With World of Warcraft: Midnight, Blizzard is getting ready to make good on a major change to the game teased earlier this year: making some of the numerous mods, or add-ons, players love to use to enhance their play obsolete. But Blizzard isn't just adding features to make the game's combat add-ons redundant — it's also preparing to remove the functionality of those add-ons altogether, and players are none too happy.
The conversation around WoW's add-on problem began back in April, when we spoke to game director Ion Hazzikostas about a new "one-button rotation" feature coming to the game that would allow players to automatically use the optimal next combat ability with the push of a single button. This, along with some other quality-of-life features at the time, were the first steps in what Hazzikostas described as an effort to "rein in" some of the functionality of add-ons around "real time in combat problem solving, specifically where like automating, coordination, communication, in ways that are always going to be better than anything the UI could natively provide you, as long as they remain possible.
What Hazzikostas means here is a long history in World of Warcraft of players using add-ons in combat for all sorts of things: tracking buffs, debuffs, ability procs, and cooldowns, keeping track of damage numbers, boss timers, warnings when bosses are about to do something, even hyper-customized add-ons that offer automatic, quick, plotted out solutions to raid positioning during challenging boss mechanics. Some of those add-ons are harmless by any definition – it's hard to argue that there's anything wrong with knowing how much damage everyone did in a given encounter, or having better visibility on when your abilities are off cooldown. But Hazzikostas and other WoW developers have been expressing more and more lately a desire to reduce the amount of work add-ons are doing to actually solve in-combat problems for players, such as positioning or reaction to a boss mechanics. They want to remove that, they say, and replace it with better combat design that doesn't require such methods in the first place.
Which leads us to now. World of Warcraft's next expansion, Midnight, is currently in an alpha with a number of media and creators getting the opportunity to test it out, including us. As a part of that, Blizzard has come right out and explained what's happening to add-ons in Midnight: it's disabling the ability to use any add-ons related to real-time combat data. That means extremely popular tools such as BigWigs and Deadly Boss Mods simply won't work anymore starting in Midnight.
What's more, a good chunk of the functionality of popular add-on WeakAuras is also disappearing. WeakAuras is one of World of Warcraft's most popular add-ons, and is a powerful tool that lets players essentially display all sorts of custom graphics and information in their game based on a variety of factors. While it's used for a ton of different things, many players use it for combat data, either for tracking their own abilities in some way or to help direct them in boss encounters. I personally use it as an elemental shaman to track which of my abilities are active or procced at a given time, and in the current raid, there are several encounters (Fractillus especially) that people have made custom WeakAura strings for that anyone can copy into their game and use to make the mechanics a bit easier.
With Midnight, all of that disappears. In an interview with Wowhead, Hazzikostas emphasized that the goal isn't to "kill WeakAuras". "That is not what we are doing," he said. However, just today, the developers behind WeakAuras announced they would no longer be developing the add-on into the Midnight expansion:
The restrictions are so severe that core functionality, such as Conditions or Actions, or having multiple triggers in one aura or a cloning trigger, would become impossible. Producing a stripped-down version of WeakAuras without these features would require several months of refactoring. The result would be a barely recognizable version. Given that, we have made the difficult decision not to create a WeakAuras version for Midnight.
All this is leaving a number of players frustrated, nervous, and even angry. While Blizzard has said it's going to be implementing its own in-house tools in Midnight to fill some of the gaps left by DBM and WeakAuras, most of those new features aren't yet available for testing in Midnight. As such, there's no way for anyone to tell if they'll be an adequate substitute yet. Blizzard has also tried to reassure that it's started Midnight with the most extreme version of cuts to combat data functionality with add-ons, and intends to pare back based on player feedback. That may be true, but at first blush, the changes are extreme. Many players are lamenting the loss of tools they've used to play WoW for years and gotten used to. Blizzard argues it's "leveling the playing field" so players don't need to spend hours configuring WeakAuras just to play the game competitively with others, but it's difficult to swallow that pill without immediate evidence that the game will remain playable for all those people to begin with.
And sure, you could argue that players should be able to play World of Warcraft without them, but recall that add-ons have been a fact of life for WoW players for decades now. It's almost assumed that everyone has and uses them, especially some of the most popular ones. It's natural to be alarmed to think that suddenly a huge chunk of what makes your UI look the way you want it to, and your combat rotation understandable to you, might vanish overnight.
