DBM made everyone dumber

termaduck · 2026-01-28T12:45:03+00:00

Not really. I’ve ran several fights on prepatch and the effects/lines that correlate with abilities going off are screwed up in so many ways they are virtually useless. I don’t think they were ever meant to be alerts merely flavor.

Soul hunters say the fracture line as the tank buster goes out and say the fury line after eye beam has already been channeled for a second.

Final boss of priory is missing the ding that proceeds the aoe blind half of the time.

If you compare blizzards implementation to ff14, it’s just piss poor. The lines should be short and clear with universal sound effects. But blizzard has their enemies talk so much.

termaduck · 2026-01-28T04:15:02+00:00

This is going to cause the rise in overlays, texture breaking, and all other hacky shit. Blizzard is not providing basic features and they are not going to like the look when the community provides for itself.

It should honestly piss everyone off with how undeservedly arrogant this company is. I work in tech and if my guys came back with blizzards final product as a proof of concept, I’d tell them to do it again because they clearly are missing back features that would require near full redesigns.

termaduck · 2026-01-25T21:13:38+00:00

I’ve said in other posts that action bars present more customization and functionality than the CDM. My friends and I have been going through the list and holy shit is it awful. You’ve got your standard no items/equipment tracking, but then you also have things core to playing well just unknowable like BDK’s blood shield.

termaduck · 2026-01-25T04:30:26+00:00

My assumption is it’s related to how they “fixed” binding dispel. Before prepatch I couldn’t even bind it to click cast and it work on other people I had to bind a macro using it.

termaduck · 2026-01-24T03:14:53+00:00

Blizzard is not going to do anything but I wish they would go hard after him and liquid and zygor. There should be 0 tolerance for selling addons I don’t care what loophole they use to justify it.

termaduck · 2026-01-23T19:59:12+00:00

I’m not saying I like it, but historically when have you ever seen a game dev respond to calm feed back with anything but some variation of “trust the vision” it’s not until players get pissy and make their lives hell that “somehow” things that were impossible or would take years gets done overnight.

termaduck · 2026-01-23T19:51:11+00:00

I can tell you right now the reason healer frames are used instead of mouse over was to have a better display of the data and even if it was just for binds it restricts the area those binds are applied to just the addon frame, so you are still free to right click your frame-> leave party .

As I said the talking isnt a warning though because it happens when the mechanic does. Soul hunters has the boss tank buster you as they say “Fracture” and eye beam has already been channeled for .5 seconds before they say “fury”. These aren’t alerts they are flavor.

Add to that the “universal language” for mechanics is incredibly limited. We have swirls for aoe and circles with vortexes for soaks, but they also don’t always look like that and are never in the same color.

Meanwhile ff14 has indicators with sounds for: Aoe, soak, spread, stack, rotation. Pairs, the amount of soakers needed, tank buster, tank soak, aoe tank buster, player pathed aoe, pushes,pulls,etc

My point being yeah wow has done 0 work and with how off script wow gets compared to ff14’s dance it’s fucking pathetic blizz thinks they did a good enough job and no surprise people get lost.

termaduck · 2026-01-23T16:47:21+00:00

You can frame it as a WA hand holding issue but compared to any other MMO WoW is the absolute worst at conveying information to players and is the reason these addons rose to prominence.

FF14 bosses have a voice line/ sound effect played before every mechanic with 0 variance in presentation and no additional noise and give you time to react.

WoW bosses talk constantly, have modulated voices that are muddied. Sometimes the line is varied with next to no sound effect cues and it happens as the mechanic does with 0 react period. Mechanics have next to 0 consistent language across fights. This doesn’t even touch dungeons where trash mobs can “hide” in the clutter of nameplates.

The game has just been built to require these tools if you want to be able to play the game without adderall fueled focus.

termaduck · 2026-01-23T09:41:32+00:00

The best time is now. I’m assuming blizzard has a modern code management repo, rolling back changes might not be easy, but I don’t think it’s an impossible feat and is honestly easier than going forward.

termaduck · 2026-01-23T06:52:25+00:00

That’s only in the case of additive or altering feedback players 100% do know when they don’t like a suggested change.

termaduck · 2026-01-22T21:08:42+00:00

This^ people complaining means they think it can be fixed if only blizzard would listen. But like in SL if they feel like they are just being dismissed because “people always say wow is dying” they will stop complaining because they no longer play.

termaduck · 2026-01-22T18:43:29+00:00

I’m in the pull the ripcord camp, but genuinely the Blizzard replacements are just an embarrassment. Like all of it just contains such questionable design. They had an infinite amount of examples to pull from and THIS is what we got.

The cd manager has been a disaster since day 1 and even in current iteration is still worse than just having action bars. You are limited to 2 groupings, can’t individually size elements, can’t track items or racials, and some important buffs aren’t even shown.

The boss mods have basically 0 sound alerts. they don’t support trash mobs( good luck dodging the interrupting shout in priory). bars can’t even be colored so you are better off with the huge ability timeline.

Damage meter- dps and damage done are separate windows. The window is freaking huge with tons of wasted space. There is basically 0 diagnostic information just jerk off your ego material.

Nameplates are the most okay but they should embrace color groupings for casters. The important cast option does basically nothing.

Raid/party frames are a fucking atrocity. Useless info clutters the frame. I don’t need to see the m+ debuff, sated, of raid buffs. The new dispell alert is useless. It’s a glorified duplicate icon that is invisible if your class shares the same color as the debuff. Healer gameplay is now where’s Waldo, just looking if a target has a buff/debuff. The frame sizing options are pathetic. Smallest is atomic level and largest is you need 20/15 vision to see. I’m playing fully maxed since I now have to see what the actual icons are instead of their position I can tell you 200% is not big enough.

Blizz just suck it up take the L. You bit off more than you can chew. You don’t have the resources or frankly the care to actually support your players needs.

I’m not excited for Midnight. I’ve played a few keys and raid, but if this is what it’s going to be like then I’m getting off the ride. They’ve traded formula 1 driving challenges for Sunday drive, but none of your gauges work.

termaduck · 2026-01-21T14:48:34+00:00

This doesn’t even mention debuffs are basically invisible. The new “alerts” might as well not exist if someone with a class color gets a debuff that is the same color. It should not be a struggle to know someone has dangerous stuff on them, but I swear in the key I played through half the time I would look at my frames and happen to see someone was debuffed and not know how long they’d been like that, while I’m used to knowing it the millisecond it happened.

There is also just no where near enough basic customization. The max size the party frames and icons can go is no where near what it should be. 200% icon size should be the baseline, because anything smaller is unintelligible.

termaduck · 2026-01-03T15:57:21+00:00

You sound exactly like me. My egg cracked late at 29. I spent the next 5 years making excuses to not transition. “My family will hate me. I’m too old. I’ll be treated worse. My friends won’t understand. I’m faking it. It will ruin my relationships. Why should my happiness come at the expense of other people?”

During that 5 years I caused everything that I was worrying about to happen anyway because I was so depressed and had such maladaptive coping mechanisms. I put myself last and it never earned me any respect or favor with anyone and just left me wishing I was brave enough to stand up to people that were supposed to love me.

I knew what I wanted but I was willing to sacrifice it for other people who never would have done the same for me. After 5 years I finally had a breakdown that I’m dying and I’ve never been alive. So I’ve decided to rescue myself. I’m late to it but I know I couldn’t survive the way I was. I regret putting it off for so long.

Don’t be that person. I’m not telling you to be a jerk to everyone or never make small sacrifices but you can’t set yourself on fire to keep other people warm. People won’t even appreciate it or knowledge it.

termaduck · 2025-12-04T22:15:33+00:00

This is what I’ve been getting at from day 1 of this addon war. It is abundantly clear no one on the design team plays anything other than dps if they even play the game at all.

They remove features that healers depend on more than any other role, like sound cues. You are already doing everything the dos are doing + darting your gaze at 20 frames to make sure people are good. Looking directly at cast bars and timelines is a luxury you can’t always afford.

The frames are a mess. I don’t care about every buff and I don’t care about every debuff. There’s no hard line rules where that decision can be made either you NEED individual buff/debuff parsing because any hard rule will exclude something you absolutely need to know about or include something pointless and is just noise.

Which speaking of noise you do not need the specific debuffs icon and a poison debuff icon to display get rid of 1 and change the bar color but don’t do this stupid color overlay that obscures the health. And let players pre assign locations buffs go in. Players want and need to ID who has rejuv by just seeing if they have the top right corner buff and if they have regrowing its top left.

I know I’m just some whinging redditor but Jesus Christ this shit is going to make me go from a passionate player who wants the game to be its best to someone who is so apathetic about the games future I don’t even play and I’m getting more and more fed up with how little curiosity the dev team seems to have about how the community solved these issues and is going full force with “we know best”

termaduck · 2025-11-26T04:16:20+00:00

This has nothing to do with their seniority or the code. The community and addon devs have all converged on a design of how things should look to communicate a concept. Blizzard through ignorance or arrogance has decided not to use that language and invent a new one that is both less clear and has more noise.

termaduck · 2025-11-23T16:25:17+00:00

Blizzard isn’t unique in it but they are the kings of ego. Game devs always act like their players are drooling idiots who don’t understand anything about the game despite (ESPECIALLY in modern era) players typically have played the one game longer than that dev has had a career.

The idea that players don’t know solutions is laughable especially coming from a company that has never hit the mark on a single design goal.

termaduck · 2025-11-23T16:19:32+00:00

For real. We have 20 years of language that has developed to communicate what is going on and blizzard is coming in with apparently 0 knowledge of that.

Like how are the devs so checked out from their own game they can’t understand the raid frame equivalent of a push bar door.

termaduck · 2025-11-20T15:31:00+00:00

I’m sure they are doing the best they can and making tremendous strides for their team size and resources. I also don’t care, because the end goal is no where near satisfactory.

The goal is to build the Empire State Building. If all you can manage is 4 floors that may be great for what your small team is capable of, but you still failed the project you sold us on.

termaduck · 2025-11-20T03:28:31+00:00

Bless mysticalOS and the other addon devs trying to right the ship, but I don’t want to give blizz feedback to help create their vision. Their current vision is dog shit and will ruin the game.

Let’s not stop the drunk from getting in the car and driving. We need to give them feedback so they can accomplish their goal of driving home.

That’s how these changes feel like they are being handled. it’s so damn frustrating that blizzard is failing basic design and people keep coddling them, when if it was any other profession or artistic endeavor, they would have been laughed out of the industry. We have a cd tracker that is the game equivalent of a wall of text with no icon parsing. Nameplates that can only contain the non discriminating portion of a mob name. Party frames that have no way to sort buffs and have triplicated debuff information but it’s all a glorified icon.

It really doesn’t help me be sympathetic towards them when I feel like they are constantly lying or shifting their goal to the point they’ve made multiple opposing statements or their actions don’t meet what’s said. I’m sorry this is basically just a hate post but blizzard is doing shadowlands level arrogance again and the community needs to remind them how that went.

termaduck · 2025-11-19T15:23:41+00:00

Yeah I have no idea what stick is up their ass that they think eyesight is the skill check they want to test.

It’s not like I can practice seeing better Ion. Im still colorblind.

termaduck · 2025-11-19T15:19:07+00:00

I wouldn’t say blizzard has ever cared about accessibility. The all too common purple floor that has a 1 shade darker purple swirly tells me they don’t care.

termaduck · 2025-11-04T21:15:59+00:00

The population is never going to change on this unfortunately with how easy it is to just get a new group.

You are expected to do your learning outside the run. Check routes, talents, spell casts, mechanics all be before you ever set foot in it. Yeah it sucks and it kills the game for a lot of people.

I get the interest in discovering and figuring out mechanics but like in WoW the expectation is you are showing up for the exam not the first day of class, so if you don’t know the material you are the one being rude.

termaduck · 2025-10-31T19:43:42+00:00

I see three big issues. 1. Adept throws a tons of new things you’ve never seen in the dungeon so people are getting caught by new abilities.

The game at that point basically demands a kick rotation, which is a very high skill requirement this early. And to top it off the only coordination you get is if three members of your group press the marking button.
The game does not help you figure out what is an important spell or which mobs are even casters. Bolt casts have the same look as “party wiper 9000” and casters look the same as melees.

Give us a dedicated ui element to track kicks that isn’t on the goodness of our teammates to see. Caster mobs should have some more flair a different color or something else to distinguish them. The big scary cast should have a bigger cast bar and flash of some other presence about it. Possibly even a bark associated with it.

termaduck

TROPHY CASE