World of Warcraft: Midnight is on the horizon and set to streamline the game for players of all skill levels, giving WoW a more approachable combat system for all. Class specializations are being revamped to make it easier to track key buffs and debuffs, reduce pressure to rely on addons, and make the path to mastering every specialization clearer. Midnight keeps the excitement of combat alive while opening the door to WoW wider for everyone.
Our plan for the first wave of Public Alpha is to rebuild all 40 specializations according to the the philosophies in our Developer Insight: Combat for Everyone in Midnight article. As always, Alpha will be level-locked over its duration, so you will not have access to most of the new Hero Talents and Apex Talents gained over the course of leveling until later in the testing phase. Specs are designed with the assumption that you have obtained all those talents, so please take that into consideration during your playtesting and feedback.
Your feedback on these changes is crucial to us, and we are looking forward to reading it. Here’s what we are hoping to learn from players from the alpha test:
How well do the changes meet the goals described? Each spec changelist in the patch notes contains an overview of the changes and goals for the new version.
Gameplay clarity pain points you’re still experiencing, such as information that’s important to playing the spec well, but is difficult to track.
Building characters for different types of content—do you feel you can get the tools you need for dungeons, delves, raids, and PvP?
We hope you’re excited for the new class changes in Midnight, and we’ll see you in Azeroth!
Experimenting with the Cooldown Manager from the perspective of using it with no addons as a replacement for class WAs showed a few UX concerns and places were important info was lacking, mostly around the Tracked Bars panel and buffs where duration is not very important, and more important information was either displayed VERY small and difficult to read, or not displayed at all.
Specifically the ones I noted were:
Improved Whirlwind (Fury Warrior): The Stacks matter most while the duration is almost entirely irrelevant. Especially as a tracked bar where not showing the icon hides the stack number as well. This would be much more useful if the bar displayed how many cleaving abilities you still have rather than how long you had to do them, and the icon showed the stacks as the major element rather than the duration.
Ignore Pain (Protection Warrior): Stacks are used to show a percent of the maximum size, but are a much smaller number that is not present if it is shown as a bar without an icon, ideally given how running out cuts the buff short, this info would be preserved and given more emphasis. Additionally it may be personal preference of the player to see the plain number value of health the shield will block rather than a percentage, which, given it is shown as stacks, lacks a “%” unit and may also be unclear to new players.
Ironfur (Guardian Druid): The tiny stack number is extremely well camouflaged into the black and gray icon colors and has no way of showing the duration of earlier stacks and when they will begin to expire. I imagine this issue will also exist on any other buff that does not renew itself.
Bone Shield (Blood Death Knight): The number of stacks in bone shield is a very important figure, but the duration is also important since it is disastrous if the buff is accidentally allowed to expire. Similar to Ignore Pain, right now the stacks and duration are given much different emphasis, especially as a tracked bar which may not show stacks. Since the number of stacks are also shown on the Marrowrend icon, this spreads out or duplicates information in a way that may be unclear to new players, especially if they expect the number on marrow rend to mean they can press it 12 times like it would for Death Grip or D&D in the same toolkit, not that they have 12 stacks of the buff it gives.
Blood Shield (Blood Death Knight): The duration of blood shield in combat is an almost useless stat to know in comparison to how large the shield currently is, which is not displayed at all by the cooldown manager. This is especially painful as the Player Frame, and Personal Resource Display do not show the size of shields overlapping the health bar either, meaning there is no way without addons or mousing over the buff to know how large the absorb is. I imagine this issue exists for all other instances of absorb shields as well.
Consecration (Protection Paladin): This one looks like development in progress, but it is unclear the tooltipless buff “protection paladin” in the cooldown manager changes itself to show the consecrate buff including the extra time from Sanctuary, while the Consecrate bar shows the duration of the last placed consecrate. Also if the buff version is moved to tracked bars, it shows as empty until you leave consecrate then counts down the 4 seconds given by Sanctuary. regardless, it doesn’t feel like a great way to communicate to the player that they accidentally left the faded edge of their consecrate hidden under mobs and other abilities, and have 4 seconds to reenter or lose the buff.
In the same vein of development in progress, the sound alerts lack “when” options for buff expiration (or near expiration, given how bad it is for a new BDK to accidentally let their bone shield charges expire), and reaching the maximum number of stacks/charges are the exact sort of major events that a player may want a sound alert to draw their attention to.
Outside of spec specifics, it is also worth mentioning that the cooldown manager currently lacks an ability to track non-class related things such as racial abilities, potions, trinkets, or externals like pain suppression, power infusion or bloodlust that would be important to know about.
Hello, my name is Warried I’m a multi R1 warrior and gladiator healer and I have compiled some of the most important UI features that have been suggested by the pvp community and that are needed for quality of life and still not available on Midnight Alpha.
DR Tracking | This has been announced but we have yet to see a working version of this in the current alpha.
Enemy Arena Frame customization | Currently there is absolutely zero customization for the new arena frames since their introduction. There needs to be scaling options for Trinket size, Buffs, Debuffs and CC on the target, this would be great for QOL.
Interrupt Tracker | Consider adding this to the Arena frames right next to trinkets. For casters and healers this is a very important feature to track because the only way you can know if interrupts were used easily is by listening, and this puts deaf players at a huge disadvantage and needs to be a baseline UI addition.
Party Frame Customization | Just like the Enemy Arena Frame customization section, the ability to change the scale of Buffs, Debuffs, and CC that is currently on the target is not in the baseline UI.
Team CD Tracking | In Solo Arena content in WoW PvP, tracking teammate defensives is crucial for dps and especially healers. Consider adding an option to see your teammates Interrupt / Biggest Defensive like omniCD.