occasionally. I could go into EM spam mode while drinking a soda, eating a sandwich, or talking to my wife. As a healer, during most four hour raids I pay more attention and sit in my chair more than I do all day at work, which is sad in several ways. As a dps class in EQ I could pretty much get up whenever and no one would ever notice.

Face reality, healing is the least desirable role to play, and I'd prefer they not make it any worse.

 

Sancus

Considering that I do know the full details, yes, it's a very well informed statement. Also, thanks for pointing out how EVEN MORE IRRESPONSIBLE that idiot is. He "gave as much info as he had access to", info which he wasn't supposed to have access to, and given that, felt he had the right to disseminate it publically EVEN KNOWING that he had no idea what he was talking about and didn't have the information necessary to put any of it into context?

So of course, all he accomplished was starting threads like this, full of wild and fearful speculation based on a fraction of the relevant knowledge.

So yes, I will shoot the messenger, when he's being irresponsible and has no right to be a messenger in the first place. If you're going to be a messenger, you should at least try to do it halfway competently.

This is tantamount to screaming "Fire!! We're all doomed!!!!" without mentioning that the Fire Department is already onsite and has the blaze under control because the third party that told you there was a fire didn't bother to mention it.

So where's the post-deletion on the original incomplete, poorly informed statement, huh? Oh, but that's well-informed, right? *rofl*

<Vontre> I removed the cooldown on evo
<sancus> and what happened?
<Vontre> DPS went down rofl

 

Malan

No, the original posts at least are generating discussion on the value and place (if any) of mods in a game such as WoW.

Your posts, however, are trolling.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

◊ Praetorian

This is what happens when I'm busy at work or traveling for business and such -- I don't get to scrutinize threads as closely. At a glance this looked like a reasonable thread, but in actuality it's just shitflinging about speculation on both sides.