Tracking of group abilities will no longer function in add-ons after the changes, so things like other players’ cooldowns won’t be visible, he said. That might, in turn, lead to dungeons with fewer interrupts in a pack of mobs, which might in turn lead to less reliance on classes with abilities that stop a whole pack of enemies from casting.
Incoming heals will no longer be trackable, nor will specialized buffs or debuffs. But if they needed to be, that should be built into the base game, Hazzikostas said.
“It should be part of the default UI,” he said. “Same is true for tank swaps. If we’re building an encounter where once your co-tank reaches four stacks of some negative effect, you need to taunt immediately, we should be giving you much better information to make that apparent. That’s on us.”
Another issue they want to make more visible is diminishing returns in PvP and PvE, where stuns or other crowd control become less effective after repeated casts, until an enemy is immune.
You can install an addon and disable most of its functionality, however if you mess something up it would still fall on your shoulders regardless if you didn’t know or had an addon tell you and you ignored it. “Peer pressure” to install an addon would be like complaining that you can’t come into the office and work topless.
If you can calculate, arrange, and vocalize assignments for four people in three seconds, go for it, but few can do that unless they are a John Madden raid leader in a box watching.
There are a lot of people who don’t use voice in the game, this issue won’t effect people in voice as much but it will effect people not in voice which is a lot more common nowadays. Lowered difficulty across the board I’m all for though, again I think the game is on the extreme end of the wow spectrum atm
This doesn’t help with cd tracking since you’d have to be doing math in your head and going off of timestamps. Knowing if a CD is up in X seconds is pretty important atm cause you know itll be up for set 3 of the bosses damage output as an example, it’s not just about the cd being active or not active. Also from the article details wont be a thing anymore and youll have to rely on the in-game damage meter that will be implemented eventually, no guarantee it works exactly like details
Now, a weak aura can give you an audio cue to move out of fire, or an ability is casting, or things like, “Interrupt now” - but it’s all just tracking and using cues to notify you.
You may have heard complaints from other players about not being invited or being kicked from Mythic Plus due to “not using a proper add on” but I would imagine there are other factors at play during those moments.
I run a lot of Mythic Plus content on a lot of characters and as different roles. I have never experienced a party member being kicked because of an add on or not having one. I’ve also never experienced being kicked because of it. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, because from your comment, it clearly does - I would just venture to say it’s rare or there are other factors involved.
And I’m not sure why calling me a liar is necessary.
Add ons are literally not necessary.
I have no idea what content you’re doing - but you can go in blind with appropriate item level and limited knowledge in a +2 and complete it just fine.
You can continue to learn from there using the base UI.
Just because someone else says it’s necessary, doesn’t make it so.
I would say it’s a lack of player skill when they say they can’t play without it.
We played for years without add ons and even those were limited.
DBM, Recount - some of these were horrible back in the day and very limited.
All we had was the base UI for the longest time.
I mean, I’ll be the first person to hate on Ion and call out his constant lawyer-talk and idle promises, but… 1 week is nowhere near long enough to see any results in any changes being made.
At least wait until the .7 patch before calling him a liar about buggy content. More likely the next major patch. I mean, we all know WoW will continue being an insanely buggy mess and Ion will continue to fail to live up to his promises, but at least be reasonable about it
Blizzard is taking these steps in part because of player complaints about how many add-ons are needed to successfully complete raid and dungeon encounters, according to Hazzikostas. https://www.pcgamer.com/games/world-of-warcraft/world-of-warcraft-game-director-details-which-combat-add-ons-are-safe-and-which-will-be-eliminated-in-the-coming-purge/
“because of player complaints about how many add-ons are needed to successfully complete raid and dungeon encounters”
Ian probably doesnt even play retail why does his input matter on what everyone else does. If you want to play with addons play with addons if you don’t then don’t. If he wants to put in a system for those that don’t that’s fine but why punish the rest of us.
I agree for the majority of people, at some point you are just guessing without addons in higher end content. I played addonless until around shadowlands and its biggest advantage is just increasing your consistency and the possibilities because of having information you wouldnt normally have. This comes with its own set of consequences though which turned into making m+ a mess
They have shown several times over the last few years that they are incapable of making adjustments to how they design content to align with other changes that they made. Healer nerfs with the claim that damage wouldn’t be spikey … we still had massive spike damage. Tank nerfs with the claim that they wanted tanks to not be self-sufficient… we still have self-sufficient tanks. They’ve come out and said repeatedly they don’t like raid encounters that require WA’s to do… yet they have continued to make such encounters over the years. There’s absolutely no reason to believe Blizzard is capable of actually adjusting how they design content that will not just make this a worse experience.
And for what? Because self-proclaimed casuals who make it their entire identity that they don’t use addons think they can’t do content because they don’t use an addon?
Also the nameplate thing… lmfao. Blizzard your UI is garbage and you have given us absolutely no reason to believe you are willing or capable of creating a UI that isn’t complete garbage. You seem invested in trying to create built in replacements for addons but in a way that has next to no customization let alone more in-depth features.