sackless1: 2 words: cooldown manager.

The goal was to implement a bar that resembles the class weakaura most people use. What actually happened is they added a non functional action bar that has 0 customization. They released it like that. It's not finished. If you could pick and choose the spells, add class resources and adjust the order, it'd be fine, but none of that was done.

judsonjohnson1602: Typical garbage video from this guy that needs blizzard to even have groceries and electric nothing to see here

Joe-v2r: I get that add-ons are really important for a lot of players, but calling people "whiny" or saying they "just suck" isn't fair. Not everyone wants to use extra tools just to keep up in the game, and Blizzard trying to make the game easier to understand without them makes sense. This isn't about hurting top players, it’s about making the game easier for more people to enjoy. Add-ons can be a big wall for new or casual players, and fixing that could help a lot.

saetchs: I like how the background makes you look like you are wearing a pointy wizard hat

Aegea291: Unless they make mechanics easy to understand what you need to do (without addons) it’s gonna make pugging even worse imo. Raiding will be even worse, how will you even be able to organise 20 people in pugs without addons?

castme13: All these weakauras make it extremely hard for new players to get into the game. So yes just because you dont see it as a problem doesn't mean it isn't a problem. They should create their own systems that are built into the game.

Spudwow: One of my biggest issues with Blizzard blaming addons, is that it is lazy game design. We wouldn't "need" addons if they gave us extra seconds to fix a problem, we wouldn't need addons if they designed the fights with their game in mind. So what if a weak aura does solve it? That weak aura is only mandatory because Blizzard failed the design of the fight.. lets take a look at recent examples, I could go back further but lets not for the sake of keeping things relating to the expansions only.

Ovi'nax.. not a chance anyone is killing that boss without weak auras, I refuse to believe a single guild killed that without the liquid or northern sky pack or something similar. Blizzard could of designed that fight way better, to something like each add has a different coloured egg, and then 2 people get the same colour debuff and then they get to go pop that egg. So the 2 people that got a red debuff go pop a red egg together, the 2 got got a yellow debuff go pop a yellow egg and 2 people that got a green debuf go pop a green egg. Like I'm sorry but I'm a college dropout and not overly smart.. yet I can think of a solution that would completely null and void the required weak aura?

Bunkjunker, if they extended the one shot from the adds to be something reasonable, you wouldn't need a weak aura to assign you a spot to go.. it would make it easier. Aye but that's what a weak aura should do.. make it easier, not make the fight possible in the first place.

Take a look at the blizzard health bars.. why do they hide spell information from us? Why isn't an option to show that a mob like the knights in priory have their shout coming up in 5 seconds.. and I know we all skip them where possible but it's the 1st mob that came to my mind but it can be tranposed onto any mob.. why doesn't the player, naturally know in the base UI that this mob has a big bad spell and it is ready to be cast or is coming off cooldown in x seconds? Blizzard blame addons, but an addon was only created BECAUSE blizzard don't show us this information. Why don't Blizzard let me change their nameplates to have different colours for different types of enemies, when you're pulling a pack of 15.. 20 mobs you don't want to have to look for "insert spellcaster with big bad spell name in here" you want to look for pink. Pink is simple to look for or whatever colour people use.

How about we gander at, and I forget what the addon is called, but there's a addon that shows on the tooltip every talent and spell that interacts with a certain spell and how it interacts. There was a video circulating not too long ago, I think by a main monk healer? Though I could have the spec wrong. Why do blizzard hide the information away from the player? Fair enough I understand they might not want it to be always on show, but I'm sure a "simple" checkbox could be put in as a setting to show Advanced Tooltips or something. It was quite funny because in that same video the creator hovered over a certain spell and the tooltip went from top to the bottom of the screen AND scrolled further down

Let's not even begin the discussion on the innocent addons that will be struck down because of restrictions, are sites like Warcraftlogs going to be screwed because they will have to restrict certain event types happening within the combatlog, maybe even seperating out from the combat log entirely so when we do log review nights for raid I now may not know exactly what is killing us, just that someone, somewhere is screwing something up. Great, now we as players can better ourselves and just continue to slam our head against the wall until either the boss dies or the guild dies? I feel this is a bit dystopian and maybe too far flung but I suppose, until they come out with further details, we've got to be prepared for the worse and hope for the best.

I suppose what my biggest gripe with it is, it can all be boiled down to choice. WoW has been a successful MMO for many reasons, and I genuinely think one of them is down to the wide acceptance of addons by both the playerbase and most importantly by Blizzard and also the breadth at what addons can achieve. You get to make the game look how you want to look, and I know they're not taking away (or they say they're not taking away) customisations options so I can still use ElvUI and get my nice clean borders but I can also choose to display the information I deem pertinent to fulfil my role how it best suits me.. if I want to show my groups cooldowns to the the side, I can do that, if I want to show my healer's mana without needing to see their resource bar, I can do that. If I want to have a dancing raccoon every time bloodlust is popped, I can do that. What I feel with this is that we're not too far away from Blizzard stepping down and shoving their artist down our throat and we're forced to see what they want us to see, how they want us to see it. I think that it is absolutely great that a certain player can choose to show their character profile picture on their UI and bask in the artistic artstyle that Blizzard ship BUT I also like that I can hide all that stuff and have my nice clean, borders and show only the information that I want to / need to know.. I don't care what my character looks like in a portrait, I don't care for fancy designs on the end of my action bars

I think what has also done, near, irreparable damage to this whole cause is the recent abysmal release of the cooldown manager. Yes in a few years I choose to believe that the cooldown manager is going to be best thing since spice racks but how that released? Nah I'm sorry but if that is an acceptable release state to blizzard for something that is a choice to use how bad can they screw something up that everybody is forced to use from the top echelon of gamers down to the lowest and how are they to cater for each level of play that is in between aswell? Could you imagine if they disable say something as simple as dbm/bigwigs and come out with their own tracker but forget to add a spell in or maybe even a few spells, or maybe it has the timing wrong.. I would hope they fix that within a hotfix the same hour but let's be real it's probably going to take a day. So you would feel like that entire days worth of progression is lost within the new raid because of something entirely out of your control that is forced upon you, where as if that was a weak aura guy or a addon developer that shit would be fixed faster than you could butter a slice of toast. Let's take something more complicated like nameplate spells cd's on mobs, I and everyone else has to track each individual nameplate to look for a spell being cast and keep looking because we don't know if the spell is queued or if it's on cooldown whereas right I just look at pink nameplate and can see "big spell in 10 seconds" cool I don't have to look at that nameplate now for 8 seconds I can reduce my mental load and focus on something else for that amount of time.

Have their been times addons have gone too far? Yeah absolutely, Neltharion map was one of them, hell I'd even say something like the Sprokket map you use for bombs is along a similar line maybe not as egregious but I think it's in roughly the same ballpark. I believe Liquid Max said it as well that there is stuff that the Weakaura developers have discovered they can do, but don't do it because it would just nuke the game.. something along those lines, may not have been Liquid Max. I already know of at least one discussion going on about using an external website to track everything relating to mob spells, and a similar conversation about using a YouTube video that you play on countdown for raid fights or how macro's can be used to still feed information into addons to track cooldowns. Macros.. the bread and butter of the game, designed and maintained by Blizzard is going to circumvent Blizzard's own crackdown on addons.

I can side with the argument of ridding addons such as OmniCC which is an extremely powerful tool but I genuinely think that 90% at a minimum of people who have that installed, have it installed because it came with a pack or because there is this social pressure to have it installed. I think I said this before, and maybe it was on one of your videos, that most people will not adapt there route (if they're the tank) to adhere to people's cooldowns.. so what's the point in tracking CD's if you're not going to adapt to what is up at that time. Hell I'm a fool for this aswell, unless I'm in a guild guild and shotcalling, I don't change my M routes if the group has all their CDs or not maybe that's because there is a "known" pug route.. like cinderbrew 1st pull is expected to be big and bloodlusted then you go a tad bit smaller on the 2nd pull, same as priory 1st pull and such they're just "known" pug routes. Though I also believe that Blizzard needs to improve their base UI and essentially bake this into their UI before they rid the world of OmniCC , I also say.. don't disable addons and just continue on as we have and blizzard just fix their base game so that when a new trial appears in the guild we don't have to say "install x pack, y addons and here's a hundred page document on how to improve your performance in game with custom cmd code and screenshot of exact places to look"

castme13: You literally just shat on this idea all video then at the end said "oh im optimistic" Like why even say that obviously you dont want your precious add-ons to change

mjorgan298: Having or not having add ons shouldn't determine if you are good. I think that's thing they want to reduce.

TripleTapHK: I'm not really opposed to deleting most addons if Blizz actually implements better functionality in regards to mechanics. WoW is my favorite MMO for many reasons but I really like the way FF14 does its mechanics. Most everything has clear indicators for what you are supposed to do with AoE abilities, stacks, spreads, knockbacks, tank busters, etc. The challenge lies in how to optimally play your character around those mechanics along with your group instead of just making mechanics obscure and hard to execute from a platforming perspective.

ThomasBachler01: So that you can buy a bit of groceries and electric nothing

Shadowfolds: I like your perspective, it's very different from mine. I honestly just feel like it's not the player's job to code enemy ability timers, or maintain functional cd, buff/debuff timers etc. I think wow is the only game where we end up doing the dev's jobs for them to make functional encounters and UIs and I'm glad they're at least going to attempt to do it themselves finally. I have some faith, but I hope they at least give us an expansion's worth of time to get used to and let them perfect their versions before disabling our stuff.

rafaellontra2189: Weakauras are ugly. they are a pain to configure. they lower my fps. they have way too much power and they are borderline cheating (especially in PvP). The reason they are used so much is because the base game is not intuitive enough. This change is a huge win.

eodyn7: People who refuse to download add-ons are almost always people who under perform in raids and dungeons. They use the lack of add-ons as an excuse for their poor play instead of taking the initiative to get better at the game. I've seen this numerous times in raid teams.

castme13: Arrogant ass video "Just fucking do it" how about blizzard fixes their stupid game so people dont have to jump through all these hoops to play. Because trust me they are not and people at the top end are shrinking every year

dane-train: I disagree with ya brother. I’m super excited for this change. I do 13s. So not super high. But to me a level playing field is more important than customization.

ZolidSnake: Personally, I'm looking forward to these changes.

I used to play practically without addons (omniCC, Questie, and Quartz) since Vanilla, BC, and WotLK.

When I returned to Draenor, I was forced to use DBM, but it was either that or not being invited to raids.

In DF, I tried ElvUI for a while and liked it until a massive update broke it for like a week, and I realized, "Why did I install ElvUI to play?"

In TWW, I limited myself to installing only the basics, and my goodness, I haven't gone back.

Currently, I use bartender to reduce the amount of buttons in my action bar and certain WAs to know if one of my buffs was activated or to give my resources a visual style, but other than that, my interface is pretty vanilla.

There are no more alarms, giant bars of upcoming abilities, and I can boast that I'm the one who knows how to do a mechanic and not react to a horn like a trained dog.

Like everything, whether Blizzard does things right or wrong, we'll see in the future. But I hope people become less dependent on add-ons. It's a pain to have to invite friends and tell them, "Wait. Install these 40 extra things before you play."

Btm, i'm not a Mythic raider atm but 3000 IO and AoTC is not a "Casual player" either.

Dalgorithm8: To me, all of this is for the underlying goal of growing the game while reducing barrier to entry for new players. Blizzard themselves have stated they are looking towards “the next 20 years”. Building this future while being handcuffed by external systems that they have no control over is not something they want to do, for good reason. I recently saw a video by Preach regarding “WoW 2” where he mentioned that it won’t likely be a completely new game, but rather an overhaul of the underlying systems (many of which are decades old) to allow them to build and do things that are currently not possible, resulting in new and innovated features for the players. Player housing is an example of this. Blizzard wants to balance keeping the existing player base happy, while also seeing growth. For the former, I can’t see this happening if blizzard removes all of the functionality players find invaluable (interrupt trackers, etc.), so I think the “final product” of this will be somewhere in the middle.

marioher6357: Why not add the features but not block the api...

BigDavey2Chainz: People are going to get such a shock when they realise it wasn't the lack of add ons holding them back. It takes 10-15 minutes to set your UI up. Its never been easier to find someone on youtube and take their exact UI. If you want to be the best you can, it is a requirement.

Taniver: Steam workshop was released in 2011, its completely ridiculous that blizzard and now Microsoft cannot think of a solution to this other than ruining the way half the player base plays the game, like why even invest time as a company to do this over just creating a steam workshop system that solves the problem for basically free, it makes no sense how they clearly have an entire team of people working on this for what will be years and years, instead of just letting the community do it for them

zakuzagb1539: on the point about people not wanting addons or being disadvantaged, I thought the main point is more so that the way they design the content is kind of boring now because they can only catch players out with big ass 1000 swirlys reliably because of how they have to design around add ons?

that was how i understood it unless im wrong but hopefully it doesn't ruin stuff too much.

Also im not sure if they are focusing on tracking information as much as they weakauras that are like "stand in this place to avoid this mechanic rather than using your eyes"

Kromush1995: Hard agree. If people are too braindead to install addons/weakauras to do competitive content (not high-end, even though it’s also for that), then why must all suffer for their idiocy/laziness? Are they trying to dumb down wow intentionally to be more like classic?

We already know how much of an abysmal failure were the ui revamp in df and the cd manager in tww. I have zero faith in blizz being competent of producing something akin 5% to Details, not even discussing DBM or WAs.

1dasd22Al: complaints coming from casual players that don't even do content or play more than 1 hour a week.. This is all because they feel "left behind". This is so sad.

kingtut8367: Im 100% convinced the people complaining about addons are the ones doing world content and sub 2500. You want the game easier and no addons required? Go to fucking classic.

johncraig5979: There's something in the back of my head whispering horrific visions of a Blizzard porting WoW to consoles. I use add-ons to benchmark myself, especially with Details. If I DPS and I am really low on the charts it makes me wonder if it's rotation or gear. That then leads me to research the best items to craft or search for in Delves then use something like Hekali to get a grasp of a rotation. DBM and Bigwigs yell at me when something bad is happening because there's so much going on while concentrating on abilities and you can zone out of all the enemy casts. I never thought I would ever step into a mythic dungeon or use Weak Auras, but my characters have hit that progression wall were my 5 main played characters need a lot of gilded crests and the weekly 3 delve limit is not enough to upgrade their gear. Now I'm trying to time keys in any 7-10 and Blizzards basic UI is a cluster with enemy name plates, which results in me getting Plater to see mobs health and abilities more clearly.

If Blizzard wants to restrict add-ons then they need to improve their UI in the game and have a way in-game to teach players how to play their game, rather than us having to go to 3rd party websites. But, this discussion is probably due to the 2020 Success of FF14 when Shadowlands failed to capture customers and Blizzard wants to ride the coat-tails of success from a near-pier developer and competitor 5 years later.

Jun 11 2025

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