Last night I was forced to bow out of the Heroic Warlord Zon’ozz fight when my ostensibly updated addons repeatedly caused the game to freeze and crash on me. It didn’t make any sense at all how my addons were showing as out of date when I had manually updated every single one of them.

I then tried doing the fight without a single addon – no DBM, no Spellflash, no Recount – and boy, did I feel so…crippled. And naked.

“I can’t raid without my addons, sorry, guys,” I said to my core group and logged out before I could go emo on Vent.

Fast forward several hours of research and tinkering, plus a fresh install of the WoW client, I finally discovered the root cause: the “Download Now” buttons of certain addons on their respective pages at Curse were still doling out the older, out of date versions! To get to the updated version, I had to go to “Other Downloads” and select the file.

So now that I can raid again, I’m at peace with the world, but the experience also taught me one thing: I’ve become overly-dependent on addons. Once upon a time, back in Wrath, I raided using only two: Deadly Boss Mods and Recount. Now I have all these extras, namely:

- Dominos
- Titan Panel
- Tidy Plates
- Spellflash
- Bitten’s Spellflash Library
- Bitten’s Spellflash: DK
- NPCScan
- NPCScan.Overlay
- Healbot (for my druid)
- Decursive (for my druid)

“I don’t use addons, not even Healbot!” bragged one healer in LFR. “Addons don’t mean shit if you don’t have raid awareness.”

Well, I have to admit that no amount of addons can compensate for lack of raid awareness or skill. DBM, for instance, can only do so much with their warnings; ignore them and you’re dead. Recount and Skada tend to distract numbers-conscious DPS who make a career out of checking the meters to see if they’re still in the lead instead of checking for adds that might pop up any second. But in such scenarios, the fault lies with the user. Addons, in my humble opinion, make life – and raiding – so much easier for WoW players who want to get the job done.

But there are still those who insist that really good players DON’T need addons and can make do with the default UI. My response to that is a raised eyebrow followed by, ORLY? Then pray tell, why do all the Tankspot videos and sundry raiding guilds’ videos show UIs packed to the rafters with addons? We’re talking about the absolute best hardcore raiding guilds here, folks. People with MAD skills. Would they have gotten their first world kills without using a single addon? I doubt it. Until I see a top raiding guild video that doesn’t have any mods in it, I’m sticking to the belief that a raider can’t be at his best without them.

But hey, feel free to disabuse me of the notion if you have solid proof showing otherwise!