You’re nuking addon’s ability to deal with combat state, yet the cooldown manager is so hilariously underbaked compared to weak aura’s that you’re going to make the game harder for everyone.
I know why the dev team is going down this route and its a noble goal, you’re just not remotely close to providing anything close to what we currently have.
They already have— including addons that aren’t combat related.
This right here? 
In Midnight , addons will continue to be capable of providing many of the features and customizations players have long enjoyed. This includes adjusting the look of almost everything you see in the User Interface, such as raid frames, nameplates, action bars, panels, fonts, and art. Addons will also be able to present combat information to the player in ways that differ from our base UI.
Not true at all right now. There are still unit frames, HUD displays, Skyriding UI customizations, etc. that are still broken, dead in the water.
And I won’t believe that they’re allowing access to such things, including Healbot/Vuhdu, until I see it in an upcoming Alpha build.
And I had better see it in an upcoming Alpha build.
I mean the source, on your level 10 alt, is the addon authors themselves but regardless here is your boot you requested.
They explained in the alpha patch notes why they’re changing specific specialisations and addons only come up once, with respect to Demonology Warlocks. That’s it.
The class changes are happening for reasons ‘mostly’ unrelated to the addon changes.
The article literally says that addons will be able to modify the visuals of the UI, meaning yes, your action bars can be padded, and yes, you will be able to apply skins to change the visuals.
The only thing they have explicitly said they want to break is an addon’s ability to use real-time combat data. That’s it. If any addon that doesn’t pull from real-time combat data is broken, then that’s not intended, and it’s something they will be fixing, which was stated really early in phase 1 of the alpha tests.
Where is the evidence that it’s obvious it won’t do that? The class changes aren’t even done, there is no tuning, and we have no idea how M+ will play.
Nothing is “obvious”, you have no idea what it will be like. Not a single clue.
And yet so many of these types of adds are completely dead in the water right now. Still waiting on API builds. Still nothing yet.
There had better be something.
Thanks for giving us players insight. Midnight is so exciting. Let’s go!!
Hope you guys can actually pull this off. Your track record has me a bit skeptical.
Yes. Blizzard is lying.
Unless you can give me a separate action bar for EACH one of my party or raid members
What do you mean by this…? Are you implying there is no click or hover casting? Because that’s been a thing for years now in the default UI.
Oh, right, what really matters is M+…
That’s part of the problem here, disregard or actual blindness to the other 99% of the game, by Blizz and by the hardcore endgame crowd.
We can all see what the spellbooks and trees look like in the Alpha, if you think those changes won’t drastically gut gameplay, flexibility, etc… you’re kidding yourself.
It doesn’t matter how they’re “tuned”, it doesn’t matter how M+ “feels”, they abilities and spells are gone, or moved to the wrong place on the trees, or combined with each other in ridiculous ways. The tree themselves are changed to be less flexible and more just “put point here to progress at this level:”.
Just because you aren’t aware of something/don’t see it on Reddit means nothing. NDAs are a thing.
Regardless, they also may be working with people you’re not familiar with.
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.
Are you deliberately taking this in bad faith or have you willfully ignored any of their other announcements, videos or blog posts talking about exactly that?
They have said numerous times that current fight design has been an arms race with addons, and that they’ve had to design fights with addons in mind.
You’re correct that they’re two separate issues, but they have to be addressed simultaneously, in tandem. If they kept designing fights the same but removed combat addons, you’d have impossible fights. If they simplified the fight design but kept combat addons, you’d have an entire expansion of braindead fights. You can’t tackle one before the other.
Again, addons will still be able to reskin raid frames or create totally custom raid frames for those who prefer that.
Just want to highlight this last part of the article, since I think some people may have skipped, overlooked, or just rushed straight here to the forum post.
I just wanna see how it works from a PvP side of things.
The class changes and everything gotta make the combat over there feel different, and I want to see what that’s like. (In addition to PvE, I want to get my hands on that.)
Wish I was in the Alpha lol.
Also would love to see if “Important Casts” apply to players in PvP. Prolly not.
wouldn’t be the first time.
How do you reconcile this with the fact that the cooldown manager uses a whole host of API calls that aren’t available to addon devs?
Right now you can’t even make an addon that does what the cooldown manager does because you effectively cannot replicate action buttons. The options are either use the template which immediately gets tainted, or rebuild them ourselves which also immediately gets tainted.
That drives people to the cooldown manager because at best the addon implementation is a cheap derivative. The problem with that is your cooldown manager is still woefully inadequate.
If you are going to force people onto your solutions by turning off alternatives before they are ready then your solutions better be good enough. Right now they are not. If I want to show cooldowns in two places (or god forbid in a curve or with two different sizes) that’s impossible. Same if I want one debuff on my target to show up in one spot and another debuff to show up in a different spot. Also impossible.
You PROMISED the community that you would not force us onto your solutions until they were as good or better than what addons could do. You are currently lying about that. Your solutions are not good enough even from a purely cosmetic point of view, and you are killing addons used by millions of players who won’t even get to touch your implementations before they go live.
edit:
Some more purely cosmetic things that are impossible that my UI currently does:
edit2:
To call out an especially egregious one… Misspelled, the hecking SPELLCHECK addon, does not work in combat because you can’t access the edit box.
edit3:
You want to easily fix this then let players have full control over the following in combat:
Done. We just want control over information about ourselves. With addon communication in combat neutered, if you continue down this restrictive of a path people will just go off and use 3rd party overlays like final fantasy and you will create an even bigger monster. Please stop beating up the community over 1% of the player base that you consider to be cheating.
I am merely curious on one thing, and I think I speak for the RP community when I say this.
How will this affect non-combat oriented addons like MyRoleplay or TRP3?
They are either disconnected from the actual game, or lying.
The changes they are making to classes and specs have NOTHING to do with the “war vs addons” they’ve said they’re in (and finally decided to go nuclear on, including the fallout problem).
Gutting the classes and specs will do nothing to address the issues that actually drive people to use addons. Blizz loves to blame addons for making the fights complex, but really it’s Blizz’s designs that drive people to use addons – the fight designs, NOT the class and spec designs.
For example, taking Corruption away from Demo locks has NOTHING to do with raid boss fight designs OR addons, that’s just a stupid excuse to remove a button.
Meanwhile, locks are getting this really stupid “stance” mechanic for which curse they can cast, that makes them MORE complicated… which again makes one wonder if they don’t understand their own game, or are just making excuses with the whole “complexity” thing.
Ok I hear you blizzard but I heard my favorite WoW streamer say this is bad so it must be bad
Waaah I’m mad
Also, on a more serious note: WHERE’S MY ARCANE LASER YOU BLIZZARDS