Comments on: WoW Macros And Addons And How I Hate Them

By: Gordon

Gordon — Mon, 10 May 2010 21:42:56 +0000

It’s a very good point. I don’t think the Blizzard UI is all that bad but yeah, a lot of MMO developers are going down the route now of just letting others do their work for them (in regards to UIs and add-ons – QuestHelper is a perfect example of this). It’s a tough call as to which is best because although it means it’s the responsibility of amateurs to maintain their work, it frees up the time of the developer to do more useful things.

By: Brian

Brian — Sun, 09 May 2010 22:45:33 +0000

My real problem with the addon system in wow is not so much the automation. Blizzard created an addon system to avoid any responsibility towards maintaining a decent UI imo. Don’t like something about the UI? Go find a mod or make your own!

What sucks is you end up with a game that without mods won’t show your whole raid with health bars for healing.. arguably doesn’t support enough button slots for all the skills and consumables you need at your fingertips.. you get a poor UI, terribly unsuited for playing the game. And instead a bunch of programmers are out there maintaining mods that they’re not allowed to sell. And we players are forced to either 1) deal with patching and adjusting to it when mods stop getting updated or 2) run without addons at a disadvantage.

Addons can be cool in some ways, but I feel Blizzard should still make some attempt at maintaining a competitive UI without requiring third party mods.

By: Gordon

Gordon — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:56:44 +0000

It seems like something that should be standard in MMOs now so I’m always surprised when games come out with limited UIs. I don’t ask for much, just the ability to resize windows and move them about.

By: Gordon

Gordon — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:27:16 +0000

Ah yeah I think that’s the problem… I’m trying to do everything in one click and it’s not allowed

By: Tesh

Tesh — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:06:09 +0000

I still love the Guild Wars UI. You can move almost every visual element where you want it. Not much in the way of resizing, but the freedom to move stuff around is great.

By: Bootleg

Bootleg — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:57:01 +0000

I play as a healer, and recently switched from healbot to Vuhdo. What do you consider extreme about healbot?

My experience with healbot is that it doesn’t really do anything I couldn’t achieve through the standard UI. Regardless, at a base level, I still have to choose what spell to use, when to use it and who to use it on. There’s no automation involved. (unless I’m not using it to it’s full potential)

Deadly Boss Mods… That’s an addon that may go to far. “I don’t have to know anything because DBM will hold my hand and tell me what to do and when.” That’s a bit of an exaggerated look at DBM but it’s not far from the truth.

By: Rohan

Rohan — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:18:02 +0000

You can’t do the first through macros, at least not on a single button press. I don’t think you can do the double weapon switch in one macro for the second, though you can do one weapon switch + ability.

The basic rule of WoW macros is that all lines are executed simultaneously.

That’s not strictly true, but it’s a good way to think about macros and what’s possible and what isn’t possible. You can’t really do consecutive actions across multiple GCDs with one button press, though you can with /castsequence.

For example, you can do your first request with

/castsequence reset=5 Battle Stance,Charge,Hamstring,Defensive Stance

But you have to press the button 4 times.

By: scrusi

scrusi — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:00:09 +0000

I have never used Tauntmaster, but there have been addons in the past that clearly did too much. Old Healbot and old Decursive come to mind as well as macros (I had a very good 1-button pvp macro for my warrior back in vanilla). Blizzard has come down on these before and if Tauntmaster does too much I suppose they will come down on it as well.
So addons can clearly do too much and developers need to take care that they don’t, but that doesn’t completely condemn them in my eyes.

Also, if I can easily macro an integral part of the game, the game isn’t really well designed now, is it? That’s a topic for another day though.

By: Gordon

Gordon — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 10:46:08 +0000

Not to mention that when a new patch comes out and introduces a new UI element that buggers up your entire UI addons!

By: Gordon

Gordon — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 10:45:24 +0000

I’m getting into PvP in a big way too which is why my sudden interest in macros. I guess what’s just frustrating me is that I can’t seem to do what I want to do with them