You're no BETTER or worse than someone who does play with addons. Thanks.

You can't say "whatever floats your boat" and also say "it makes you less of a healer."

Either say, you're fine with people doing whatever they want, and you don't care.

Or, say that its a crutch, and they are not as good as you.

They are mutually exclusive views, however, and render your comment a bit useless.

Actually, you're wrong. Blizzard designed the game with the intention of allowing users to alter the interface in simple ways. That's part of what makes WoW so great. Find some part of the interface awkward or clumsy? Design a addon to simplify it or find one that already exists.

Blizzard intends for users to customize their interface so long as the addons operate within a set of fixed rules. Using addons, whether for healing or any other purpose, is condoned and even encouraged by Blizzard in their game design for WoW.

Not necessarily. You can say, "hey, I won't actively persecute you for doing X, but I honestly think you would be better off doing Y - but hey, that's just me"... in other words, whatever floats your boat, but I think doing Y is better.

I would say you're only halfway correct. You do benefit, as a healer, by learning to do it the hard way. By forcing yourself to use the default raid frames and keybinding your heal spells, you train yourself to be quick on your clicks... and you realize the seriousness of missing a heal by just a split second.

But then, after you're proficient in that manner, it's time to look into a better interface. Whether you use Grid, Xperl, Healbot, and/or Clique (or something else entirely), you will be a better healer for it.

From a simple human-computer-interaction standpoint, a better healing interface means a speedier reaction time... and thus a better healer.

So yes, running without addons, you can still be great. You could even be the best healer in your guild. But you could always be better. Don't be so full of yourself that you can't see that. And mastering a better healing interface is one step towards bettering your performance.

>To me people, who use addons to make your job easier, makes you less of a healer, and your not healing the way the designers intended you too.

I use two addons to heal: Grid and Clique. I don't think it makes me any less of a healer to not have my screen cluttered by a 25 big rectangles instead of 25 small squares. In fact it allows me to see more of the game then the default UI does. It also removes the huge number of buffs and debuffs that I don't care about and lets me choose to only display the ones I do care about.

And clique is awesome because it lets you set up keybinds so instead of selecting a player and pressing "3" to heal, "4" to cleanse and "5" to put a bubble on them, you hover over the little box and then right click, or shift-click, or alt click to do the same thing without even changing your main target. It's the same thought process, but with less keystrokes so you can do more in less time.

The bottom line is that the default interface gives you too much information to filter through and forces you to heal inefficiently, but macros and addons allow you to spend less time figuring out what's going on and more time actually healing. Which is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

Designers intended you to fight bosses, not clumsy UI

I healed 25 man heroic ICC without special unit frames for the first few months. It wasn't until I was assigned to dispels on Heroic Rotface that I finally took the time to do my UI. Before, I was searching all my frames for the debuff logo. Now their raid frame glows orange when they have the debuff.

Could I heal heroic ICC without the frames? Yes, and I did. And I did a damn good job. But my unit frames now give me so much more information than I had with the default. And the fact that I can condense them to take up a smaller allotted space allows me to see all 25 people without moving my eyes. I think this is the biggest benefit of all. My raid awareness has increased drastically.

I've never healed with addons so i might not know what i'm missing, but so far i've never had any situation where i thought something like grid would better my experience.

Do people who have addons automatically have less skill? I have no clue. That needs research. There's nothing claiming that's correct or incorrect yet.

@nikdaheratik

"And clique is awesome because it lets you set up keybinds so instead of selecting a player and pressing "3" to heal, "4" to cleanse and "5" to put a bubble on them, you hover over the little box and then right click, or shift-click, or alt click to do the same thing without even changing your main target."

You don't need Clique to do mouseover healing, FYI. You can do it with mouseover macros. On my healer (granted, only a 55 Priest), I use Grid + macros that use a fall-through targeting priority that starts with @mouseover.

(Note: I'm not saying Clique is a bad addon--I've never used it, but I hear great things. I'm just saying that Clique isn't required for mouseover healing, as long as you're okay with using keybinds instead of mouseclicks.)

Sorry, I don't want to be the other healer in your raids. You may think using Grid is a crutch for me, but when I can easily see everything going on around me (and react to it) and you can't, I become your crutch.

@Lameboat

"To me people, who use addons to make your job easier, makes you less of a healer, and your not healing the way the designers intended you too."


I'm sorry but you are terribly wrong. If you think Blizzard designers intended for you to use the stock UI then please explain to me why they implemented an API that allows people to create 3rd party addons. Why did Blizzard develop the "World of Warcraft Interface AddOn Kit," which helps with the creation of addons, especially for beginner developers? Why is there an official "UI & Macros" forum where people can discuss the development of addons.

And also, just for good measure, the splash screen that you are presented with when you open up the official addon kit states, "The World of Warcraft interface is customizable! AddOns allow the game to look and behave the way you want."

Blizzard made the stock UI so you could play the game out of the box, and that's about the extent of what they intended you to do with the stock UI.

In conclusion, you can sit on your high horse all day, and say you are a better healer, hell, maybe you are, but I'll still out-heal and out-dispel you any day.

@jv_gdesign

With that said, I would -never- allow you to heal in a progression raid that I was in if you're not using Addons. Hard Mode fights are, for the most part, simply too fast-paced and frenetic not to use a healing UI. I wonder how you would have healed Yogg-Saron without a healing UI to allow you to quickly dispel the many debuffs on the fight - and most people will tell you that effective dispelling is actually what wins that encounter.

I'm sure I could heal ICC quite competently without any add-ons at all, but I think it would be silly to do so. I certainly don't think I could lead a raid as effectively or alert others to important information about the fight.

The metaphor of a crutch is extremely inappropriate. People walking with a crutch usually walk more slowly than people who don't need crutches. This is not at all the case for healing with addons. If you feel addons are somehow unfair then compare them to performance enhancing drugs if you must, but the people in the best guilds in the world use addons. People who heal with addons heal better than people who refuse to use them.

But furthermore, addons don't just makes things easier, they can also challenge you by giving you more information than you could possibly get with the default UI. On heroic Sindragosa I decide where to stand and who to heal and with what spell based on the number of stacks of Mystic Buffet that everyone in the raid has. On heroic Lich King I need to be looking at my environment to determine the relative location of the necrotic plague target and the ghoul pack, as well as shadow trap locations, and without having all the other information I use (tank health, incoming heals, who has shield and weakened soul, time to next infest, whether anyone has aggro on a ghoul, boss health percentage) in one compact box I would just have to make decisions based on less of that information because doing the wrong thing quickly is better than doing nothing at all while you think about it.

Use addons to get more information about what is going on and use that information to make better decisions. If you aren't using addons you are choosing to get less information than you could have. That's not to say you can't be very good, because you can. But most likely you won't be as good as you could be.