This game badly needs mods and macros.

To be fair, rather than have something like GearScore, there was some system that could track some other statistics - which is the whole purpose of needing a score:

Such as:

• Maximum DPS reached
• Maximum Threat Reached
• Maximum health healed
• Minimum DPS
• Threat Stolen count
• Number of deaths to standing in fire
• Etc.

Things like this give a much better picture of how well the player performs. Rather than boot a great dps player with less-than-great gear versus someone who was carried heavily through raids and is still a detriment despite top-end gear.

What about the ever popular and I use that term loosely.
"All healers must Die" mod. That thing ruined PvP for healers.

One addon I do like and is not harmful, at least to my knowlege. Auctionator. I dont want to make a spreadsheet in excel with past market prices to look for trends. I could care less about any other mod really, maybe the ability to make my enemy cast bar bigger so I can see it without having to look at the bottom of my screen.

Agreed. Honestly anything to fix the broken GTM interface would be welcome. Something to let you drag in a stack of 50 items and have it ask you how many stacks you'd like that split into. Instead having to manually split stacks using the stupidest method possible (shift click + drag, then click arrows or select the box and type a number? While it links the item in general chat? And you couldn't have even had it move focus to the number box when splitting? Really? Who came up with this?) is mind-numbing and makes selling stuff off a bigger chore than it already is.

Eh, I don't know about that. The thing about DPS meters is they have to be interpreted on a per fight/role/class basis. "Maximum dps reached" doesn't mean anything if the number reported is one from a fight where part of the mechanic gets you a stacking buff to damage or where you do tons of AoE instead of single target. 20k dps might be really great on a fight that has lots of single-target switching, and downtime due to a phase where the boss goes immune and you have to run from fire, but then 20k dps would be terrible in a fight where you collect items that give you a stacking damage buff and you're doing 100% bonus damage to stuff you're AoEing constantly. So "maximum dps ever" doesn't mean anything unless you know the specifics of the fight.

Similar arguments for the rest of those stats...even "threat stolen count." Sometimes a DPS or a healer needs to taunt and kite. Or maybe the tank was bad, so a good dps will easily steal threat off a bad tank.

All these addons are just tools, and whether they're good or evil depends on how they're used. I didn't mind GearScore even, because I didn't care how high your GS was, I just cared how low it was. I remember in ICC, a lot of times when starting pugs we'd want people who had at least about a 4.8k-5k GS. Why? Because that's what you'd wind up with after getting all the gear from the 5-man heroics and badges. It doesn't mean you're good, but at least it means you didn't hit 80 3 hours ago and are wanting to come into ICC wearing quest greens.

Same thing for DPS meters. Again, they have to be interpreted. When people whine about these because "oh no it's just so elitists can kick players they 'think' aren't doing enough damage!" I have to wonder how little dps they were doing when they got kicked. I don't see people getting kicked for not being number 1. I see people getting kicked when they're doing less damage than the tank. When you're in a raid where players for the required gear level should be doing, say, 20k dps about, and you've got some who really know what they're doing and are pulling 25k, and others who are a bit behind at 16k or 18k....I don't see the 16k and 18k players getting kicked. Who gets kicked? The guy doing 6k while the tank is 10k. That's so low you should do more just by auto-attacking.

The whole "epeen" argument is stupid. I don't want meters to show off how great I am...I want them to protect me from how bad others are.

You misunderstood me.

It makes it so that the 8 or 16 people in the ops group don't have to bang their head against their wall to a hard enrage timer because little Timmy was watching his favorite after school cartoon and pulling like 15 damage per second.

That doesn't trivialize content. It trivializes the amount of time I have to spend being frustrated because someone isn't pulling their weight and I have no idea who and no real way of being able to tell.

Yea, and thats great and all, but you will still have no way of telling if everyone is doing what they are supposed to. Keep acting like you do, though.

And I agree, purported epeen measurement as a counter-argument is pretty stupid.

However, if it could be circumvented with more accurate readings for actual situations - the better. I'd posit if there was a souped-up version of the training dummy it would put SWToR over any other MMO out there. For instance, a danger room level on the Fleet Bases where you could get the metrics for enrage timers, standing in flaming ****, interrupts, and whatnot using a squad of NPCs that don't yell at you in vent. You could test yourself and give raid leaders some real numbers before committing to a 4-hour wipefest.

STEALTH : Actually, I think they should hire R. Lee Ermy (a la Gny. Sgt. Hartman) to do the voice acting in said level. "Private - I do not like the smell of bacon. And you reek of it. I will make you scrape your own face off the floor and run 300 laps. Now GIT UP!" /rez

Also, with regards to addons and "situational awareness" that "trivializes content," I think that stuff only trivializes bad content.

One of the things mods and macros forced the WoW devs to do was design more dynamic content.

So in vanilla WoW, a raid mechanic would be something as complex as "Gehennas has put a debuff on a random player! Find that random player and dispel it immediately." That was...challenging...(until decursive which was later broken) because it was difficult to know who had a debuff on them because the raid frames were non-existent and you had to scan party debuffs for that one little icon. That's "challenge" born out of a poor interface. It's not difficult because the mechanic is difficult...it's difficult because the UI is clunky. Now instead you get healbot/grid addons that color code when somebody has specific debuffs, so the challenge is not knowing when somebody has a debuff, it's figuring out what to do about it. So maybe the player has to move out of the group before he gets dispeled or he'll blow people up. The designers assume the players will know what's going on in the game state, and the challenge is how they deal with it. That's much better than the "challenge" of trying to pick out a 10 pixel by 10 pixel non-color-coded debuff icon.

Same thing with standing in fire. The challenge of fire on the ground should be related to "where am i going to move so I can still be effective and in range of others and not get trapped." What DECISION do you make when you know you're on fire, not the challenge of not knowing you're on fire. The fact that the game DOESN'T by default flash and shake your screen when REALLY BAD STUFF IS HAPPENING is a design flaw in the UI. The UI is the USER INTERFACE. It's supposed to communicate to the player what's going on in the game, and important things like HOLY CRAP YOU'RE ON FIRE AND ABOUT TO DIE should be given much greater emphasis than a little debuff icon. Play an FPS game, hell, since Doom 2, and when you're getting shot the screen flashes red and your dude grunts. In modern games like Gears of War and Call of Duty the screen jumps and shakes, a pounding heart and panting sound fills the speakers, the screen darkens and tunnel visions and blurs letting you know BAD STUFF IS HAPPENING SEEK COVER. In SWTOR you get a little 10x10 pixel icon with no text or duration unless you mouse over it.

As for macros, in vanilla wow, yes, some classes could macro all their abilities into one button and just spam it, casting whatever ability was off cooldown first. That doesn't mean the macros broke the game...it means the game mechanics were already broken. So Blizz had to go back to the drawing board and design class mechanics that rely on dynamic buffs and procs, so you can't just have one fixed rotation. No, you have to use this filler ability to stack up a certain buff that when it reaches a decent level you can expend it with this other ability or this one instead while making sure you keep this other buff up too, and if this talent happens to proc you'll want to cast one of these two things instead, etc. Your "optimal rotation" is constantly changing based on the situation.

The's the great thing about current WoW raids. They have very complex mechanics, that rely on your ability to think fast and make decisions about what to do. The game designers assume you know what's going on in the game, and now build a lot of that stuff into the encounter, with boss warnings in the middle of the screen. They don't rely on a clunky interface to provide challenge.

The problem with SWTOR's clunky UI with no mods is that the designers will never have to be pushed to make those kinds of complex game mechanics. Even in WoW with all those addons flashing and shaking your screen when you've got the GET OUT OF THE RAID OR YOU'LL BLOW EVERYBODY UP debuff, pugs STILL fail to it. How much better do you think they'll do in SWTOR when the only indicator they've got is a tiny debuff icon? They won't, and they'll cray, so BW won't be able to design complex game mechanics because the UI will still be in the way of people understanding them. So SWTOR is destined to always be an easy-mode game until they get the UI out of the way between the player and the game.

Honestly, one thing playing SWTOR has made me do is realize how little credit I gave Blizzard's designers. I was all "Pandas?! F that! I'mma go play lightsabers!" and now I see "oh, yeah...lightsabers, sure...but...bad game design. Maybe pandas won't be so bad..."

Ya know...that would actually be a pretty neat addition to WoW or SWTOR. A little L2P guide. WoW has the dungeon journal that tells you the encounter mechanics, but they don't have something that gives new players the basics of how to play their class without hitting up EJ (which most won't bother to do). This is where you get the LFR heroes pulling 7k as a fire mage. Nobody ever told them spell hit cap is 17%, and that they need at least a big ignite and their living bomb (and the pyroblast dot too if they got a hot streak) before hitting Combustion, and bonus points if you can Fireblast/Impact proc that to any nearby adds. Would also help casual players understand all the changes each new patch. Should also be a little easier to standardize once they simplify the talent trees in MoP.

New thread started here for that.

You know? I have read many arguments from many people concerning this issue. However, most of you people against macros are simply not looking at it from a business standpoint. The game needs to be marketable to ALL audiences, since it is an M (MASSIVELY) MO. I may be able to deal with having to use 20 different buttons with a combination of mouse clicking, though I prefer not to, and you may be able to. However, there are a LOT of people that would love to play the game that simply can not because of the sheer volume of buttons to mash. Both of my sisters and my wife would love to play this game, but they just can't handle the amount of button mashing it takes to be effective at higher levels. Let's face it, most of you will still play WHEN macros are implemented, but without them there are a lot of people that will not. Stop being so selfish, a game should be able to be enjoyed by lots of people, not just those good at mashing buttons quickly.