Not having combat UI mods in WoW hurts way less than I expected, and while I think Blizzard still has some work to do, I'm mostly just happy for the peace and quiet

World of Warcraft: Midnight's pre-patch is now live, meaning players are currently shivering in a cold room from the mother of all modding comedowns. I'm one of 'em, given I've always had stacks of Weakauras enabled to help soothe the ache of WoW's sometimes-janky class design.

In case you're unaware, WoW's been of a mind to fix its UI mod (addon) problem for a long time. Specifically, combat addons—the idea being, a player shouldn't have a raw competitive advantage because they had a bunch of third-party plugins installed. Blizzard announced its plans to cull combat addons last year, and that day has finally come. (Addons that don't impact combat are fine, although they do need updating.)

I've hopped in and had some time to fiddle around with the changes on my Outlaw Rogue—both the lack of combat addons, the class changes made to facilitate that, and Blizzard's updated "Cooldown Manager" and Personal Resource display.

I'm not convinced these tools are comprehensive enough to handle everything I want them to do—I'd love, for instance, to be able to customize more about the appearance of my personal resource bar (an opacity slider would be nice), or to add sound alerts to more triggers, rather than just skill cooldowns (I don't want to be staring at my combo points bar all day).

However, what I have noticed pretty much right away is the peace and bloody quiet. I had an absolute orchestra of alerts, pings, and noises fluttering about my screen at all times. And while I shall miss my little pirate flag, it turns out there's a lot you can replicate. While I've not checked out the game's roughly 40 specialisations individually, the redesign for my Outlaw's fixed most of what I was using addons to smooth over anyway.

That's not to say I'm totally pleased. I'm still fiddling with the quirks of the system. For instance, if you want sound alerts, you need to have the cooldown manager's custom bar visible.

I prefer to just have an action bar pop into combat with all of my cooldowns visible, given it's easier to manage their orientation. At the moment, I've opted to put the manager's ream of icons in a very teeny-tiny, 10% opacity box in the corner of my screen where I can pretend they don't exist just to get the sound alerts to work.

Also, a lot of abilities don't permit for audio triggers with little rhyme or reason to them. For instance, I can't set an alert to inform me when I've got a specific buff, or for when my Blade Flurry's about to run out. I also can't set an alert for something coming off cooldown, it has to be available (that is, the noise only plays when my current global cooldown has finished ticking over).

But hey—I can get most of the big cooldowns. Otherwise, I am officially here to say that I was wrong. This new system might not be perfect just yet, but it is better. Look at how neat and tidy this all is.

Okay, neat and tidy for me. And trust me, you don't want to see what it looked like before.

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