I'm talking about situations where I need to take pictures quickly in almost total darkness, such as parties and the like. I'm the official photographer whenever I'm out with my friends, so I need to be able to do that.
My camera has a pretty powerful AF illuminator for the standards of prosumer digicams, but it's still just a 5mm LED. It'll do for short distances, but for anything beyond spitting distance it needs external help.
I used to EDC
this one-mode twistie light; if you unscrew it just enough that it turns off it's possible to hold it like a pen and push on the back for momentary activation. This makes it great as an auxiliary AF illuminator.
The single mode was a problem though, as full brightness was often overkill and battery life was pretty lousy, so I swapped it for a short time as my EDC with
this multimode flashlight.
The two dimmer modes make that one much better as a general-purpose EDC, but it sucks for momentary activation. Every time I needed it to assist with autofocus I had to either leave it on for long enough that it locked into high mode (about three seconds), or click through four modes the next time I needed it (including, of course, the never-enough-hated strobe and SOS modes). That got annoying very fast.
I then replaced the MTE with a Nitecore DI, which is to me the perfect EDC, as it allows me to use it both as AF assist and multimode general purpose light.
As for the WB it doesn't suffer, probably because it already considers the rather blue light of the illuminator and compensates accordingly. Even if it didn't, though, weird WB is better than a horrible blurry mess in the picture.
In the end, my opinion is that multimode lights would be much better without SOS and strobe, and with a much shorter time limit for mode lock.