The Elevator is the hardest raid boss no matter what MMO you're playing.

Well, it's a common misconception that working on new content means less bugs getting fixed. Different teams, different goals, and adding something like this wouldn't have any effect on current bug fixing. The devs have already expressed interest in doing it at some point though, so that's cool. I think it would be a fun little minigame personally.

This is likely going to be buried in the cacophony this topic invokes, and I've already posted on this many times before, but I'll reiterate regardless. For those of us who played WoW from the beginning, we know the value an open modding platform brought to the game. There were tons of features that were not there in the base UI, that were added because players wanted them. Blizzard kept tabs on the mods that were popular and said "Man, that's a good idea. Let's implement that." A lot of the time they hired the mod developers onto their team. The less people you have on a project, the less innovation you get. You could have the 20 best UI Devs in the world working on a project for five years, and you will not have as valuable of a project as a group of 5000 good UI devs would put out. Then factor in the needs of the smaller group. UI development is very costly. What if I, as a guild leader, would like a custom UI to help me track loot distribution based on my guild's methods. There is absolutely zero chance of this ever being put into the game officially. Thus I, and my guild, go without. Sure, we can use spreadsheets out of game, but I'll tell you, my WoW guild ran a lot smoother when our guild member wrote a custom mod just for us to keep track of everything. Now, let me address the myths. UI Mods do not let you do anything that you could not do without them. If you think they do, you are wrong. This is not opinion, this is fact. Things that let a player do actions outside of normal behavior are hacks, and people get banned for using them if they're caught. There is literally no downside to allowing it, from a player's perspective. Yes, maintaining the API is tough from a dev standpoint, but the payoff is immense. The players that outperform you using mods will still outperform you even if they didn't, because they'll just look up the relevant information on a forum somewhere and put it to use directly. People who don't download mods aren't going to look up rotations either. Those players will always underperform. That's their prerogative, but don't diminish the quality of the game because of it. UI mods can only provide information. Many of the UI elements in this game would likely not exist had they not been popular mods in WoW. Equipment comparison tooltips come to mind immediately. Those were not part of the standard UI in WoW until literally years later. There are others too. Blizzard took the community's innovation and made the game better for everyone as a result. This kind of community collaboration is key to longevity for an MMO.

Your logic would be like going to a town hall where 2000 people have met to discussing how a small section of town isn't getting electricity, then making the declaration that a huge amount of people in town are not getting electricity, and that anyone saying otherwise is clearly believing lies. You see, these are forums. Most people go to forums to find out news about upcoming game changes, find out new strategies about the game, or complain about things not working. If you go to the forums of a game and judge the size of a thread complaining as representative of the size of the problem, you are a complete fool. Bioware has metrics that analyze the performance of every player playing. The 5% are people with unique system combinations that cause the issue. Yes, people having the issue are loud. People who are not having problems don't run around screaming "YEAH! THE GAME IS RUNNING GREAT!" The point is it's a glitch, they're trying to fix it. Honestly, people like you who concoct and/or perpetuate these massive conspiracy theories need a critical thinking class or something. The people complaining in game and the threads on the forum would lead me to believe it is a minor isolated issue, where people with certain computers are having trouble regardless of how potent the machine is. Guess what, that's what BW said is happening. 5% seems much more believable than 15%.

I can tell this is your first MMO. Let me break it down for you. Someone with talents in healing who attempts to deal damage will find that in the early game, they actually can keep up with their damage spec buddies, just like how they'll find that their damage spec friends can heal just as well as they can. Fast forward to max level. Those skill points you get every level? Yeah, they add up. Eventually, a tank or healing spec who tries to do DPS will find that they can't put out anywhere near the numbers their party members can. DPS who try to heal will find their heals costing massive resources while healing very little. DPS who try to tank will find themselves crushed into paste.

Once again, pay no heed to these people. Wow this is frustrating. Ok I'm gonna break it down for people, then I'm out of here. This thread is filled with stupidity. Weapons and armor have a thing called "Rating" This affects base damage of the weapon and base armor stats in armor. This stat is always derived from the Hilt, Barrel, or Armor Enhancement in moddable gear, otherwise the ratings are fixed. The rating affects ALL DAMAGE and ALL HEALING. Universally. Upgrading your weapon will always give a more significant dps increase than increasing your base stats.

I know the feeling. But this is the nature of MMOs. People don't read/listen, then they complain that things are broken when really they're just idiots.

The person you quoted has zero clue what they're talking about. Claiming this is an issue is like pushing on a door that says "pull" and complaining that the door needs to be fixed. Just because people can't read doesn't mean there's a problem.

You to realize that hilts and barrels actually bump up the base level of the item, right? Orange gear have no stats. Pull out all the mods and they literally have like 6 armor and no stats. Put in an armor enhancement, a barrel, a hilt, etc. Suddenly they have actual armor and base damage. It does contribute to skills, also, since force/tech power are directly tied to the "weapon rating" stat, which is, you guessed it, tied to the hilt/barrel. Please don't mislead new players with misinformation.

We had this debate in the beta forums months back. What it boils down to is that the vast majority of people advocating against addons confuse them with hacks. They don't know the difference. When they talk about how it gives unfair advantages, just mentally replace the word "mod" or "addon" with "hack" and suddenly their posts make sense.

Uh, I hate to break it to you. The bosses in vanilla all worked that way too. Enrage timers weren't in response to DPS meters. They were in response to people bringing 20 healers, 10 dps and 10 tanks into Molten Core, and never having a challenge as a result. The mechanics you describe above could easily be used to describe the Ragnaros fight. Lurker too. Good raid design and addons are completely separate. Don't blame blizzard's lack of inspired raid design in WotLK onward on addons.

Just to put out another thing. From a raid guild leader perspective. We judged guild applicants based on their performance in a trial run, much like many guilds do. I would keep an eye on their rotations, their activity levels, their ability to react to things. This allowed me to look at that really low dps player and see that it was due to gear that he did poorly, not because he sucked. We never had a problem gearing up newcomers, the issue was finding players who knew what they were doing. Without the ability to monitor my players, myself and my officers had no way of knowing the worth of the player. I'd fall back to a less effective method in that case, and judge players based on their gear.

Really? There were visual cues to everything that was happening. I frequently raided from a friend's house back in the day, and while it was certainly annoying to not have my addons, I never had a problem performing with the base UI. Like I said, it just gives you information. The addons don't play the game for you. It sounds to me like you're validating your inability to clear content by saying developers made the game too hard because of addons. If you can't clear it without addons, odds are you won't be able to clear it with them either.

Actually, DPS meters predate all of that. Most MMOs had the ability to dumb the combat log to a text file for parsing. Hell, FFXI has a real time parser that basically gives you a WoW style DPS Meter. That game is a perfect example, actually. The UI was so deficient that it became a community standard to use a hack that allowed custom UI mods. Players have wanted UI customization since long before WoW. The reason is simple. People have different styles. I like to know everything that is going on. I like to have a huge amount of information about my players, because I'm a guild leader. I need to know if people aren't performing to standard so I can fix it. The vast majority of players don't need this. Thus, Bioware will never invest resources in a tool for a niche player need. A community addon developer will though.

I love this myth. You can always tell who the people are who never raided in WoW. The only addons that could even be considered as having "done the job for you" were in vanilla. Specifically decursive. The thing is, the actual competitive raiding guilds didn't use them because it made bad decisions, and generally the use of such things were the hallmark of the "stand in the fire" type players.