xxhpaoihj: I haven’t watched the video yet, but Tettles is probably wrong

GoodGobGents: "I'm walling" said the ragnaros pug tank into his mic in Spanish while none of us are in voice comms

SimonCoulton: Addons get updated every day, Blizz doesn’t have the capacity to do anything they say they will.

MindWavesTV: Voice coms isnt a solution to anything for m considering vc is a bigger barrier to entry than addons for the average player.

StevenBoston-k7p: Squishei has spent too much time with the other two knuckleheads.

Watching for spell animations to see if someone has kicked is fucking hilarious son

rukinohi: I just hate this "jUSt tAlK To ThEM" take... My dude, 80% of the time playing, I'm pugging. I don't want to hop on comms with random pugs. Besides, I'm playing on EU servers, half the time the team is composed of Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, some of whom don't speak english...

Would communication help while pushing 16s with pugs? SURE! But my bro, my dude, my friend - I have a wife, I have small kids. I just want to play THE GAME, not annoy my family with constant chatting just to kick or PI properly...

niantenadie: "Just track kicks via their existing sound queues and animations" is a completely insane take. I realize Squish doesn't push keys at all, but come on, man. You cannot be serious with that.

And I'm really not into the idea of being in a call with pugs in this game, and it has nothing to do with being antisocial. I hang out with people IRL, and I have probably 50 or so people I'm regularly social with online. It's that a lot of people in this game are fucking weird and/or have zero mic etiquette. I'm not interested in hearing people open mic open mouth eating, mouth breathing, TV blaring, babies crying, etc. Like basic things you just expect people to not do as a baseline in any situation. Which, IDK why, is in my experience a uniquely WoW thing. There are poorly socialized people out there in all online games, but the ratio seems way, way higher in MMOs.

GoodJudyGames: I would quit M before I would get into voice with randoms.

themInterwebs: I feel gaslit into believing that less player knowledge of what is happening in the game and less interaction with mobs/other players… is a good thing?? Is that the argument yall are making? That I should be looking at player animations instead of OmniCD to see if someone interupts?? Lmao get out of here

brandoncomer6492: I think yall are kinda blowing smoke up your own ass on your opinion of the "civilians" tracking CDs. I mean it's definitely true of DPS, but I play with several healer friends in the 12-14 key range and they all are acutely aware of my defensive CDs and have actively called me out when I didn't use one and ended up dying as a result. Healers are constantly scanning their party frames and as a result tend to be able to glance over and parse OmniCD routinely.

Alurin93: As a protection paladin pugging mythic , I absolutely use the party cd trackers to decide who I sac/spellward on certain mechanics, especially when things turn south (i.e. healer death on a boss)

forkmasterderp919: Blizzard has not given us any reason to believe they're even remotely capable of doing what they say they want to do. The cooldown manager alone proves it, that was braindead easy compared to the other fundamental changes they are planning and it was an abject failure. While the theory of reigning in addons is a good one there's a 100% chance Blizz turns it into an unmitigated disaster

CasparRubin: Maybe we are already in a discord call with other people. Maybe we don’t want to join a random discord with random people to get completely harassed, especially women get omega harassed as soon as people know they are female. „Going voice“ is such a stupid solution. Ever been in a CoD voice lobby, thats fun to you? Sometimes we just want to turn on the PC, get into a pug and play the game and see if we have to hold PI for 10 seconds because boomie has CDs coming up soon so we can time the key, not giving random PIs because we dont know how will have CDs up when.

averagescrub3235: Maybe I'm weird about the OmniCD thing but as a healer it has become second nature to just glance over and see if my tank used his major defensives and if my DPS has their main CD up, it definitely comes with way too much being tracked out of the box but once you get it down to the stuff you actually care about its useful.

Schweppie1: The problem I have with addons going is that the Blizzard implementation will be broken for 2 patches at least (See every single thing implemented for the last 10 years). I am not paying to play a game that's made worse.

solotopp: Idk what you guys are smoking but I main prot pal and regularly use omnicd to see who used a defensive and who didn't so that I can appropriately sac, ward or bop. Knowing what aoe cc is available can also change decision making for pull size. CD tracking going away would hurt this especially in title range where a sac can save a life.

Shadowfolds: I actually do look at my groups defensives and offensive CDs because I main holy priest and can interact directly with them with PI and symbol. Which is why I main it. I love those 2 spells, though I have a feeling they're gonna be gone in midnight with the addon changes :\

rhammpy4507: “Not as fun with addons” blizzard speak for “we want to port to Xbox”

brandoncomer6492: you can tell how sheltered some of these guys are from the real WoW experience. Many of the people who I end up in M pugs with don't even speak English.

themInterwebs: I don’t like the argument that because lower skilled players don’t make good use of addons such as OmniCD, that they should be fine losing access to that information.

Crater1221: Am I supposed to hop in voice for every random key so I can hear the tank say "I'm walling"?

anthonytgameaddict: Blizzard is going to have to roll the difficulty back to wrath as far as raid and dungeon design go if they don't want people to use external things to circumvent these changes.

Senen33: "It’s more fun to play this game when you don’t have perfect information"

Yeah I fundamentally disagree with that. OmniCD has made the game so much more fun for me since I’ve installed it years ago. And playing other games where you can’t customize your UI so you only have your own cd in the corner of your screen and that’s it, that’s the one thing that’ll always make me come back to WoW. Having more easily accessible info is just straight up fun. Losing it will make the game less fun for me. That’s it.

Clariuswow: Edit: Just to be clear, this rant wasn't aimed at The Bench. It is entirely caused by my annoyance that Blizzard seems to be blaming addons, and by extension the playerbase, for their own failure to properly design raid bosses and dungeons that don't require those said addons. I agree with most of what is said in this podcast, but I just think practically all of the goals of Blizzard can be accomplished without limiting addon functionalities in any further capacity. Now they want to disable addon functions that have nothing to do with the dumb mechanic "solving" weakauras that everyone hates? Why?

Even if 90% of people don't actually look at things like OmniCD, are we really ok with making the game experience worse for the 10% that do look at it? As a healer it is a huge reduction of the skill ceiling.

If the reason behind it is to save the people who don't even use it, from themselves, then that's just an idiotic argument. If the idea is to have make a baseline version of OmniCD, then why even limit or remove the ability for addons to do it? The goal has to be to reduce the skill ceiling by reducing the information available to the players.

I completely fail to see how this in anyway is going to make Blizzard capable of simplifying the game in any way that they couldn't already do. OmniCD is not what has caused dungeons and raids to be a visual cluster fuck with a billion kicks and swirlies. That is entirely on Blizzard, OmniCD and other addons is NOT what is preventing them from simplifying gameplay.

Additionally, Ion has talked about messing with things like Aura Hooks which is going to impact how healers (and anyone else) are able to track Debuffs such as big dots and shit, but also Buffs such as active defensives. Dont tell me people need to call out when they used defensives, are u going to have everyone in a raid call out when they press a personal? Of course not. If as a healer, I cannot customize how I see debuffs and buffs on my raid frames, then that is just simply making my game experience and my ability to play the game worse. Disabling this ability is never going to let Blizzard simplify the game in ways that they couldn't already do.

We can all agree that the base UI needs more ability to customize things like buff and debuff track. It 100% does, but why on earth does that have to come at the cost of addons being able to do it?

They have made the game a massive cluster fuck of shit and bloat, and the game is impossible to visually parse. Limiting the ability to change nameplate colours if a mob has Shadow Word: Pain, or whatever, is not going to make the game easier to parse, it is going to make it HARDER. If they want to make the game easier to understand and parse, which would be fucking fantastic, they can absolutely do that while still allowing addons to HELP make the game and information easier to parse for players, just like addons always have.

Addons and the customizability of UI and how you personally want information to shown is one of the BIGGEST and most important pillars of the game. Imagine if someone logs in one day and the thing they have relied on for a decade, now suddenly doesn't work. Thats insane. Addons, and a better and more customizable base UI, and simplifying the game, visually and gameplaywise, can absolutely go hand-in-hand.

Tenezill: Hey that's a first, haven't heard a dog shit opinion from Squishei yet

So what you are saying is, I now need to get into coms with every fucking random I play in lfg to call my wall, and wtf are you talking about animations of interrupts, you can't even see your own character in most pulls, so now we are going back to 5 mob pulls or what, nearly as nonsensical as dratnos oh they get big and green when they cast what an absolute joke.

What is proposed is kneecapping the possibility of more interesting pulls because we don't know what to kick when to kick if I have a debuff that needs to be dispelled and so on... None of the points you guys make have any logic behind it all I hear is " iT gOoD fOr tHe GamE"

ps.: i love to listen to the podcast, i hate to be as harsh as i was above, but i stand to it. you guys do a great job i just wholeheartly disagree with your points towards addons and also the 1 button rota.

Jun 03 2025

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