Playing with mods vs playing without

Mod King to Little Timmy?

Until about a month ago, I was a mod king, utilizing mods like Spellalerter, Gladius, SCT, etc. Even minor mods like Bartender and Xperl were being used by me in order to maximize my gameplay... or so I thought.



It's obviously been a long time since the taking of this screenshot, but notice Spellalerter, bartender, Xperl... non-hotkeyed abilities...
Nonetheless, the times of being a mod watcher have ended. And I must say that the difference is night and day.



I will admit that going from all of those mods to 0 mods (actually, I'm cheating, I still use OmniCC and Itemrack) was really rocky and difficult for the first 70-100 arena matches. The biggest issue for me was initially the fact that buffs do not show on your party frames and that debuffs displayed are capped at 4. Who the hell at Blizzard HQ designed it this way? Why not just show all the debuffs? How about at least an OPTION to show all debuffs?

Other beefs with default UI: the in-game proximo is not unlockable, can't scale the size of the in-game scrolling combat text, lack of a timer over your abilities (like OmniCC), the list goes on.

The Disadvantages of Learning the Ways of Default UI

As a Paladin, the single most annoying thing about playing in arena with no mods when you know everyone else is using mods: your Divine Plea will never last more than 1 tick against any team with a priest/shaman on maps like Ring of Valor.
I can't count the number of times I would pop Divine Plea only to have it almost immediately dispelled on that map. And, on a few occasions on the other maps, I learned the hard way that popping Divine Plea 3 yards away from a pillar, even if you are about to run behind it, is not good enough to protect your Divine Plea against teams with Spellalerter/Xperl (Xperl will display buffs on the /focus frame and Spellalerter will tell you immediately when someone uses Divine Plea).

In the bigger scheme of things, though, mods are a serious crutch. I personally never thought so until I started adjusting without said mods. I started becoming more aware of things whereas before I could gaze at the middle of my screen to tell me when a druid was cycloning, a priest was mana burning, etc. If you play with 300 mods, have your frames moved around, buffs and debuffs placed in strange positions, you are just hurting yourself. Sure, you will be completely accustomed to them and play well, but you will slowly become more oblivious to the game and become more attached to relying on your mods to keep you alert.

In the past few weeks I've been watching a lot of streams on Xfire and, surprisingly, there are an awful lot of people that play with few (if any) mods. And many people use smaller mods like Gladius and OmniCC, which is a lot less significant than something like Spellalerter.

To those that do use a ridiculous amount of mods, it's ok to use them, but know that the skill cap is much lower for you because of how those mods are assisting you.