After years of silence on Reddit, WoW’s Senior Game Director Ion Hazzikostas stepped back into the fray and clarified how much power addons should have in the Midnight expansion and why the base UI should be enough to compete.
Ion’s response came shortly after MysticalOS shared a video where the DMB and BigWigs authors sat down with him to discuss the state of addons in Midnight. The conversation covered current issues and constructive feedback from the addon community. You can watch the video below.
After seeing the wave of reactions, especially around countdown timers, Ion jumped back in to offer more context on Reddit.
While some players agreed with Blizzard’s push for fairness, healers worried that removing audio countdowns could make high-end play harder. Reddit user FattyBear argued that hearing a timer isn’t “automation,” it’s just a way to manage complex mechanics while already dealing with heavy visuals.
Ion clarified that addons shouldn’t be able to do more than the regular base UI and that boss fights in the Midnight expansion will have both clear telegraphs, ahead of time, and sufficient time to react. If they fail to hit the mark, they aren’t against adding an audio countdown solution to the base UI.
A lot of this sounds positive. The only thing I heard that made me recoil a bit was hearing Ion’s take on audible countdowns to enemy spells.
So, we’re aloud to have a visual timer for the ability, but hearing a countdown instead of seeing it is me being a fuckin noob according to him. Fair enough I guess, but I’d also like to see him heal some of these bosses at an 18 and time his ramp down to the second, consistently, every time the ability is coming up.
Granted, I don’t wanna argue in bad faith, ramping will likely be a little less important with so many healing amps being removed (a direction I support), I guess I just don’t see how there’s anything wrong with hearing a countdown as opposed to seeing it, and I kinda resent the sentiment that hearing a countdown is “automating” my gameplay. Timing things down to the second can be the difference between failure or success in this game, and I’ve got plenty to look at and react to in game as it is.
Perhaps they’re sincere in that gameplay across the board will change to support their vision for addon restriction, but frankly, what I’m hearing is blizzard taking on a large responsibility to design their gameplay to support this hardline direction and honestly, I doubt they have the time or staff to devote to that season after season. I hope I’m wrong about that.
Despite everything, I’m excited to play midnight and I’m glad we’re making big changes. I’d rather stumble on big changes than continue down the road we were on.
Hi, I just wanted to clarify my comments on this point.
We for sure could have been clearer on our philosophical goals here, which have been spread across multiple interviews and videos over the past year. We’re working on a blog that can be a single source of truth there. The overarching goal of the changes in Midnight is to level the playing field and do what we can to make it so that while addons can still thoroughly personalize your experience, they aren’t giving you an objective competitive advantage over people using the base UI. In pursuit of that goal, we’ve made changes to the addon API, to our base UI, and to how we design our combat and encounters.
So in this context, it’s not that we view a spoken countdown as a form of automation or as inherently problematic; rather, we feel that it would be inappropriate to allow only addon users to have that functionality. We also have concerns that giving addons access to exactly how many seconds remain before a specific spell is going to fire could open the door to creative problem-solving solutions.
Our focus is on designing our Midnight encounters to have both clear telegraphs ahead of time, and sufficient time to react (more time than we would have provided in a world where we knew the majority of players doing organized content were using addons to ensure they were ready for every major ability). If it turns out that we’re unable to hit that mark, we’re definitely open to adding an audio countdown solution to help, but we’d want it to be available in the base UI rather than requiring an addon.
