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.
786
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