World of Warcraft: Midnight is on the horizon and set to streamline the game for players of all skill levels, giving WoW a more approachable combat system for all. Class specializations are being revamped to make it easier to track key buffs and debuffs, reduce pressure to rely on addons, and make the path to mastering every specialization clearer. Midnight keeps the excitement of combat alive while opening the door to WoW wider for everyone!
Looks promising and fun. Will have to reset the approach to WoW come pre-patch and learn the game again. Looking forward to it. <3
I hope the team considers something that Ion touched on months ago when you rolled out the Combat Assistant.
He mentioned discussions on giving people access to a way to customize their own “Combat Assistant Priority” and sharing with others via a string-link. Similar to how talents are shared.
Hope this is something that could be done going forward. In most cases it will end up with “just copy this and you’re good”. But it would be nice to have such an option, unless the gameplay changes and approach to combat changes so drasticly that we don’t really need a Blizzard-Hekili look-a-like.
Why do you insist on making retail into classic?
Please make a reliable backup for TWW. Might need to roll back from Midnight.
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Personally I don’t use many combat addons. I have WA installed but I don’t really use it. To be honest I don’t understand how to set it up haha. I use Plater purely to know what/when to interrupt because, well, I used to be appalling at that. The addon I probably rely on the most is Hekilli. Now before ya’ll groan at me, there are two reasons for this:
I have a slight disability with my left hand due to a cycle accident as a child. The result of this is my left hand is a little clumsy, inaccurate, and lacks any meaningful form of muscle memory. So locating key combinations for keyboard casting is almost impossible for me. My right hand however, when using a mouse, is incredibly accurate.
So I mouse cast. I have my UI set up in a very unique way and I click-to-cast with a single mouseover macro for interrupts. I use the keyboard for movement only. I do everything else with the mouse; casting, camera control, etc.
On top of that, I am also mildly Autistic and suffer with brain-fog as a result, so remembering complex strings of combinations is a challenge for me.
Hekilli solves that problem. I don’t just sit there and click the spell it tells me to, as to be honest sometimes it doesn’t always suggest the best thing, but I rely on it being there as a guide. Trying to remember without it would be a game killer for me. I don’t use the boxes to suggest the next cast, I have button flash and use that only.
I’m not the best player in the world, I will never be Mythic raider level, nor would I be anywhere near the top DPS for my class. But I can hold my own. I can run +10’s keys on all current dungeons without too much difficulties. I don’t play PvP, ever. But sadly for a damage mele player the amount of DPS you can pump out is critical to being accepted/invited/etc, so without Hekili my overall DPS will drop, I will then stop being invited, and will just gradually fade away. That I won’t do, so if rotation helpers go I will probably have to go along with it. No great loss to the community as a whole I am sure lol
Making combat more generic and easy because people can’t read a 10paragraph guide on their class or watch a 5 minute video is such a crap idea.
Having to track different buffs/debuffs during fights is what makes the game fun. Instead of everyone just using one button rotation in a year from now…
TLDR: We want 9yo Fortnite kids to be able to play WoW on XBOX with a controller and pull a 99% log by pressing A and B only. Complexity IS rewarding and high cognitive load is a good thing, or you think that your player base is mentally challenged? If I can pull a very high log with muscle memory only i will stop playing for sure, because it’s not challenging anymore.
Really dont like these changes. Sure we have to wait and see how it turns out on release but so far, it killed the hype for me.
I like the ideas in general overall and the objectives here, but the new frost mage is a disaster. It’s got like 18 buttons in total for the whole class, which is down from 42. Same issue with fire.
Maybe that was a bit much pruning guys? Maybe chill out a little bit here? No pun intended.
I like what’s happened to the CD’s. That’s good stuff.
But here’s what I really don’t like. You still haven’t learned your lesson on readability! How do I know? Because with frost, there’s still a ton of effects firing off in all directions that don’t mean anything, and what really means something is going to be represented as a tiny icon on every nameplate with a number on it that stacks to 20, and my job is to read these tiny numbers to figure out whether to Ice Lance stuff or not.
So my combat loop is going to be read 5 tiny icons next to 5 health bars in the middle of my screen and look for numbers greater than or equal to 4, and to especially worry about numbers approaching 20.
Can we not do this? This is literally worse than when we started. Right now I just have to see the icon exists instead - way easier.
Ideally the enemy should look like it can be ice lanced - physically. To indicate to the targeted player in PvP that they’re in danger, and to get my eyes off always looking at bars and icons. I want to visually see stuff being hit, but I have no time for this when I’m always looking at UI panels. I want that visceral violence of my stuff hitting enemies and causing damage, and I’m not getting that. It’s still World of UICraft, it’s just not World of AddonCraft.
Start over on Frost Mage. Terrible overhaul.
it depends what they mean. if they wanna simplify classes like arcabe or enh could be good. but let see…
Just want to say the new status quo doesn’t have to be total smoothbrain
Just don’t have situations where you have to track 5 different random procs individually that you yourself generate, let alone tracking what enemies or party members have going on
There’s a lot of space to land on between two extremes.
I’m delighted with this direction.
People will give out hell as usual but reducing the complexity of the gameplay is the best thing you can do to improve the health of the game.
I look forward to dusting off some old characters in Midnight
I think a lot of classes can have their rotations comfortably simplified but you need to be careful that you don’t take away the utility and fun aspects of classes by doing so which was the criticism of the pruning in WoD. Personally I like this direction but I am cautious that quite a lot of specs have very janky rotations that are hidden by the sheer amount of abilities involved in that rotation.
that’s good, i hope everything goes smooth and nice
I am looking forward to this. Some classes were way too much bloated, so it’s good they are changing them. however, my only fear is for them to change ALL classes into this. let’s hope only overly complex specs will be affected, or that reworks being done don’t destroy the fun aspect of those.
Does that mean SBR will be gone?
have you seen how many abilities ele shaman has in classic right now? MoP was crazy, there’s a reasopn they tried to prune in WoD
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hoi8xV0GFuw yes everything is fine 
Wow on Handheld when?