Since the launch of Midnight, we’ve continued to iterate on the addon-related changes introduced in the Midnight pre-patch. In the 12.1 Curse of Ula’tek update, we are pleased to be taking the next major step in that work. This work reflects the insights and feedback shared by our community, with a focus on auras, commonly referred to by players as buffs and debuffs.
These changes focus on preventing auras (whether on the player, enemies, or party and raid members) from leaking important combat information that can be used for combat automation. At the same time, we want addons to continue being able to show auras in a variety of custom ways.
To support that goal, Curse of Ula’tek will introduce new APIs that allow addons to display filtered sets of auras in customized ways, without exposing the underlying aura information that could be used for automation. Addons that currently display auras will need to be updated to support these new APIs, and we’ll be working directly with addon authors throughout the Curse of Ula’tek PTR to help them adapt to these changes and gather feedback during testing.
Looking forward to it. I would like this to include customising the buff bar cooldown viewer bars, if possible. I prefer this to relying entirely on a separate addon’s implementation. I’ve invested a lot in heuristics to do this today (see Enhanced Cooldown Manager). I wish it was simpler to identify which bar is which buff so that I can change its colour or style [out of combat].
It is extremely disheartening that we are reaching levels of customization we previously had for 15 years JUST NOW 8 months into the expansion.
It continues to invoke feelings of “this was not needed and has done nothing positive for the community” and I have seen very little from you guys trying to push back on that which makes all of this continue to feel like a drain on dev resources that has caused the content of this expansion to feel very lackluster.
For love of Elune, there is no reason to hide my current Rejuvenation status from addons. You’ve made UIs worse in every way including (and perhaps especially) in terms of stability, even for people who aren’t automating. I just want a pandemic counter on lifebloom, which your tools don’t allow. That’s absolutely asinine.
Will displaying auras in customized ways include being able to display them as things other than icons? I’ve been healing with statically placed, color-coded rectangles for decades now and the period of time at the start of Midnight and pre-patch when I HAD to use non-static icons was absolutely miserable and actually made me want to quit, which is kind of crazy considering I’ve been doing this for over 2 decades.
So how many more years do we need to wait to be able to see extremely basic information about the cooldowns of our party members, like their major offensive cooldowns, defenses, crowd control, interrupts? People just want to be able to see when other people in the group have cooldowns available, WITHOUT asking or needing to do silly things like pinging the action bar to announce when a cooldown is ready. And until you completely remove caster mobs from the game, an interrupt tracker will ALWAYS be necessary. I’m not saying just make it available for addons to access, I’m saying make it a part of the game directly, so everyone has it, because everyone SHOULD be able to have this information.
Also when can we finally expect to have Targeted Spells on party/raid frames as a core feature of the game like it was always supposed to be? Healers simply should not be expected to check enemy nameplates to be able to tell who is being targeted for damage. For them, that information belongs ON party frames. It’s the exact same information you can get from looking at nameplates, it’s just changing where you see it. That doesn’t go against any of your design philosophies.
And someday we need to be able to use custom sounds for alerts again. This is one of the biggest things lost with WeakAuras, just being able to use whatever sounds we want instead of being beholden to what Blizzard decides to give us. Sometimes I want a small sound that is easy on the ears, but still stands out just a little bit over combat. Other times I just want a sound that makes me laugh (when Icy Veins was still a thing for Frost Mage, mine would play a few seconds of “Ice Ice Baby” when it came off cooldown). This isn’t something that presents a major combat advantage, unless you want to consider how terrible the sounds we have now as being a combat disadvantage.
Though truly, your war on addons has gone way too far as it is. Changes made almost exclusively because of what the RWF players were doing barely impacted those players at all, while being MASSIVELY more damaging for more casual players, older or slower players, players who are hard of hearing or completely deaf, have poor vision or are completely blind. If anything, the correct answer is to roll it all back to pre-Midnight and focus ONLY on improving the base interface and improving encounter design so addons don’t have any reason they need to be the answer (e.g. not designing fights like Fractillus).
Yeah… I’ve been playing WoW since launch (with a few breaks), but so far the war on addons is the thing that’s brought me closest to rage canceling my sub.
Can you at least consider opening up log hooks for combat text customisation?
It’s quiet annoying to gauge damage taken without the ability to customise self damage text. MSBT made this possible beforehand, but without proper hooks no addon is able to cosmetically show combat text in a more organised and adjustable fashion as the self text being rigid and hidden under the default CDM position for most people as a class hud is ridiculous.
In PvP, major offensive/defensive and CC should be visible as a baseline, minor offensive/defensive and CC should be able to show or hide.
In 12.0.7, default ui “Enemy Buff” is missing Pain Suppression as a major defensive, Disarm as a major CC/defensive, Rogue’s Feint as a minor defensive. Also some major offensive, including Unholy Dk, Assassin Rogue, Affliction Warlock, Both spec of Demon Hunter. Some of the offensive might be instant cast, so we might need to figure out a way to show the pre-go, like showing debuff stacks or have special nameplates for summoned units.
Right now, Enemy Buffs is showing unecessaries purgeble buffs, and prioritize them then other important auras, we should be able to turn off the purge buffs and prioritize major offensive and defensive as a baseline.
Blizzard, you can take some most used BetterBlizzPlates aura white list, or WA aura alert as a references, people mostly were using Mes’s important alert. Or just collect opinions from AWC pro players
About addon APis: would it be possible to make stuff like MoneyFrameTooltip used by other Tooltips not using secret values anymore?
I don’t see how vendor prices of items would present an advantage in combat, on the other hand using secrets in the money frames breaks a lot of stuff in WoW (both bullt-in and external addon LUA code).
In understand that Blizzard wants to use secrets for combat-related variables, but please stop spraying enforcing secrets all over the place for stuff that is just convenience and unrelated to combat at all.
Really not enjoying not being able to see cooldowns and defensive and what not as a healer it feels like I’m regressing cause I don’t have the info I need. This is akin to not showing cast bars anymore so people struggle to interrupt.