This comment is based on the Midnight beta build as of Nov 13.
Two small aspects of the Midnight UI have jumped out at me so far as making combat far less approachable, one more than the other.
Before I dig into the details, the general gist of the problem is that, for me, associating written words with things (like mechanics) is just incredibly challenging, especially when the thing is not exactly the literal meaning of the words. I’m much better at associating things with numbers, colors, shapes, icons etc. And this quirk of how my brain works has an unfortunate interaction with certain changes in Midnight. I’ve found workarounds that I’ll discuss. I’ll also discuss some potential design solutions that, to me, would be clear improvements without revealing data that would enable computational weak aura-like UI elements.
I’ll use dungeon boss boss mod timers as the first of two examples. I haven’t yet memorized the mechanics for these new dungeons yet, but even when get to that point, there’s this separate challenge of guessing which spell name goes with which mechanic when I’m reading my boss mod timers. I do have a solution that blizzard provides directly in their UI: the boss mod displayed as a timeline with visually distinct icons. I can glance at those and get something visually that I can associate with a mechanic. That’s great. That said, I’d prefer to use the old timer based display and have the timer bars either inherit color from the icons or have an option for us to color code them.
Technical note - I understand on the technical side the client can’t have non-secret spell ids, so the color coding would need to be server side. Custom color coding would still be possible if the server allowed the client to send a list of colors for the spell ids, similar to how they’ve announced they’re going to implement a way for the client choose which mechanics get sent to show while protecting the secrets from boss mods.
For a second and more frustrating example, NPC IDs are secret which means we can’t add visual distinctions for different mob nameplates in beta. This means when we pull a couple packs in a dungeon, I have to read nameplates to find the caster I want to focus for kicks and to find the priority target I want to burn. And even that also requires me to know what they’re actually called and mentally filter out the flavortext in their names. For me, that’s incredibly unpleasant. Similar to boss mobs, I do already have a workaround, although this one is more janky. The workaround I’m planning to use to avoid this is to have 16 macros per dungeon season: 1 priority target and 1 priority focus macro times 8 dungeons, where those macros have a list of priority focus and dps targets for the key. It’s similar to have I have for the odd totem that spawns in keys today, but pumped up to 11. And it’s fine I guess, but honestly not fun to need to do all that prep for a janky workaround to something I used to use colored nameplates to show visually. Similar to boss mods, I think the preferable answer is to allow the client to send colors associated with npc ids and then return colored nameplates inside the secret to preserve the secret of npc id.
I do want to note that I can see an argument here that’s there’s some skill expression in learning mechanic and npc names and associating them with what they do. It’s a preparation type of advantage that a player cannot outsource to an addon author in Midnight. That’s a legit argument. For me, with how my brain works, it’s a skill I don’t have. And I can already see that on beta. To be honest, I already knew about that shortcoming when it took me about a year longer than other kids to learn how to read. And it still happens at work today when I have trouble learning some technical jargon and pick it up slower than colleagues.
More importantly though for the game design about where the fun of the game in wow combat comes from. For me, memorizing what the mechanics are and what to target and what to kick is the homework part of wow that I do to get to the fun part. The fun part is learning how to execute when you already know all of that stuff and, in the moment in combat, you have this clarity about what’s happening and what you need to do, and yet it’s still hard to execute. It might be hard To execute because there’s a lot happening in your rotation or because there are mechanics to dodge or interrupt or soak etc, or, in midnight, because there is a coordination puzzle to solve in the fly and a weak aura can’t help you do it. All of that is great and is where I get my passion for the game. Associating spells and npc names, and reading them in combat, is not part of what I enjoy. To me it’s homework. And these particular changes make combat a lot less approachable for me.
To be really succinct, my view is the UI should show the combat state as clearly as possible while (under the Midnight framework) making as few decisions as possible for you. It’s a tough balance to strike in places. In my view, knowing which mobs are in the pack at a glance and knowing what mechanics you’re facing at a glance are clearly about knowing the state, not solving it.
PS: unsecreting unit player and unit pet cast information seems bananas to me in the context of the design intention around the Midnight UI. That exposes a lot of information to addons that I really think would need to be secret to avoid rotation related computational weak auras-esque functionality.