Thoughts on implications of no addons on threat and the meta

[Cadarn]

"People have to get a feeling for what is happening on threat"

Threat is an invisible limit on how much dps can be done by a player (dps) set by the performance of another player (tank). The average human being can not feel numbers. It is though possible to observe the game but that requires to gather a fair amount of knowledge.
Firstly animations and debuffs are an indicator to what is happening.
Secondly it is possible to keep the combatlog open to watch but doing that thoroughly either live or after a fight is a rather nasty thing to do to yourself.


"No threatmeter means waiting for 5 sunders."

Noone does, rightfully so, like waiting for threat because it is neither fun nor efficient. It is the tanks job to enable the dps to pump as hard and early as possible. That means tanks are forced to gear for as much tps as possible since threat is now an unknown factor. 
 
Classes which can manipulate threat are at an advantage. Hunters will be more in demand than before as of misdirection. They are also one of two classes which can reset their own threat to zero.

Classes that can not manipulate threat and/ or are dependant on burstdamage will lose viability. Those are the ones that will overaggro regularly. That is especially the case in a more casual environment where the tanks are forced to equip mitigation over threat.


macros

Castsequence is an incredibly powerful tool that will be utilized more. I am working on castsequences to replace palypower. Just like palypower it needs to be adjusted depending on players. This is just be beginning of possible automation and optimization. The existence of infamous hunter castsequences should be common knowledge.

Mouseover and focus macros are essential as clicking and then acting is way slower than it needs to be.


The need for optimization increases

Bottomline of the meta is that bosses need to die as fast as possible to reduce the amount of mistakes done by players. The longer a fight needs the more chances are there for mistakes that lead to deaths, frustration and loss of focus. No addons means that players will do more mistakes by default as they do not get told all the time what to do. The consequence of that is that the need for tps and dps increases while still only bringing as much hps as mandatory.


"No meters make everything viable"

A class is viable if it delivers dependable results in every situation.

For everyone willing to put in the work it is still possible to adapts existing sheets or create new sheets according to the changed values of the server. That means that classperformance is measurable. It will be known what classes and speccs perform the best.

Personal performance is also still gaugeable. The first obvious thing to see is how people are enchanted, how they treat gearing themselves. If they keep up the farm even if they have similiar sidegrades.

Consumables, dispels, tps, dps, hps can be checked by hand if someone is willing to put in the work. It will though be noticeable if those things lack. Skilled raidleaders will know their usual suspects.

Videos will be used more as a tool to improve the raid. While this was before almost mainly a speedrunning method as to where to save some time it can be used to analyze far more. It is a very effective tool to find and correct mistakes.


My personal conclusion:
I believe that noaddons leads to a very intense meta that still rewards "hardcore" behaviour but more importantly will punish everyone who decides not to play the meta.

People who believe no addons allows them to slack will have a bad awakening as people in general love to point that out. As it is the human nature to optimize and compete players will use every tool available to measure performance.



 

Edited August 16 by Cadarn

[rahowa]

Nice monologue.

Tusk

Edited August 16 by rahowa

[Mugjin]

I get what you're saying in theory but... Red Dawn did Kara recently, it was streamed and it didn't really look like what ur saying... but I guess they didn't clear it yet either but I think you're over thinking it haha 

No addons is pretty chill imo

[Carlosgr]

The OP takes the mindset of the overall hardcore-try-harder and projects it into every player and guild out there. The things you say are "human nature" are not necessarily every human nature.  A lot of it is culture of gaming that evolved over time in private servers. Those "facts" are only true if you approach the game with a hyper-competitive mindset. Having no add ons to measure things attracts more people that don't have that mindset.

[Cadarn]

9 hours ago, rahowa said:

Nice monologue.

Tusk

Thanks, i guess.
 

3 hours ago, Mugjin said:

I get what you're saying in theory but... Red Dawn did Kara recently, it was streamed and it didn't really look like what ur saying... but I guess they didn't clear it yet either but I think you're over thinking it haha 

No addons is pretty chill imo

Threat becomes an issue when people gather gear. It is non an issue when players barely have gear.

17 minutes ago, Carlosgr said:

The OP takes the mindset of the overall hardcore-try-harder and projects it into every player and guild out there. The things you say are "human nature" are not necessarily every human nature.  A lot of it is culture of gaming that evolved over time in private servers. Those "facts" are only true if you approach the game with a hyper-competitive mindset. Having no add ons to measure things attracts more people that don't have that mindset.

It says right on the headline "meta". Meta means "most effective tactical assignment". Is your point that things are different if you do not play the meta? Because i wrote that too. By definition of the word meta the game becomes more difficult the less effective you approach it.

[Carlosgr]

The game doesn't start at the raid door. Sometimes it is casually easier to just ignore the meta, and show up to raid 80% "optimized", and just have a slightly harder or slower raid which is fun, and you don't have to do insane farms.

Besides, the meta is very different without threat meters. All of the "optimize your DPS with this" tip can backfire on your face.

[Cadarn]

What you actually are saying is that it does not require effort to get some players and just raid. That is true but it is as far off the meta as it can be.
It is not interesting to talk about what is not the best. Else the whole world would watch the formula2.

The reason why many people here are not playing the meta is the amount of population blocking the ability to replace players. It is hard to impossible to make a raid out of consistent players when you have to bring whoever is available because you need half the online population for it.

I already explained what can be done about threat and what the issues of having long fights are on the OP.