Breakfast Topic: Is the endless updating and configuring of addons worth it?

I have to start out by saying that I hate addons. Yes, I understand their utility, I use a lot of them, and I appreciate the talented and devoted people who make them — but I really, really don’t like them. In my perfect world, I would simply fire up a game and play it without the need to spend time finding, downloading, and configuring a bunch of additional features. But WoW‘s super basic UI, though it’s improved over the years, makes addons a necessity.

So today let’s talk addons — the good, the bad, and the sometimes endless configuration process.

What’s my problem with addons? Mostly, it’s the ongoing updates and customization. Over the last few weeks, Bartender forgot some of my hotkeys and I was left trying to figure this out (and set them back to what I wanted) while running a dungeon on our leveling stream. This meant I spent a lot of time accidentally casting Heroism. Oops.

Over the past few days I’ve made a push to do more LFRs to grind through the legendary ring quest. After one run, I decided my raid UI was a mess and set to reconfigure my raid frames — which I find necessary to keep track of other players — and HUD — which I find necessary to keep track of myself. This happened mostly in brief periods of downtime while running said raids so I could easily see what I was changing and what I still needed to change. Then there was googling to figure out what certain settings meant and how to tweak or turn off different features.

After getting things the way I wanted them, I realized that the settings didn’t carry to alts, despite the addon information saying they should. In the process of figuring this out and tweaking the addon’s profile settings, I managed to completely remove all customization from the alt I was trying to fix, putting me back to square one. While I did eventually figure out how to copy my settings, it took a lot of trial and error and general frustration.

In short, with addons I always spend a lot of time setting things up when I want to be playing. And while I have things the way I want them for now, when the next patch arrives I may have to start all over again… and I don’t look forward to it.

So tell me, readers, do you use addons? Do you feel you need addons? And just how much time do you wind up spending configuring when you want to be playing?