Given Blizzard’s track records on enacting sweeping changes without any counter-change to compensate, what makes you think this is a misconception? Will they accompany this change with a similar reaction like they accompanied the healer nerfs in DF S1 and S2 with a reduction of massive groupwide damage spikes? They turned the first 2 M+ seasons of an expansion into a hellish experience because their metrics had shown that healing in raids was too easy.
It doesn’t matter if it’s mechanics/systems or class tuning, Blizzard always goes in swinging a big hammer, and only after they’ve smashed everything to bits will they go through the rubble to see where to go next.
But even if they actually do something, it’s rarely more than a nice gesture. The new UI redesign is a welcome step in the right direction, but it’s nowhere near as customisable as even addons from 2005 have been. I’d still want something to declutter the UI. You can’t even move or resize all the components, just some of them. It’s heaps better than the old UI, but it still needs to go a long way before it can compete with UI replacements like Elv_UI’s unit frames.
The new cooldown monitor is borderline useless with how it’s implemented. Even if you only use WA to track cooldowns, it’s already leagues ahead of Blizzard’s implementation. I cannot pick which cooldowns to track, I cannot arrange them, I cannot set an audio cue if a cooldown is up soon. They just threw every ability that has a cooldown in a separate quickbar and called it a day. After literal years (if not decades) of 3rd party cooldown trackers this was the best they could come up with?
To see how far behind Blizzard’s developers are on QoL items, go and install Plumber. The sheer difference in day-to-day convenience this little addon gives you compared to the base UI is insane. Blizzard implements events and mechanics that are cluttered and messy to use. Plumber takes that and offers more convenient ways of doing those things. The first time I’ve installed it was during the Emerald Dream part of DF, where you had to plant seeds. Plumber put a little menu next to the soil that showed you all your seeds, how many you had and how much of the currency used for growing. It also took the massive planting UI and shrunk it down. It also enable holding down the mouse to keep donating currency to the growing process instead of having to click individually. These are all things that should have been there out of the box, if those events were properly designed with the player in mind. Yet it takes an addon to make the most out of those patch events.
And now they are planning to take away core functionalities from mainly casual M+ players. Blizzard has neither the right people nor the mindset to design their UI/mechanics/systems around the players. They’ve been designing those in a bubble that got carried by addons for decades now. They are like Bethesda in that they push the responsibility for a functional gameplay experience onto 3rd party developers and just provide a barebones game. I honestly think Blizzard do not know anymore how to approach event/mechanics design from a player perspective. They’ve been designing barebones experiences to be made playable by 3rd party addons for so long that I don’t think they even know how to approach this issue from a human angle. Their failings in the UI remake and the cooldown monitor show that they do not even understand why addons like WeakAura are so popular.
I’d go so far and say if you believe that Blizzard will accompany this with a proper similar reaction, then you are having misconceptions. The entire history of WoW’s design processes contradict you. It will take at least half an expansion before the damage done to the game by these heavy handed changes will at least be somewhat mitigated, and for the next expansion they will turn some addon functionality back on to make the game playable again.
I agree. I also use VuhDo. Any healer’s performance skyrockets with click-to-cast functionality.
Simply because even if you figured out a way to bind heals to buttons, you would still have to select a target to heal. 1 extra action, therefore less reaction time.
However. This functionality was added to wow default UI keybinds. It already exists.
However. Its really bad. Its such an inferior version that i dont know anyone that uses it. So, they will be forced to update it and we will retain a VohDo thing from the wow UI.
However. What you should be concerned about are the things that they have 100% confirmed they want to get rid off with out an alternative:
OmniCD and “targeted spells” weak auras.
Those two things also improve performance by a significant amount and they better make sure thay reform dungeons and raids to make sure we wont need them in the first place.
But im all out of copium. So i really doubt they will. Be ready for a crazy hard M+ season when they get rid of them.
I never used such add-ons or macros (tried and failed). I am able to select my next target during GCD and then press the appropriate button. Portrait or tab. Casting costs mana and breaks mp5, so it’s a no-no, I’m swinging my staff or wand. My damage is miniscule anyway. People appreciate the result, they can go on a sensible rampage and have fun, because they have a reliable, powerful healer supporting them.
The time difference is 0.3s tops between click-and-cast and click-to-cast. It shouldn’t matter, I don’t like overly volatile combat.
My favourite other games have 5, 6 and 10-15 buttons. I can’t imagine reaching many more - clicking them is faster than arranging fingers in a neck breaking combination.
Thus I’m not sure that enabling 40+ abilities to cast easily is the actual way to go. It should be designed without, for without.
Healers have always been fond of onClick and Hover macros / add-ons so I absolutely support that they should be available as an option.
Lol, no. Casual players don’t even use addons at the moment and will be happy if the game becomes easier again because mechanics are no longer tuned around those using addons.
How do I spot guardian spirit proccing in the base UI?
How do I see all hots on someone in the base UI if I play resto druid? (It only shows 3 max)
How do I see if someone used defensives or if they need an external or they’ve got an immunity to just negate something so I don’t need to pay attention to them?
Same. I heal without trouble while using 0 combat addons.
Okay sure, I only run +2 content. But this way my brain has to work on thinking before pressing and wasting valuable mana.
Way more fun!
I used to play resto-shaman in DF (hc raids and m+), I only used standard UI, and my only combat addons were and still are DBM + TellMeWhen.
I had more than enough space in my UI for all the abilities I need, and I even had some keybinds still available after I assigned both healing and dps abilities.
I do not know for sure what happened with resto-shamans in TWW, but I’m pretty sure you don’t need 45 keybinds to play the game. Even more - over complicating your gameplay with 45 keybinds (for all possible, but mostly impossible scenarios, I assume) is probably the most inefficient way of making your game efficient
Surely Blizzard expects healers to make meaningful decisions. In order to make a meaningful decision, on whether to heal player 1 or player 2, I would need to know what defensive CDs are currently available to each player and what heals are currently incoming on each player so that I can prioritise.
It either goes on a long or a short cd, shown by the icon in your spell bar. Why do you even need to see it, it either works or it doesn’t.
Watch beneath your target’s portrait.
Again, you don’t need to see that, just heal. Either it’s overheal or it saves their lives. It’s not like we’re still that short on mana it would matter.
The only heal addon I use is Grid2, and that simply because the standard unit frame thingy can’t be moved freely across the screen or made smaller as far as I know.
Yeah, and why do you rely on it? Because game mechanics have needed to become quicker and quicker to keep the game entertaining for people using addons to make the game easier for them… Incoming damage was way slower in the past, exactly because devs new a healer first had to klick on the person they want to heal and then klick their heal; now ppl playing without addons have to deal with far quicker incoming damage because of it.
It’s not just healers. These changes are PUG killers. If they’re not using voice comms to coordinate, tanks won’t be able to immediately see if DPS or healers have their cooldowns ready for a big pull, it’s more difficult to coordinate kicks or CC. If you’re running a static group with voice comms, then you won’t be hit as hard by this, as you can just say “kicking next Overkill Deluxe”, “using next stun” or “blew Bubble of Shame, careful with next pull”.
These changes will mostly impact PUGging above a certain key range, increasing the gap between the PUGs and the coordinated players. I mean, even the latter group will be impacted, but likely nowhere near as much as the “higher end casuals”, for lack of a better word.
<3 looking forward to that. Maybe then we can finally go back to small controlled pulls, where we can actually see all enemies and properly react to all their casts instead of having 100 bars block our screen at once and 5 mobs needing an interrupt at the same time.
I miss the times when we had mob groups of 5, where you had to hard cc 2 out of the 5 first so it wouldn’t turn into a wipe. Way more immersive gameplay. Enemy mobs actually demanded respect and were kinda equal to the players’ strength.
Again, they won’t, because they don’t use these addons. And at least I will be happy to heal again once incoming damage gets tuned back to klicker-speed.
