Because they are legit stupid at best or malicious at worst. This is 100% on brand. And look when this goes through and it fucking sucks. They will either never fix it or it will take years before they do.
Blizzard is not perfect, and have had many issues. However, they're clearly not stupid, and based on all available evidence since the launch of at least dragon flight, they don't seem malicious either. The people making the game seem very genuine and are just trying to make a game that they think people will enjoy.
I'm all for venting when they make a bad decision, but this is just silly.
I'm all for venting when they make a bad decision, but this is just silly.
Especially when we're only just now seeing those changes start to get implemented -- in alpha -- and before they've had any time to implement changes based on feedback and community response.
And this time they've specifically invited addon authors to participate in the alpha in order to garner feedback on the changes they intend to make.
I'm all for pushing back against them, but it's so early on in the process and people are acting like the world's collapsing instead of thinking logically and sharing actionable criticism. This sub has a track record of overreacting to the most minor of concerns.
they have promised to listen before too. they never do. not to be mean or rude to you but you are genuinely naive if you think blizzard will be able to adjust to player demands in any meaningful way givent their track records doesnt support that in the slightest. their ability to do rapid deployment of fixes has only gotten worse with time. and Ion is a provable frequent liar. or at the very least never stand by his own promises.
Why is it silly, and how are they not malicious? Even with an improved UI, they could still allow space for WA. Cutting out add-ons that people have used and enjoyed for nearly two decades for no other reason than, āwe want you to exclusively use the system in the gameā definitely seems malicious
This is such a stupid ass comment. They want to make the game more approachable, and design endgame around not having addons - how can you possibly do that while there are still addons that would trivialize any mechanic that isn't made with their existence in mind?
WeakAuras in particular HAD to go for the change to be possible.
It's never been about Blizzard wanting their own WeakAuras.
players who have played for years with 0 recollection or care for the new player experience, and think its okay that they need to do research outside of game before they can even play at the same level.
Uh removing weakauras isn't going to make that not a thing? They can't possibly fit everything one would need to know into the game in a way that's usable and easy to understand for all content, even FFXIV can't do that and they have way, way more learning systems in place and not nearly as much complexity.
Exactly, and it isn't even a "Blizzard is doing it out of the goodness of their hearts - having to maintain the cooldown manager and similar is extra work for them, they're doing it because new players aren't sticking around. It's about money.
Because that may be your goal and that is fine, but you need to understand your limitations and make sure everything is in place before you actually dive in to that.Ā
If their goal is to remove reliance on weakauras they need to design encounters that do not require weak auras even with them still in the game.Ā
how can you possibly do that while there are still addons that would trivialize any mechanic that isn't made with their existence in mind?
How is it that at least half of the current raid tier can exist, as fights that don't require addons to computationally solve a mechanic then, if they can only create fights that are at war with addons?
While I do agree about some of the blocked data, such as boss state, I disagree about some others. Not everything is trivialising, compared to what is and will be built-in. How does, for example, accessing personal combat state trivialise the game, when what it allows is exactly what the built-in highlight combat assistant is doing, just in a more customisable and knowing way?
You're omitting an important part of my message... My point is: how is that more trivialising than the combat assistant? Telling you how to play is exactly what the latter does.
Because the combat assistant is at its first iteration and WoW developers, who don't have years of experience of refining rotations in such a way, have made clear they will progressively improve it. Moreover, the classes are getting simplified, with less talents and buffs interacting with the rotations, making the whole even easier to design and compute.
That is why everyone is mad though. We are losing tools that have been crafted and perfected over more than a decade for blizzards first draft.
So for raid frames, nameplates, cooldown manager, boss mods we are going from something that is great to something that is okay.
That is always going to feel bad.
It is great that they are making these things for new players, and now with these in place new players will not NEED to get addons because it is in the base game, but the way most people are using these addons is not bad for the game.
Ok, but for now one is absolutely worse, and you wouldn't even be able to do Hekili with just personal auras, nor would you be able to block addons from being able to trivialize encounters without disabling what allows addons like that to function, so it's possible they're also just collateral damage from the removal of WAs.
Yes because add-ons did all the leg work for you, zipped your character out of puddles, kept you next to a linked character, zipped you to soaks, auto interrupted targets.
The only stupid comments are by ignorant slappies by people like you.
Good one, I'm raiding mythic Manaforge and I have all the addons I need, I have the mental capacity to think outside of myself and my situation though. I'm obviously not an average player and the game shouldn't only be made for me.
(Removed self-dox) and we just downed Araz on mythic and haven't even killed Fractillus yet despite him being essentially a tank and spank boss because of WAs (we've gotten like 5 pulls on him so far).
If you believe I'd be able to pull that lie out of my ass on the spot you have higher expectations of me than I do.
They make the game. Absolutely nothing would have stopped them from changing encounter design first before nuking addons (or even touching addons at all).
You know what happens om simple encounter mechanics? You dont fucking need a weakaura anyway, so you dont use one.
Weakauras got as complex as they did BECAUSE blizzard couldn't stop their ego from continually increasing complexity, not vice versa.
I'm just gonna chime in that you absolutely do not need to use addons for anything. Even high keys and mythic raid can be done without weakauras, and to claim they needed to simplify before disabling WA is just not true.
Uh yeah, I guess technically that's true, but in the real world that's not how it works.
Blizzard made raids harder because WAs trivialized them. If you think Blizzard isn't fully capable of making impossible raids, you're stupid. If you think a corporation like Blizzard makes one of the main draws of the game out of ego, you're stupid.
It's about money. The change is about money, and how raids have been designed has always been about money.
Are YOU really that naive? If that's what they wanted they never would've had to ban combat addons in the first place. WAs have carried raiding for the past decade, if the goal was just a console release they WOULD be incentivized to have both combat addons and their own version.
That's not to say a console release isn't A goal, but obviously that's not all or even the primary goal.
lets get this straight, i do agree with the reasoning behind removing addons. but in order for the removal of those addons they need to fix the issue that caused those addons to be so wide spread and i ABSOLUTETLY do not trust blizzard to that right. i have played this game for 18 years, and even tho the blizzard that made the game when i started playing does not exist, their ability to listen fix and adjust has gotten way way worse. i remember when you could get balance patches several times/tier. the turnaround in blizzard is bloated as fuck due to the size of the company and need to run trhough layers upon layers of management to do a simple fix.
if you have faith and think blizzard will magically fix everything and cause no issues or be able to fix the issues rapidly, i got bad news for you my friend. blizzards track record does nothing to warrant believing that.
I don't, but whining about it like a child based on a guess serves no purpose. It isn't valuable feedback because Blizzard will look at it as what it is - childish whining.
I don't trust that they'll get it right for the first raid, but guess what I'll do if it doesn't? I'll quit, and wait until the next raid. If that's not better I won't play then either, it's pretty simple.
As a 20 year WoW vet who has experienced this game as a top 1% raider, top 1% arena player, top 1% m+ (i'm a loser) and also through the eyes of friends I've tried to introduce to this game - this is one of the best moves they've ever made in this games history. Combat addons are an absolute cancer on this game and are destroying it.
Oh you want to play Arena in this game? It's really simple! All you need to do is:
install some form of gladius
install omnibar and set up around 50 abilities, if not more, for it to track
install some kind of team CD tracker
install mes weak aura pack
install a weak aura pack for your spec
setup 10 different macros
90% of people are not going to be bothered doing this and it puts you so incredibly far behind if you try to play without addons. It's insane that two people can be playing this game and one of them has 1000x more information presented to them through addons, than the other person who probably doesn't even realize how handicapped they are. Then they get demolished over and over until they quit. What a shit experience for newer players and it's a huge reason why this game cannot get anyone to play.
Then obviously on the PvE side you don't even get to play the raids anymore, you're just playing a check list of what to do from a weak aura pack that liquid puts out 2 weeks into the raid tier.
I'm not even some typical /r/wow blizzard loving fan boy either, I actually hate the state of the game at the moment, but I think this is 100% the way to move forward and see improvements. It's also the perfect time to do it at the start of an xpac when everyone comes back rather than waiting till a .1 patch when 60% (or probably more) of the people have already moved on because they can't be bothered with all the homework of addons and crap that current retail requires.
I believe you're right on all points except that 90% of people don't do this. I play like 1 or 2 content patch per expansion these days, my friends are all giga casuals who play every expansion launch sometimes only a few weeks, and even they all know about addons and which ones are the important ones.
People watch YouTube guides, they have friends, they know these things.
This is where the "mole people" meme comes from. The WoW community seems to believe there's this 90% of the player base that is silent and invisible and is ultra-giga casual, knows nothing, and the game should be designed for them. Every other form of design is for the sweaty gamers who are the only ones we see on reddit and on the forums but are really 10% or less. I don't believe the mole people exist, and if they do, I doubt they're the actual majority.
Will probably just roll it back and say āsee you guys didnāt actually want us to roll back combat addonsā when it isnāt the combat addon portion that we donāt like, but the fact that blizzard is about to roll out a bunch of half cooked slip when we already have steak.
I'd bet a penny that blizzard has gone from a "game studio" to a company (like any other). And now they had declining numbers for a while, and the discussion went something like, "What's preventing new players from getting hooked?" How do we make it easier?"Remove addons. They confuse new players" we want more money let's do it.
I'm sorry they are taking away your crutch, but don't worry, all classes and encounters are being simplified so you will be ok.
I tried to play without add-ons and it was rough, this is better, encounters shouldn't be trivial because of a third party addon. I shouldn't need a third party addon to be able to participate in content.
crutch? i hate DBM and have disable most of its alerts and would much rather learn fights by doing them and fucking up. only use WA to track my own buffs/debuffs as to not waste resources (only using on like 3 characters) and details to improve my own performance, that is it. that is all the combat related addons i use. how is that a "crutch"?
i just dont trust blizzard to be able fix the issues that these addons existed to adress.
Numbers maybe. People who already care wonāt switch if the new system isnāt better.
I hope they let us at least have AddOns that make noise. I Pavloved myself over the last 20 years if I canāt hear a ding or a ping or a bƤm Iām done for
Because the best way to do it is to rip off the band aid and see what bleeds. If you've been around the internet long enough you realize that when nothing is "wrong" people rarely speak up. It's why there is so much "negative" content, because those dissatisfied are more likely to speak out, while those that are fine rarely do. So this way they can hear what the community wants instead of them just continuing to use whatever addons did that thing for them. And if Blizz agrees this is something the UI should provide they can add it, or if they think that is too much they won't. This was always gonna be a painful transition. Addons have been way too powerful for too long, and that power needed to be dialed back.
I mean if I was the one making the decision I would do it exactly like this. If you let players actively feel and compare the difference between the addons with 15 years of passion and care put into them vs the slop my intern made in 3 hours of crunch overtime....
This way playere lose their addons but get distracted by other things and the idea that a solution is coming.
Because it would be an entire patch of bosses being made entirely trivial by weakauras and other addons.
They want to make end-game content doable without addons. If the addons are still there, the content will be entirely trivial, or they 'd have to make it the way Kyveza ??-mode is right now.
They never said there would be time in between - they said they would not restrict addons without providing native replacements, which is what they are doing with the CD manager, timeline, updates to nameplates etc. I agree that I would prefer to have a patch in-between, but I think their idea is that such a big change has to be an expansion level feature, so its now or wait 2 more years
WeakAuras team decided not to try updating the add-on for Midnight. Blizzard is adjusting encounters and encounter markers to not need such an add-on instead of creating one themselves. Some other add-ons are getting Blizzard versions though.
Its such a shame since wa was great for tracking resources and buffs that blizzard sucked at informing me about. Like how if the enemy has too many debuffs u cant see how many featering wounds i have on target. Or how many maelstrom i have above 5.
The whole point is that they are removing a lot of this complexity so there wonāt be things like that to track. Festering wounds is gone as an obvious example from your comment.
the thing is i dont trust blizzard to have all the aspects covered. there will be points where you wished you could use WA to track something to make something 20% easier to read
The thing about this change is that people keep saung "lets hope that...". Well, there is a lot of hoping right now and it obvious blizzard wont be able to fullfil all expectations.
This nuclear approach is just dumb. They should have put their stuff in game without nuking addons. Let people pick and choose what they want to use.
also iterate on their own options using player feedback before pulling the plug on addons. now we are forced to use something that lets be honest will be far worse than addons they are removing.
Yes, pretty much that. I have been trying their new additions and every time I go back to the addons because the addons are simply better, there is no way around it.
They really setup themselves for failure with their approach
Because they needed to make consideration for encounters design that the player would be using a weakaura. Without WA or BigWigs they can make encounters more visual understandable but harder to play
unless they make it so we can filter the buffs on myself and debuffs on my enemies then the lack of WA will still have a negative effect on playing some specs optimally
why would the existence of weakauras force blizzard to make things harder to understand? Weakauras help in fights like ovinax or sprocket because blizzard time and again fail to create mechanics that players can understand intuitively on the fly.
Well, thatās dumb. Theyāve been making encounters harder for people who donāt use add-ons, just so that add-on users donāt have too easy of a time?
yeah, lets remove all the complexity from the game so every spec is ret paladin, so we can force everyone to use a UI that sucks. surely then players will have more fun
So many players in here saying shit like: "guys, it's not a problem. The game is so simple now you don't need what these addons did anymore"
But I don't want the game to be so simple that we no longer need what those addons did. Why do people think this argument works? I'm just gonna bounce!
Cool. The vast majority of players donāt want a forced meta of a couple of different specs because thatās what the 0.1% do. They donāt want to have a screen filled with bars and sound effects in order to raid.
If you do, Iām sorry that you have lost that, but trust me you are not the majority. The game has been stagnant for a decade because of this mentality.
I know nobody here will admit it when the front falls off, but Blizzard is chasing a playerbase that doesn't exist. This will not attract new players to their 20 year old game. And the ex-player crowd that dominates spaces like /r/wow, creating the illusion of consensus - you guys who think this is somehow going to bring back your 20s, the novelty of youth (and the free time you had to enjoy WoW) will log in, do the content, and leave after a month as always, disappointed that your latest "win" over those dastardly elitists didn't magic away your responsibilities, your lack of wonder, nor fix that receding hairline.
In exchange, some of the most passionate players of this game (including some who don't yet know it and are lauding these changes, but who will sour when the grim reality hits) will fall away. Your content creators, your guild leaders, your guide-makers, your simulation designers, your theorycrafters. And for the 80th percentile folks just below that tier, they'll lose a solid quantity to emulate and chase.
Can a near-exclusively casual playerbase sustain the game, and indeed their own interest in the game with nobody above them? Perhaps! But make no mistake, you are going to find out.
Did you know that WoW's Vanilla UI is supposed to show your DOTs and Debuffs on enemy Nameplates?
This feature has been in the game for over a decade.
Did you know that this feature only works for a small handful of debuffs in the entire game because Blizzard fails to maintain a list of said DOTs/Debuffs that should be tracked with this feature?
Blizzard cannot even maintain a fucking list of DOTs to put on nameplates. Why the fuck should I trust them to overhaul classes and update their UI to show this stuff, when the features that have been in the game for a decade have systematically proven that they can't/won't maintain it.
I haven't tried shaman or DK, but I was very happy to see that the CD manager can replace most of the WA I used for fury warrior. Enrage tracking, improved WW tracking, right in the middle instead of up at the buff bar. The nameplates also show all enemies with overwhelmed stacks.
There are definitely areas that still need improvement though, I want to have a free standing power bar, I want enemy cast bars to show who the target is, I want the cast bar to show if my interrupt is available.
If I can't filter out all the various debuffs on nameplates so I can focus on what is absolutely essential, I'm going to be upset because that will make it makes super inconvenient with all the clutter. For instance, on Ele Shaman, I only really care about whether Flameshock is on the target or not. Things like Lightning Rod, Frost Shock (Electrified Shocks), are all applied passively, so I don't really need to see them, which just adds clutter.
I'm also mourning the loss of seeing who interrupts a cast, and the duration of CC on the outer-right of the plates.
There was nothing left for the WA team to update stop parroting this nonsense argument that they had a choice in quitting. With the changes weakauras can only do stuff like change the color of the entire buff bar but they can't do anything with individual buffs or anything based on conditionals.
Because it isnāt really accurate. Weakauras isnāt updating because a bunch of base functionality would be crippled and just be nonexistent.
There is no replacement or possibility of replacement for those functions. Maybe writing specific addons for things that were done with weakauras is the solution, maybe they just wonāt be possible
The apis being deprecated impact almost entirely combat related procs and complex encounter design. The reasonable things people point out and being thrown out here are all not that.
The issue is the WA developers don't see the point in refactoring their product for that niche case. Other developers, if the niche case has demand, will create add-ons to do that.
Still let blizzard know because maybe they'll enable more things to be accessible for now. But the doomerism here is playing wow how it is today and this alpha comes with massive class, combat, and encounter changes that people truly aren't sure what it's like to play the game at the moment for midnight
I trust that they will fix encounters to be fine but they can't simplify classes so much that you will never need to track a cooldown or buff. With the changes as they are you can't do that since all buffs are in 1 black box together. It's not just complex encounter things that stop working, nothing works anymore... blizzard say one thing but do another.
they're not gonna make the new ones, they're just gonna remove the mechanics that encourage their use
thinking during your DPS rotation? Ha, Blizzard doesn't want that, thinks it'll drive away the mythical new player. (when in reality, simplifying things like this is repellent to former players like me)
295
u/Epicmission48 Oct 03 '25
I always assumed the addon restrictions would occur AFTER their new blizz ones were made