Originally Posted by Igni
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?
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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.