With realm restarts in each region (just completed this morning for Americas realms), we’ve made a change for addons that query unit health.
Now, the UI API functions UnitHealth and UnitHealthMax return health values for NPCs (rather than percentages), information that a very large number of players have been generating with the Real Mob Health addon.
This hotfix has no impact on PVP, as these functions will continue to provide health percentages for enemy players or the units they summon, as before.
I’ve been seeing folks speculating that it’s due to server performance, and man I hope that’s the case. I’m all for this change as it really doesn’t affect anybody, but also I really want better server performance during moments of stress!
Personally to me I hope we get more small un-gameplay-impactful changes that just improve the experience. I’m enjoying Classic for the social experiences of it, not necessarily the annoyances from 2004-2006 that they got rid of for reasons besides making the game easier or more convenient.
Functionally this changes nothing. literally nothing. Everyone and their mother was running RealMobHealth and already saw real health values. Not that much different than the days of old before unit health was added to official api in wrath I think it was? vanilla and BC both obfuscated mob health and addons basically put it back.
This is basically true of threat as well. Although threat doesn’t use that much syncing. Real Mob Health was using a crap ton of it. To the point that having millions of concurrent users running it for BWL launch, did in fact cause strain on servers. It made blizz re-evaluate whether or not it made any sense to obfuscate health, only to have an addon tank their server performance and give health info ANYWAYS. Logically it makes more sense for blizzard to kill the addon and give health themselves.
Again though, there is literally no functional change to end users. You had health before, you have health now. You just have it with less performance impact to both end user and blizz servers. Win win?
I’m honestly surprised they didn’t just return the threat api while at it and kill off that wasted cpu and sync overhead as well, but I guess not as many people are running it.
if you use the default ui and want your target frame to continue displaying that value, youre going to need an addon that actually calls that api up when drawing the target frame. the realmobhealth addon author created an addon that does simply that. hooks unithealth/unithealthmax api into default blizzard ui.
curseforge . com / wow / addons / modern-targetframe
Yes i deleted realmobhealth and reinstalled it upon logging in and not seeing mob health or an option to turn it on - the advantage is soon ui addons will have this as standard built into itself
elvui, luna, etc. all those handbuilt target frames will certainly retain the functionality as those actually call unithealth/unitmaxhealth while being drawn.
the default ui needs to be modified to use these updated api calls. thats why he released that new addon, modern targetframe.
people who use the default will experience your issue. people who use a custom target frame can remove realmobhealth and just continue.
i uninstalled realmobhealth and no longer had them show in the target frame, then installed modern targetframe and it does now. it solved the problem for me in the default ui.
if it didnt solve the problem for you then there might be another addon causing an issue
oh also i was originally replying to vol, i didnt even see your post haha.
I’ve moved the RealMobHealth files on Curse into their archive and I’m sending a request to move the addon into the outdated category on WoWInterface. I thank everyone for their support of the addon during the course of its lifetime.
In all technicality, Blizzard is already running the formatting code to display the health values on the TargetFrame. The only thing I do on that part of the addon is place text objects where existing code is looking for them.
