Now what I really need is for them to give something similar to druid or priest (cos I have both of those either at 80 or close by.)

“We also introduced several new heals for Holy Paladins including Healing Hands (an AoE heal-over-time that is applied to all players standing near the paladin), Light of Dawn (a cone heal with a 30-yard range)” (this was taken from world of matt)

And there’s also room for a discussion about whether you should be fighting the UI or the actual mob (ie. what does it really prove if the debuff icons are really teeny and hard to see?)

But mostly I think you’re right and I should write some more about LOTRO raiding. I’m very lucky in that the guys I raid with there have the patience of saints and are generously running raids to some of the easier locations (imagine raiding Naxx) for newer raiders and alts. Which means I have had a chance to get a feel for the pace of the LOTRO raid game. As another bonus, the raid leader is french and I love french accents The main thing to note is that WoW raiding used to be much more like this before addons really took on.

I don’t in any way claim to be an experienced LOTRO raider, I may see if I can persuade Arb to write a little about the more cutting edge side of things.

The one thing I really don’t like about addons is if you don’t pick the “winner”. Interesting that you mention Cosmos, because I used that for a long time. I had everything set up just the way I liked, then it wasn’t supported anymore. *sigh* Then I had to go through the pain of finding the “improved” versions of what I used previously.

However, the worst for me was EQ2, where the game is almost unplayable with the base UI. Patch day was not just a pain, but it also meant that my preferred UI (Fetish Nightfall) was probably not updated yet.

We’ll see how it goes for LotRO. I’m hoping that the impact will be minor, but my experience tells me it will be otherwise….

But what I mean more is that I’d like to see healing based more on area effects, cone effects etc, so you’d actually look at the raid to decide where to go heal rather than at a grid on the screen. It would be quite a different design for raid healing, with much less emphasis on healing a single player quickly and accurately.

Paladins were said to be one button healers. Well, actually two. The bigger heal Holy Light or the shorter casting time minor heal Flash of Light.

I had a mod that turned me into a proper healbot.
It decided based on an incoming damage prediction and health level of the target which spell to cast and which rank of the spell to cast to minimize overheal.
This had some drawbacks, there was a chance the mod screwed up royally and the guy died. But most of the time it was much more economic with mana preservation than me.

I am against Addons and would only allow heavily restricted restricted macro use in any MMO. I am also opposed to anything more than cosmetic UI / skin modding.

Game companies must provide a proper and working interface for their games. It cannot be that players of said game depend on external addons for maximum performance. The chance of cheating, abuse and exploitation is just too high. And it can also take the fun out of the game through too much automation.

I bet there would be a boss mod for LOTRO’s Sammath Gul that tells me exactly when I have to hit the “clobber” or “punch” button to interrupt the boss from casting his devastating spell.

But I think preserving a “pip of fervor” for clobber while still using other skills and doing damage and not just sitting there only doing clobbers on cooldown is a player skill, something that has to be learned and mastered. An Addon could take that away or make it easier. Still, it would not be nearly as bad as the “Healbot” addon!

As Andy said, I also would miss Grid… but does this not tell something? Namely that Blizzards Raidframes are PURE SHITE and need and overhaul, something they totally ignored and left the field entirely to modders.

People have done that in the past (in wow), enable friendly names with health bars and click away (or have a mouseover macro)

As to the true-scotsman analogy: Imo healers without addons aren’t bad healers… They just are not as good as they could be. That is not to say, that they are worse than every healer who *do* use addons, because that is not true.

It just saddens me, that good players, through some distorted sense of either “what the right way to do things” or “I’m am actually doing better this way” chose to handicap themselves, by not being all they can be.

I do think there’s a difference though between addons that make healing easier, and ones that make surviving easier. I wouldn’t mind so much if things like DBM got banned because I think it is a bit of a crutch which reduces encounters somewhat to watching and reacting to timer bars.

I realise this is not much dissimilar to healing, which is all about watching bars anyway, and I can’t really justify the disparity between wanting DBM and its ilk to go away, yet wanting to keep Grid or Vuhdo or whatever.