World of Warcraft: Midnight's lack of combat addons lets the devs make raids harder without resorting to 'shoot more bullets at you' design, says encounter lead

A raid boss in World of Warcraft: Midnight - an imposing void creature decked in armour, surrounded by a fleet of voidwalkers in front of a yawning dark portal. — (Image credit: Blizzard)

World of Warcraft: Midnight is a singular expansion in the game's 20+ year lifespan, in that it'll be the first of its kind to not feature combat addons after Blizzard took an axe to them in its pre-patch.

To compensate, a lot of the game's classes were redesigned, since they'd been built under the assumption that players might be using addons to deal with complex mechanics (hello, Roll the Bones). But I've also been told, in an interview with lead encounter designer Dylan Barker, that the change has paved the way to new encounter mechanics, too.

In case you're unfamiliar, WoW's UI mods (called addons) have been a part of its ecosystem pretty much forever—and while they still exist, they're no longer able to read a lot of the data required for solving combat encounters, forcing Blizzard to offer their own alternatives to some of the most crucial ones and leaving players to deal without having the rest.

World first teams would quite literally have Weakauras-fluent programmers on deck who'd be trying to devise custom auras for certain mechanics—mechanics which were also designed with those programmers in mind. A nightmare scenario from both a design perspective and a gameplay perspective: You probably shouldn't need coders to raid.

This issue trickled down into Mythic+ too, Barker explains, with certain addons previously helping players keep track of interrupts and other mechanics in the fast-paced format: "Let's say, in a Mythic+ scenario, [we're changing] what mixes of trash we're suggesting is reasonable for players to pull … up until the number of creatures we expect makes it unmanageable."

Barker also tells me that it's allowed Blizzard to pare back "what we would call 'dexterity mechanics' in bosses, especially raids, in favor of mechanics that can challenge players' coordination and their strategic abilities." Essentially, Blizzard couldn't challenge strategy and coordination effectively beforehand, so it had to rely on raw reflex. These addons could solve strategy, but they couldn't pilot your character out of the fire.

I'm not a high-end WoW raider, but I have done some raiding in FF14, so I can use that for comparison's sake—in FF14, there's a mechanic called "limit cut" that usually forces players to strategise around directing an attack to specific parts of the arena in a specific order, randomly assigned to the raid.

Actually moving to your spot isn't the hard part—it's figuring out where to go and when. In WoW, this kind of thing could be solved with a Weakaura after a few pulls with a savvy enough coder on board, whereas in FF14, where mods are forbidden, you had to learn how to solve it yourself (in theory, people still cheat, but that's a whole 'nother bag of worms).

I think many encounter designers [at Blizzard] have been trying to do that over the years, and have not been able to pull it off quite like this."

Barker seems to be implying to me that WoW can now have more limit cut-style mechanics with reasonable amounts of complexity in them, designed for people, not computers and coders: "I think there are a couple of mechanics in the raids for this opening tier that are possible in Midnight that might not have been possible in the recent past, and we're able to challenge players [via] puzzle and communication and coordination and strategy more."

Barker says this already impacts one of the opening raids of the expansion: "It's cool, because the way that gets harder from Normal to Heroic to Mythic is not 'we shoot more bullets at you'. It is harder on a communication axis, on a coordination axis.

"I think many encounter designers [at Blizzard] have been trying to do that over the years, and have not been able to pull it off quite like this. So it's super exciting."

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Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

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