[fareesh]

I remember writing LUA scripts to alert people of certain encounter mechanics between boss attempts when my guild was among the US top 20 or so. The "boss mod" addons eventually caught up, but when you were among the first to get there, you could do a lot of additions/modifications yourself to make them better.

Great game, good times. Not anymore though from what I hear

[bladegash]

Yeah, when I was in one of the top guilds during vanilla, there was an addon that top guilds had that allowed for adding timers/modifications via LUA. I can't remember the name anymore, but it wasn't publicly available, just circulated amongst upper echelon guilds.

We would wipe dozens, if not hundreds of times, just to get all the timings down and scripted. It also helped that four of the people in our guild worked in QA for Blizzard (not so well-kept secret of many top guilds back then).

Like someone else mentioned, now WeakAuras more of less does that in a much more user friendly way. Still the same process of wiping hundreds of times to build the WeakAuras though.

[jabroni_salad]

The boss mod addons are still king, but over the past couple expansions a tool called WeakAuras has been getting really popular. It lets you make little displays that pop up or disappear based on in-game conditions. There is a whole ecosystem of these, you can share them via in-game chat, and they are pretty fun to put together between wipes.

[bpicolo]

> Not anymore though from what I hear

Still a ton of fun. I consider it better than the original - more content to enjoy.

[jefft255]

I think so too, and I played a lot in Vanilla. Shadowlands looks to be interesting.