World of Warcraft game director details which combat add-ons are safe and which will be eliminated in the coming purge

World of Warcraft senior game director Ion Hazzikostas recently warned players that add-ons and mods that predict or help players respond to things happening in combat will be disabled in the future. We caught up with him in a far-ranging interview to find out what, specifically, would be affected and why.

“You have your quest helpers, you have your gathering add-ons, you have your role-playing add-ons, all of that stuff is no concern,” he said.

PvP add-ons might still tell you what classes you’re facing, but won’t tell you what cooldowns they’ve used. Auction house add-ons won’t be touched.

“The goal is at the end of the day to get to a point where if asked, ‘Hey, do I need to use add-ons to play?’ the answer is, ‘Well, they’ll give you a lot of options to customize your experience, but no, it’s up to you.’ Today, if we’re being honest, we can’t say that.”

He said Blizzard definitely won’t take away combat log or aura hooks in patches 11.1.7 or 11.2—which leaves the door open for the final patches of the The War Within expansion, including the pre-patch for the upcoming Midnight expansion later this year, as a possible starting point.

“This is meant to be a philosophical kickoff and to begin the conversation with the community,” Hazzikostas said. “Add-ons have been part of the game since its very earliest days. If we were to just come along one day and rip off that band-aid, it would be jarring.”

Mods that help and annoy

Blizzard is taking these steps in part because of player complaints about how many add-ons are needed to successfully complete raid and dungeon encounters, according to Hazzikostas.

Blizzard will be working on improvements to the in-game Cooldown Manager, visual effects, improvements to the game’s UI Edit Mode, audio cues and the handling of nameplates for players and enemies.

Hazzikostas said the company heard loud and clear the player feedback to the first, basic rollout of the Cooldown Manager, which was part of the recent troubled 11.1.5 patch. Players decried its simplicity, lack of functionality and the fact that it could not be customized. Ironically, some mod-makers immediately created add-ons to improve it.

The cooldown manager is so utterly featureless it may as well not exist. from r/wow

Above: A recent Reddit post reacting to the Cooldown Manager.

“We know we’re not going to replace a fully in-depth, customizable add-on that you’ve been using for years and tailored to your personal gameplay with something that we have as an initial, fixed offering,” he said. “But we’re getting a whole bunch of feedback about the ways in which it would need to change. We need to add customization and improve it, to make it feel like it could be a reasonable substitute for a more-advanced power user.”

In-game solutions may not be as good—and that could be okay

The task ahead of Blizzard will be challenging, he said, but added that having a fixed development team and slower update cycle doesn’t mean that Blizzard’s solutions have to be a “we have details at home” meme situation—or that maybe it’s okay if it is.

“Some of it is being guided by feedback to understand how we can bridge that gap for a majority of our players, and also to some extent accepting, and hopefully getting folks to accept, that it is 96 percent of perfect,” Hazzikostas said.

“Your performance relying on [rotation helper] Hekili is still inferior to someone who has it all ingrained as muscle memory. There’s always a higher skill ceiling. Is it a critical flaw if the highlighted combat assist recommendation for your next ability is not reflecting the latest theorycraft that was discovered yesterday? I don’t know if that should be a dealbreaker.”

He said he was open to the idea of allowing player-shared loadouts, like the text strings currently used to share talents. That might improve Rotation Assist for those who wanted the latest theorycrafting.

“That’s an interesting idea,” he said. “This topic has come up in the context of Edit Mode layouts, and other things we want to empower people to share.”

The overwhelming majority of add-ons won’t be affected by the changes, Hazzikostas stressed. Blizzard considers this a continued collaboration with add-on developers, perhaps even to the extent of partnerships that would allow amateur developers to contribute ideas or coding approaches.

“Everything is possible,” he said. “I don’t want to close doors. We’re always going to be listening. Our hope is that the things we add are going to be things that can be reskinned and tweaked by add-on developers.”

The smallest change possible to achieve the goal

Hazzikostas said the team had discussed many approaches, and believed this was the least invasive path that would still accomplish the goal.

“This is not us setting out to smash a bunch of add-ons,” he said. “The way we’re approaching it is, ‘What’s the least collateral damage that we can cause while addressing this issue?’

“The goal is to build up the native functionality of our UI to increasingly narrow the gap between players who are using add-ons that assist with competitive functions and those who are not. Once we are most of the way there, there’s going to be that last mile that consists of things that honestly we don’t think are super healthy for the game.”

That’s when the functionality would be turned off, he said.

Previously, Blizzard experimented with private auras that could not be read by add-ons and WeakAuras. But players circumvented that with in-game macros that told the mods when players saw they had conditions that had been kept secret.

“The aura is private, but you can just make a separate macro that pipes the information in, and now whoops, you wiped because someone hit the wrong macro or had a typo in their macro and great, we’ve succeeded in making it even more frustrating,” Hazzikostas said. “Let’s never do this again.”

The company is building in all of this functionality in part because they know players will find ever-more-circuitous routes to getting the information if they don’t. If boss ability timelines aren’t a thing, he suggested, players might turn to YouTube videos or recorded sound files that would provide audio countdowns when pressed at the start of a heavily scripted encounter.

Keeping the challenge, ditching the complexity

Dungeon and raid fights will still be just as challenging, he said, just not in a way that requires perfectly-working WeakAuras.

“Our goal is to deliver a baseline, a consistent level of difficulty that meets players’ expectations. I’ve seen discussion of whether WoW is harder than it used to be. If you measure that by player success rates, then no,” Hazzikostas said.

“We might tune a Heroic end boss for Ahead of the Curve to be something that’s going to take a couple dozen attempts, for a guild that’s in the core audience. What it takes to hit that mark has continually increased in terms of complexity, because our players have gotten more sophisticated.”

With this move, Blizzard hopes to dismantle the arms race between add-on developers and boss mechanics. A fight like Blood Queen Lana’thel in Icecrown Citadel had one simple mechanic—who to bite when you had a vampiric lust and were about to be mind controlled—that ramped in difficulty over the course of the fight. It would have been trivialized by a combat WeakAura, he noted.

“No stress, no confusion, no need for communication, no need for backups. A fight that had exciting frantic moments in 2009, 2010 gets transformed into something that’s pretty ho-hum,” Hazzikostas said.

Less swirls, more fun for casters

In modern raids, players might see happy changes like a reduction in the number of bosses that frequently place random damage swirls on the ground, a mechanic the team has come to lean on because add-ons can’t predict or help with it, he said.

“Our classes weren’t designed under the assumption that you’re going to have unpredictable movements every few seconds,” making those encounters less fun for caster characters, he said. “We just want more variety in a diverse design space.”

The toughest modern bosses with mechanics that require players to clump up or head to specific spots might give a few more seconds to respond, or have fewer spots to go, in a world without combat add-ons, he said.

“If we know it’s being solved for you, and you’re just being told to run to diamond, how is that challenging?” Hazzikostas asked. “How do we make it challenging? The only way is to only give you two and a half seconds so that you need some movement boost. You’re taking a warlock gate from point A to point B, because otherwise anyone could do this.”

No changes for Classic, but plenty of changes to raid fights

These changes will likely not be implemented in Classic, where the team is careful to avoid messing with history. New features like the damage meter might be rolled out, but combat log and aura access is unlikely to be turned off, Hazzikostas said.

In the modern game, Blizzard knows this will force its developers to be better about making mechanics visible and readable.

“I think, frankly, this will stop letting us off the hook when we fail to do so,” he said. “If you’re riding a Katamari ball on Stix and if you run into one of these three nameplates you wipe the raid, but there are 90 things on screen, good luck visually parsing that.

“There are nameplate attachments and things the community has come up with to help solve that problem. We should have solved that problem.”

Visual customization of nameplates, including how big they are or what they look like, will still be allowed, he said—but using conditional logic to change the way they look because of something the player or enemy is doing or a buff or debuff they have likely won’t be.

“This is all pretty speculative,” Hazzikostas said, as the team is still working to solve the problems that players have created mods for. Lethal casts in dungeons, for example, should be telegraphed much better, perhaps negating the need for mods that alert players when something bad is coming.

No more tracking other players or enemies

Tracking of group abilities will no longer function in add-ons after the changes, so things like other players’ cooldowns won’t be visible, he said. That might, in turn, lead to dungeons with fewer interrupts in a pack of mobs, which might in turn lead to less reliance on classes with abilities that stop a whole pack of enemies from casting.

Incoming heals will no longer be trackable, nor will specialized buffs or debuffs. But if they needed to be, that should be built into the base game, Hazzikostas said.

“It should be part of the default UI,” he said. “Same is true for tank swaps. If we’re building an encounter where once your co-tank reaches four stacks of some negative effect, you need to taunt immediately, we should be giving you much better information to make that apparent. That’s on us.”

Another issue they want to make more visible is diminishing returns in PvP and PvE, where stuns or other crowd control become less effective after repeated casts, until an enemy is immune.

“We have this very important mechanic and really, unless you’re using an add-on, it’s not super obvious,” he said. “We should make that obvious.”

At the end of the day, the game should be just as easy or difficult as it is right now, he said, but for different reasons.

“Part of the goal of mechanics is to create a problem that needs to be solved and a bit of challenge that feels satisfying once you overcome it,” Hazzikostas said.

“The goal is to keep similar numbers of wipe counts for Normal, Heroic and Mythic encounters, early versus late, similar success rates. But to tailor that to a world where the problems are, once again, in players’ own flesh-and-blood hands to solve, not an algorithm that they’ve downloaded.”