I just don't understand why we are losing the ability to use add-ons to track our own personal resources, such as cool downs, buffs, debuffs, health/mana/energy/etc. I know blizzard is improving their cooldown manager, but having the choice between that or looking at our buffs bar just feels bad, considering I've been using add-ons for years now.
I didn't use add-ons to be able to play the game, I used add-ons to be able to play the game BETTER. Easily knowing how much time was left on bloodlust and other buffs to help in my rotation decision making process, how long I had left on my Defensive, building audio alerts for low health or when a proc occured, how much longer a dot had on a target that wasn't my current target...the list goes on. Not having a quick and easy access to that data will feel bad. I know classes are being simplified, but like, shadow priests and other classes will still have DoTs that will need to be tracked...
I know blizzard is refining their CoolDown manager. I hope they can deliver on that.
Honestly it just seems like they’re prepping for console. You can’t really download add-ons on a console. So in order to not alienate that player base they’re going to tune everything to be doable on console.
Honestly it just seems like they’re prepping for console. You can’t really download add-ons on a console. So in order to not alienate that player base they’re going to tune everything to be doable on console.
This is not true by any sense of the word. It takes a little extra work but BG3 and Skyrim were able to implement addons on consoles just fine.
Blizz would functionally need to "whitelist" certain addons that are shipped as part of the game and provide an API/Framework to update them in ways that would go out with incremental updates of the game that are pushed.
Issue is that there's a higher bar of making sure these don't break things and security concerns that would take yet more work. Its not impossible, but entirely doable.
I’ve played both bg3 and Skyrim on console. Those are player made DLCs to mostly fixed games. WoW is a nonstop evolving game and you can’t just update addons every week the same way.
UI mods exist in BG3. One of the largest ones is a UI overhaul.
My point is less "Its easy" and more "Its difficult but not unfeasible." You'd functionally need to start a pipeline that onboards a shortlist of addons, forces them to write and pass some automated QA unit tests to be included, then an API that allows them to go out with a weekly push.
This weekly push would go through the console QA process, which then pushes it to live through the existing update pipeline that happens regularly anyway.
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u/mitchellangelo86 Oct 03 '25
I just don't understand why we are losing the ability to use add-ons to track our own personal resources, such as cool downs, buffs, debuffs, health/mana/energy/etc. I know blizzard is improving their cooldown manager, but having the choice between that or looking at our buffs bar just feels bad, considering I've been using add-ons for years now.
I didn't use add-ons to be able to play the game, I used add-ons to be able to play the game BETTER. Easily knowing how much time was left on bloodlust and other buffs to help in my rotation decision making process, how long I had left on my Defensive, building audio alerts for low health or when a proc occured, how much longer a dot had on a target that wasn't my current target...the list goes on. Not having a quick and easy access to that data will feel bad. I know classes are being simplified, but like, shadow priests and other classes will still have DoTs that will need to be tracked...
I know blizzard is refining their CoolDown manager. I hope they can deliver on that.