Blizzard is making a huge change to WoW: combat add-ons will be eliminated, with new features coming to replace them

World of Warcraft senior game director Ion Hazzikostas dropped a bomb in a Blizzard broadcast today, one that many suspected would someday hit: At an undetermined point in the future, WoW will stop allowing add-ons to read combat events or auras.

Currently, WoW’s most popular mods, including all damage meters, boss encounter information systems such as Deadly Boss Mods or Bigwigs, and almost all WeakAuras (mini-mods made using the WeakAura framework) use those hooks to show information on screen.

For some character classes and specializations, the mods are almost required to play at a high level, where necessary information about the character and target are impossible, or almost impossible, to see using just the in-game tools and UI.

Hazzikostas said that Blizzard will build functionality into the game to cover many of those uses starting in patch 11.1.7. (The Public Test Realm for that patch will go live Soon™.) The objective, he said, is to eliminate mods that make computational decisions about how players should interact with different encounters.

Popular raid WeakAuras from Liquid and Northern Sky auto-assign players to certain locations and duties in raid fights, for example. Hazzikostas said that causes designers to make those fights ever-more complex to compensate and keep them challenging. It’s an arms race, where mods cause designs to change which then pushes players to use more mods.

“You look at the dungeon journal and you’re scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, and maybe half of it doesn’t even matter because add-ons are going to handle it for you. That’s not a great place for things to land,” he said.

Blizzard’s objective is to build in the functionality that players need, then turn off mod access to read live combat logs and events. The new built-in functionality will include damage meters, customizable additions to the new Cooldown Manager, nameplate improvements, raid encounter information presentation, and boss ability timelines.

He addressed several questions in the video, which we’ve reorganized here:

Will this eliminate damage meters or combat logging, either in-game or on sites such as Warcraftlogs?

Sort of. WoW will still generate the combat log, and it can still be read on a delayed basis. Blizzard built in the ability to delay combat log reporting a while ago, and it’s that version that sites such as Warcraftlogs use for after-the-fact reporting.

Damage meter mods—the single most popular type of add-on in WoW, according to Hazzikostas—will no longer function.

Still, “the large majority of players have a damage meter add-on installed, and so that indicates they still want to see that information,” he said. “In any world where we were going to limit some of the abilities of add-ons to do real time combat event tracking, we need to provide a damage meter solution of our own.”

Blizzard’s plans include measuring damage and healing, but also factors such as interrupts and avoidable damage, as some mods do now. It’ll have the advantage of being from the canonical source, he said.

What about rotational helpers, such as Hekili?

Again, Blizzard plans to develop its own, with a Rotation Assist function in 11.1.7 that will highlight the next ability players might want to cast, based on their characters and what’s happening in combat.

Surprisingly, Blizzard will also debut a one-button version of Rotation Assist that will automatically change to the next ability needed and be cast with a single button press. That option is intended to help those who are learning, people with accessibility needs or those who just want to more casually play the game.

A small penalty will be added to the global cooldown for using the one-button option, but not the Rotation Assist highlights. RA will attempt to compensate for environmental factors such as how many mobs are in range, what direction the player is facing, and the like.

How are raiders supposed to handle fights of incredible complexity, such as Broodtwister in Nerub-ar Palace, where two players each had to clump on several different egg clusters in a matter of seconds, without some assistance in coordinating?

Hazzikostas said that encounters like those would have been balanced differently if players didn’t have WeakAuras available to them. Blizzard might have given more time for players to get to the eggs, for example, or simplified the mechanic. These changes will require both building out new functionality in the game and changing the way the team approaches design.

“We can probably remove a couple of mechanics, but still keep the same level of challenge,” he said. He gave the example that a debuff that affects everyone in an encounter might only need to affect a few, if players weren’t using mods to make it simpler: “The goal is not to make it easier. The goal is to make it less complex… Our goal here is to preserve challenge, and we know we’d have to design encounters differently in some cases.”

What about mods that don’t affect combat decisions?

Blizzard will try to preserve mods that are oriented toward aesthetics, display options, roleplaying, quest helpers and other ways to change what you see on screen, particularly out of combat, he said.

What about mods that change how abilities are displayed based on procs and character actions, or track those effects?

Those mods are largely based on the combat log, so they will no longer function. But Blizzard plans to build out the recently-debuted Cooldown Manager with more customization starting in 11.1.7, including picking what’s shown.

“It’s super fair to point at some specs like outlaw rogue and ask, how is anyone really supposed to execute this perfectly with the base UI?” Hazzikostas said. “Those are not reasonable tests for us to be posing to our players without providing the information to do it correctly. We either need to provide the information, simplify the mechanic, or both.”

What about mods that add audio cues?

“Audio prompts are something that are super valuable to people,” he said. The team plans to add support for that, including to the Cooldown Manager. “Many people would appreciate being able to have audio prompts tied to certain things, or procs firing.”

Audio cues are sometimes needed now because the team hasn’t always done a good job of telegraphing mechanics and their impact, particularly in hectic situations such as Mythic Plus-difficulty dungeon groups, he said. Blizzard plans to make improvements there as well. If a mob is casting something extremely dangerous, it should be hyper-visible to players.

“They shouldn’t all just look indistinguishable on the screen,” he said. Another popular mod, GTFO, makes an obnoxious noise when the player is standing in something damaging. Right now, that’s needed because the game doesn’t give enough cues, he said.

“It’s not clear when you’re standing in something, and so I need GTFO or some other sound effect. It should be obvious. We should fix that on our end.”

How quickly should players expect to see access turned off?

“We need to ease into this,” Hazzikostas said. The team will incorporate the new functionality, listen to players, and when the developers are satisfied that what remains is largely unwanted automation or the functions they want to return to the players—problem solving, combat, communications—then they’ll turn off combat log/aura access for everything else.

“We want to keep chipping away at those things, and hopefully get to the point where really the only difference between what we are offering and what powerful add-ons can do is that small subset of computational problem-solving stuff, at which point we can move forward,” he said.

Those improvements may require building in more tools, such as improvements to the ping system, he said.

How set is Blizzard on doing this?

“Nothing here is locked in. My hope today is to begin a conversation about that direction, and what areas are welcome, what areas we have more to do to convince the community on, what areas we’re wrong on,” Hazzikostas said. “At the end of the day, this game belongs to our millions of players.

“We will be reading. We will be listening. This is a long path ahead. I’m curious to kick off the conversation and hear how people feel about it.”