Quote Originally Posted by The_Jackal View Post
For me, I define hard like this: Even knowing what you're supposed to be doing, it's not easy to do, and nothing in WoW, or any other hash-table driven combat system, really qualifies. Maybe healing whack-a-mole for a raid healer, but I feel that's a problem which can largely be addressed through dividing up responsibility, and good UI optimization. Same with DoT juggling for an Affliction lock. Is configuring an addon hard? Is paying attention to GTFO hard?
Addons like DBM and GTFO are the minimum for clearing progression mythic (and I'd argue even heroic for most people) raids, not the win button. They very much fit your definition above - i.e. "even knowing what you're supposed to be doing, it's not easy to do."

And healing triage (what you call "whack-a-mole") is similarly the bare minimum to be an effective healer in such content. Healers have fight mechanics too, and they aren't just moving out of red zones on the ground. You have to know your kit, how to kite/CC in some fights, when it's safe to dps, and you not only have to know your own mechanics, you have to know everyone else's so that you know when they might have to do something dangerous.

Sure after a while everyone starts to overgear the content and it does get easier over time, but if you're looking for absolute challenge then it's there, just challenge yourself to clear the content within that smaller window. You can be one of the folks testing those addons in the first place for example, going into those fights on the PTR with nothing but the Dungeon Journal to guide you so that the rest of us know where the prompts are. And Blizzard rewards you for it - the sooner your guild clears the whole raid, the more weeks you can farm it, which means better gear for your group, more of the raid-only mats as bad-luck protection or even BiS hunting, and more chances at the status symbol rewards like rare mounts.

Quote Originally Posted by Rodin View Post
The increasing reliance on add-ons and macros was another of the reasons I quit. To me, using an add-on is modding the game, and as such cheating. By the time of WotLK they were pretty much required, because Blizzard was amping up the difficulty to keep up with people using add-ons. Some people would outright kick you from a group for not using the correct add-on. Simply playing the game with the provided interface was actively frowned upon!
I can understand this frustration, addons provide some features that really should be baseline to the game. I remember how Blizzard themselves ended up using the community-created dps and threat meters back in Vanilla to help them design fights because they had never thought to make one themselves.

With that said, for the most part if you're not using specific addons nobody can tell but you. Even when they can, you can get the addon and simply disable it or its alerts. If you're really skilled enough to have the same level of output without them as someone else is with, that can be a personal challenge for you. As I covered above with Jackal though, for myself and many others, "knowing what to do" does not remove all challenge from the execution of that thing.