This Cyborg World of War...

Tobold has been doing a series of posts on WoW Addons lately.

WoW. I mean, wow.

I had no idea.

There's add-ons for one click healing. I haven't read the actual description of the add-on yet, but I presume this means you have 40 squares of people, and when you seen the green bar is low, you just clickie on the square and the add-on pretty much decides for you which spell is the most efficient to use to regain that much hp.

My bad, I just went back and read it, and apparently the SmartCast feature in combat was taken out in WoW version 2.whatever. So now you can just do one-click out-of-combat buffing and what not.

There's add-ons for showing you how much aggro each person has, so you can tank more easily.

There's add-ons for telling people YOU'RE STANDING IN THE BLOODY FIRE, GET THE F OUT OF IT... which explains why about half the people in my Warhammer guild team fighting a new mob that spurted a gob of acid on the floor had insufficient situational awareness to get the hell out of it, even after I had a) suspected something was wrong due to my hp plummeting, b) taken a while to observe my combat log to ascertain I was taking damage, c) spotted the tiny damage-over-time icon on my character that explained about the acid in a pop-up tooltip, and d) moved out of the acid while exclaiming over chat to MOVE OUT OF THE ACID.

It took them about 30 seconds longer and two other teammates screaming to make them realize something was up.

This is what happens when you rely on your UI's add-ons and someone else's video takedown more than actually looking at the virtual world's feedback.

Sorry. Just sour.

To think that I tank based on observing whether the mob is focused on me or is attacking someone else. Hmph.

I don't know that I'd go as far as to agree with Tobold's accusation that using add-ons is easy mode. To an outsider, the necessity to use all these add-ons is a scary barrier and steep learning curve in itself.

But I'm certainly shocked at how reliant WoW raiders appear to be on these things. Talk about the ultimate in cyborg technology. How in the world did the rest of the other MMO world raid with barebones UI?

P.S. Another of his recent posts indicate that the balance in WoW heroics has shifted to the point where people are doing AoE tanking and AoE damage to clear trash. I cannot help but think of freaks in a dumpster and a giant fireball nuke over 5 years ago and start laughing at the cyclic nature of things.