We’ve had addons for what, 20 years now? Now it’s a problem? People twitch strummer said so? How is more customization and information visualisation bad?
Yes, high-level PvE requiring weakauras for complex fights needs to change.
But in my 20 years of playing, Blizzard has never been able to pull off UI/UX capable of replacing addons. I’m sorry, they just don’t have either the expertise, passion, or time to do it.
That Midnight built-in damage meter looks pathetic. Cooldown manager is a joke for 2025 development speed, tools, and reference to decades of existing addons that do the same thing.
What Ion seems to be saying is that WAs solve to much of the battle in raids. No matter what they come up with, it is the WA and other addons and not the players that are winning the fights.
To compensate they have to throw in complex puzzles to be solved, which probably means the mechanics. Apparently they don’t want to do as much of that.
That’s fine. They are welcome to break pure combat addon that solve or effectively play boss fights for you.
But other things, such as a replacement for ways for tracking your cooldowns, buffs/debuffs, DoTs, is terrible.
Blizzard built-in Diminish Return tracker (DRs have been a thing since vanilla yet Blizzard NEVER exposed their timers to the UI until NOW 20 years later) is still buggy and has old DR timers and doesn’t even track properly.
The Blizzard Damage Meter is a joke compared to Details.
Kill encounter addons, fine. Leave mostly everything else as is.
Issue is they can’t, if they don’t kill all the stuff then the same people making the problematic WA’s will get around it (look at Echo’s solution to Blizzard trying to stop automated solving via Private Auras).
Now the real answer here should be set a clear precedent and issue suspensions when that happens… but Blizzard doesn’t have a backbone to do that so instead they’re just broadly killing any addon that touches anything that can provide data in combat
Well, they are still in Alpha. They have that and Beta to go to fix some of these things.
Also, this impacts everyone equally. If the RWF people can’t clear the raid because of the changes, they are going to do something, either nurf the raid or add things back. They are not going to let RWF go on for months while everyone else just hits a brick wall on the first boss.
but like, who cares? this seems to only be a thing in RWF guilds, seems like it would be a healthier decision for the game to kill RWF than to kill weakauras for the other 99.9% of the playerbase.
Your missing the point. People seem to be implying that they won’t be able to clear the raids because they will be too difficult without the addons. What I’m saying is that they watch what people are doing right from the start.
If no one can do the raids, not even the top players, then they are not going to just leave it that way with no one able to ever complete a raid. Obviously they will nurf the raid or buff the players so that people can continue playing.
It just happens to be the RWF people that go first so that is what they would notice first. If the RWF teams were killed then they would notice the HOF people first.
Raids without mechanics just become gear checks. Did you kill boss before enrage. Did you heal the tank buster. It’s boring. It’s been done.
Currently with the direction the game is going you could predict fight outcome by your ability to hold down one button and sidestep a circle. lol
Isn’t it that Blizzard no longer wants outsiders to have access to its back end, though? That’s a legitimate risk they’ve been taking for decades now. Maybe they had some trouble there.
Currently in retail, I can’t show the Avenging Wrath buff on my ret pally. I have the talent, but the cooldown manager shows it greyed out. I would like to know, how many months do I have to wait for Blizz to fix simple bugs to their base UI?
That’s one of the reasons players use addons: Blizz is so slow at fixing the things they break, while addon authors can fix their addon within hours or a few days of a patch release. And let’s not forget that addon authors don’t get paid and they develop addons on their free time!
This was always going to be the result. The reason companies open up APIs to developers is because you get 1,000s of free employees who are highly motivated to make the best thing possible with no corporate red tape.
The WoW team is trying to replace all of the people building addons with maybe a handful of employees who are clocking a 9-5 and probably have other responsibilities, like keeping the base UI working.
The rate at which we’ve seen the UI change over the years proves this out. Edit mode is still lacks basic features that bartender has had for over a decade. The CD tracker didn’t even have the ability to reorder abilities at launch.
Blizzard’s take on addons as a crutch is valid, but they completely ignored addressing the huge upside of community addons.
Well Ion seemed to be indicating that they compensate by adding what he called “puzzles”. Those are probably what other people call “mechanics”. He seemed to be hinting that they want to be able to rely less on “puzzles”.