Patch 10.0.5 included the removal of the CVar nameplateShowOnlyNames, which was used to hide the ugly health and cast bars on friendly nameplates in instances. Looking further, Blizzard_Nameplates.lua has been updated such that DefaultCompactNamePlateFriendlyFrameOptions.hideHealthbar and DefaultCompactNamePlateFriendlyFrameOptions.hideCastbar are now set to false, rather than being tied to any CVar (as they were previously tied to the state of nameplateShowOnlyNames).
Why was this change made? It makes the friendly nameplates far busier and more distracting for those of us who liked to see these nameplates in instanced content.
10 Likes
yea pleaseeeeeee blizzard put this back into the game, name visibility in raid/dungeons is so bad without this feature.
While I realize this absolutely doesn’t solve all of the issues involved with this change, if you’re just looking for nicer looking names in instances (and elsewhere) and don’t need them colored fancy or clickable, Dragonflight added the ability to set a minimum size for the regular (non-nameplate) name text.
Options > Accessibility > General > Minimum Character Name Size
It affects all names, not just friendly ones, but it keeps them readable with nameplates turned off.
2 Likes
This is definitely a step backwards and very inconvenient. Once upon a time this would be cause for just another add-on but with with the game and many UI modifying add-ons not playing nice together you never know what kinds of problems you may run into.
Blizzard please fix this. I can’t stand having friendly healthbars.
And having friendly nameplates off isn’t ideal because the names aren’t quite prominent enough to be easily read – even after enlarging the minimum font size.
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I do this but there’s no comparison between names and nameplates in terms of visual clarity during an encounter. It’s definitely a good option, but I don’t know why we lost the option to have clean friendly nameplates, too.
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Seconding this, absolutely awful change for calling out people who might of messed up mechanics too in a raid. Can’t see names at all, have to pray I mouseover in time to see their name in a tooltip. Please revert!
I too am saddened by this change. It is AWFUL to read regular nameplates now. Please, please revert this change! 
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Yes this needs to be reverted
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Is there an official blue post on why this change was made? Unlikely to be accidental, so it would be nice to get some color from Blizzard on this.
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+1 Blizzard please respond. This is a huge accessibility issue - removing this option has severely negatively impacted visibility in group content.
I can only hope this was prematurely removed ahead of providing a more robust set of nameplate options, but as-is this is a huge problem.
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Blizzard - please fix this. Thanks.
So apparently Blizz have loosened their hold a bit on friendly nameplates inside instanced content, not sure to what extent.
This addon is working in 10.0.5, I just tested it in H-Vault (didn’t check in combat).
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/df-friendly-nameplates
Plater also has a setting under General > Interface Options > Hide Blizzard Health Bars
Looks like builds 10.0.5.47799 and 10.0.5.47825 got pushed to retail yesterday, one of those probably changed something regarding nameplates…?
And it looks like a really recent plater build brought back that option, thanks for letting us know!
47799 was the removal of the CVar and 47825 doesn’t appear to have modified Blizzard_NamePlates.lua so not really sure what changed or when.
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Took a quick glance through the Plater code and it seems to just re-create the CVar, which should do nothing as Blizz is no longer leveraging it. I’ve seen reports of Threat Plates doing the same.
DFFN has some additional functionality over the old CVar in that you can class color the friendly names and enable click-through.
Wait, you can class-color friendly names in instances?!
The DFFN addon can, yeah.