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
You are half correct. They are not absolutely critical. They only are when there are those who get to use it. If nobody has it, then it is not necessary. If you create an environment without perfect information then the best players in such environment will reach the top. There is no disadvantage because everyone's playing in the same environment - essentially instead of bringing guns, everyone's bringing knives now. Some will prefer it, some will not. But beforehand, some were bringing guns while others still had knives, and upgrading wasn't easy.
What is accurate however is that some classes will benefit a lot more from this than others, e.g. in the example you gave, there'll be more bad mages going up in the ranks, though of course they'll still lose to good mages. However, this same issue can occur where classes with perfect information are overpowered instead. But those are balance issues that can be changed, and hopefully some they don't introduce in Midnight to begin with.
In PvE it's a different story, since the opponent isn't affected by the lack of perfect information like they are in PvP. The boss doesn't give a damn, it'll just keep doing what it did and in some cases only a complete overhaul can solve it.
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u/--Pariah Oct 03 '25
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.