So here’s a couple of informational tidbits on what can and cannot be done so far concerning addons and the API.
As usual, this is current information and the API is still being worked on and there is still feedback being taken from addon authors and others. If you have feedback, please leave it here in hopes that it, too, can be seen.
Thanks!
This link is to give a little more depth to what’s happening right now with changes and what’s accessible to addon authors:
https://x.com/luckyone961/status/1977644714355458189
And this video is from the DBM author to give more information, as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNNiZD1UFp8
Edit to add an update, thanks to Cayna!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egu7ua85Gp0
13 Likes
I really wish they’d either walk back the cooldown restrictions or create an in game alternative spell announcer. I don’t understand why this specific thing is such a huge deal.
It isn’t difficult to throw in a /say or /y with your cds but the announce will trigger whether the spell is available or not, and it’s visual clutter. Speaking of i need to find a way to make text bubble transparent…
From the tweet, “You can’t even create small little boxes for combo points, soul shards, or any other similar class resources.” is going to be the single biggest pain point for me from a DPS role perspective.
7 Likes
I don’t think Blizzard UI devs really play the game very much or else they would be baking in features most people use
32 Likes
They can’t even get a damage meter to work after boasting about how theirs would be better because of server side data. But they can’t track Aug any better than we can.
I’m not sure I trust them to bake in anything anymore.
22 Likes
Like, why can I not see soul shard fragments? Why do spells generate soul shard fragments if we can only see whole soul shards? This is going to drive me up the wall.
8 Likes
According to the WA devs, rumors are that there are less than 10 devs working in that division. And by the WA devs estimation, there is literally not enough time before Midnight releases to do everything that the collective addon authors have spent decades implementing.
It’s not about playing the game or not. I said this at the very beginning: Blizzard operates under a budget. Compared to 3rd party addon authors who did these as passion projects; operating under a time and financial budget means there are going to be cuts and things left out to meet deadlines.
Everything is going to be worse. That’s the point.
21 Likes
Action bars
A lot of people prefer to use their Bartender or any other custom AddOn action bars as some kind of “Class WA” instead,
but this won’t be possible either. AddOn action bars won’t have access to the cooldown or even charges/stacks of spells while in combat (even open-world combat when questing or hitting a training dummy).
This means we’re more or less forced to use default action bars unless you’re fine with using pretty dead spell icons without any useful information while in combat.
Gods this is so damn stupid. My action bar being black and having 0 padding is NOT COMBAT RELATED. I dont care if it is TECHNICALLY because it TECHNICALLY shows procs and CD countdowns…IT DOES NOT MATTER. There is ZERO damn difference in combat between my fricken ELVUI actionbars and default.
10 Likes
Yes I realize the constraints of working under budget is the biggest issue, but if the people designing the implementation played the game, surely they would know what this thing should look like? Instead of randomly throwing features together that, essentially, don’t work or cohere into a useful whole.
3 Likes
That doesn’t mean their superiors are allowing them, or providing them with enough time, to make it that way.
At this point the logical conclusion is that Microsoft is giving them a “strip everything down” order. The suits at Microsoft definitely do not play the game.
8 Likes
Yep. It’s pretty ridiculous how they screwed us.
9 Likes
Midnight is going to be a disaster. Most people that play the game don’t even keep up with updates like this. People are going to log in when Midnight launches, see their addons gone and their class completely gutted and freak out lol.
8 Likes
The DBM author is posting updates about this on his YT channel (MysticalOS WoW), he goes into actual code and string specifics, he isn’t just midwit yapping about speculations.
1 Like
More than likely folks won’t even notice right away because we are accustomed to addons not working on patch days/ new release.
1 Like
And then they’ll come here asking why their addons aren’t updated and we’ll have to break it to them.
9 Likes
My biggest concern is not having a sound option for boss abilities. Without that I get visually overwhelmed so it means no longer doing even heroic raids.
The other issue and its a related one is that not being able to remove all the boss abilities I don’t need timers for or buffs or debuffs and such adds to the clutter that makes it so difficult to find the information you need.
It sucks but without these I fear my time playing wow is coming to an end.
Although loosing the ability to change how my UI looks to the degree stated is irritating…
8 Likes
Right?
If Blizzard wants to make a working cooldown manager we all want to use, why not just look at the popular weak auras and addons and . . . do that?
2 Likes
This will sound like defense of the devs but it’s more just what I think is closer to actual truth having worked in IT environments for decades myself.
Devs are the easy target to blame for all things we dislike in the game of course, even myself have blamed them at times. Purely because I get frustrated here and there so in the moment it’s just easy to blame them.
The devs in reality largely don’t make the decisions though. They are just the “doers” of the work.
It’s like any job or at least most jobs just because a worker is doing something people think is stupid doesn’t automatically mean the worker thinks it’s not either.
They are just doing their job.
There is a lot a very emphatically stupid stuff going on at my job right now having to do with a lot of customers not getting their IT tickets or projects done. But I keep working the way they tell me because it’s a job to me. I’m not the boss. I feel the same applies to the devs now with all the blame placed on them.
3 Likes
I don’t think very many people at Blizz play WoW outside of any kind of work requirement and then probably the bare minimum. There have been too many obvious flaws found on releases. I can’t really blame them because for them it is work and not an outside hobby.
2 Likes
It’s a video game, you will be fine. Some of you are so melodramatic about the most trivial things.
5 Likes
Literally zero evidence of this being the case. If it were, someone at Blizzard would have anonymously leaked that info to someone like Jason Schreier or Bellular and we’d have tweets, videos and articles about it already.
I get folks like to create elaborate conspiracy theories these days as to why X thing is happening and justifying it with Y or Z reason, but it’s just not true.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t care, it does those things and because it does those things it’s broken. That’s how the cookie crumbles in this case. Now personally I think that Blizzard should ease off on the accellerator here and have this change roll out slowly, one step at a time (or better yet completely revert it until their versions of the integrated addons are actually ready) but they don’t seem to be willing to do that.
Thankfully there’s still plenty of time between now and when the game releases for them to work with addon authors and for their engineers to work their magic on allowing some addons to read data while others can’t, but if we get to late beta and nothing has changed from how it is right now? Then the effort to implement their own versions of these addons into the base UI should be rolled back.