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 encounter design and how everything comes together!

The Dance Macabre

WoW’s current design paradigm for encounters is a sprint through mechanics. When a mechanic is going to go off, you usually have just a few seconds to respond, the assignment of mechanics follows a couple of loose rules but is generally engineered towards chaos, and then you deal with the aftermath once a mechanic resolves. For healers, you generally ramp your healing into the tough spots so that you have multiple sources of healing ticking away, players can and should start popping their own defensives, and everyone needs to be mindful of positioning and other requirements depending on the mechanic. With more advanced boss mods and tools like bespoke WeakAuras, Blizzard’s response has generally been to layer mechanics and shorten the time to respond, like on Mythic Broodtwister Ovinax, where you have only a few short seconds to get multiple players onto the same eggs to break them and spawn adds.

Manaforge Omega, the most recent raid in the retail version of the game, follows a new-ish paradigm as a preview of what we might see in Midnight – the signature WoW chaos and complexity, but reduced a bit and given more time to breathe. When a mechanic targets you in Manaforge Omega, you get more time to respond and the tells are generally relatively obvious. Blizzard has also used debuff distribution as a control mechanism in this raid, giving out debuffs in waves on several fights instead of all at once. Orbs on Forgeweaver Araz and the claws on Nexus King Salhaadar are both good examples – there are paced debuff applications that go out separately so it isn’t quite as complex of a cluster of things happening. This aids players a lot, actually, as all the fights in Manaforge Omega could be done comfortably without boss mods by most players – the timelines and warnings can help with reducing the mental burden, but it isn’t nearly as necessary. In fact, the main boss people point at for WeakAura usage is Fractillus, who makes you play Tetris. A group that can pay attention to their backsides and see where the walls are to avoid overstacking can do the fight easily without any help, but assignment WeakAuras are used commonly to reduce that need to pivot the camera around and do make it slightly less thought required.

But WoW’s history is full of examples of mechanics that resolve quickly and leave little wiggle room, like the lightning bombs on Raszageth, fire placement on Fyrakk, seed soaking on Denathrius, dream phases on N’zoth, all kinds of different things in WoW are marked with this quick random assignment that gives 5 seconds or less to respond.

The Accountability Audit

A common theme we have hit upon in all of these posts now is that Blizzard created the conditions by which a lot of these boss mods rose to prominence and I want to continue to point that out here. Thinking way back to specific mechanics like Defile on both Lich King and Jailer, knowing that a Defile was about to happen meant the group could pre-spread slightly and quickly move out as soon as the mechanic went out, avoiding it growing too fast, and while that was possible without boss mods, it took a lot more effort. Blizzard has consistently been moving in the direction of reduced time to process, more chaos, and a need to immediately react, and that trend has continued regardless of the process of boss mods or WeakAuras. These mods became commonplace because Blizzard moved in that direction regardless of external forces and players adapted by creating cognitive offload through these tools. Defile is an especially great example of this because it also has a heavy group responsibility – the targeted player obviously needs to be out of Defile, but so does everyone else or otherwise it quickly multiplies across the room.

Blizzard has increasingly leaned on mechanics like this over the years, where one person might have an assigned debuff or thing happening, but that thing affects other players and can spiral into a failure state even if the assigned player does it correctly. Soaking on Soul Hunters this tier is a reasonable example, where the player with the soaking debuff needs to suck up the blue puddles, but the healers also need to eventually dispel that player so that the damage component of the debuff doesn’t stack too high. The soaker might do their job correctly, but if they get dispelled too soon, while they have a defensive rolling, or especially if they’re in the slime vacuuming it up, well, that kinda ruins the mechanic. Blizzard also loves doing this to healers specifically, where they get a dispel-related mechanic where the goal is to dispel before it gets dangerous, but not too early or else it can get bad, like in So’leah’s Gambit where the dragon boss places a damaging debuff onto players that buffs their damage done – you want that damage to be done with that awful boss sooner, but the damage being taken for that buff is also not exactly light and requires an answer sooner or later, especially once multiple such debuffs are out.

So I think it is important that we understand this because on encounter design especially, Blizzard has to be mindful to adapt the changes they make to fit this new world but also to not fall into their own design proclivities for risk of the mechanics they make still being too dangerous for the new style of the game we will find ourselves in.

What Can We See of Encounters on Alpha So Far?

Not much. This post was my summary post for a reason – we don’t have a whole lot to work from when looking at the current phase of Alpha and the content available within. What we can do is attempt to draw some speculative conclusions based on the state of things on the Alpha and what we’ve seen of the design shift in Manaforge Omega.

So far, mechanically, raid fights seem to be maintaining a lot of the mechanical layering that currently exists in the game. The finale fight of the Voidspire raid, for example, seems to hinge on assigning various Void-based debuffs to players and then using a random-targeted AoE that can clear those debuffs, so players have to mind their debuffs and then stack together with the randomly-chosen player to clear them. This is actually a pretty fine mechanic example for this new world, provided that there’s enough time, clear debuff tracking, and a clear-enough visual to show in-game to communicate the mechanic to players. If we look at Manaforge Omega, there will probably be enough time, given that mechanics have been noticeably slowed in MFO to allow players time to process and handle the movement and positioning necessary, but that is also an assumption that we cannot currently validate. Likewise, what felt easier in Manaforge due to existing boss mods and WeakAuras might not be as easy in a modless future, which means that even designing to near that same specification might result in mechanics that are harder to handle. For me, my true north is this – the redesign of combat sans mods in World of Warcraft is a success if we have consistent ease of access to crucial information, sufficient time to resolve mechanics, and clear encounter visuals with good contrast and visbility that use a common visual language to communicate with us as to the expected resolution.

The encounter journal on Alpha at least reflects that WoW isn’t changing styles too much, nor should it need to for these changes. Manaforge is a good blueprint for what that future could look like, albeit still built with maybe a second or two less padding than I would expect for the future without boss mods yelling at me about what I should do.

Let’s Summarize

What Is The Main Fear These Changes Drive?

I think the first thing to address is that players are highly conditioned to expect certain things from World of Warcraft. The game brings a faster combat style where there is a constant tension between doing your rotation and priority of abilities correctly while also managing encounter mechanics. Some players are only good at one piece of that puzzle, others are mediocre at both, and a lot of what helps players bring up skills in these categories is being taken away with the addon API black-boxing. You won’t be able to use a spec WeakAura or rotation helper to assist with the first piece, and you won’t have intricate warnings and custom setups for boss timelines or dungeon abilities to fill-in gaps in the second piece. For players needing those things, this set of changes brings a lot of worry that the game will become too difficult to manage effectively, and for players who have mastered their classes/specs and are reasonably quick learners at encounter mechanics, the fear is that the attendant reductions in complexity for these new design ideals will make WoW less exciting to play and less deep in terms of skill expansion and skill expression. Both are valid fears!

As a contrast, the current state of combat content in Final Fantasy XIV can be instructive. Rotations and priority systems for each job in that game are very easy to learn, as they are simple combo setups with a clear chain of actions and no real random chance effects to manage (unless your favorite jobs are Dancer or Red Mage). In FFXIV, basically the entire complexity of end-game challenging content is baked into the encounters – with tighter DPS checks to ensure that you remain on-target with the simple, on-rails rotations, and intricate mechanics with puzzle components that have to be solved (on M8S this tier, you get an add phase where non-tanks are given color-coded debuffs with timers, instructing them to hit an object matching that color before the timer on the debuff runs out, but the debuff does raidwide damage when cleared and puts up a Magic Vulnerability for a few seconds, with a pair of debuffs needing to resolved within seconds of each other before a major raidwide, forcing you to really actively manage the timeline of the fight carefully to avoid the clear of these debuffs accidentally killing the raid team). The problem with this design is simple – any session on a given role can feel about the same, because outside of very specific optimizations per job, you’re doing the fight exactly the same way anyways. Even where job optimizations could come in to play, the standardization the game did in Endwalker on a two-minute meta means that everyone makes the same changes basically – do you send your two-minutes or hold them for a major mechanic or forced downtime?

Functionally, what this results in is a shallow pool of mastery for your job while encounter mastery is about doing the very specific dance to specific spots on a fixed timeline with only small fluctuations for random variance in the design (that same fight has an opening combo that puts players in one of four positions but it’s really inside or outside the hitbox of the boss and stacked with your same partner or spread, rotated to either a cardinal or inter-cardinal position assigned to your pair). Aside from some role-specific challenges, then, FFXIV’s high-end content tends to feel repetitive after a while, because there’s just not a lot of difference to picking a different DPS, or switching from healer to DPS or to tank aside from base role responsibilities, and even those only rarely change the fight much at all (M6S, to their credit, is a great example of how to make an interesting fight because the ranged DPS, healer, and tank roles are all vastly different there, and the tank role especially exposes unskilled tanks who cannot properly cycle their mitigations or manage threat).

WoW players are not a monolith, and something that I think makes Blizzard’s job unenviable here is that there is no one prescription for a “WoW fight.” Over the game’s nearly 21 years of history, raiding has seen all manner of different forms and shifts with encounters ranging from healer-centered fights like Loatheb or Valithria Dreamwalker to council fights to add fights to epic multi-phase final bosses with vastly different mechanics and execution per phase, and for most of that time, fights have had at least two and up to four different difficulties, with over half that time also having multiple difficulties that scale based on player count in the raid to provide a (hopefully) consistent challenge for anywhere from 10 to 30 players. Where a lot of players worry is that each level of difficulty is going to lose something mechanically to make an addonless future possible, and that coupled with losses to core spec and class toolkits, enough depth of mastery will be lost as to render WoW less appealing as a game of knowledge and skill. Even down to the LFR level, WoW has stuff you have to engage with and can be made better with players who perform up to par, the loss of which would feel quite bad.

It also needs to be said that Mythic Plus is where a lot of WeakAura packages become necessary, because at high enough key levels, even basic mob bolt casts can be deadly, and the hope here is that Blizzard sticks the landing on easing casting and interrupt requirements to be doable in this new world without taking the fangs out too much, because the challenge and skill to coordinate these abilities is a huge part of the fun of M+!

The Negative Impacts of Black Boxing

We discussed this briefly in part one, but as multiple addons have announced changes or shutdowns as of Midnight prepatch, it should be said that Blizzard’s far-reaching black box policy for API data in Midnight means that a lot of addons which interact with aspects of combat even just cosmetically are going to be shafted unless more changes. The second alpha build has already made some changes to un-black-box some data that isn’t combat related even while in a protected scenario like Mythic Plus or an instance generally, and those changes also allow addons to pass certain values into the black box, which lets them perform limited functions. The impact is still clear – combat cannot be affected by addons, but this is an important first step towards fixing the problems we were en-route to having, where visual customization addons wouldn’t be able to work properly because the black box would obscure the information they needed. It seems like Blizzard’s general rule is that addons can interact with their replacements to offer skinning, but cannot communicate between players to offer additional information, so healer unit frames can use Blizzard’s options but nothing more, boss mods can skin the Blizzard alerts but nothing more (something which BigWigs developers have confirmed they will be doing, in fact!), and theoretically skinning the Blizzard-official cooldown manager is also possible. Until Blizzard reaches a release state of change, it’s hard to still have a strong opinion one way or another, but I think that provided they stick the landing on allowing visual customization without the black box restrictions murdering existing addons for such, then we will be in a good spot come Midnight on that front.

Inevitably, we’re losing some addons just due to codebases that assumed continuity from Blizzard, and I think Blizzard could have prevented the PR issues and strong negative player sentiment that has come about if they had considered notifying addon developers sooner, looping them in with the API changes substantially earlier than the first alpha, and working proactively with addon devs to feel out what would allow the addon community to continue to thrive while conforming to the new rules in place. The lack of communication or cooperation with developers created a bad situation where, even if we take in good faith that Blizzard isn’t trying to kill addons and is just trying to do something to make the game a smoother experience for more players, the result of their actions looks like they kinda wanted to kill addons, especially WeakAuras, and where the damage done by losing certain addons also makes players question if the promise of continued existing visual customization is true, since it won’t be for a lot of customizations that lean on WeakAuras today as well as the vast array of non-combat WeakAuras like profession knowledge trackers.

So much of WoW’s design over the years has trended towards reuse of existing systems, which leads to a problem where many things in the open world and out of combat rely on auras applied to a player, which leads to interesting potential breaks like an addon for Dragonriding tracking, which would work fine in the open world until you accidentally fly too close to a mob and then suddenly all the data involving Dragonriding that leans on auras is shoved into hiding where that addon cannot see it – and then what? The overly broad approach Blizzard is taking here is out of line with how they’ve expanded the game over the years, creating a scenario where their intention (hiding combat data from addons to create more active gameplay engagement and management) turns into a nightmare where a billion different small quality of life addons break because the functions they lean on are also hooked into combat functions that are obscured when combat status is entered, even when the underlying root thing they are doing is distinctly non-combat!

Accessibility is a key concern I brought up in my first post in this series because it became obvious early on that this black boxing was going to effectively kill the ability of some disabled guilds and players to do high-end content. Sure, from the perspective of someone who can hear voice comms, hear audio alerts, see through Blizzard’s low-contrast encounter visuals, and talk out loud in voice comms, Blizzard’s changes are kind of inconvenient assuming design remains similar in encounters, but for those guilds like Undaunted, the deaf guild that always gets AotC, communicating clearly required a network of WeakAuras and chat functionality to push commands in a way that the raiders could utilize, options that are no longer there. Lots of addons offer tweaks to assist gamers in this kind of position and those are just basically all toast now, which feels like a massive oversight on Blizzard’s part. The backbone of WoW as an accessible game is built on addons, and the full impact of losing several of those functions remains to be seen, but it isn’t good now, and the hope is that Blizzard finds a way to accommodate here that meets the challenge.

Blizzard’s Tools Need Work

While the first versions of most of the Blizzard replacements are in the Midnight Alpha (sans damage meters), they’re…not great. They’re not completely bad, but they need a lot of work to get there. Ironically, the rotation helper and one-button mode are the most well-made, and Cooldown Tracker V2 is actually pretty decent, to the point that most spec WeakAura gurus have confirmed they’ll be offering Edit Mode customization codes to create a CD manager that functions like the WA packages they make today. However, where there are gaps, there are huge gaps! The nameplates Blizzard has added make differentiating mobs hard (the name shortening means that you usually get the flavor part of a name over the functional part like Mage or Priest to tell you what to watch for), the nameplate stacking is atrociously bad (without stacking on, the nameplates fly all over linked to the mobs, with it on, they can overlap completely which obscures everything on the mob beneath including the cast bar!), and the customization is lacking (buffs and debuffs can be scaled, but not separately, so you have no easy way to neatly sort that info into usable segments). Blizzard’s boss mods are more of a question mark, but the basic version is just a visual timeline (which, admittedly, I prefer to the list of things) and it only has the acceleration locked at 5 seconds (so things are kind of crawling along the line until 5 seconds prior to execution, where the timeline becomes realtime).

Blizzard is overly invested in their own vision that maintains the game’s flavor, which is understandable! But this lack of willingness to offer even some basic customizations means that the tools we get from Blizzard are always going to feel half-assed. And frankly, this was always sorta going to be the case – Blizzard was never going to match the full depth of options in Plater or DBM, obviously – but even if we adjust our ass-size expectations for Blizzard to a lower target that cuts some of the excess functionality, I still feel like they’re only going half-adjusted-ass (okay it’s out of my system now). More work needs to be done and aside from easing API restrictions, each Alpha build needs to be pushing more tweaks and changes to fix these issues before the game is live.

What About Workarounds?

One thing I think we can sort of look at is the interesting ability of full third-party tools to interact with WoW data. In Dragonflight, this was a thing with external parsers being used to ascertain the true performance of Augmentation Evokers, and in Final Fantasy XIV, the primary tool most people use (damage meters with options for boss mods) are external software that sniff packets to find data. Will we see the same thing happen starting in Midnight?

Well…probably not. When external parsing and overlay tools gained popularity during that stint in Dragonflight, Blizzard changed the way combat logging works in the game to delay reporting data such that it would not be available real-time, causing most such tools to break. Even so, such tools are against the terms of service of the game. And while I bring up the FFXIV example, where such things are also against the TOS and actionable, Blizzard has one key difference with WoW – the Warden tool, which detects these things interacting with the WoW process and reports that back to Blizzard. In FFXIV, you can only get clapped for having third-party tools if you can’t keep your mouth shut about using them, but in WoW, Blizzard can and will know and has taken action on such things in the past. The changes made in Dragonflight to externally-available log data already basically shut the door on such functionality, and while I am not smart enough to say it closed all possibilities, Blizzard is quick to act when these things start spreading and I doubt we’ll see such tools last long, if they can even come into existence at all.

One thing that every Mythic racer with a podcast is eager to discuss is the possibility of creating external tools like YouTube videos with encounter timelines to yell audio prompts at players, and while that might very well happen, I doubt most players will be using anything like that and even those racers might not really need to bother. Generally speaking, I think the approach Blizzard has taken is mostly buttoned up to the point of being excessive as we’ve discussed in this series and so I highly doubt we’ll see crazy levels of external tools, whether that’s sophisticated network traffic analysis or shouty YouTube videos with specific encounter timelines.

What Do I Want To See?

Well, my editorial has been sort of present all series, but let me summarize my thoughts and perspective here.

I don’t think these are bad changes to the game, ideologically at least. I think Blizzard has a right to enforce the game being played in a way that is more inclusive of the full playerbase and I think that what removing combat addons allows for, in theory, is a better possible future for the game. I think that streamlining specs to play more straightforwardly while retaining layers of interactions and strategic depth is a great play to interlink with addon removal, and you can then shuffle some of that difficulty into making mechanics that require more precise solutions but offer enough time to make the decision in a calm and measured way.

To me, WoW’s combat addon apocalypse will be a success if three factors are met, as I mentioned earlier in this post – that class and spec kits offer fun and layered gameplay with nuances to learn and skill expression to be had, that encounters offer fun and engaging mechanics that require smart solving with just enough time to do it, and that players have clear cues in all forms from the base game that makes mechanics clear and easy to comprehend, putting the challenge into execution of those mechanics and not seeing what hue of purple is the good thing versus the bad thing. Delivering all 3 of these principles gives me what I want, and I can deal with losing profession tracking WeakAuras or dancing model alerts when Bloodlust is popped if the core game is rendered more playable out of the box at the high-end of the game. I even am okay enough with Blizzard’s UI art style and design that if these elements are delivered, I’d probably consider dropping ElvUI and other tools I use to customize in favor of the stock UI.

I am, however, disappointed in Blizzard’s lack of communication and overly broad initial implementation of these changes, and I hope that it is as many have speculated – that Blizzard is starting with a strong hand to negotiate downward from instead of starting small and taking more away over time. I do think that Blizzard could have been much better served by communicating changes much earlier to addon devs, even offering NDAs in exchange for test server access and full API documentation to begin making changes, and I also think that Blizzard should have done a trial window in Midnight where players could continue with existing addons while also having the Blizzard replacements available to try and provide feedback on, leading into the addonpocalypse instead happening in The Last Titan. This turns to a stern “do better Blizzard” from me on the topic of accessibility, as disabled gamers face bigger hurdles with these changes and it is sad that Blizzard didn’t seem to put any thought into that topic at all.

Overall, though – I remain cautiously optimistic. So far from what little we can see of Midnight, the changes are in-line with promoting a better overall play experience out of the box and should still provide layers of challenge and skill expression for players to sink their teeth into, but I also know some of what we see in regards to class changes on alpha are excessive and will hopefully be smoothed out with tweaks over the course of the next several months, given that we’re likely getting pre-patch in mid-January or early February to clear the deck for the late February (rumored) launch of the actual expansion content.