So while blizzard has already decided to nuke combat addons I have a suggestion. Why doesn’t Blizzard just simply not compete in the arms race of encounter design, make a toggle to turn on the blocking of that data and it lets you qualify for RWF and hall of fame (You know top tier This is the challenging stuff kinda mode) and this way it would definitely give them a better read on how the community as a whole would feel about nuking the addons
It would also allow both groups of people to feel like there is a way back or a way without going to far forward, cause the way its being suggested feels like they are setting us on a path setting fire to the bridge behind us so that if no one likes it, and I mean almost unanimously hated, we’d have to wait for them to rebuild the addon support and thus harming the game and community.
I feel like this would be compromise for Blizzard, Mod Devs, the community as a whole.
The RWF and HoF guilds are going to be impacted by this the least. Guilds like Liquid, Method, Northern Sky and them will be perfectly fine and even helped by the fact that they no longer have to spend resources creating the packs. Max from Liquid has repeated ad nauseum that if they could compete at the same level without Weakauras they gladly would, and it’s not due to player skill, it’s due to the fact that their competition is using them so they have to as well. One thing I will agree with Ion on is that one of the worst parts of raiding is the downtime before boss pulls trying to make sure every member has the correct pack, the correct update, configure their settings, etc while everyone else just stands around.
The people who are going to be impacted the most are the low and mid skill players. Players who skate by to AOTC in the backpacks of a few good players in their guild that use addons. This “leveling of the playing field” that Blizzard is pushing means the good players will have less agency to carry the bad. Removal of computational combat addons and a shift in design philosophy means everyone’s personal responsibility in a group is going to be jacked up even higher, and you are going to be required to pull your weight more than you do now.
We are going to see a LOT of low-mid tier guilds fall apart and stop doing end game content when they realize a couple of their guildmembers can’t carry the rest of the crappers any more, and that the people who are just there for social hour and die constantly are actively preventing your group from progressing.
Upon hearing about the upcoming combat addon purge, I literally did an addon purge myself to be better prepared.
I’m currently only using 2 addons. One that saves my keybind profiles, the other changes my zoom when transitioning between mounted and unmounted.
It’s not exactly 1:1 as before, but I’ve grown accustomed to it within a couple of minutes of gameplay.
I’m making full use of all the tools which Blizzard has provided and am very keen on the extra features coming in future patches and Midnight.
Gone are the days of LUA Errors, spamming /reload and broken patches on updates, for me atleast.
I’m sure Blizzard will implement more features from popular addons as their own inbuilt features in the future.
This is a huge W by Blizzard, in my honest opinion.
But the upside is without combat addons players will be able to play at a more skilled level more easily because blizzard wont have to design encounters around weakauras, DBM, etc
No they won’t. Blizzard has said multiple times they aim to make the difficulty curve the exact same. If it took your guild 50 pulls to down Heroic Dimmy, it should take 50 pulls to down whatever the equivalent boss in Midnight will be. Whether they’re capable of hitting that mark accurately is a different conversation entirely.
The most likely scenario, given Blizzard’s track record, is that the difficulty is going to be massively overtuned at the beginning of Midnight and people are going to walk into raids and M+ and get their crap rocked. Everyone is going to complain, people are going to quit, and Blizzard is going to have to scramble in three different directions at once: adjusting their class tuning, adjusting their encounter tuning, and now fixing their native features because everyone and their grandmother knows they are not going to be fully functional upon rollout. Just look at the cooldown manager. It’s been in the game for nearly 6 months and is just now getting to a possibly passable level.
Is it going to be healthy for the long term success of the game? Maybe. But taking what we know from Blizzard over the past 21 years of this game, only a fool would believe Midnight isn’t going to be a crapshow for months at least. The real question is how many subscribers will they actually lose.
Beginning of every expansion I’ve played is like this anyway, but I do hard agree that this will probably be the case even moreso this time around. Ion will never let a new expansion be perceived as easier, even by the no lifes in liquid and echo. For whatever reason, they can’t stand the thought of the game not being super hard. Maybe it’s as simple as just stretching things out
In delves, open-world, late-season mythic raid, and low keys - sure
High m+ content or any keys close to title - absolutely not, and 100% impossible.
Groups plan routes around efficient use of cds, maximizing dps and being as efficient as possible to time keys. If a +18 dungeon timer is 30 minutes, 1800 seconds, and the total collective health of every mob in the route is 65 billion; the group needs a combined 36m dps to time the key. Assuming 100% damage activty time, and barring the fact that this is very simple.
The difference betwen dps in a pull with cds and dps in a pull without cds is huge. Ex. my last 18 psf the groups combined dps was 134m dps in the paladin pull after first boss. Outside of cds other pulls were ~70m dps with the same number of mobs. Takeaway? The pull without cds took double the time, a minute actually. If these cds were used on a smaller pull and not that one we’d lose a minute on the timer and not time the key. Add in that high keys are timed with very narrow margins, and it’s essentially impossible to time high keys without information in real time to execute.
So essentially what we’re going back to is a complete and total script for every single dungeon. Just rehearse a lot in lower dungeons, then run the dance and hope it hits right. Absolutely any anomaly goes off script, and the key is simply over. No reacting, adapting to the situation, anything.
Added fun is that every dungeon besides streets and gambit this season have pulls that have to be killed before healing/defensive cds run out. Ex. Paladins in psf, everything in floodgate, 2nd pull in Arak, pull after first boss in HOA, almost every pull in Dawnbreaker, Sentinels in Eco-dome. List goes on. Tank just pulls that in the dark and the pull takes too long? ggs.
I don’t understand why Blizzard doesn’t introduce its own viable solutions to things like WA before dismantling addons. Also I don’t understand people who say that without addons they can finally “focus on the game”. Either way you’re looking for cues from the UI to be effective - why trust Blizzard who seems to downsize their team every expansion and can’t even manage to produce enough retail content to also handle addons?
My theory? This is coming from Microsoft and they don’t have a choice.
They’re already producing too much content for their team to handle. Scarizard, a former Senior System Designer who recently left, said in the podcast with Dratnos and Maximum that one of the main reasons for his departure was the workload and amount of stress the content schedule was putting on him and his team. He confirmed the theory that there are seeming to be more bugs and things not working correctly recently because they literally don’t have the time or staff to do proper QA or even fix things when they’re discovered. The Weakaura devs also commented that it is almost impossible for Blizzard to do everything they’re saying they can do in the amount of time they have with as small of a team they have working on it.
For the end goal they want, it’s either all or nothing. They do not want us having access to all the information we enjoyed anymore, that is a fact. If they do it now or later doesn’t matter when it all ends the same.
If they left the addons working as is while they built new their internal ones, everything will be fine now. But then when it comes time to ship those new, internal, but stripped down ones, people won’t use them because why would they? WAs exist. But if they then kill WAs functionality, we’d be right back here anyway.
