Ion recently said in an interview that Blizzard plans on completely removing friendly & enemy player (and NPC) cooldown tracking add-ons in both PVP and PVE.
That means that players won’t be able to visually see what cooldowns their team members & opponents have used. This is likely going to include NPC abilities in M+ and raid as well.
This is going to disproportionately affect high end puggers who rely on add-ons to know when their teammates need extra heals after spending cooldowns, and I can’t even imagine how much this is going to effect a huge amount of PVP that relies on enemy cooldown displays to coordinate a strategy.
The argument Blizzard gives is that it’s unhealthy for the game to require a ton of add-ons for the most efficient play. People are genuinely freaking out over this. I’m pretty ambivalent, because for some crazy reason I think a little bit of chaos might make the game fun again.
What’s your opinion? Blizzard plans on implementing this either later on in this expansion or during Midnight.
My opinion is that they should disable this for enemies, but put ally CDs into the base game. Maybe not a laundry list of them, but a few very important defensives at least.
I can see this being an inconvenience or even a problem for healers out of comms or pugging for sure.
Regardless of which way they go, I still want this function disabled outside of the base game so that addons and WeakAuras don’t interact with it. Assuming they do it well enough. According to the interview, they seem to be very keenly considering player feedback.
Another thing I wanted to add though. You have to remember that even if they do implement this fully the way they introduced it in the interview, everyone, that means both healers on either side of the arena and all the DPS would be without this information.
It would probably be a cluster F for a while until people got accustomed to it. Or it could be miserable and healers wouldn’t bother playing PvP, dropping healer population even worse than now.
Im on board with this. Never used this for pvp or pve but it isnpretty much widely accepted and assumed you have cd trackers just like it is accepted to have damage meters , wa or dbm.
Addons have gone too far and Im glad they are reigning them back
blizzards ui is too awful to not have addons to track DR’s, bigdebuffs, and allied/enemy cooldowns.
just look at the arena frames they added into the game, legitimately 0 people use those because of their awful implementation that provide no information.
i agree remove weak auras though. it’s gone too far when players have a WA for every aura in the game
No kick tracker is absolutely horrible, they should développe their own addon for it or nobody will play caster anymore especially since everybody got a kick now and you get some kind of cdr for some spec to decrrase kick cd.
For the people that don’t keep up with the ongoings or news on this. Blizzard has already said countless times they won’t be stripping addon or weakaura functionality until the game is in a place where Blizzard can natively give players these solutions in the base UI.
Now whether or not you believe they will do it correctly or well enough is up for debate. But they have said countless times since the WoWcast video they won’t strip anything absolutely necessary away that they won’t offer in the base UI eventually.
As far as seeing player and enemy cooldowns. I’m not sure they will definitely give us a base UI function for that. Maybe with enough demand for it. I think they view this as too much information probably or something along those lines. That’s how it felt reading the interview.
First of all I have never seen Ion or anyone state they are “removing friendly & enemy player (and NPC) cooldown tracking add-ons in both PVP and PVE”. Not saying they 100% for sure didn’t, but my experience with these types of threads are people completely misrepresent what was actually said and when they are asked for proof it’s never provided. Can you link the video and provide the timestamp for this statement?
This is another way of stating a change like this would remove coordination and make for overall worse gameplay. Forcing everyone to just guess when something was used would be a complete mess and prevents better players from using their kits to their max effectiveness which is why I am highly doubtful this is what they’d want to promote.
I read the article and it’s hard to decipher what they will actually do but it’s blanket statement like this that I believe misrepresent what is actually being said. For example this statement is taken directly from the article:
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.
“We have this very important mechanic and really, unless you’re using an add-on, it’s not super obvious,” he said. “We should make that obvious.”
Yeah sorry. Idk why but whenever I link something on mobile it messes it up. But I’m glad to be able to give a source.
What you quoted from the article though is specifically referring to diminishing returns.
This is what was said about what OP is talking about. From the article:
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.
because that is specifically referencing dungeons/PvE. It could very well end up applying to PvP or PvP could be so reliant on that information for meaningful gameplay that it stays in there or as whole. Again hard to say exactly what will happen but the blanket statement of “this is all going away” isn’t true from what I read. It’s more like “some stuff is being integrated, some stuff is going away, and some stuff is wait and see”. Which is what we already knew for the most part.
Well yes of course it’s all up in the air and under development still. I’m just saying if they’re willing to disable this functionality in content as challenging as mythic raiding and high mythic plus, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that they will do it gamewide—PvP included.
They always could walk back this portion of the interview if enough feedback from the playerbase say they don’t want this to lose this functionality.