Although I can't find the post again, I came across Praetorian indicating that oRA2 has effectively replaced CTRaid for all hard-core raiding guilds. Can anyone explain its advantages?

It's got less cruft and more awesome. Basically it does just what you need, nothing more. Only ready checks/item checks/mt and mtt windows basically. You can force your raid to use oRA2 and then everyone gets to pick their own raid frames and such.

The key difference is the things oRA doesn't have when comparing it to CTRA.

Most guilds at least use different boss mods than CT's ones, and a lot of people use different raid frames than the ones from CTRA, so that's extra functionality inside of CTRA which you might not be using. oRA doesn't have either of those included, which basically makes it a better choice in regards to UI memory usage; assuming of course you have other mods for those things.

It also works fine together with CTRA being used by other people, so if it only counts for yourself you can still go for it if you feel your UI memory usage is getting out of hand.

I don't think there is much reason to switch if you actively make use of all the features CTRA provides though.

I remember many patches where I'd update CTRA, it'd be broken, I'd update again, it'd be broken. I'd update again, and maybe it would finally work.

In the last major patch I had oRA working within 8 hours of the patch release, while people were languishing with CTRA bugs for a week.

Personally i use RDX because i love how customizable it is, plus its modular. You can take out what you dont want and need. Put that with the fact that its updated constantly and is a very good all in one package. I don't find the price of it to be much of a detractor because its only about $20 a month for my entire guild to use.

I know several posters here also use RDX (malan and hamlet being two that i know of) so i thought id throw that in there as an option as well.

Actually I can't tell you what the advantages are really today. I can tell you however, how it was when the security API model came into WoW with patch 2.0 (pre-TBC). CTRA broke, and badly. Stuff didn't work anymore. You got no MT frames. Or you got them but they were empty. Or you got them, they worked and after one round of combat they disappeared. Or it threw those nice "This addon has attempted to call an illegal function blabla" box. Or lots of them.

Then you updated when finally after 7 days an updated version was released and it just changed the kinds of errors you got. Especially the MTT-frame never worked for me.

On the other hand, ORA2 worked flawlessly (ok with very minor flaws but absolutely no showstoppers like CTRA) from day1 of WoW-2.0. They were ready, the CT-Team was not.

So I switched and never went back. The PVP-crazy times there also proved an excellent chance to take a good look at my addons and UIs and weed out old stuff and try out new addons. And this I did and I've "aceified" my UI then.

So what is the advantage today? Frankly I don't know, since I havent loaded CTRA since then. Bigwigs+Ora2+Grid+Clique has made me much more efficient and aware what's going on while using even less screen real estate. If the CT-stuff didn't brake so horribly, it probably would have taken a lot longer for me to look for alternatives.

Maybe CTRA is fine again. It was a very great tool for a long time, but for me it had outlived its usefulness. If it works fine again, it's just a matter of taste I guess.

From a programmers view on the other side, CTRA was quite inefficient. I saw that it was updating its frames even when you weren't even grouped or in a raid and the frames were hidden (it still calculated and moved stuff around!) while ace addons are generally extremely modular and disable themselves and deregister their event hooks when stuff is not needed. CTRA even managed to throw fatal LUA errors while I wasn't grouped/in a raid anymore with one of its bugs then, which really pissed me off, and which made me look into its code in the first place. I hope they did redesign that since then, it was .. working but far from elegant code.

But as I said, no idea about the current implementation. I haven't used it since then and I'm not feeling any urge to go back. It was a great tool for a long time, but I feel I found better ones.

Back when Blizzard implmented the hidden addon chat channels (so addons could magically synch instead of you having to /join a channel, or press Ye Olde Synch buttons), oRA2 had either already, or within a day or two, a version that would work with the old style synch channels and, simultaneously, the new style hidden channels. To my recollection, once CTRA supported the invisible synchs, it didn't support the synch channels, which meant you had to force everyone to upgrade (which they should do anyway, but let's be practical - until it breaks, some people will use version 1).

oRA2 is compatible with CTRA, so we actually have raids where people are using one or the other, and noone knows, or cares.

While that's a very, very, very old story, it was the sort of thing that sold me on oRA2. Both are developed for free, out of the kindness of all involved developer's hearts, so of course I'm just grateful for what was great while it was great.

And, you know, the whole beaten drum of oRA2 being an ace addon, so it would seem to be slightly less demanding on ye olde resources (and that's even from someone not running the mininum required system)

One main difference I really like is the fact ORA2 shows % health of the mobs in the MT windows. The last time I used CT (pre 2.0) it didn't do this. Thaddius was really annoying when having to hear "feugan at x%, what's stalagg at?" and hearing 5 people respond, or no one respond. ORA2 got rid of the need for vent communication of health %ages as everyone in the raid was now able to see them. I never could convince everyone to go to ORA2, but those that did haven't looked back.

Back in the day, CTRA didn't use bars either, for the many new cyclical encounters that Blizzard was starting to introduce (like Maexxna), bars were quite superior to the "text only" approach that CT had at the time.

Neither mod has bars...

i guess teenee is talking about bigwigs

What's really needed is a single raid data agent that reports threat, total damage done after combat ends, and that supports all of the *ra queries like items, durability, etc and sends the info to the raid data channel.

Then you could code whatever front end you like for the data and of course the raid participant can choose to view it through a frontend mod (a damage viewerr, a threat reporter, etc) or not to view it all. But your minimalistic users could just run the raid agent and give the raid leader all the info he needs to make good decisions.

Until such a thing exists, ora2. If you are familiar with modding, open up the lua files for both mods and compare.

Doh. Yeah. oRA2 + BW was the replacement, to CTRA obviously.

I could be wrong but the other nice thing is the oRA2 MT windows show the raid symbol of the target. I didn't play with new CTRA endlessly but it didn't seem to do this with any checkable option.