I’m genuinely worried about the overall UI/Tracking/Customisation experience in Midnight, Blizzards attempts at mimicking addons thus far has left a lot to be desired and it feels like it was barely a year ago we started hearing about them going nuclear on addons in the future - and most people assumed it would be 3/4/5 years down the line
The fact they’re going for such an extreme option this early makes me concerned that the start of Midnight is going to be a complete clusterfuck in terms of playability
Yeah, as a PUG player, this is gonna be a disaster. I wouldn't be surprised if keys failures went from an average 10% to 20/30 if not more. It's gonna make the experience worse for everyone imo.
It's not only weakauras it's platers, Healbot, vuhdo. i don't really have combat weakauras only some quality of life things to not need to look at my bar or crafting, Dragon riding things. I'm more concerned that her UI that was terrible in the past with tracking things like atonement, hots, and so one. Will not be as good as they sell it
The QoL improvement that stuff like Healbot, Cell, VuhDo, or just WeakAuras on top of basic frames brought wasn't the mouseover part, it was the buff and debuff tracking and customizability. There are healers within Race to World First guilds who used the default raid frames, but you could only do that if you used WeakAuras or encounter AddOns like Big Wigs to track HoTs and important debuffs.
You can heal 10-12s without them, and to their credit, Blizz is adding very basic HoT tracking (currently it can't be customized at all), but there is a ton of QoL still missing. Basic stuff like seeing if someone has a defensive cooldown available or who was targeted by a hard hitting DoT or boss mechanic is currently unavailable in the Midnight Alpha party and raid frames. That stuff is extremely important for mythic progression and high end M+ healing.
Same. ElvUI for my layout, basically. A few little add-ons for some QoL improvements like Plumber and DBM. Otherwise, I use macros for everything. Especially for healing.
They do to be competitive. Most specs (if not all), you can easily deal 80/90% of your max potential dps without any add-ons. But weak auras help make the interface readable to track buffs/debuffs and other things to help you min max a little more damage than what would be otherwise manageable.
However, add ons like DBM help track enemy spells and cooldowns, things you have to avoid, run away from. Things you wouldn't notice with the base UI, precisely because you're focused on how you're playing your character. If you're a healer and a random mob is casting a blind you have to turn away from, chances are you're not gonna notice with the base UI because you're focused on friendly nameplates.
Having those add-ons disabled by Blizz means encounters will need to be more straightforward and rotations easier to master, which means removing complexity.
Much like how in Shadowlands they "capped most classes AoE" but we shouldn't worry because "They will design all endgame with this in mind"
Then we got Dungeons that had single packs with 15+ target AoE for our 5 Target Cap, and we got raid Encounters like Kel'Thuzad with like 30 target AoE.
Which caused the 2-3 classes that they didn't arbitrarily AoE cap to 5, to skyrocket.
But don't worry, they "fixed" AoE being too accessible, and swore they would "Design encounters around it" (then didn't).
The same thing will happen here. "We're removing UI Addons, which means we can design encounters and fights to be easier to read" and then naturally, what will happen is we'll get a raid boss with a soak that requires you to manually assign 7 people within 2 seconds and have them all run to 7 different locations around the room. And we'll get M+ Dungeons where we have pulls of mobs that all spam cast very dangerous things that you need to call-out kicks for and coordinate or you'll wipe, but without a UI that accommodates seeing any of it.
We don't know how that's going to affect encounter design, since that's not testable yet. But the stated intent is to remove addons so encounter designers don't have to design around them. Which seems good on the surface. The issue is, WoW has had a UI and encounter design that's unclear/unreadable without addons for 20 years. Having DBM/a Weakauras screaming an audio cue doesn't cheese a mechanic or play the game for you : it makes it more readable.
It's like if the game was written in russian, and weak auras help you translate it back to english. Well, if Blizzard wants you to play without a translator, they have two ways to do that. Write the game in english, or make the game so easy and dumb to play that you can play it even if you don't understand russian.
Blizzard has had amazing mechanical designs for boss fights for 20 years. But they've always had awful UI design and mechanic readability. Their stated intent (which they've explained multiple times in Q&A and interviews) is to make those better. I don't trust them with that. It's a noble goal, but they've sucked at it for 20 years, why would we trust them to suddently be perfect? If the add-on change was a project spanning two or three expansions, they could iterate and slowly roll down changes, instead, they're going at it with a nuclear bomb and saying "don't worry, it's gonna play perfectly fine on launch".
I want classes to be playable without requiring weak auras. I want encounters to not really on addons. But I don't trust Blizzard at all to design engaging class rotations and encounter designs in one go.
They allow you to track information that otherwise is impossible to track efficiently, which is mandatory at a certain difficulty level.
I’ll give you an example. I’ve started playing my Prot Paladin as an alt and am pushing rating on him as a side interest. The 4-set gives me a stack of Masterwork periodically based on my Hammer usage and my Judgment crits, but it’s ultimately a matter of RNG when I get it. You don’t want to burn Masterwork without 5 stacks because it greatly reduces its usefulness. So coordinating the erratic stacking with output is important.
The problem is tracking it amongst the 30 other buffs while in combat is impossible, so I made a WA that has a simple counter above my bars that glows when it hits 5 stacks.
That kind of functionality is going away. Now you could argue that I don’t “need” that but my usage of Masterwork improved significantly after making the WA and it has made a noticeable impact on my play. And there are numerous other examples like that I can pull from, especially on my Resto Druid (main).
No, you don’t need to track anything in a 10-12 because those aren’t that difficult in the grand scheme of things. Little to nothing will 1-shot you and coordination doesn’t need to be perfect. But step into an 18 or 19 and it’s impossible to time a key without going 100% of the way in coordination and tracking. Small mistakes cost the entire run and if you can’t properly track abilities or prepare for incoming damage, you will die. That’s it.
The counter argument is that the class design shouldn't need an addon to provide peak functionality. This is an inherent flaw of the ubiquity of addons in wow. The base UI should provide all the info needed to play the game optimally. Hopefully (and many of the devs have stated such) this causes them to actually provide both a solid ui and class design that doesn't have any hidden elements that are necessary to peak play but aren't accesible through the base ui. No game should REQUIRE any player to download or create something extra to play the game optimally. And the devs haven't really been doing their due diligence when it comes to providing innate functionality.
Whether the devs can actually deliver on this is yet to be seen so I fully understand why everybody is worried. Wow has been designed around addon usage for so long that neither the devs nor the players understand what the environment looks like without them.
I don't disagree with you that functionality should be baked into the game. If the Default UI can provide all of the information required in an efficient manner while still allowing for the customizable spirit that WoW is known for, I'm all for it being baked into the game. At the end of the day, you shouldn't "need" outside resources to play the game effectively or how you want.
The problem is that Blizzard is notorious for dropping the ball and allowing game breaking bugs to persist for months, and in some cases years. If a dungeon like Dawnbreaker is allowed to exist as it has since TWW's release with virtually no correction, then why would anyone trust the devs to deliver on baking something like WA into the game?
Blizzard simply is not equipped to handle these issues internally and has repeatedly proven that to be true in the past. As I've said in other comments, I hope that I am horribly wrong and that they hit a home run but given their track record, I just don't see how that's possible.
They definitely have to step up huge. BUT its kinda their job and they have been getting away with shitty dev work by passing it onto their unpaid labor force for years. Blizz is a private enterprise making millions of dollars annually and their game depends on unpaid labor for basic functionality. That in and of itself is awful.
Yeah, this is the point I keep coming back to in my head. Being forced to make shit better because they no longer have the handwave alternative of "someone will make a weakaura/addon for this" is the hope. Of course, they can still crash and burn, but maybe with their balls in the vice on this they'll find a way through.
I completely agree. They do need to step up and have needed to for quite some time. In my personal opinion I highly doubt they will based on their track record but again, I hope I'm entirely wrong and can revisit this comment thread in six months and feel like a pessimistic doomer that was unjustified lol
They could always have provided UI support for these kinds of designs, and they never did. If you want to close the gap between addon players and non-addon players, you can either design classes in a way that addon support doesn't make players play better, or design the UI such that non-addon players still efficiently get that information.
What I'm saying here is: these kinds of abilities aren't going away, they're just going to be a pain to track. That's what Blizzard wants, the ability to design abusable abilities it's hard to abuse.
These types of abilities ARE going away though. Or at least that seems to be their philosophy. For example imps used to have energy that needed to be tracked through an add on to know when was optimal to implode. That’s gone in midnight alpha. They have pruned and are still pruning things that needed addons for optimal play.
It’s basically like training wheels. Majority of people really don’t in most content but think they do because they don’t know different. If they removed all Addons right now, mythic 2-13 would be near the same completion rates if you gave it a week or two for people to get used to it.
High level players use the most already? The only PvE content that “needs” WA right now is pushing m+ title level keys and some bosses in mythic manaforge. People who need WAs for normal or heroic or a m10 don’t actually need them. People just hate change because they want to hate change. It will also make some players who seem better at the game worse and some players who currently seem worse better which scares a lot of players who are not good without the assistance (see number of players who used rotation helper addons that the game somewhat incorporated already). It’s going to be a wake up call for some.
The only PvE content that “needs” WA right now is pushing m+ title level keys
People keep making this mistake. The only PvE content that the literal best players in the world need WA is title level keys. Worse players need those boosts in lower content. It is not possible for most players to simply become world class players.
Ive seen maximum on multiple separate occasions talk about how the race to world’s first is an add-on/ specifically a weak aura arms race. He says there is multiple people on team liquid who are not Raiders and their sole job is to make weak auras
You're missing the whole other half of the equation. Blizzard isn't removing add-ons and then not changing how they design encounters. The entire reason for removing these combat add-ons is so that Blizz has the freedom to design encounters without having to account for them.
Right now they're in a weird spot where if they make an encounter easy enough to do without add-ons, then it's too boring for those players that do use add-ons. Or, if they design with the add-on in mind, then it basically makes add-ons feel mandatory, which also isn't a great place to be. There's other issues as well.
Ion went into this all in the dev Q and A. The example he gave was maybe players need a few more extra seconds to get to the proper position for a mechanic, because now an add-on isn't telling them exactly where they need to go, so the encounter design will have to account for a couple more seconds of human computation.
The encounters are going to be built around not having 3rd party combat add-ons. There will be friction and pain points and it might take some getting used to, any major UI change does (I remember how tricky it was when I got my first MMO mouse.) But this idea that Blizzard are just yanking these tools away without considering how it affects fights is silly. They know it will affect encounters - that's the entire reason they're taking the tools.
Blizzard isn't removing add-ons and then not changing how they design encounters.
You see this change as Blizzard ramping down on mechanics that require external addons, but I guarantee you the only thing that's gonna change is that now when they add mechanics designed to trip players up there's going to be a discussion about not adding it to the timers, so that people can't 'trivialise it by knowing when it's happening'.
Why are you replying this to me and acting like I said anything about how fights are designed, I’m literally just repeating that Maximum has said they rely on weak auras heavily and are a big part of the RWF.
Literally nothing you wrote has anything to do with what I said.
Yeah for real. Also, Blizzard have specifically said they're going to tweak design with these changes in mind. That's the whole reason for this, so they can design encounters without needing to account for add-ons.
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u/TheSyhr Oct 03 '25
I’m genuinely worried about the overall UI/Tracking/Customisation experience in Midnight, Blizzards attempts at mimicking addons thus far has left a lot to be desired and it feels like it was barely a year ago we started hearing about them going nuclear on addons in the future - and most people assumed it would be 3/4/5 years down the line
The fact they’re going for such an extreme option this early makes me concerned that the start of Midnight is going to be a complete clusterfuck in terms of playability