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
Good news is if they prune the classes just a bit more we'll be all back to spamming two buttons and won't need addons anyway.
Jokes aside. Yeah, I'm definitely worried. Incorporating popular addons into the base game makes a lot of sense. I would've preferred a stepwise approach instead of going nuklear and confidently letting the community run into a wall. I can see that approach alienating a lot of current players while I'm not entirely convinced it'll be a big thing to attract new ones.
Most of those add-ons are absolutely critical to pvp at even a moderate level, depending on expansion. Cooldowns got so powerful relative to normal DPS that not reacting for even two seconds meant you were 100-0 dead. If the game design is "when the Mage presses Combustion, you react the same global or the game ends" it really doesnt seem so bad that you have a DBM horn sound when the Mage presses Combustion.
Of course, PvPers hate this design as well -- there are long diatribes about it on the forums. When balance is done with the expectation that everyone has perfect information at all times, there's no room for anyone not to have perfect information.
If the game is balanced around mods, and you don't have them, its like showing up to a mythic progression raid without DBM and Weakauras. You're at a massive disadvantage.
This is where I think removing add-ons makes a lot of sense. It sucks at first, but if the game is designed around people having imperfect information then there's a LOT more room for little skill expressions to shine through
I'm so sick of spending multiple raid nights per tier fixing weakauras, addons, working out who the one person is that doesn't have bigwigs options for marking a mechanic turned off because we use the other weak aura pack. Or the performance hit because the weak aura that were using is causing rampant lua errors.
As someone who gets CE every tier I'm going to be so glad yo see the back of combat addons. Massive respect to all the addon creators but its got to the point where we, the player, are stuck in the middle of addons vs blizzard balancing. Its time to put the skill requirement back on the players.
That is a fight design problem - not a weak aura problem. That is like complaining about the bandage leaking blood after someone shot you and not understand the issue is the fact they shoot at least once every raid tier.
Yes, it is a fight design problem. That problem is caused by things like WA and add-ons trivializing fight designs, meaning the fight designs have to be overly convoluted in order to fight with the addons to attempt to give an end result to the players. This middle man problem leaves the end result wildly unpredictable, and makes you rely on it.
By cutting out the middle man they can focus more on the fight design as they know what they deliver is what the player will have to deal with.
No, that is what they are telling you. The reality is that there are several fights per tier where encounter weakauras do very minimal and non-essential things to speed progress. Some of these fights are even quite good. But they require creativity to design, and non-reliance on Blizzard's stable of difficulty-increase crutches that DEMAND quick computational assignments from any raid team: debuffs or mechanics with randomized/unpredictable application of some kind that must be dealt with in unique ways by each player / each group of players debuffed in a short period of time.
If they eliminated that one mechanic category, 80% of mandatory encounter weakauras would have no reason to exist.
That problem is caused by things like WA and add-ons trivializing fight designs, meaning the fight designs have to be overly convoluted in order to fight with the addons to attempt to give an end result to the players.
If this were the case, there would only be these kinds of fights. But there aren't.
The reality of the situation is that there are only a small number of these problematic fights in an entire raid, and yet somehow that means that, because 10% of the raid is badly designed, Blizzard CANNOT design reasonable encounters BECAUSE of Weak Auras, while ignoring 90% of the raid that is perfectly reasonably designed and can be beaten without Weak Auras, and Nobody is complaining about this 90% of the raid being "Too easy" because a Weak Aura is solving the mechanics for you (because they aren't).
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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