Robot healing

World of Warcraft has a very powerful scripting language, which allows programming all sorts of add-ons and macros. And like everybody else I use quite a number of add-ons. For example Gatherer, which marks all the herbs I find with Raslebol on the map, so I don't need to write down the locations on a piece of paper. Or Telo's Infobar, showing me information on the main screen which I would otherwise need to press a couple of buttons to see. Or even Tacklebox, which reduces the number of mouse clicks necessary for fishing.

Unfortunately that is a slippery slope. You get lazy, install more and more of helpful add-ons, and in the end the macros play the game for you. Somebody just recommended ClickHeal to me, for use with my priest. Now I'm certainly impressed by the description of what this add-on is doing, that must have been many hours of programming. But I'll be damned if I'm going to use this. With ClickHeal you can basically put your priest on auto-follow, and just hit ONE button over and over, and the add-on decides which of the many priest activities to perform: Buff, remove debuffs, heal, it does it all, and even prioritizes what to do first. Turns your brain into mush, and your character into a heal-bot.

Now somebody is going to tell me that in a raid a priest *is* a heal-bot. And the better he "functions" in removing debuffs, healing, and buffing people, the better. Can't hit the different buttons fast enough? Install an add-on to do it for you. And please don't chat in a raid, it could disturb somebodies concentration. *Bleh!*

I refuse to play a MMORPG on that level. And a large part of my antipathy towards raids is coming from the tendency of raids to reduce people to the function of their characters. I'd rather go on a 5-man group or small raid, where it is me who is making judgement calls on who to heal when. Yes, there is a risk that I might mess up, but what fun is a game with no risk? The famous definition of Sid Meier, defining a game as a series of interesting decisions, is true for MMORPG as well. Hitting only one macro button repeatedly is not an interesting decision, even if it ends up keeping the raid alive and earns you some epic loot.