Im sure there are a bunch of threads on this, but I wanted to post to give feedback on the proposed addon changes.
For starters, I don’t necessarily disagree with the philosophy Blizzard has here. I think, because of addons like weakauras becoming so powerful, Blizzard has had to engage in a sort of “Arms Race” with regards to class design and encounter design which has made several specs and boss fights feel excessively complicated. So, overall, I think disabling addons will allow encounters and classes to feel better and become less complicated.
My main issue is with HOW they are implementing this. To be blunt, I have zero faith in Blizzard at this point to create a system that has the same level of functionality or polish as Weakauras. They have proven time and time again that they can’t do this. The initial UI changes, the initial cooldown manager, and just the overall state of initial patches shows that this first pass is going to be awful and very insufficient to fill the huge gap left by addons being disabled.
In a prior interview, Ion even said “And I think that some of that gets back to us knowing that we need to really ease into this, that any world where we just kind of rip the band-aid off, and say alright have fun. We are in a new world. As opposed to, you know building up more built-in functionality, starting to have clearer visuals, simplify some mechanics.[…]”. So they know that ripping the band-aid off and removing addons while also trying to create their own functionality in game won’t go well but now they have just decided “oh well, deal with it”.
They need to have an overlap of time where addons are still allowed and they slowly introduce their functionality into the game and let players (aka their QA team) test it and make sure it fills that gap, otherwise this is going to go so poorly.
I am primarily a classic player at this point but I do enjoy jumping into retail on expansion launches or major patches to mess around and I really do enjoy M+. But I will not be purchasing Midnight if these changes go through. I cannot support retail with these kinds of short-sighted decisions. I know there are a lot of people that feel the same way. Hopefully this feedback reaches the devs but I am not holding my breath.