Playing with addons

The topic of the week in the blogs I read seems to be addons, or maybe more specifically healing and addons, with a lot of recent posts about this and a lot of opinions and discussions and flaming back and forth in the comments.

I pulled some interesting topics from some of the blogs discussing this because my views on these specific matters were quite different and I felt a rant coming on :-)

"If you are incapable of playing this game without addons, then you are allowing those addons to play the game for you."

I can play this game without any addon at all, and I have done so many times when one or more of them have gone fubared and I cba to try to find which one and fix it. Error messages all over the screen ftl :-(

For many situations or classes this is perfectly viable and I usually don't even notice that all addons are disabled. For other situations and other classes, this is not so.

Healing is one of these not-so situations.

I can heal a 5-man group without any addons at all by clicking on their party frame and press the appropriate keybound spell for the heal I want to use.

Does it take longer? Yes. Will I miss who has that misty-green poison dot ticking down? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Will I waste a lot of time on misclicks on targets? Definitely yes. Will this result in a wipe? Maybe, maybe not. Do I like it? No.

Could I heal a 10-man raid without any addons? Same answers as above, only even more slow and strenous. Could I heal a 25-man? Same again, and with even more emphasis on slow-to the point-of-or-past-too-late and strenous-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown.

So, I am capable of playing this game without addons, but (in this particualr case) I don't like it.

Why don't I like it then? Well, there are two reasons, actually:

1. I hate to lose people on my shift, and I'd be a lot slower without my addons, using only the default UI, and thus I would end up losing a lot more people.

2. My addons actually make me experience the game MORE, not less, and accordingly to not use my addons would make me miss out on a lot of the gameplay.

Let me elaborate.

The addons I use for healing are Healbot and Visual Heal. Despite its name, Healbot is NOT a bot used for healing.

Healbot is a customisable addon that presents information about the people in my party or raid. It shows me the healthbars, the mana bars, who has aggro, and who is out of range for me. It can be set to show a lot of different buffs and debuffs on the player, and it presents this in an easily accessible manner that makes me feel comfortable I won't miss anything crucial.

However, what it can't do, is heal the player for me.

(Ok, out of combat there actually is a one-click kinda thingy called Smartcast. If I want to heal someone out of combat and has SmartCast enabled, Healbot will automatically choose the spell most suited to heal the player to full. But hey, who gives a shit about what happens out of combat, eh?)

The frames of all players are bunched together where I put them, within easy reach for me, the healing spells I use are bound to different key/mousekey combinations, and I feel confident I can pull most of my party or raid through whatever we encounter.

But, and this is important, in combat, it is I who choose whom to heal, it is I who choose which spell to use, not my addon.

Although I have been playing computer and console games for a major part of my life, I am not a twitch gamer and I do react a little slow sometimes. Anything which makes me able to toss out my heals more easily, or able to see and target who has some nasty debuff before he/she kicks the bucket is a great benefit to me.

I mean, its still ME doing the healing, isn't it?

I even have time to watch how the fight is going this way instead of suddenly wondering why is noone needing a heal anymore? just to realise that Oh, the boss is dead.

Sure, I could practice manual targeting and healing with the deafult UI to improve my performance there, but it would never be as fast and easy as it is with my Healbot, I would be too focused on targetting and healing and lose out on a lot of the actual fight.

So, in my opinion, this kind of addon is NOT playing the game for me, it is helping me have more fun.

Call it crutches if you want but if I risk falling on my face when walking I am very happy for a pair of crutches, thank you.


Another interesting topic was "Good healers use addons to heal. But great healers don’t have to rely on them."

Now this could be a quagmire to tread. What makes a healer good? What makes her great?

The truth is, that I don't understand this statement at all.

I don't consider myself a good healer, maybe I would dare to aspire to "adequate" or maybe "good enough", but definitely not "good". I usually get the job done but sometimes I botch things up and people keel over around me.

Anyone able to pull a group through or carry their part in a raid, with or without addons, is good enough. And that is, well, er, good enough. In my opinion.