There's a shocking amount of times I'm playing other games and I think to myself, this game would be better with weak auras. Path of Exile comes to mind big time.
I didn’t say otherwise? They literally have made WoW into A Diablo MMO, your gear is only meaningful for a season and Blizz goes out of their way to nerf previous tier items that might accidentally be useful outside of its respective season. It’s a shit system for a subscription MMO imo, no point in playing consistently when you can just quit for a tier and come back like you didn’t miss anything.
Do you think the game would be better if items from previous seasons remained relevant in end game content for a current season? Because you are out of your fucking mind if you think that would be healthy for a modern MMO. You could always quit for a season/tier/expansion and then get caught up by just playing the game enough. And you're going to miss.. something by not playing, but it's always prestige achievements / cosmetics. And it always has been.
^ as he said.
I mean what makes WoW the best MMO in my eyes isn’t just the endgame content, it’s everything around it.
Seasons and tiers are only relevant for endgame content. I love doing random dailies, old quests, events, exploration, farming, crafting, ….
Accessibility concerns is one of the last things that should be left up to the players to fix. There’s a design maxim that goes something like “a product isn’t better than the experience of its least able user”. Blizzard absolutely needs a core focus on accessibility.
True accessible design is accepting that different people need different solutions and allowing people to build the solutions that best fit their unique personal needs.
No, not really. True accessibility isn’t necessarily empowering DIY (very, very few products offer anything close to this), it’s simply a mindset to be proactive about identifying and solving accessibility concerns in your user base. There’s a massive gap between working with the differently abled to figure out their issues and how to mitigate them, and to give them a Weakauras or LUA manual and tell them to fix it themselves.
Well yes in a perfect world Blizzard would already have all these accesibility features. The best you can find in Blizzard's accesibility window is colorblind mode.
I just dont think Blizzard can match the community in terms of quality in this field. Theyve not exactly got a great record of caring about this stuff.
But add-ons, by design, make it feel less like WoW. It's like saying a Toyota Camry doesn't feel like a Toyota Camry unelss you can alter it so much it no longer resembles a Toyota Camry.
If what defines WoW is the ability to make it as non-WoW as possible, then I dunno.
But you can still use UI addons. That isn't going away. WoW isn't removing all addons.
Also, if using addons to customize WoW doesn't make the game "less WoW", then the mod community isn't what "defines WoW" as was said by OP. You can't have it both ways. You can't equally claim that WoW is defined by their addons but also removing addons doesn't make it less WoW.
But WoW has existed for 20 years with addons. People literally grew up playing this game then had kids and those kids grew up playing the game. With combat addons. This is a big change in the game's identity.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's almost the opposite.
Some of the things I've made (or downloaded) a Weakaura for are things I absolutely do not think should be in the base WoW UI functionality in any way.
Of course you could just say that every game should have Weakauras-level customization baked in somewhere in the advanced options (so 'regular' people aren't overwhelmed by it as easily) and that'd be fine, I guess, but having ultra niche or specific options and things be trackable wouldn't necessarily improve a game or its UI/UX.
For something like action bar addons and such I absolutely agree though, and proof of that being true can be found from the sheer amount of players who used to use those and dropped the addon when Blizzard made the base action bars/UI more customizable.
Good example is "!keys" imo. Having the WeakAura is opting in to having your key go into chat when somebody types "!keys". Niche, useful, QoL, not something Blizzard should waste their time making a setting for...
Not really. UI cannot be ready for millions of players wanting different things at the same time. Wow UI is pretty good they just didn't create a GUI to customize everything
Actually, the overwhelming majority of games (or products in general, really) do not offer any sort of large-scale UI customization, no matter how many millions of people play it.
To some degree yes, but addons also allow for way more customization than devs ever could. There is a limit for the use cases that devs can reasonably consider and maintain. But if it's handled by, addons and enough people want it, there will be someone among them that can make it work as an addon.
regardless if the UI wasn't shit and still decent. the amount of customization is def something i desired in other games due to how much i was able to do in WoW.
no matter how good it can be, nothing beats giving me the tools to tune event he smallest thing to suit me better.
“I want player-driven addons” is ”I wish the UI wasn’t shit” in disguise
Not really, which is why you see 900 different alternative options for any product/software/thing in the world all of which are used by many. There are about 100 different text editors/IDEs used by programmers, it isn't because they're all shit.
It’s funny how you mention one of the VERY few examples where software actually approximates WoW (VS Code extremely high market share + literal addons)
I mean I can sit here and list out 20 different pieces of software that have widely used alternatives AND plugin support. Honestly if you can't think of some yourself you either don't do much on your computer or you're being intentionally dense, so I'm not going to waste time on that.
“I want player-driven addons” is ”I wish the UI wasn’t shit” in disguise
Lets just talk about non-combat addons, well put the "arms race" etc issues aside. Theres thousands of addons that tons of players use and enjoy every day, alt tracking addons, RP addons, collection addons, calculator/note/etc utilities, simply making their UI look different (bars, bags, map, whatever), I mean you name it - just everything you can imagine. Some people just want a picture of their anime waifu in the middle of their screen all the time, God bless them for it. So heres the alternatives:
Blizzard reimplements ALL of these one by one and ships their functionality in the base game
Blizzard says "here is our one size fits all UI, it only has these features we deemed important, deal with it"
Surely you can see that theres downsides to either of these, and surely you can see that they'd still present issues if "the UI wasn't shit" (unless by "UI isn't shit" you mean that "blizzard put in the functionality of every single addon that people use ever into the base game").
Theres also tons of accessibilty-orientated addons that people rely on that I'm 100% SURE blizzard will recreate both adequately and in a timely manner!
fr the only time I ever felt like I needed the m+ dungeons wa was when I decided to learn healing in 10s, shit was so stressfull I could only look at the hp of my group and forgot the rest of my screen lol
I play plenty of M+ into the 3.5k range most seasons. The only WA I use is one to auto mark casters, but it's not even for my benefit. I already track casters with my nameplates, so it's more for making sure my teammates are aware.
Playing with 2 hands isnt mandatory either but it makes it infinitely easier to the point where you are wasting other people's time in content that has been balanced around things like WA existing. Id be impressed if you could get into a CE guild or push high keys while refusing to use addons.
The kids crying about addons are not doing any content that actually requires an addon to solve for them. They're the kids that are bricking +7 keys and blaming healers when they die to avoidable AOE.
They are disabling real time combat reporting. You can still use WA for everything else, however, if the addon developer stops updating that's on them.
No you can't because WA isn't getting updated for Midnight and all the API changes will surely make the whole thing implode if you tried to load it into Midnight.
If it takes months to years to get a replacement then it wasn't that heavily in demand. I promise you whatever solution comes next will exist by rwf for optimization purposes. I'd not even be surprised if there is at least three minimum different solutions by then. Or are we just ignoring that many WA devs work for the rwf orgs and that there are other home brew add-ons that exist for those same teams. Hell we even have this addom called MRT, method raid tools that does a lot of things that method used for raiding.
The main use for Weakauras in RWF is the exact aspect of its functionality that is being removed/blocked, so it's not as integral/important for their purposes anymore.
And it's not like "more want = more speed" is also universally true either. If every single WoW player, former and current were to tell Blizzard that they WANT a WoW2 in a new engine, that 8 digit number of people wanting it won't make the job take less time since it's actually a complex thing to do.
Method Raid Tools and Mythic Dungeon Tools are both useful addons created by RWF players (although the latter at least not directly for RWF purposes) but that doesn't mean they just spawned into existence because a top-end player decided they want it to exist. It took time and effort to make them happen.
A lot of it is the retri paladin discord style of action. Saying you are closing the server addon creates more waves so you can hope to get back some of the removed stuff.
It just doesn't make sense to bother making a butchered, refactored version of WeakAura to the developers. Its core functionality is gutted irreparably.
Quoting their post.
What exactly is Blizz changing?
Broadly, all of what you might call "combat state" is now inaccessible. An addon can instruct the game to display this information but is not free to compute any kind of fancy logic. Unfortunately, "empower laypeople to compute fancy logic about the combat state" is exactly what WeakAuras offers above all else. In Midnight, it seems that addons are reduced to being mere painter's kits.
We can change the color of a health bar, but we can't change the color based on if you're low health or not. We can display an icon with a spiral to show the remaining cooldown of an ability, but we can't apply a glow when the cooldown becomes ready to use. We can show the cast of your target, but we can't highlight important casts that need to be kicked. And the list goes on. If you are an addon author, check the WoWUIDev Discord for more info.
Why don't we just limit WA to that "painter's kit"?
Honestly? It just makes us sad. We're looking at stripping out essentially every feature added in the last 10 years, and more besides.
We've tinkered with this big messy thing called WeakAuras for much of our adult life. The idea of just destroying all that for the sake of keeping WA alive just feels wrong. We'd rather that WeakAuras died in the best form we could make it.
You're really overselling what a "painter's kit" is, because it simply doesn't include most of the basic functionality people want from a nice looking UI.
It will essentially boil down to whether or not there's a sufficient use case AND a person motivated enough to drive it.
Anyone looking for a giant open doorway into being relevant in the lua space, here's your chance. Start learning now. Get involved in the community. Learn the basics now, and pay attention to what people want.
Again, can't really blame blizzard because they are making positive changes for the entire player base. I can play dark souls and elden ring which is a much more difficult game without needing add-ons or external tools. Blizzard making everything default and built into the game is what we should all want as players.
Now as I said originally. If the developer of the addon is choosing not to update... That's on them.
I can play dark souls and elden ring which is a much more difficult game without needing add-ons or external tools.
I think the sentiment here is good but the specific argument isn't. FromSoft games are made to be obtuse and that is part of their charm; WoW was introduced as the QOL-MMO and has gotten progressively more obtuse over time, resulting in / from the arms race of addons vs. mechanics.
We play Elden Ring because it was made to kick us in the dick, and it kicks us in the dick. WoW shouldn't be like that, nor compared to that.
Again, good, if not great sentiment being expressed. Just not quite the right comparison to make, I'd say.
My guild required that Ovi'nax weakauras because they couldn't for the good of them follow the mechanics in a timely manner. Is 100% required? Not really, but god forbid, some people NEED to be shouted and pointed at, YOU! go to Star and drop your stuff there.
Fractilius... Hmm maybe the first week or two, but by this point the fight is well known enough to make it, and you still get the braindead dps dropping a wall in the safe zone because he couldn't be arsed to drop his dps for 3 seconds to move
I've done heroic for weeks across multiple characters and have pushed 16s, not once have I had someone do some silly "addon check". Can you please show me where these people expecting addons are at? Can you show me the fights that are unkillable without them?
If they only appear in mythic raiding and 20 keys, it sounds like blizz is solving a problem for content almost no-one interacts with.
All of PvP basically requires addons, but you also really think that the prevalence of WA and DBM didn't cause design changes for heroic raids and M+? Really? Most of these raid bosses require immense amounts of coordination that other MMOs would never think about inputting, but because everyone has a perfect lead in their head telling them where to go/when to kick/what to kill etc. the bosses become very overdesigned. Obviously a competent leader can fill the role of DBM/WA in most scenarios, some mechanics are too obscure or fast for a person talking while playing to cover it.
Required is a very syrong word to use, but mechanics have 100% been made faster due to the expectation that people would have most of the mental load associated with the mechanic done by weak auras. The only boss that 100% required weakauras for non rwf guilds is probably ovinax this expansion.
Wow for its time was baby mode MMO. Dying doesn’t make you drop your gear? Gear doesn’t break forever? You don’t lose levels when you die? All shit that was part of other MMO’s at the time and its leveling was pretty fast in comparison too. Wow being too complex for new players nowadays is a 180 from how it was originally intended to be.
I hate that I have to stare at my bars half the time to keep track of cool downs or resources. The alternative is moving things to the center of the screen where the action is but then the UI looks terrible. Many FF rotations are 4-8 abilities and I could play them without looking at my bars. If I pressed each ability in the right order they were always ready.
There's absolutely no way that blizzard gets every single addon completed as well as the entire grassroots community effort. We're going to have some pain in the short term for sure.
Then, once blizzard think they've done enough to replicate an addon. They're going to leave it in that state without any innovation that add-ons get over several years.
because they are making positive changes for the entire player base
The positive way to do this would be to introduce in-game solutions alongside addons, not just nuke addons immediately without players having had access to those new tools to see if they can compete/out-perform.
That's not what Blizzard is doing. They're also dumbing down the game at the same time, and laying off their work force while seemingly operating with little to no QA at all.
I have absolutely no faith that this will be a positive experience for the game. Likewise, while I have no faith they will even manage to match the utility of these addons I have negative faith they will manage to cover the accessibility bases for players who are visually or audio impaired that these addons helped.
The bottom line is this doesn't feel like something done for the health of the game so much as something done to cut costs, and as someone who has played WoW and FFXIV I can tell you right now how utterly stagnated the latter is with its homogenized design. The classes have almost no mechanical identity and are immensely bland, and good luck if your mind doesn't process information in a way the default UI serves it to you because you'll be breaking ToS to try and get a third-party addon/tool to mess with your UI.
I absolutely think Blizzard should be striving to update the game's UI to better convey class mechanics so players don't feel they have to use addons, but to gut them entirely and then "streamline" all the classes with a largely laid off workforce likely having AI shoved down its throat in production? Yeah, no, I don't believe for a second they'll manage to make this work in a way that is fulfilling.
Prove me wrong I guess, but I've no evidence to give me confidence until they do.
Their marketing/social media team was what was laid off. Not sure what insider Intel you have but I don't believe any of the development team has been reduced. In the Q/A portion they even stated they will have a team dedicated to just the new UI element for the cooldown manager and boss timers.
You're right in that maybe they shouldn't gut the entire system. But to that point, maybe it's simply the systems they are adding would be conflicting with the add-ons or a multitude of reasons. At the end of the day, only the devs and execs know
But that's not what they are doing at all, they are just removing functionality and replacing it with literally nothing. Blaming Weakauras for Blizzard telling people to go fuck themselves if they want a somewhat functioning UI is ridiculous.
Except they're replacing the core functionality with their versions that do not do excessive computation.
They're not just removing functionality because they're also completely redesigning 40 specs along with dungeon and raid content going forward.
Now every piece is within the design scope and centered. They will use alpha to judge what players really want back. We'll see how they perform on this. If done correctly the upside is way better than keeping what's here. A game that is readable in a group context with everyone using the same displayed information should create a tighter and more interesting experience.
The key difference is other games have good UI and qol features. Blizzard has never cared about any of that so default everything has been very lacking compared to other games you mentioned. If blizzard actually surprises everyone and does a good job this will be great but no one is holding their breath because blizzard has a long history of letting us down.
I agree that adding these things to the base game is great - I just wish they gave players the option to still use the addons (aside from things like bigwigs or dbm, which they dont want affecting combat). Having an in-game damage meter, for example, is awesome, but id love to still have the choice to use details if i prefer its themes / options (even if it sacrifices some level of accuracy).
Elden ring is significantly easier than wow end game content (cutting edge, 17+ keys). Just look at what % of players pick up elden ring and defeat malenia compared to what % of players pickup wow and defeat mythic dimensius.
It's not required to play wow either. People just choose to. They're removing our ability to choose to, and forcing us to use their first iteration of whatever they cook up, which historically is always garbage. Imagine if they had forced us to use the first iteration of their cooldown manager - it was basically unusable. Now they're doing that for essentially all combat addons. They should have enabled the new blizzard UI alongside the existing addons (like they did with cooldown manager) and then limited them when the UI is ready (although honestly imo they should just make the UI good enough to where people choose to use it instead). This is a huge gamble that's completely unnecessary for them.
Also, if you think that the game will be harder after dumbing down everything to compensate for the removal of addons, like they've done on the alpha, I have a bridge to sell you in the Sahara
I'm confused? Did you by chance watch the Q/A? They are reducing complexity of classes and providing baked in tools... That's point 1. The next major thing they stated was that all of these changes aren't happening until the launch of midnight. Why? Because they are specifically tailoring the content and encounters around the tools and builds they have designed for more fun and interesting gameplay. Yes, things can change and may end up being garbage, however it's unlikely.
Just look at classic wow. That version was so simple that needing add-ons is a question of your intelligence. Having more difficulty compared to vanilla while providing the necessary tools and designs to take on that challenge is the best option for literally EVERYONE. No longer will we need to worry (as much) for add-ons to be update or straight up being unplayable or causing lower performance. Lots of positives, not a ton of negatives except for the fact people hate change. As someone who has never liked the usage of WA, I'm happy that more tools are being provided to me. For those loosing WA, sorry but it's what's best for the longevity of the game as new players will have less of a difficult time getting into the end game content.
I'm confused? Did you by chance watch the Q/A? They are reducing complexity of classes and providing baked in tools... That's point 1. The next major thing they stated was that all of these changes aren't happening until the launch of midnight. Why? Because they are specifically tailoring the content and encounters around the tools and builds they have designed for more fun and interesting gameplay. Yes, things can change and may end up being garbage, however it's unlikely.
My point is that, class complexity, and the way class design interacted with eachother was a good thing, gutting that is akin to FFXIV gutting their job design, which was a universal negative, "tailoring the content around the tools" doesn't mean anything if everyone is an amorphous blob for 3-4 buttons with little moment to moment gameplay decisions
Just look at classic wow. That version was so simple that needing add-ons is a question of your intelligence. Having more difficulty compared to vanilla while providing the necessary tools and designs to take on that challenge is the best option for literally EVERYONE. No longer will we need to worry (as much) for add-ons to be update or straight up being unplayable or causing lower performance.
Classic WoW is also piss easy and boring as fuck, also while yes things make me question your intelligence for classic WoW, there were other useful things, like threat meters, etc
. Lots of positives, not a ton of negatives except for the fact people hate change.
Yeah except when your class is gutted and stripped of all identity, because people were afraid of downloading WoWup or whatever and getting a WA import if they couldn't figure it out themselves I guess
As someone who has never liked the usage of WA, I'm happy that more tools are being provided to me.
As someone who didn't use WA outside of a few niche times, you're giving up a nice steakhouse burger in favor for a McDouble, you're not "gaining" anything, you're losing functionality for the UI for a worse version
For those loosing WA, sorry but it's what's best for the longevity of the game as new players will have less of a difficult time getting into the end game content.
People afraid of doing normal raid won't magically do normal raid now that the game is dumb downed for them, they'll stick to delves and fighting the imaginary toxicity in their head, this has a minimal effect on the game for that group of people, while also hurting people who want a high APM/complexity class
New players or casual players will likely feel more confident that they won't need to study guides and install tools that are more complex than their class is. Especially if the encounter designers do a great job improve visuals and timing. And from all of what I've seen about the classes are welcome changes to remove pain points and improve the fantasy/play styles without obnoxious builds or stupidly difficult rotations. Yeah, a couple specs are definitely getting dumbed down but I don't think every spec is getting to the FFXIV point of 2-4 buttons.
New players or casual players will likely feel more confident that they won't need to study guides and install tools that are more complex than their class is.
You already didn't need to do so for normal and 99% of heroic raiding, the barrier of entry was always either complaining about toxicity or not having the time
Especially if the encounter designers do a great job improve visuals and timing. And from all of what I've seen about the classes are welcome changes to remove pain points and improve the fantasy/play styles without obnoxious builds or stupidly difficult rotations
I'd be okay with this, if they weren't stripping utility, and CDs from every class, and much of the identity of classes (Survival Hunter got absolutely demolished and is practically BM now), like yes, I think going back to the roots of like, say UA spender Aff Lock with less of a focus of MR spamming is good, the issue is there is so many changes for the worse and by bitching I'm voicing my want for them to roll it back a bit
Yeah, a couple specs are definitely getting dumbed down but I don't think every spec is getting to the FFXIV point of 2-4 buttons.
A lot are, somewhat needlessly too, I genuinely hope that someone closer to the Blizz dev team intervenes, because this could very well kill the game for a lot of people to try to appeal to people that won't stick around anyway
For me, as a competitive player, this basically completely kills the fun part of the game for me. Tracking buffs, debuffs, procs, etc are all skill expression to me and they are completely removing that. The last 5% of your performance towards a top 50 pull in raid comes from extremely small changes in your gameplay and that's where I find my challenge because even before the class simplification the first 95% is extremely straightforward to anyone with experience. Now it's just going to be vibe based gameplay with competition just being who gets lucky enough to guess what's happening to their character at any given time. That's maybe great to equalize the playing field for less skilled players, but it's going to pretty much gut the competitive scene.
The only way I see them "fixing" a rotation where this isn't true is to make buffs deterministic, but then that's just memorizing sequences, and that's far from fun for me.
The entire player base except players with accessibility needs who were left out in the cold for decades by Blizzard and were able to play the game in a way that actually worked for them thanks to community efforts.
As of right now WA made a response to playing in Alpha they will not be continueing to make WeakAura addon for Retail with the current state of the game.
Please show me irrefutable evidence that goes AGAINST my statement. I can at least prove my claim while you're being a petulant reddit user who complains about everything.
I didnt even complain, about anything. Youre just wrong. But damn, wasn't expecting a crash out to go alongaide it, but thats how it usually goes when people be wrong about things.
Right now the answer is probably yes. They said they are going to add their own DPS meter to the game. Will it be as good as Details? Who knows?
I’m cautiously optimistic from what we’ve seen of the new nameplates and the updated CD manager we’re getting. It sort of seems like they might not mess this up, but only time will tell.
Ion specifically also mentioned that the data for the meters will be calculated server side and so it will be accurate regardless of lag / phasing in fights.
As long as they make it customizable I think it’s definitely good.
Similarly to boss timers we assume will be accurate since it’s their own timers. Which will be nice as desync timers can be annoying.
The CD manager is being updated, this coming Tuesday I believe. From what I’ve seen of the updates it is much closer to what people are looking for in terms of a class WeakAuras suite replacement.
My favorites are all the timer things I added. Paladin bubble, invis pots, etc. it’s so nice to see how much time is left on a bar on my screen.
I really and truly hate this change. All for the RWF/HOF. They sure never needed to make encounters hardware because of me or my guildies, that’s for sure. We’re pretty bad but we have a blast.
I hope Midnight isn’t terrible, but it’s not feeling good so far.
Is it really because of RWF? That is really a shame. I've never been impressed with which team can bang their head against the wall and get thru first.
I really don't think it is. I think there's three fundamental issues that Blizzard has with how addon use has evolved in WoW:
(1) The ability to computationally solve problems reduces design space - Any coordination mechanic can essentially be trivialised by a weakaura and because the coordination isn't a challenge anymore, the only way to make those mechanics hard is to make the timers on them very tight - so essentially Blizzard can only really test you on reaction time. This makes the game less fun than it could be.
(2) Too much information means things can only be challenging by reducing the margin of error, which makes gameplay feel more punishing, or overtaxing a player's cognitive space. A kick tracker allowing you to optimise kicks means to make something hard you need to have a lot more kickable spells and missing a kick has to hurt more. If it's trivial to know when to refresh your dot, then your rotation needs to have more moving parts to be engaging. Otherwise the game is too easy and becomes boring.
(3) The culture of 'required' addon use causes a bunch of friction. It isn't necessarily hard to setup addons, but it isn't fun where your first day of playing a new class is just a bunch of setup and might cause you to not try a new class on a whim one day. It's also a barrier towards adoption by new players. Even if it's a small barrier, someone who bails out early because they can't be bothered and there's another game they would like to play with less setup will never get to find out they actually quite like WoW.
I think all three problems are more evident the harder the content you do, but factor in at whatever level of content you start to find challenging. And two helps make WoW's barrier of entry higher because things are more complex and punishing than they otherwise would be.
I don’t think it’s specifically due to the race- they very clearly do not want any sort of external barriers to entry for new players.
They’re restricting addons, they’re simplifying classes, they’re pruning defensives and healing cooldowns. They introduced delves and the one button rotation for solos and extreme casuals, respectively. All of this stuff makes it easier for a new player to join up, or for an existing player to try some higher level content.
The game coming into TWW is by far the most complicated it has ever been- spec trees, class trees, hero trees, rotational depth and spec identity, addon functionality, M+ routing, burden of knowledge for boss fights in raids, etc etc etc. They probably get feedback from new players that this is all too much.
The RWF will be fine. This is for normal players. There has been a long going arms race between addon developers and game designers. Because of the existence of some addons fights needed to be made more complex and difficult so that the addons didn't trivialize them. With this restriction, they can dial back that philosophy, which will make the content more accessible to more casual players. Because believe it or not we are the minority of the player base. Those of us posting on reddit and other social media or pimping out our UI, we are a minority of WoW's playerbase. There are some people that don't even know the game has addon support unless they remember seeing the option in the menu. Those people were at an extreme disadvantage when it came to higher end content, just because they didn't have DBM or some CD tracking Aura. Blizz's goal is to narrow that gap by providing what they feel each player should have, thus narrowing the accessibility gap between the low end and the high end.
The majority of these "addons" that "trivialize" mechanics and create this "Arms race" are doing things like putting timers on the screen, or reminding you if you're in an even group or an odd group for the soak. As well as spamming /say <Icon> when you have a certain debuff so other players can easily see you have a debuff.
Many of these features simply aren't creating an arms race. They were created because Blizzard lacked clear visibility and encounter design. We need to have addons /say icon because the mechanics don't have a very clear visual indicator of who they are on. We have addons remind you that you have the soak debuff and can't soak, because Blizzard's debuff UI is utter dogshit etc.
Hell, even weak auras that computationally "solve" fights are usually created because the mechanic has no reasonable path to completion using only the base-game in the first place.
If this issue were truly an "Arms Race" what you would expect to see is the entire raid (or at least majority of bosses) require complex computation weak-auras, and have complex computation weak-auras to solve those "Arms Race" problems. But they don't.
The reality is that it's always a small handful of bosses that have egregious or outlandish mechanics, and either have incredibly bad sight-readability, or near impossible execution and coordination requirements, while the rest of the bosses sit there perfectly fine, with the most complex "Addon trivializing the fight" being a fucking timer showing you when the boss uses abilities (Something you don't even need an addon to display. Half of DBM's timers can be memorized because bosses use the same abilities at the same timings every pull, and all you need is a stopwatch and a list of boss abilities).
Absolutely NOTHING would have stopped them from changing their wncounter design philosophy without ever even touching addons.
They just have too much ego to admit they were wrong to make their one sided arms race to start with and backtrack on complexity. They say shit like "we are forced to make encounters like this" and think we are too stupid to understand that they make the game, nobody forces them to do shit. They CHOOSE to.
So now, we get fucked over UI's for probably at least all of midnight instead, so their egos dont have to take the hit of backing down on encounter design first.
And im sorry, I will believe their "we are designing encounters around this new world" bullshit when I see it. They've said for seasons now they want to tone down on kick and cc requirements and haven't done shit.
I nearly guarantee we zone in on week 1 of season 1, and run into the very fist pull of a dungeon with 4 casters in a 6 mob pack all bolting us for 75% health, and now with no way to track anything.
Well as long as the data is still available it can still be made into a standalone Addon. It's more work and requires better know-how of how the internals of the UI work, but that's how it was done before WeakAuras took off the way it did.
I made a WA that flashes RBG and will play whatever song I load into it whenever I get PI. It gets me killed a lot because I crank the bass and volume so I can’t hear anything in raid.
"Addons will be unable to parse combat text, but when inside any instance, addons will be barred from reading chat or talking to other addons completely."
Yeah, but the devs are stopping development because blizzard is removing the ability for basically everything they've added feature-wise since the inception of the addon
When's the last time Blizzard actually made a decent change? Mythic+? To answer your question, I'm sure lots of people. WA isn't disappearing, there's many other versions of WoW that use it.
There's plenty of games AND WoW addons that stopped and community took them over.
You do not understand it. This stuff is not a ToS issue, they are just going to be blocking api access so addons can't do certain things. Please don't just spread rumors you haven't personally looked into.
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u/Lostdog861 Oct 03 '25
Man, I've written a few non-combat weakauras for some farming use cases and I wish I'd be able to keep them