Since the start of patch 11.2, players have been wondering just what exactly happened to the new Spell Density options. Blizzard announced the feature before the patch, which was supposed to allow players to reduce how many spell effects they saw from other players. This type of feature exists in quite a few MMOs, and it was certainly a welcome addition. However, it hasn’t been working at all – that is, unless you use a console command.
A Long Time Coming
While the feature has been “missing” since the patch, Blizzard mentioned they were fixing the issue on August 28th, 10 days ago. We haven’t seen any hotfix since then, and the options for it still do nothing. There have even been reports of players having other players’ spell sound effects muted and nothing else by the options (which may or may not be intended)! However, many players have been digging around and realized the options (or at least some of them) are actually implemented. You just have to enable them manually, through console commands.
The Commands
It’s time for some old-school action as you’re going to need to set up some macros! The commands are very simple one-line ones, so it shouldn’t be too much trouble. There are four possible settings, but it’s a little unclear if all of them work. The base setting, which sets the spell effects to a minimum, does work, however.
/console set spellVisualDensityFilterSetting 1
Settings 2 through 4 at the end of the above command are supposed to add more and more effects back, with 4 disabling the feature entirely and returning you to the default all-effects enabled. The settings also only work in instanced content, and you may need to use the command inside. The open world always seems to have it set to 4.
Here are some examples by Several-Ad1692. First off, Defile with only the option checked, which does nothing:
And then with the console command:
Same thing for Glacial Advance:
The WeakAuras
Of course, If you don’t want to set up some macros and do it manually, there’s already an addon for this as well. In fact, there’s an entire category of WeakAuras for the topic! So grab whichever one you prefer and get those spell effects down!
Hopefully, Blizzard can fix the issues that are causing the options not to work properly (and some to possibly not work at all) soon, so this will no longer be necessary.
