Blizzard have been talking about introducing major changes to the way combat addons can interact with the game for a while now. Today, Game Director Ion Hazzikostas talked to PC Gamer about what exactly this will and won’t entail, and when it will begin.
What Purge?
The discussion over removing certain addon/WeakAura functionality from the game has been going on a while. We’ve already seen the Private Aura changes, which made certain boss abilities untrackable/uniteractable. The goal is to have more changes like these, to the extent of removing combat log/aura access from addons entirely. The reasoning behind it is that Blizzard don’t want players to be entirely reliant on outside addons to be able to play most of the game’s boss encounters. Some players are already unhappy with the sheer amount of addons you need to have to be able to complete higher difficulty encounters.
Timing of the Changes
Hazzikostas mentioned there will be no changes to what addons can or can’t access in the next two patches. This means that at least 11.1.7 and 11.2 will remain untouched. After that, the team will begin the process of removing functionality from combat addons. During and before that process, they will also be adding new functionality to the base game. This is so that there isn’t suddenly a big gap where the old addons used to be. 11.17 will begin putting in the new baseline functionality that will replace the problematic addons, starting with the Rotation Assistant.
The most likely start to these major changes seems to be the Midnight pre-patch. These also won’t happen all at once. Hazzikostas emphasized it will be a process very much handled in cooperation with and based on community feedback.
“This is meant to be a philosophical kickoff and to begin the conversation with the community. Add-ons have been part of the game since its very earliest days. If we were to just come along one day and rip off that band-aid, it would be jarring.”
Different Difficulty
The main intention behind these adjustments is to change the way difficulty works in the game. Right now, there are many addons that players use to basically tell them what’s going to happen and what to do about it. They are absolutely mandatory for a lot of higher-difficulty bosses to be even possible to defeat. There is a lot of information players simply cannot get from the base game, making these fights impossible without addons. This is what Blizzard want to change.
“Part of the goal of mechanics is to create a problem that needs to be solved and a bit of challenge that feels satisfying once you overcome it.“
The Goals
By adding more information and tools to the base game, the goal is for players to be able to be competitive in raids and dungeons without all these mandatory mods. They also want to dismantle the arms race between addon makers and boss designers
“The goal is at the end of the day to get to a point where if asked, ‘Hey, do I need to use add-ons to play?’ the answer is, ‘Well, they’ll give you a lot of options to customize your experience, but no, it’s up to you.’ Today, if we’re being honest, we can’t say that.”
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“The goal is to build up the native functionality of our UI to increasingly narrow the gap between players who are using add-ons that assist with competitive functions and those who are not. Once we are most of the way there, there’s going to be that last mile that consists of things that honestly we don’t think are super healthy for the game.”
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“The goal is to keep similar numbers of wipe counts for Normal, Heroic and Mythic encounters, early versus late, similar success rates. But to tailor that to a world where the problems are, once again, in players’ own flesh-and-blood hands to solve, not an algorithm that they’ve downloaded.”
That last mile is when major functionality will be turned off for certain addon types. The biggest of these could be access to combat logs and auras.
More Design Variety
Another victim of the addons is different types of boss challenges. Everything is made with what the addons can make trivial for players in mind, limiting what designers can do. This can also lead to repetitive mechanics. Those can be the only ones that can offer a challenge that the addons can’t neutralize.
“Our classes weren’t designed under the assumption that you’re going to have unpredictable movements every few seconds. We just want more variety in a diverse design space.
If we know it’s being solved for you, and you’re just being told to run to diamond, how is that challenging? How do we make it challenging? The only way is to only give you two and a half seconds so that you need some movement boost. You’re taking a warlock gate from point A to point B, because otherwise anyone could do this.”
Private Aura Change Failures
Hazzikostas also talked about how the addition of unreadable auras for boss abilities didn’t quite turn out great. Players just found a way around the limitations. Macros were used to feed the now hidden information to addons. This added more frustration to the process. Now, mis-timing a macro or having a typo in it would cause a wipe. He added, “Let’s never do this again”.
Rotation Assistant Functionality and Loadouts
Hazzikostas also talked about the Rotation Assistant. Specifically, about how it not being a perfect match to the existing mods may be ok. The Blizzard version of these addons shouldn’t be seen as a wholly inferior option, but it’s most of the way there, that should be ok as well.
“Some of it is being guided by feedback to understand how we can bridge that gap for a majority of our players, and also to some extent accepting, and hopefully getting folks to accept, that it is 96 percent of perfect.
Your performance relying on [rotation helper] Hekili is still inferior to someone who has it all ingrained as muscle memory. There’s always a higher skill ceiling. Is it a critical flaw if the highlighted combat assist recommendation for your next ability is not reflecting the latest theorycraft that was discovered yesterday? I don’t know if that should be a dealbreaker.”
He also mentioned the team is open to adding options for shareable loadouts for the Rotation Assistant.
Upcoming Changes
Hazzikostas mentioned there are big improvements coming to the already implemented Cooldown Manager. We’ll be seeing changes to everything from visuals to editing, audio cues, nameplate options, and more.
“But we’re getting a whole bunch of feedback about the ways in which it [the Cooldown Manager] would need to change. We need to add customization and improve it, to make it feel like it could be a reasonable substitute for a more-advanced power user.”
What Will and Won’t Change
Talking about what functionality will or won’t be allowed in addons, as an example, he mentions that while editing the size and visibility of nameplates will be possible, but using conditional logic to change the way they look because of a player or boss ability or move likely won’t be. Another example used was that lethal casts in dungeons should be telegraphed better. This might negate the need for mods to warn players about such abilities.
Once the major changes hit sometime after 11.2, it will no longer be possible for addons to track group abilities. So no more seeing other players’ cooldowns. Due to this, dungeons may be changed to they require fewer interrupts. Incoming heals or specialized buffs/debuffs will also no longer be trackable. However, if any of the removed featured end up being crucial for players, they will simply be integrated into the base game. This also applies to diminishing returns for crowd control abilities.
“It should be part of the default UI. Same is true for tank swaps. If we’re building an encounter where once your co-tank reaches four stacks of some negative effect, you need to taunt immediately, we should be giving you much better information to make that apparent. That’s on us.”
There is a lot more Hazzikostas talked about in the interview, so make sure to check the whole thing out over on PC Gamer!
