To me, using mods in raiding IS dumbed down. I'm still an MMO player and I left WoW years ago. All deadly boss mods did is tell players what is already under their nose with animation tells, emotes and projected images. To say games that don't use mods are dumbed down is ridiculous. I think we might be surprised just how challenging games can be without holy trinity and hate mechanics.

If you ask me, combat that requires watching your cooldown timers more than you watch your oponent is dumb.

If we can see what the enemy is about to do based on animation, we need only make the correct countermove. A simplistic interface that doesn't have us picking from a screen full of icons could in fact make it more interesting.

And to carry on my example of locking all similar attacks into one slot, I might want to set it where I only use a Level 1 lunge attack at Level 10. Each would not do much damage individually, but I could do a whole bunch of them, driving the enemy back and back and back, and allowing my friend to get past. Then I could switch tactics and hit them with normal Level 10 thrusts. The Lunges would have done enough damage that a few basic attacks should put them down. Then I join back up with my friend.

So no. We don't need a complicated combat system for it or be complex. We don't need to watch a screen full of icons on cooldown to have intense meaningful combat.

I don't think having to actually observe the environment, characters and combat movement in order to ascertain what's going on is 'dumbing a game down.' Poor design is having such visually clunky combat and un-dynamic team mechanics that you need a second monitor of text and graphs to explain it for you. Watch - or better yet, play - a Dark Souls boss fight (particularly with co-op) and you'll see that games are meant to be played well, not fed to you in a rainbow of colorful words. WoW-esque combat is dumb because the visual queues are so poor and the animations so unrepresentative of what's going on, that you can't actually play it like a video game.

It all sounds good to say you can observe the environment instead of relying on raid tools.

In reality, if you are in a raid, with 25 people around and having to concentrate on raid leaders cues,
do you think you will have time to look at visual cues? (Im not even putting LAG into the picture)
Are you sure you can DECURSE using vanilla interface?

What im saying is, its all well and fine to say that we want minimalistic UI in an MMO, but seriously, do
you think it will work well at all? Look at WoW. Can you imagine raiding using only vanilla interface?

So im not buying into the propaganda that Matt Firor is spewing about minimalistic UI.
He either has not raided before, or he is too out of touch with MMOs already.
Its all just marketing PR talk chaps.

In reality, when I'm leading 250 people into (PvP) battle, you damn better believe I need to rely mostly on "visual cues" to be able to follow what the hell is happening around me. Communicating by TeamSpeak or Ventrillo, specific things to watch for (objective reached, enemy forces arriving or retreating, ...) are given to people whos only job is to do just that and report; those can as well play lever 1 characters with their UI turned off - they have to be able to assess the situation quickly and precisely by visual clues alone to do their job, not rely on some piece of software trying to tell them what to do, since the enemy will deploy countermeasures against this software if it suspects you using it. Everybody else follows orders exactly and shuts the hell up, they don't need to know or understand what is happening at all, it's not their job.

Of course.

In a PVP battle, you probably don't need any UI tools. I don't use any UI tools when im doing PVP battlegrounds.
Kill whatever people kill, follow their lead. Simple. (Granted, i don't do much PVP. My interest lies more in raiding)

A raid situation is completely different. Its like trying to do a choreographed dance and not foul it up.
Timing and Distance are critical. Especially for decursing people, vanilla style just doesn't cut it.

My point is most if not all raiders in any MMO would want to rely on UI tools to raid.
You can bet there will be 3rd party tools used. Rift had a 3rd party DPS meter check.
So if UI tools are critical to raiders, would it make sense to have a minimalistic UI then?
Why are they declaring that they are going to have a minimalistic UI when it doesn't make sense in a MMO context?

Someone posted about DC Online having minimalistic UI.
I haven't played that before, is it really minimalistic and does it work in a raid environment?

Unless Zenimax Online has something that is so mind bogglingly good and special, (which i highly doubt)
boasting about minimalistic UI in ESO is just marketing bull crap TBH.

Lol, they're not doing anything to improve MMOs, most of their design choices are remarkably similar to games like Tera and GW2, which have both shown their hand already.

Lol i was right. Matt Firor doesn't do raiding.

http://www.edge-online.com/features/how-bethesdas-taking-elder-scrolls-online

In the above article he mentions:
Personally? I’m not a crafter. I want to go explore. That’s me. I tend not to do instanced dungeons a lot, but that’s
a separate kind of game again, and if it’s the whole endgame where it’s a raid, it’s a different kind of game yet again.

Wot??? U No DO DUNGEONZ??? UR GEARZ IZ TEH NOOBZ!!!! NO L33T RAIDZ 4 J00!!!!!

That's WoW style raids though (which other people often call "the dance" as well, from what I saw). Other games have other raid mechanics. In case of TESO:

* the lead designer comes from DAoC, which means PvP (RvR most likely) will get a big focus.
* they claim mobs (and this includes raid bosses) will have an improved AI, which would make any kind of "raid choreography" useless, and have raids be more dynamic and unpredictable (... which WoW raiders hate, I can already tell you that )

I have not played DaOC b4 so i can't comment how it'll be like. I'd imagine it'll be like a gigantic Wintergrasp.
Again the improved AI talk is also marketing talk. Unless the AI is truly alive, at the end of the day there will be a certain sequence, and we will still do the "dance" again lol

So yea, welcome to another round of
"Level Up to Max > Gear Up / Grind Rep > Raid > Wipe > Raid Somemore > Gear Up > Raid > Wipe > Raid Somemore > Gear Up > QUIT > Find next NEW EXCITING MMO"

at least in a raid we don't need a tank and healer XD now

Ofcourse you will.