Join Game Director Ion Hazzikostas as he recaps and explains the planned changes to addon capabilities, and the accompanying broader changes to combat and encounters.
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Boooo! ​​​​​​​​​​
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I have a friend who has visual issues, and they rely on certain addons in order to assist them visually, relying on certain sound prompts on when to active spells and abilities, and to help them avoid certain dangers.
Without them, they are heavily hampered and are unable to do mythics or raids without it.
Blizzard’s method, once again, is to take a sledgehammer to something and destroy it. They installed a lift into their two story building, then got irked that too many people use it. So they proceed to smash the lift and destroy the accessibility ramps into the building too.
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Im sorry… this is a whole blog post about nothing at all.
What are you talking about? Normal Raids, F&F guilds, and +10 dungeons and Delves “needing” addons?
Never in the history of WoW has ANYONE needed an addon for that. And it has NEVER been an issue at all. The only ones that “needed” an addon were the people that were actually not that good at the game and needed that “extra help”. You are hurting them, not helping them.
You are all being really, really dishonest with all this discourse. The REAL reason you want to get rid of addons is because you are sick of Mythic Raiders cheesing your bosses with WA. In particular, RTWF raiders that you love so much.
And MEANWHILE you are throwing everyone else under the bus for that. Because there is not a single addon that “plays for you” or “tells you what to do” in M+ for example. NEVER. Since Legion when you introduced that game-mode.
But you dont care about us. You only care about your precious little RTWF raiders and their dumb event…
ALSO:
So much bla-bla. And WHERE is my party frames for healers huh? You want me to heal in that garbage of UI you guys made? PLUS, you put mob’s Spell Target in your new Nameplates, but refuse to paint that in the Party Frames? WHY?
And you want to make combat more “clear” but ALL the mobs are called “Voidweaver… something” and you cant even see who you are targeting?
So many contradictory things here. And I dont see any improvement at all. Just paragraphs of what I have read 3 times already.
There. There is my feedback. Less “bla-bla” about “not needing addons to play” and more coding your own addons properly. Please. ACTIONS. Not WORDS. The addon creators are 10x more efficient at it than you guys. Hire them please!
And stop ingoring M+. It’s insulting that you guys spend 3 months or more of a season with ZERO tuning at all. In particular when… coincidentally… the MDI is running. Im frankly sick of stale metas. Put some inflation in M+. Like you do in Raids (your poster boys) with % aurabuff over time…
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Very reasonable line of thinking behind this decision, I approve.
Will be very interesting to see how it turns out.
Cautiously optimistic because as always
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There’s a TON of functionality missing for PvP going away with the loss of addons, and currently there’s little to nothing to replace these things in the beta. Is this something that will even be addressed? Everything feels like it’s still so early on development UI wise, I’m not even sure most of the PvE changes will have made it fully in by the end, let alone anything PvP related (e.g. DR trackers, enemy arena team display upgrades). Not to mention that almost all of the UI changes are so heavily geared towards PvE that some even seem to degrade the PvP equivalent use cases. Even on the non-UI front, there’s arena maps missing in rotation that have been missing for a while now and haven’t even been fixed yet.
I’m getting more and more scared for the future of PvP.
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This exactly.
“Oh no 3 dozen highest skill people might find a way to make this fight a little easier! Better shaft 30 thousand to make sure that doesn’t happen anymore!”
It’s ablism at the clearest way. To use your example, Blizzard’s response to this is to say “Hey you can make the stairs yellow if you like!”
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More like sheep see ppl use addon X they need add on X they tell others get add on X or no invite…
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Yeah no.
I really liked the ability to make my own interface widgets with WeakAuras, experimenting with ways to display stuff in weird ways, and you’re taking my drawing board away because somehow people who couldn’t react to stuff flashing on their button bar had an addon that showed them what they should press and NOW their reaction time magically was fixed and were superhuman button mashers.
Nothing you do with the interface will give me that back. I’m stuck with you trying to mimic “popular addons” I didn’t use and plastering them on my screen OR ELSE. If I disable the “fellow teenager” brand imitations I don’t have the info since I can’t create anything myself because the info iS A SeCReT teE hEE!
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The addon changes are right and necessary. Please don’t let a handful of loud users block an adjustment that makes WoW more accessible for the vast majority.
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I support changes and i would go step further.
“Midnight includes a new Boss Warnings system which allows players to see which boss mechanics are upcoming, while leaving the choice of how to handle them in players’ hands.”
Unnecessary and anti gaming. Players are supposed to learn encounters by memorizing. Animations and sound effects should be only things that are announcing what is about to happen.
Scrap that built-in DMB please.
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But they always listen to the loud minority in the M+ base…
lol you are learning to stack or run…. they not changing moves every fight… Stop being lazy and relying on an addon to tell you so.
I’ve got visual and memory issues. WeakAuras allowed me to compensate for both by letting me add text underneath the icons of important buffs as well that summarize what they do and this has helped me a lot. I doubt Blizzard will ever feel the need to add a level of customizability like this though because f**k me for having such a specific issue I guess. 
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Those who didnt touch mythic + 10 or higher or normal/heroic mythic raids still wont gonna touch them, because their main problem werent the addons, but something else like:
- Consume too much time
- Solo players
- Ect
SO these addons never affected them in any form, yet you “punish” those who used them for years. I agree that many addons that made x fight jokes need to be banned in any “clever” form, but gutting everything combat releated addon are gone too far.
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For once I am very happy with the direction Blizzard is taking. WoW will finally feel like an RPG, and not like a calculator. The best thing to do would be removing all addons and addon support altogether. I’ve been playing without any combat addons since Dragonflight so I will be in that privileged position of nothing changing for me. If anything, the game will feel easier. I can tank/dps/heal m+ up to +13/+14 fine and do heroic raid fine with no addons, and I am just an average person, not a cutting edge 200IQ player. So to all those people dooming and glooming - no, the game will be fine. You will just have to redo your UI with EditMode instead of ElvUI and WeakAuras.
Keep at it Blizzard. Big W for removing addons! :3
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When are you introducing different nameplate colors for mob types? This feature should be baseline and not provide a “competitive advantage”, this is the only reason I can reasonably identify which nameplate belongs to which mob, because I can’t read the names fast enough.
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Once these changes go live, I believe that for the most part assuming the text is 100%, players won’t be as negative as they were initially.
My only concern is the part where it says: (about addons)
”But they can’t “know” with certainty whether you or your target have a specific debuff currently active, or what the cooldown of a given ability is.”
This means debuffs cannot be as unforgiving as they are currently, I recall having a lot of attempts getting to resilient 13 due to operation floodgate.
During one of the failed runs, I had the bomb on me and went from full health to 0 in what felt like only 5 seconds, with dmg reduction cd up. So the healer in this case didn’t notice debuff and I could not do anything about it. A paladin dps went “lol why did you die”. Kinda wondering if this will be a more common situation ahead.
This is a controversial topic, and I know the launch experience is probably going to be quite rough, but I think this is the best long-term decision for WoW. The biggest problem is that it took 21 years to happen, which is why it gets to much resistance now.
I do think it’s a shame addons like ElvUI seems to be heading to the graveyard as collateral damage. While I personally don’t use it, I know many who do and will miss it dearly.
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Cheers, looking forwards to play the game without being forced to play with addons <3
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I for one support this decision and look forward to having most of what I need, or maybe even all of it, baked right into the game.
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