One of the more interesting statements about patch 11.1.7 this week, in what ended up being a deluge of patch news, was that Blizzard is adding a rotation assistance mode and a one-button rotation to the game. As part of their freshly-declared war against computational combat addons, this makes sense, yet as a first salvo in said war, it is, on first glance, a bit baffling of a call. It’s led to a lot of players being exceedingly normal about this idea, about what makes a good player and how you could theoretically replace high-end players with one-button enjoyers, and I think the topic is generally pretty hyperbolic any time it comes up.

What Is a Rotation Assistant?

Rotation Assistants are a small corner of the addon ecosystem in WoW, providing addons that evaluate your current combat scenario and recommend which button to press next, usually with a GUI that shows up as a mini-hotbar with the next several actions. These addons, the most popular of which is Hekili, use an APL (Action Priority List) so they are compatible with the same inputs that are used to program character simulations for gear comparisons, and generally aim to make recommendations to you that should optimize your performance. They are computational because they accept all kinds of input and use it to change recommendations – they can often detect based on neighboring target counts if you are in single-target combat or AoE, they know what gear and trinkets you have on and will recommend your on-use effects if configured to do so, and they can even help you manage tank gameplay by popping up a recommendation to cycle your active mitigation when it is about to drop, or even just standard defensives for all roles.

Because of the limitations of the addons themselves and the data they can access through Blizzard’s WoW addon API, they are usually not perfect. They can struggle to detect AoE scenarios if the targets are reasonably spread or you consistently maintain one main target, the recommendations to use defensives for non-tanks don’t evaluate the fights themselves and will make only a cooldown-based recommendation for some abilities (damage-dealing defensives like Windwalker’s Touch of Karma or Retribution’s Shield of Vengeance are the main examples where rotation helpers will push you to use them on CD), and they can be slow if a spec has a lot of instantaneous spell-based feedback, like outside of the Combustion window on Fire Mage (during which most rotation assistants cannot help very well because you’re literally waiting to confirm critical strikes before it will recommend your free mega Pyroblasts).

Why Are Rotation Assistants Controversial?

WoW players like it when you get good. Okay, little bit of a joke, but honestly, to many people, the mastery of a rotation is representative of why WoW is fun – it gives you a way to improve your play, that improvement is easily felt in-game, and the achievements of reaching new heights of throughput and play mastery feels good. Like developing any skill, getting into the weeds on a WoW rotation has a lot of different inputs that all contribute to a satisfying feeling of mastery. To some players, the notion of shortcutting that journey is bothersome or feels counter-intuitive – why play the game if you’re not going to play the game?

It has to also be said that to a certain category of player, rotation helpers feel bad because they unlock the ability to play about as well as the average player, and if you are hardstuck in that category due to your own skill (or lack thereof), well, of course someone just pressing what they’re told and doing as well or slightly better than you will feel bad.

There is also a perception, a misguided one, that a rotation helper will get you close enough to play at the highest-levels of the game as to be endangering to the enjoyment of players who spent the hard hours gaining mastery the hard way. This isn’t generally anything that high-end players themselves actually believe, mind you, but it comes out of a similar category of players to those mentioned previously. It’s steeped in the idea that rotational mastery is all it takes to be good at World of Warcraft, when in truth it is a smaller piece of a larger puzzle…

Mastery of WoW is More Than Rotational Priority

There’s a tendency to believe that in WoW, being exceptionally good at your rotation is all that matters and the primary indicator of skill, but the truth has always been that this is just simply not the case. WoW’s gameplay is about a multi-faceted mastery of skills, the intersection of managing your rotation while also adjusting for mechanics, managing movement, knowing when to commit cooldowns for maximum effect outside of simple binary rules, utilizing safe defensive play against incoming damage, and showcasing the class and spec utility you have, like AoE stops, CC, and other forms of non-rotational gameplay. Knowing your rotational priorities and managing to maintain them while having to move and adjust is a lot harder, and many players will know their rotations but fail to keep them rolling when stressed.

Even assuming that a rotation helper could get you to an absolutely perfect rotation (spoiler alert: it cannot), it literally cannot know enough about what is happening around you to perfect every aspect of your gameplay. And sure, you can and many players do build entire user interfaces around adding that knowledge with stuff like dungeon timelines, interrupt unitframes, and warnings for incoming damage or other noteworthy events, but there’s a difference between being presented with information and knowing how to react to it. A rotational assistant can and absolutely does help with easing one aspect of that gameplay puzzle so you can have more mental bandwidth for the others, but it cannot take an absolute novice and turn them into a skillful, highly potent player. There are too many pieces to the puzzle, too many things to master for that to ever actually work.

Rotation Helpers Don’t Get You Nearly To Perfect Rotational Play, and That’s Fine

I can speak to this one from experience!

Long-term readers who remember my UI revamp post from 2021 might recall that I am, in fact, a Hekili user. Because I play every spec in the game at least a bit during each expansion, it makes just zoning out and playing the game a more enjoyable process. For specs I play more regularly, it is a good teaching assistant, because I can feel out through gameplay why it recommends what it does and then reference guides to pull myself towards deeper understanding. I won’t profess to always learn and internalize the full rotational priority for myself, but on specs I really play a lot, I start to learn when to turn away from those recommendations and move to something different. Can following a rotation assistant get you a good chunk of the way to learning? Sure. Could I have hit 3,000 RIO just by following what it says without any interpretation or understanding? Nope, not even close!

What makes for good play skill is more than rotation, as we’ve already discussed, and even on rotation, the best-programmed specs in most such addons will get you to like 70% of the rotation. There’s a lot that still happens underneath that which requires a learned hand and skillful gameplay, like optimizing burst windows, cooldown alignment with certain abilities, and managing for high-speed specs where the rotation helper just can’t keep up, like Fire Mage and to a lesser extent a spec like Demonology Warlock, where procs and resource flooding can start happening if you aren’t correctly turning over incoming resources and keeping things moving.

If you are a player that feels like you have to use a rotation assistant to do good numbers, the odds are also good that your reaction times might be a hindrance. Genuinely, I’ve worked with players where the thing that hurts their DPS isn’t rotational complexity or lack of knowledge, but just a lack of processing speed and thus ability to keep their GCD rolling. I’ve watched a Demon Hunter player Fel Rush out of melee and then sit there for what feels like an eternity, unsure of what to do next, seemingly stun-locked about their gameplay, and being able to reduce those moments would help them immensely, but it isn’t that they stop there because they don’t know what to do – they just don’t react to it quickly enough to keep things seemingly smooth. A rotation assistant could maybe help break the deadlock there, but it still requires the player responding and being able to respond fast enough to avoid unforced downtime. You can try to configure around this – I use a 5-bar of forecasted actions with my Hekili setup to help me avoid that scenario – but at the end of the day, the biggest predictor of actual success is not an addon or UI package – it is the player in the chair interacting with the keyboard and mouse. If that person is adaptable and quick on their feet, they’ll be able to succeed with or without a rotation helper in ways which a less-skillful player with one cannot.

Rotation Helper Discourse

The closest WoW ever gets to being as tedious, whiny, and annoying as FFXIV addon discussion is when the topic of rotation helpers comes up, because it creates this weird moral grandstanding about what constitutes “cheating” and how someone using one is less-than. At the levels of play where you have to be one of the best, a rotation helper is just not going to be used or useful, and even then, it offers less data about what is going on in the game than something like a boss mod. Developing as a WoW player is a long process and I think that anything that helps players along that journey that complies with the game’s TOS and addon API is perfectly fine – a stance that I think Blizzard probably agrees with, given that this is where they are starting the war on combat addons. There are plenty of WeakAura packages designed to do similar things, and I don’t think there’s a ton of difference to be seen between being told to use a cooldown by a bouncing WeakAura versus a rotation helper. In WoW, most players use some sort of combat assistant via addons whether they want to admit it or not – almost no high-end player uses a full natty WoW interface with just the glowing buttons to guide them through their rotation. It is quite telling that most players I have seen raise a stink about rotation helpers are mid-tier, with most high-end players I watch having even done video series where they do high-end content with a rotation helper and provide feedback, and it’s generally funny and lands in the area of, “neat, but I can play better and faster than the recommendations.”

Blizzard Starting Here Is Weird…

I think that of all the places to start this new war on computational addons, rotation helpers is a weird first stop. DBM is the addon commonly cited by most people as the worst offender and the most mandatory, and it seems like it would be the one to target. Or Details, given that Blizzard wants to add parsing in-game, and it seems like making the math work out would be fairly straightforward. Why rotation helpers? I could see an angle where they think it might be the simplest – just put a recommended rotation into the game code and make it present itself to the player – and that is an interesting take. I do think, however, that this effort might be misguided for a simple reason!

…Because Blizzard Created The Underlying Problem That Led To Rotation Helpers

The whole reason that rotation helpers are such a thing is that the game has grown to be a complicated mess of interwoven abilities and combo setups that the game is unhelpful about explaining to new and even veteran players. The return of old-school talent trees has brought in a mess of talent nodes that change core abilities, most of which do not reflect on the ability tooltips on your hotbars, so a new player has few ways to actually understand that you need to be using some abilities to setup or empower others. Mistweaver Monk relies upon Renewing Mist to setup the vast majority of their healing throughput, Preservation Evokers lean heavily upon Echo combos, Conduit of the Celestials Windwalker needs to lineup most of their burst window to Heart of the Jade Serpent buffs, the current 4-piece tier set bonuses for many DPS are only easily maximized with a tracking WeakAura to tell you when you can slam for max throughput, and there are countless other examples across every spec and role in the game.

Blizzard has created a tangled web of gameplay where true maximized throughput only comes when you have an incredibly dense level of detail about how every ability in your kit interacts with the others and how to order them in not just a basic rotation, but through a decision-tree priority that has a weave of branching paths. This information is not provided by the game in any easy to understand format or display, because in spite of the improvements Blizzard has absolutely made to the base UI, it still has some bad tendencies that were designed for how the game launched 20 years ago and not for the here and now of the 2022-era Dragonflight talents, much less the more complicated interactions many Hero Talents from 2024 have with that system. Even the easiest spec in the current game (in my estimation), Retribution Paladin, has combo interactions like the interplay of the extended range talent with the need to maintain auto-attacks, the feed of Holy Power into spenders especially during Divine Hammer windows, and managing your burst windows in the correct order so you can lineup abilities to flow after hitting Wake of Ashes so that you can pump bigger numbers. It doesn’t require a lot of thought, but even this basic level of combo gameplay can mystify newbies and those that just aren’t particularly good at the game.

Blizzard could be designing a return to, let’s say, Legion-styled gameplay where the bulk of what your spells and abilities did were the baseline effects of those abilities and easily understood by reading the tooltip, but instead, the game is focused on trying to compensate for overly complex design by creating a button people can mash instead. I’m fine with that solution, if it wasn’t already clear – but I think it puts the cart before the horse a little bit. The problem is not that rotation helpers exist in the slightest, it is that rotation helpers have become a clearly useful addon category to people because the design of the game makes engaging with it fully harder to do for a novice.

And while I just endorsed what I see as a valid pathway to solve it (reducing complexity to around Legion-levels while maintaining a high level of gameplay interactivity), I know it isn’t that simple. A lot of players like the interaction of talents and abilities that exists today, and while the pathway to learning and mastering that isn’t the easiest, it is attainable. One of the reasons that I think WoW still remains a well-loved MMORPG is that its combat is layered in a way few games are, where there is a whole journey to getting better at it and developing those skills, and I think removing a lot of that depth would be a mistake. I think Blizzard could do a better job communicating those interactions in-game and developing a way to do that is a worthwhile endeavor, which is partially why I think working on a rotation helper as baseline UI functionality is perhaps not the correct first salvo in this war.

The One-Button Nontroversy

If you listen to internet dullards like Asmongold or people who would watch his video for a heavily-misrepresented graph to make a point they don’t understand, the one-button mode Blizzard is adding is a huge affront to the game that will kill it dead. Yet I think this mode is actually probably a great move for Blizzard, even if I think the right way forward is to primarily address the underlying complexity of rotational gameplay in a helpful way.

The one-button mode is the one thing Blizzard can do that addon authors cannot, and it works thusly – you can go into your spellbook as of 11.1.7 and drag out a single-button rotation onto a hotbar. This button auto-cycles through a rotational priority for your spec and talents so each press of the button will cast the next spell in order and cycle the rotation for you, at the cost of an additional 0.2 seconds of GCD time. Kalamazi, a Mythic-level Warlock player, tried it on the PTR, and I think he does a great job of offering a level-headed reaction to it based on actually trying it out:

There are some things we don’t quite know about it yet. Firstly, the rotational priority seems to be limited to the base class and spec kit – no trinket usage, no potions, nothing outside of doing damage, and without accounting for anything other than nearby target count, so it won’t use out-of-combat state to recommend a precast (it is common nowadays for a lot of specs to have a pre-cast spell that wouldn’t be in standard rotational priority as early, like Demonology Warlocks precasting Demonbolt without the instacast buff or Affliction precasting Haunt to get it rolling). Secondly, the GCD timer lengthening is something that could, in theory, be reduced by Haste, but we don’t know if it can be reduced away. For what it’s worth, only a basic understanding of WoW stats and how they work is needed to know that reducing the GCD takes a lot of Haste, you can only drop the baseline 1.5 GCD to 1.0 seconds and that takes a metric shitton of Haste, and that even if reducing that extra 0.2 seconds is possible, it will likely take even more Haste due to diminishing returns – so while the theoretical argument is interesting, it also doesn’t take a lot of thought if you understand the game to realize that it would be very challenging to do in practice and would come at the detriment of secondary stat balance on your character. Thirdly, the interaction of these issues leads to an interesting question – how responsive is the one-button rotation to procs or other factors? Thinking about my Destruction Warlock, for example, and there is a scenario that is common in Mythic Plus where you sometimes take the Havoc-proc talent Mayhem to be able to do full single-target damage to a random secondary target for 5 seconds – in Destruction, this means you want to cast a couple juicy Chaos Bolts, but the increase in GCD time coupled with the random nature of the proc is curious here because even if the one-button mode can detect the Havoc proc and recommend a change based on that, will it be fast enough to even bother?

I think this mode is something vastly different from a rotation helper and one that deserves its own analysis, and my short summary – I think it is great. The GCD limitation and nature of what Blizzard has put into the button (at least so far based on PTR) seems to be fine enough, because it means you can perform reasonably well with it but it offers an incentive to still learn the base spec or get to a point where a rotation helper can be the next step in that journey. In terms of accessibility, it offers something neat for players who might struggle to play the game but just want to be able to enjoy the world, questing, and lower-difficulty activities – and even outside of accessibility, it’s nice to have a low-impact way to engage with the game if I get high and am listening to podcasts at 2 AM while slamming out world quests for the umpteenth time (what a fun theoretical scenario that has definitely never happened in real life). It would never be useful in higher-end raiding or Mythic Plus, and maybe a case could be made that it should be! – but for now, I think it is actually admirable that Blizzard is recognizing that different people get different things out of the game and offering different ways to interact with it.

So sure, if you’re an idiot who still thinks Asmongold has something interesting or relevant to say about WoW or you have zero understanding of how the game actually works, then maybe this one-button mode is a bad thing, but I think the way it has been approached is almost entirely upsides for the audience that would benefit and doesn’t really have any implications for the competitive scene where people might think to be more protective of the integrity of the game.

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While I have more neutral to mixed opinions of Blizzard’s restated war on combat addons, and while I think that starting with rotation helpers is an attempt at fixing a symptom of the actual issue that led them to proliferate, it is admirable in a way to start here and to have a focus on different types of players and how they interact with the game. There’s a strong case to be made that The War Within, with increased focus on casual soloable content, more relaxed modes of play, and easier access to things on alts via Warbands, is one of the strongest forays Blizzard has made into maintaining and even growing a non-raid, non-dungeon audience for the game, and stuff like this is a way in which the game can further those efforts while also providing something that the higher-tier audience can dig into and try out. It’s not perfect and it has question marks about certain parts of the functionality, as well as being part of a larger discussion about design philosophy and gameplay complexity, but overall I think Blizzard is in a reasonably good place to start here and that an official rotation-helper and one-button mode will help the game appeal to a broader audience without needing to send them to external resources, which is a good goal to have even if I think they could address that issue a few different ways.