As any experienced World of Warcraft player will tell you, WoW addons have become an essential – some may say, necessary – asset when it comes to taking on certain aspects of the MMO. These third-party mods and tools come in all shapes and sizes, but those that assist players in high-difficulty combat encounters are among the most popular and widely used. Despite there being many years of acceptance from Blizzard about the use of addons, today the developer has revealed that it’ll be changing tact. It wants to gradually outlaw the use of combat-focused addons, and instead replace them with its own in-house UI improvements, features, and tools.
Due to how complex and challenging some World of Warcraft activities and encounters are, players have long turned to some of the best WoW addons for help. The likes of Deadly Boss Mods, Hekili, and GTFO have all been designed to help players plan, execute, and survive high-end activities like raids, feeding them knowledge about upcoming encounters, giving them visual or audio clues for things like boss attacks, or recommending which spell to cast in the context of the current battle. While addon creators are a core pillar of the MMORPG’s community, it’s safe to say that the efficacy and variety of combat addons is giving Blizzard some real headaches. In its opinion, addons are also detracting from what originally made WoW so fun and unique.
In a lengthy new video discussing combat addons (and a new feature which I’ll touch on shortly) World of Warcraft senior game director Ion Hazzikostas says that Blizzard wants to start gradually phasing out the use of third-party addons that assist players in PvE and PvP combat.
“The way we design encounters has been influenced in significant ways by the way players use addons,” Hazzikostas admits. “When we’re thinking about the overall pacing of a fight, the tuning, we might get feedback [from players] on a fight that it feels like there isn’t enough going on. In actuality, there are four or five different mechanics going on, but addons are largely compartmentalizing and making it so that most players don’t have to think about them most of the time.”
“[The use of addons] also definitely ties our hands, in some ways,” he adds later, “like I think we do fewer coordination mechanics than we used to. If you look at the old school WoW days, there were encounters where the primary challenge for a raid was, by design, coordinating some rotation… Now we know ultimately that can never be the things we can lean on for challenge, because it’s going to be solved, and it’s not going to be solved through what we think of as the more interesting MMO-y communication, cooperation, and figuring out systems.”
Due to the limitations they’re putting on Blizzard from a content and difficulty perspective, it wants to gradually replace these third-party addons with tools and systems of its own design. The first is set to arrive in the upcoming patch 11.1.7, and it’s called Rotation Assist. It’s a new UI option that is “designed to help players who are maybe picking up a new spec or want some guidance on what abilities they should be using, without having to turn to third-party addons for it.” Basically, it is looking to replace the incredibly popular Hekili addon.
Blizzard’s new feature will also include a ‘one button’ option that will let you press a single key to automatically cast the spell the game recommends you use. However, there will be a penalty for utilizing it – it will add more time to the global cooldown, meaning players cast spells more slowly versus someone playing manually.
Rotation Assist is the only feature Blizzard has announced so far. When it comes to a general timeline for rolling out more features to replace combat addons (and for when Blizzard will begin to restrict and block them) Hazzikostas is remaining both cautious and flexible, saying that “we need to really ease into this.” He acknowledges that it’s on Blizzard’s shoulders to actually create the in-house tools to replace mods first, and that rolling out a hurried blanket ban on combat addons would be a disastrous move.
So, big changes are coming to WoW when it comes to addons, but this shift will at least happen gradually. For more, check out some of the best fantasy games and best multiplayer games on PC.
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