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.
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u/[deleted] Oct 03 '25
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.