One aspect that hasn’t been thoroughly discussed in the ongoing conversation about addon restrictions is the significant impact these changes will have on healers.
The default Blizzard interface has never been designed with healers in mind. I don’t know a single main healer who doesn’t rely on some form of healing addon. And there’s a good reason for that.
While Blizzard has introduced some small improvements—such as the ability to use mouseover macros—these still don’t replace tools like Clique or VuhDo. These addons allow us to bind healing spells to keys that only activate when hovering over unit frames, without interfering with other abilities when hovering over player characters in the game world. For classes like Mistweaver Monk, which already struggle with a high number of keybinds, this distinction is essential.
However, the core issue remains: the party and raid frames are practically unusable in their default form. They offer very limited customization and, for HoT-based classes like Druids and Mistweavers, they don’t even show all active HoTs. The few that are displayed often look too similar to each other due to nearly identical icons, making it hard to tell them apart at a glance.
And that’s not even touching on debuffs. The default UI doesn’t make it clear whether a debuff is dispellable by your class, especially in raid environments. Either too many irrelevant debuffs are shown, or the important ones are completely missing.
Many healers have spent years fine-tuning their UI to fit their playstyle: displaying HoTs in different colors, customizing the size and position of unit frames, tracking debuffs precisely, and even adjusting the layout to show health bars vertically instead of horizontally. These aren’t luxury features—they’re necessary tools for effective healing.
Another major concern is the inability to track party defensives in PuGs. For a healer, it’s critical to know who is still protected and who is in danger. That kind of awareness is not just key to gameplay, but also part of what makes healing engaging and rewarding. If this functionality disappears, healing becomes guesswork—and a lot less fun.
If addons can no longer track buffs, debuffs, or party cooldowns, it will render healing significantly harder, if not outright frustrating. Many players may abandon the role entirely or stop playing altogether.
Healers are often the last role considered in design changes. We saw this with the “one-button rotation” push as well.
Blizzard should seriously reconsider these addon restrictions—or at the very least, whitelist healing addons—until the default UI offers all the functionality healers need to perform effectively. Without that, healing in WoW risks becoming an unplayable experience for many of us.
And before anyone is telling that healing Addons will not be affected by the changes then please ask in the WoW UI Dev Discord or anyone knowing something about Addon development: Party cooldown tracking and Buff and Debuff tracking is essential for those Addons to function and those are being explicitly targeted by the changes with whatever other in combat restrictions added on top if this as well.
