One of the major changes (arguably a marquee change alongside player housing) coming in World of Warcraft’s Midnight expansion is the largest set of changes to the WoW addon API that has been seen since the game first launched. Blizzard’s core philosophy on addons is changing to a more hardline stance against combat-facing addons, and the change is more sweeping than we previously thought. For Blizzard’s plans, they’ve pushed 3 major changes that will facilitate a future sans combat addons, and so I wanted to write a 3-post series discussing the changes – the addon API and what is currently set to be allowed/disallowed, the combat changes coming to all specs and classes, and the announced design changes for encounter design that are aimed at creating a new era of WoW combat where the lack of addon-solving is less of a problem than it would be if current designs were just kept as-is.

Today, we discuss addons!

WTF Is An Addon API?

With World of Warcraft, Blizzard has a published set of functions that addon developers are allowed to access and interface with, called the addon API – API being a common acronym for Application Programming Interface. If an addon runs within WoW, the API defines what the addon can touch and the ways that it can interact wtih the game’s data and share that information with you or other addons. If Blizzard does not have an API function to allow access to specific data in the game or enable an interaction, then an addon cannot do it, both because Warden would detect it as a TOS breach but also because the game protects data that isn’t explicitly API-accessible. Currently, combat addons can access a lot – what a mob is casting, the cooldown timers on abilities, who a mob is targeting, how many targets you have in range, your cooldown/buff/ability status, your gear, and plenty more. Addons that help with combat work off of this data, provided by the game’s API, to function – Hekili recommends rotational support based on these factors, dungeon WeakAura kits provide warnings about partywide damage or crucial stops, and of course DBM can provide all the details of what the boss you’re fighting is doing based on this information.

When the API changes, as it often does with a new expansion or even patch, addons have to be cleaned up to reference the new API changes, which is why patch day and expansion prepatch in particular is always a clusterfuck for addons. Midnight is going one step further and implementing a new change targeted at this philosophical shift.

The Black Box Of Combat Data

In Midnight, Blizzard has made it such that entering combat, any instance unless specifically whitelisted (Player Housing is whitelisted in Alpha but all other instances like dungeons, raids, delves, battlegrounds, and arenas are not), or a timed challenge (Mythic Plus) puts data into an inaccessible “black box” where addons cannot see it, interact with it, or provide any player communications (either to other addons or to players via chat messages). What Blizzard has sold this as is a way to disable things like rotation helpers or boss mods, but in effect, it also disables a ton of other functionality like raid break timers, loot council addons, sharing of raid notes via addons like MethodRaidTools, sharing of player status info on ready check as is supported in many different mods, or anything that parses your chat to create feedback like gambling addons that read for rolls – and literally as I wrote this, Blizzard announced some changes to come that might alleviate these issues. With these restrictions enabled, there’s a pretty wide swath of addons that simply won’t work anymore, and that is kind of the point to Blizzard. Doing this is basically the nuclear option, as it effectively destroys addons that use these functions currently and would require some massive rewrites to more general packages to restore allowed functionality (and boy we’ll talk about that in a second).

Why Restrict Addons?

Blizzard is doing this because they want to provide a unified player experience and will be replacing the role these addons served with their own in-game tools – or at least, that is the announced intention. WoW often gets slapped with this feedback that it is impossible to play without addons and there’s a perception of an “arms race” between the game developers and addon developers, with addons solving mechanics leading to more complex mechanics, less time to solve mechanics, and the implementation of patchwork fixes like Private Auras designed to try and limit what addons can do. Blizzard’s party line on the issue is that addons feel required, which makes them functionally required, which means new players have a worse experience just getting the game setup and running and it creates a situation where endgame content can filter players based on whether or not they use the tools available instead of a more neutral grounds of skill expression. I think some of this is mythmaking, where a lot of what led to boss mods is Blizzard making opaque and unclear mechanics which leads to boss mods – where the consistent trend is that Blizzard often designs mechanics poorly such that the game’s own audiovisual language doesn’t give you enough actionable feedback until it’s too late. This tier, Dimensius is a clear example – in both P1 and P2, there are mechanics that do not leave residue on Normal that suddenly do on Heroic but the base mechanics that now cause the goop to go down aren’t distinguished with any updated visual tells or warnings – you either need to dredge it up in the dungeon journal, experience it going poorly and adjust, or have a boss mod yell at you about it and hopefully you know what to do. I tend to believe that the majority of WoW’s current content can be done without addons, but at a certain point, the cognitive load and cost of failure reaches a high-enough level that most players will offload it to addons – realistically, Mythic Plus above the +10 level, some Heroic raid bosses but especially Mythic raid.

In many ways, as I said with the initial announcement of this plan around the rollout of the Cooldown Manager and Rotation Assistant features, Blizzard made the underlying problem and so the fix isn’t just to nuke addons, because more must be done if you take those tools off the table to retain a playable game without also making it too dull or boring for those who love the minutiae of maximizing their play. The approach has to be multi-faceted, and Midnight now marks the point where Blizzard is starting to address the concerns I raised back then – the solutions of which we will discuss later in this series!

Are Blizzard’s Tools Good?

The main fear now is two-fold – will Blizzard’s replacements in-game be sufficient and will existing addons that could still comply with the no-combat-interaction policy be supported? We can start to discuss the first and the second is where we get spicy.

Right now in Alpha, Blizzard’s early look at replacements for addons is…merely okay. The nameplates they are introducing are better than what currently exists in the game and addresses a lot of the visibility issues that drives players to Plater currently, but it lacks visual customizations to the same extent as that addon which is kind of bad. Color-coding isn’t supported, the glows and options for certain types of casts are a little weak and hard to identify, and there’s no options for shortening enemy names, distilling casts down to useful data, or customizing the display like having different font sizes for names versus spell casts. We can’t really see much more than that, as the other options currently enabled on the Midnight Alpha are things that were implemented in TWW (rotation assistant, one-button mode) or are being updated prior to Midnight (the v2 Cooldown Manager, which launches with 11.2.5 next week). Blizzard still has boss mods and damage meters to show off as the testing phases roll on, so it is tough to get a read on it now.

The problem that we’ve already run into with these Blizzardified addons in TWW is that they roll out half-baked and, frankly, half-assed. The first Cooldown Manager was, sorry to say it, a joke, an awful and nearly-useless tool that offered no controls and just slapped a giant blob that looked like an action bar into your screen, at which point you might literally be better-served by just putting your hotbars front and center so you can at least control the ordering and see things helpfully. The nameplates on Midnight alpha are better, to give credit where it is due, but they also are lacking a lot compared to Plater. And, to be fair, that is a part of the point – if encounter design and class design are sufficiently streamlined such that you don’t need to see every single cast and target in a 12-pack of mobs, then that might be okay – but we don’t have the content necessary to make that comparison just yet.

What we can see, however, is a troubling start for this approach and how it concerns current addons…

Addon Developers Start Throwing In The Towel

Blizzard’s pinky-swear promise with this rollout is that many addons should be able to continue functioning as they do today, so that visual customization and control over aspects of your UI are yours to command still. In theory, that’s supported by the new API. In practice…it gets a bit messy.

Firstly, I want to say that a part of this bullet point is out of Blizzard’s hands. They don’t control how code is written for addons, only what things in the game the addons can interact with, so it isn’t like Blizzard is specifically trying to nuke certain addons from orbit – theoretically, we should be in a state where an addon like Deadly Boss Mods could only access the in-game boss mod data but allow you to customize the warnings display or sounds, or like Plater should in theory be able to call the functions of the built-in nameplates only but allow a player to like, color-code bars or choose a visual style that is consistent with what the player wants to see. However, functionally, this makes little difference – Blizzard says they aren’t trying to kill WeakAuras but even if they didn’t directly pull the trigger, they still created the conditions that are leading to its demise.

In practice the current Alpha limitations through the API changes have made multiple addon developers state publicly that their addons are done come Midnight and will no longer be supported. Hekili is perhaps not a surprise given that its one express function is combat computation, but WeakAuras is a bit surprising given the number of different functions it serves outside of cooldown tracking and boss assignments. While I haven’t seen an official DBM stance short of MysticalOS’ video about the API changes, it feels like a given with the current state that DBM won’t be developed into the future, and the wide reach of the “black box” changes has made the ElvUI team grumpy (without an official public announcement) as well.

A lot of the challenge with anything in software development is that you write code and design in the present based on the assumption of some amount of continuity. WeakAuras could, theoretically, be rewritten to function in this brave new world, but so many of its conditional triggers and functions are wrapped up into now-black-boxed API functionality that doing so would require an extensive rewrite and refactor of the code, which is simply too time-consuming a project for a small team on what is still a hobby project. Before being critical of the WA team (or any other addons developers really), it has to be kept in mind that many of these projects are 10+ years old, and some are even nearly as old as the game itself. At that kind of timescale for a live-service game, it is reasonable to make the assumption that continuity is assured, as it has been for the decade-plus that many of these addons have been supported for.

A common assumption that many of us had in the community is that Blizzard would be rolling out their “addons” during the Midnight launch while the API continued to work as normal and would allow developers a longer time window to adjust to changes, with early communication allowing for more time to make such changes. As it stands with Midnight being the drop-dead date however, addon developers have between now and February 26th (the rumored expansion launch date) to get things in check, less time than that still if we account for pre-patch which is likely to happen in mid-to-late January and would mark the likely cutover point for API changes. If there were two years to get things lined up for the changes, I have to believe that many addon developers would be game to meet that challenge, but with 5 months rapidly ticking down and communication only vaguely provided as of this week as to the extent of the changes, well, that kinda sucks!

So we have a common theme here that Blizzard is not communicating well with addon developers, with most of them getting the exact info we all got, and they only learned this week the extent of changes to even begin work to changeover for the new API along with likely not having release dates provided to give them tools to guide their development. Blizzard discussed doing this kind of stuff back in February and didn’t even bother to talk to addon developers about the specific details until this week when alpha rolled out – no wonder so many of them are irritated with Blizzard! Especially because so much of the game is built on its combat foundation – so even things you wouldn’t expect like Skyriding addons no longer work (because you can’t track buffs, spell timers, or player auras as that all gets fed into the black box!), or Fishing addons (same deal, uses buffs/auras and things defined as spells so oops, into the black box!).

Oh, and just to leave you with a thought if you’re in Classic-land thinking this won’t hit you – they frequently update Classic to utilize the current Retail engine version as the foundation, which means that there is potential that these changes could end up creeping into some future release of Classic just through that mechanism!

Blizzard’s Lack of Accessibility Thinking

Combat addons provide something very important that a lot of people don’t consider – accessibility to disabled players. Undaunted, the deaf guild who pushes to AotC every patch (ahead of my guild all the time, lol) is basically dead in the water with the changes as they stand because no ability to push communications via boss mods means that they cannot effectively manage callouts, which they did with a neat WeakAura system that read marks and provided target info and raid commands without needing voice comms. Blizzard’s stylistic approach to encounter visuals and audio means a lot of mechanics can be very hard to see or hear, which means that even colorblind modes aren’t sufficient to resolve the lack of contrast. While Blizzard was very mindful to invite addon developers to alpha early to get started on that process (even if they should have been communicating changes with documentation much sooner!), disabled players and those with accessibility challenges have been left out of this consideration, even those high-profile cases like Undaunted.

For those with disabilities, addons are a lifeline to customize in a way that allows you to just play the game normally, and without those options available, the game will be measurably worse for it. The longer Blizzard delays on this topic, the worse it gets, and this alongside the lack of communication with addon developers shows me that Blizzard kind of doesn’t care – it’s their way or the highway, and they seem perfectly content to implement what they want even if it pushes out these very-dedicated players who do cool things. It’s tricky to capture the full range of accessibility concerns as a developer, and addons gave Blizzard the perfect out – they can implement some industry-standard stuff like colorblindness modes and motion-reduction, but then addon developers could plug up the holes. Blizzard, left to their own devices, clearly has not thought about this topic enough and now the holes they had hobbyist developers plugging are leaking like a sieve. Oops! This is the part that makes me genuinely angry, not for myself, but because those concerns are so often dismissed (in FFXIV plugin discussions, it’s common for abled-gamers to scoff and dismiss these concerns and the Undaunted raid lead is fighting like hell in Reddit comments to be heard with some of the same scoffing happening in his direction, which is disheartening).

What Do I Think About These Changes?

I’ve reduced my editorial footprint in the other parts of this post (not completely limited, obvs!) because I want to kind of wrap it up here before the next parts.

I think that reducing the need for addons is a potential net good. While I think that the “you need addons to play WoW at all!” argument is tired drudgery that gets amplified by bad actors, there are points in the modern WoW design where addons begin to feel necessary. I think that a lot of players buy into Blizzard’s Kool-Aid on this topic and think that poor wittle Bwizzard was forced to make fights harder because of addons when the truth is more that addons like boss mods came about because the game does a poor job in designing mechanics to be readable and resolvable with just your eyes and ears in the time you get, and addons have only made Blizzard double-down on making fights with poorly-designed mechanics that resolve too quickly under the assumption that you’ll just run DBM and a Liquid WeakAura pack to tell you what to do, but those things don’t need to exist in a world where Blizzard gets its shit together and designs the game to be played by people of all stripes. It’s the chicken and egg problem, but I think it’s clear that Blizzard laid the egg with poor design language that led to the proliferation of boss mods and WA packs and they shouldn’t get to escape unscathed while blaming addon developers for the game getting to be the way it is now. It is, in fact, a testament to the average quality of the game that it is so enjoyable in spite of these issues, which admittedly only start happening in higher tier content (Mythic Broodtwister Ovinax, Echo of Neltharion, dealing with random bolt casts on a +12 or higher key in M+). In fact, Manaforge Omega represents a good turning point, where basically all of the bosses could be done sans WeakAuras or even sans boss mods, with those tools just making the fights a smidge easier, even including Mythic.

When Blizzard began the project of making their own versions of popular addons, my chief complaint was that they were targeting a symptom of the issue and not its root cause – their design choices. A rotation helper is only helpful because rotations grow overly complex and hard to track, boss mods only feel necessary when a fight doesn’t offer the time or cues to properly resolve mechanics yourself, and nameplate tools only get popular when the game is not surfacing the data needed to understand what is happening and where. Midnight reflects, to their credit, a gaze turned towards the root causes of these issues, at least with the tiny sliver we can see thus far. That is promising, and yet at the same time, the lack of communication with addon devs, the complete disregard of accessibility concerns, and the overly broad nature of the initial rollout of the black-boxing of API functions leaves a lot of room for genuine concern. We’ve got a whole testing cycle to see if Blizzard sticks the landing, but this start is kind of looking like a bad place to begin.

Next post, we’ll discuss the class and spec changes and streamlining to come, and then in the last post, we’ll discuss encounter design and bring it all together with more editorial from me!