The journey to update World of Warcraft’s combat experience continues, with a focus on making gameplay more intuitive and approachable—without requiring addons. In the Midnight expansion, we’re working closely with addon authors and taking in community feedback to create a more streamlined and engaging combat experience for everyone. The World of Warcraft development team shares the guiding principles behind these updates, focusing on ongoing customization and increased accessibility whether players choose to use addons or not.
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Remember back in August you people said this was going to be a long slow process and that you wouldn’t break addons until the default Blizzard UI was at par with or better than the addons?
Pepperidge Farms remembers.
142 Likes
I don’t even use combat addons, and I can see the trainwreck coming.
Blizz is going to break things before they have the fix ready, and then wonder why they get mass player backlash.
The changes they are making won’t do that, it’s obvious it won’t do that.
Gutting classes and specs does NOTHING to address what makes addons necessary in parts o the game, that is entirely about the design of the fights in those raids etc.
The two are so entirely disconnected that it gives the impression that Blizz expects us to believe a blatant lie, or that they fundamentally do not understand their own product.
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You say you’re doing this by working directly with addon authors but addon authors have said the exact opposite and that in the discord servers and other chat spaces intended for these conversations to happen, you have been extremely closed door policy so far and have not engaged with them in good faith.
In fact you lied to them prior to testing beginning about your intentions and then told them to figure out how to make it work. But now you say that you’re working directly with them on all of this. Midnight is in less than a handful of months and your team can’t even get basic communication like this correct as to what is really going on.
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It’s fine. Everything is fine.
1 Like
Not that I dont trust that blizzard will get something on par or better than what its taking away before its even known…
But yeah I don’t trust them to do it at all.
44 Likes
lots of banging pans and shouting, but nothing’s actually cooking at all right now.
11 Likes
I am reading a lot of “We dont want non combat addons to be broke” and yet yall are breaking them.
What all addons will be ruined, as it stands, with this change? I thnk Blizzard needs to make a list.
Will ELVUI be able to pad my action bars to 0? Can it skin them? If no, why not? If yes, why are the Authors of the addon saying they probably wont?
“Combat” is an important distinction here, as we have done our best to avoid interfering with access to non-combat information. Furthermore, addons should retain their ability to customize how information is presented to the player.
Setting Actionbar padding to 0, skinning action bars, skinning frames, formatting numbers, NONE of this is direct combat related.
10 Likes
People were using combat add-ons back in vanilla, they would have to dumb the game down to at least that level to remove most of them and we all know that’s not gonna happen.
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“There will also be options to choose voice, speed, and volume settings”
From the text to speech bit. Please, please, please give us voice options based on in universe races. Give us orc announcers! It would be beautiful!
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The “Simple Cast” and “Important Cast” do not have enough contrast. Simple should probably be greyed out, muted.
I don’t see any example of progressing health from HOTs…. how will that be visualized?
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I just wish to know who is the brazillian working at blizzard’s UI, thank you for the references on those nicknames hahahah
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Since this is getting spammed, guess I’ll repeat my reply…
I don’t even use combat addons, and I can see the trainwreck coming.
Blizz is going to break things before they have the fix ready, and then wonder why they get mass player backlash.
The changes they are making won’t do that, it’s obvious it won’t do that.
Gutting classes and specs does NOTHING to address what makes addons necessary in parts o the game, that is entirely about the design of the fights in those raids etc.
The two are so entirely disconnected that it gives the impression that Blizz expects us to believe a blatant lie, or that they fundamentally do not understand their own product.
8 Likes
“Combat” is an important distinction here, as we have done our best to avoid interfering with access to non-combat information. Furthermore, addons should retain their ability to customize how information is presented to the player.
And yet, there are addons that only do exactly that, whose authors say “we probably wont be doing Midnight”.
7 Likes
Unless you can give me a separate action bar for EACH one of my party or raid members, you are going to lose a healer. You are probably going to lose tens of thousands of healers who can’t play with your crappy UIs and almost all of us have our chosen add-on of several choices for what makes sense to us and how we play. (Tanks that can throw heals also sometimes utilize these add-ons)
You cannot just take them away until you have solid replacements in place. If you want to replace add-ons, make the replacements, get The replacements tested, get them live, get them live reviewed, and fix them and THEN ban combat add-ons IF you’ve done an adequate job.
You are going to do irrepairable harm to the population of healers and tanks you are already lacking in the player pool, as well as the pool at large.
Until you produce a live replacement for all these add-ons that players are satisfied with, you need to keep your hands off of them. It’s like you’re trying to lose half of more of your subscribers on purpose.
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All blizzard did was send out a pdf of the changes. Thats it. There were no talks, there were no “How does your addon work? We can work with you” that we all expected to happen.
3 Likes
Its too late. Game about to be 21 years old and we are gettinc proper 21 y old game design.
Oh and dont forget, two years will pass and then we will get a “the last titan alpha dev blog: thanks to your feedback we are rolling back changes made in midnight…”
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