The great purge of World of Warcraft's most popular combat mods, or addons, is almost here: Blizzard is planning to disable them as early as the patch leading up to the Midnight expansion's release.
It's a surprise for everyone who had assumed the rollout would happen more slowly to let players adjust to life without third-party tools telling them when a boss is going to do a dangerous attack. Professional raiders and casual players alike have relied on combat addons to assist them with the MMO's endgame dungeons for decades. But starting in Midnight, they'll have to rely on the default UI and their knowledge of the fights.
Wowhead attended a group interview with game director Ion Hazzikostas and UX designer Crash Reed where they were asked about addon support going forward. Hazzikostas didn't explicitly say when addons will go away, but his answers imply it will happen in the final patch before Midnight launches.
Hazzikostas said a blog post for addon authors is coming "in the next day or two" that will explain how some combat information will be stored in a black box of sorts, preventing addons from accessing it.
"The UI and addons can know that box exists, they can display information about it in a larger way, smaller way," he explained. "They can make it pink if they want, whatever you prefer, but what they can't do is know definitively what's inside that box and run any kind of logic based on it."
In a response about disabling addons for boss mechanics, he said that the most recent raid, Manaforge Omega, will be getting a tuning pass to make sure the fights still have an "appropriate level of challenge" when the Midnight pre-patch arrives. This suggests that combat addons will be gone before the expansion comes out next year.
Addon support has been a hot topic around Midnight's release ever since Blizzard announced its plans to phase them out in April. Blizzard's goal is to improve the way it communicates combat mechanics so players don't have to rely on addons for success, but many people aren't sure it can pull off such a dramatic shift to how it designs encounters. Players with disabilities are also worried about losing support for addons they need to be able to play the game at all.
Blizzard has already been adding official alternatives to popular addons to help retain some of the functionality players have grown used to over the years, including a damage meter for your group or a tool that tracks the cooldowns on your abilities. Hazzikostas has made it clear in interviews that the team understands the scope of this undertaking and plans on listening to feedback as it makes the transition. He also reiterated in the Wowhead interview that the new system will still allow addons to tweak how that information is displayed if players still want to use them.
"Again, the goal specifically is to just restrict that problem solving real-time computation that's used to aid moment-to-moment combat and do the least possible damage to every other addon that millions of people use and enjoy," he said.
There's a real risk of Blizzard ruining the game for many experienced players even if its goals of making a more legible game are promising. It will have to find a way to make boss encounters satisfyingly challenging for high-level players without leaving them exhausted 20 attempts in from the amount of things they now have to juggle. The next patch will be the first taste of how successful this new era of WoW will be, but I imagine the true test will happen when Midnight's first raids debut shortly after the expansion launches early next year.
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