Blizzard is revamping how addons work in combat in the Midnight expansion. The main goal is to make gameplay more intuitive and approachable, without requiring addons.
According to the blue post, Blizzard is working closely with addon devs and taking in community feedback to create a more streamlined combat experience for all players.
The philosophy going into Midnight is simple: Blizzard doesn’t want addons to automate combat decisions for the player.
Across the World of Warcraft Development Team, we have been closely following community discussions about the upcoming game changes in the Midnight expansion and their impact on some combat-focused addons. As we approach the end of the first month of our Midnight alpha test, we would like to reflect on the conversation so far, clarify aspects of our implementation, and share a preview of some upcoming User Interface improvements.
We began our alpha with the most restrictive version of our logic in place, ensuring that we were fully addressing addons’ ability to provide an in-combat competitive advantage. But we did so with the expectation that feedback from players and from addon developers would help guide us towards the areas where best serving our community meant loosening some of our API restrictions, adding new base functionality to shore up gaps, and/or providing new tools for addon developers to allow them to build effectively in this new environment. That process has been unfolding over the past few weeks, and we are deeply grateful for all the feedback that has shaped our priorities. These improvements will continue as we move towards beta and testing of our endgame content, aided by insights from an expanding pool of testers.
While we have been sharing detailed technical updates directly with addon developers, we haven’t always given the broader playerbase a clear sense of what changes to expect with Midnight. As a result, we have seen some players alarmed at the prospect of losing addon functionality that we expect to be entirely preserved in Midnight, so we want to offer a clearer understanding of what is and isn’t currently planned to change.
Development Note: Addon and User Interface (UI) changes are in active development and will continue to see major changes and iteration throughout Midnight beta testing. All information provided here is subject to change.
The Power to Customize
The main goal of the changes coming with Midnight is straightforward: Addons should not be able to automate combat decisions for the player. “Combat” is an important distinction here, as we have done our best to avoid interfering with access to non-combat information. Furthermore, addons should retain their ability to customize how information is presented to the player.
In Midnight, addons will continue to be capable of providing many of the features and customizations players have long enjoyed. This includes adjusting the look of almost everything you see in the User Interface, such as raid frames, nameplates, action bars, panels, fonts, and art. Addons will also be able to present combat information to the player in ways that differ from our base UI. Let’s use the new Boss Warning UI coming in Midnight as an example.
This new UI presents the player with a timeline view of upcoming boss abilities. Addons will be able to take the information provided and choose a different way of displaying it, such as a stack of countdown bars. They can also change how the timeline looks, to help with an accessibility need, or for personal aesthetic preference. Addons can even add their own custom events to the timeline, such as break timers.
As another example of Midnight addon functionality, let’s look at important casts in nameplates. In Midnight, our base nameplates show the player when an enemy is casting an important spell by making it brighter and playing a flash animation around it. Addons will be able to adjust the appearance of that “important cast” state, such as making the cast bar larger or giving it a different animation to suit individual preferences.
Overall, you can think of it this way: If the UI displays a piece of combat information, addons will, in most cases, be able to present that information to you in a different way. However, addons will no longer be able to use that combat information to drive custom logic or make decisions for you.
We’re actively working with addon developers to address any issues they’re facing with the new APIs and to give them the maximum amount of customization possible while still meeting our goals.
Continued Focus on Accessibility
As part of our continued support for Text-to-Speech (TTS), we’re working on the addition of a new feature in Midnight to provide combat audio alerts. This system will allow players to turn on TTS alerts for various important combat events. Some examples include: the ability to announce when combat begins and ends, to announce your health and resources at regular intervals, to play sounds when you gain or lose a secondary resource (e.g., combo points), to announce your target’s name and health, and more.
There will also be options to choose voice, speed, and volume settings. These options will appear in the User Interface menu (Escape, Options) under the Accessibility section along with /slash commands.
Healing and Raid Frames
Over the past weeks, we have heard clear feedback from healers about limitations in our default raid frames. While addons will still be able to significantly customize the look and feel of these frames in Midnight, we are working on improvements to help address some of the issues players have been relying on addons to solve. We are adding a setting allowing players to choose from three different layouts for the information shown in each player frame. The existing layout (name top left, buffs bottom right, debuffs bottom left, dispels top right) will still be the default, but we’re adding two additional configurations inspired by popular addon offerings. For dispels—Magic, Poison, Curse, or Disease—we are making them bolder on the frame, so they’re easier to notice, along with color and border visualizations.
We’re also adding support to display when a player has a major defensive or similar ability active. We will also make role-specific debuffs (like tank swaps) larger so players who are playing that role can know they need to pay special attention to them. Again, addons will still be able to reskin raid frames or create totally custom raid frames for those who prefer that.
The Road to Midnight
All of the forthcoming changes and iterations on these topics will be testable in future builds of the Midnight alpha and beta. We hope this has helped to provide clarity: While they will no longer be able to analyze real-time combat information, addons will continue to be an important part of World of Warcraft. We’re excited to make more improvements, and we will continue to iterate based on community feedback as we go. Thank you for joining us and we can’t wait to see you in Midnight!
