So it turns out that CastSpellByName is blocked on the World of Warcraft Classic client.
It was not in vanilla, so this is a change.
This change will disable addons like Afflicted and Decursive.
Now, this is actually a change that I love. IT was completely crazy that these were allowed in the first place, but what’s your thoughts on it?
The API is the same as current WoW near enough.
Apparently the API for classic was much more … generous.
A lot more. It was downright exploitable.
In retail you can use it to cast mounts or toys it’s just blocked for racials and your spellbook abilities. And the same is for classic but in there mounts are items instead of of spells so it’s pretty much compltely blocked. It’s good thing because you can pretty much a make bot using that.
That’s right. I’m making the same argument you are, but it really does not fall in line with the philosophy of “no changes”, which is why I was interested.
This was one of the big flaws of Vanilla. The fact that you could write bots for it using LUA.
You can use /castsequence in Classic now though.
Blizzard never said no changes. They said they want authentic experience but without exploits that works in their cloud. Those to things meant that some changes had to be there.
I remember the hysteria that ensued after they banned Decursive, people whining on the guild forum that this would make decursing impossible.
Personally i felt vindicated.
They didn’t, but the community most certainly did. The #NoChanges crowd is big and loud, and mostly stems from a lack of faith in Blizzard to do anything this good today.
This is not an exploit either. While you could certainly argue that Blizzard did not make a UI implementation faithful to their intent, the fact is that Blizzard openly published an API with a function called CastSpellByName, intended to be used by players, and then people just found out they could do this.
Prior to 1.12 you could even write addons that made you move automatically! There were literally addons that made you walk across the world automatically to get all your flightpoints.
But regardless of whether or not it was intended (probably not) and whether or not it was an exploit (it wasn’t), I’m glad they made this change, and I just wanna hear what the community thinks.
There’s a classic forum now, you can post it there.
My guess is that the moderators will either lock this or move it there.
I posted it there. It’s been moved here.
-.-
I think they just made functions in the API that they needed for themselves. Players found them and used them so eventauly Blizzard just had to come up with a solution how to keep these functions in and make them anavilalbe for addons.
Blizzard didn’t intent to have 3rd party addons run in the game. Otherwise they would publish an actual documentaion. And only recently we got some clunky, incomplete ingame one. The API was only designed to make UI implementation seperate from the game. That way they didn’t had to recompile whole game just to change one button’s position. It was the players that discovered that you can put certain scripts in the proper folder and game will run it. Blizzard just embraced by implementing the addons button, etc.
Yeah, there’s something you don’t know I would say… 
Blizzard published an API with a tutorial somewhere near the end of vanilla. It was some download thing and the installer looked like the WoW CD installer actually, and it dumped literally all the LUA and XML files and like 300MB of art assets into a folder of your choosing so you could peruse them at will and call anything you wanted.
It even came with a tutorial!
So you look through how the action bars work and… voila. Enjoy breaking the game
Found it. It’s in ChatFrame.lua
SlashCmdList["CAST"] = function(msg)
if(msg ~= "") then
CastSpellByName(msg);
end
end
EDIT:
Found the data on WoWWiki, but it links to private servers, so I won’t link it here. The one on WoWPedia, however, does not, and it also shows the screenshot of the installer I remembered!
Here it is:
https://wow.gamepedia.com/Interface_AddOn_Kit
I know about Interface Addon Kit. But what I mean is proper documantion that gives you list of functions, what do they do, what arguments do they take and what values do they return. Just plain technical information. Something like wowprogramming has but official and up to date.
Nowadays it’s kind of annoying if you make an addon for some of the newer systems you need to look and analyze a lot of code sometimes to figure out what functions to use.
I’m pretty sure that GlobalAPI.lua, WidgetAPI.lua and Events.lua was available as part of Blizzard_APIDocumentation that described everything from the parameters to the returns of the functions and then at some point they decided to remove it, I’m not sure when they removed it and why but my guess is it was too much to maintain.
I would rather they didn’t disable any functionality that actually existed in Vanilla as long as it is realustically possible, and in this case it is. But I’m not going to be bummed over it either.
It was very exploitable to be honest.
There were some legitimate uses in my view though. A friend of mine wrote an in-game “bot” (but it was a legit addon!) that continuously summoned food and water, drank it to get the mana back, and traded stacks to anyone who opened a trade window. Kept going until you told it to stop while going to walk the dog lmao.
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