Combat Addons Disabled in End-Game Content in Midnight
In a group interview with Ion Hazzikostas and Crash Reed, many questions were asked about addons in the upcoming Midnight expansion. The summary seems to be:
Any combat-related things will not be available moving forward with Midnight for add-ons.
This seems to be happening earlier than a lot of people expected with even the first tier of Midnight not having any combat-addons. Ion Hazzikostas talks about the goal of the in-combat addon change and the goal, noting that there is a big technical blog coming for addon authors.
Is Weakauras being canned entirely? I just use it for aesthetic purposes.
No, absolutely not. I just want to super clarify there, a lot of the shorthand here has been like, "oh, Blizzard's killing Weakauras". That is not what we are doing. We're going to have a technical blog rolling out for addon authors in the next day or two that lays out the system we have in place, but it's really focused specifically on reading combat events and combat state whereas in the past when we disabled, like we wanted to break add-ons or limit what add-ons could do. For those of you who are familiar with how add-ons work, there was a system called taint basically where um a portion of the UI could be protected and add-ons weren't allowed to manipulate it in combat, and if they tried to, it just kind of broke the UI. That's a very heavy-handed approach. We didn't want to take such a heavy-handed approach because we want to preserve aesthetic customization, that core functionality of just what people have used add-ons for for 20 years. The new system that our UI engineers have come up with is what we're calling secret values, where basically the UI still works as before, except that when there is a buff on you or a damage event that has happened in combat, those items are inside a black box. The UI and add-ons can know that that box exists, they can display information about it in a larger way, smaller way. They can make it pink if they want, whatever you prefer, but what they can't do is know definitively what's inside that box and run any kind of logic based on it. Again, the goal specifically is to just restrict that problem solving real-time computation that's used to aid moment to moment combat and do the least possible damage to every other add-on that millions of people use and enjoy.
Manaforge Omega Nerfs in Pre-Patch
In a question about removing boss mod tools, Ion Hazzikostas referenced nerfing Manaforge encounters that players will be engaging in Pre-Patch.
Ion HazzikostasIn terms of existing encounters, we are going to be doing a pass on Manaforge encounters for example that people will be engaging in in Pre-Patch. That pass hasn't been done in Alpha yet, but before things go live those will be tuned and tweaked and in some cases meaningfully changed to make sure that they're still fair and the appropriate level of challenge
This seems to imply that the combat addon purge might occur even earlier than Midnight and during the Midnight Pre-Patch which would affect Manaforge Omega. I'm looking at you Fractilus.
This would mean that players would need to swap to Blizzard's tools before the expansion even comes out -- the cooldown manager, Blizzard's boss timers and more. But don't fret because they announce how they're updating a lot of these features in Midnight!
Given the upcoming removal of many boss mod tools, how are we planning to preserve the intend difficulty of encounters and how are players expected to be able to adapt to that?
In terms of existing encounters, we are going to be doing a pass on Manaforge encounters for example that people will be engaging in in Pre-Patch. That pass hasn't been done in Alpha yet, but before things go live those will be tuned and tweaked and in some cases meaningfully changed to make sure that they're still fair and the appropriate level of challenge. Broadly speaking though, I think the intent here is not to make raiding harder, or Mythic+ harder, it's more about leveling the playing field and focusing some of the decision making, some of the challenge on coordination and sharing that responsibility with guildmates, with your teammates, as opposed to offloading it to an add-on that some people may have and others may not. So whether that takes the form of giving you a couple of extra seconds to get in position before something blows up, whether it takes the form of having one or two adds fewer or mechanics fewer than we might have in the past, our goal is to hit the same general difficulty target. If you're a guild that gets Cutting Edge or is in the Hall of Fame, or is aiming for Ahead of the Curve, and you typically achieve that X weeks into the season. Our intent is that in Midnight, your guild is typically achieving that roughly the same amount of time into the season with the same amount of time and progression involved. It's just that it will be a product of your own coordination, your own problem solving, not spending 30 minutes configuring a Weak Aura before you pull the boss for the first time, so that everyone knows when to run to star or circle.
Debuff and External Tracking
Crash Reed announced some large changes to debuff and external tracking coming in Midnight! External tracking is a brand new feature as part of the Edit mode that will allow you to track things like Ironbark from your team.
We're talking about blocking access to combat information for Midnight regarding add-ons. Does that include debuffs on a target to track Corruption for example, or even personal resources? Current cooldown manager doesn't allow for that, so is it planned for the future?
Yes, with those add-ons, any combat-related things will not be available moving forward with Midnight for add-ons. So, with our cooldown manager currently, it doesn't support that, but with Midnight, we'll be adding debuff states for your selected target. So you'll be able to visibly see and better understand how those debuffs are behaving on the various targets. We're also introducing, it's not necessarily a part of the cooldown manager, but it will be accessed through Edit mode as something you can turn on. We're calling it active external defensive. So that is something that will also allow you to track something like Ironbark for your other team members. And that exists outside of the cooldown manager. We chose to do that so that you could move those things independently from each other, and you don't need to do the management levels that cooldown manager has for something like those external defensives. On top of those types of things, we're also adding in things like sound alerts. So you'll be able to choose your sounds and assign sounds to events like on cooldown, off cooldown, within your cooldown manager as well to help bring that alert up. They'll even be going as far as we'll be adding in a text to speech option so that you'll be able to have the spell read out instead of it just hearing an abstract sound.
Then to comment on the part of your personal resources, we are touching on the personal resource bar. The big push right here is to make it no longer a floating nameplate. In all the previous iterations of it, it was a floating nameplate that existed in the world as opposed to a part of the HUD, which means it could fall behind other UI elements depending on where your camera was. So the work that's going in right now, we'll be updating that so that it will actually be a part of your HUD that then you can move around through edit mode and change and rescale, and all those edit mode types of things.
No Exceptions
Crash Reed and Ion Hazzikostas expand on the addon purge, announcing that there are no exceptions for addons depending on what end-game mode you're in. But some of the addon logic only applies to instances but not the outdoor world. They don't want to disrupt RP addons, quest helpers, etc.
Another follow up on add-ons, will there be exceptions to combat lock restrictions for add-ons? in PVP it's very useful to know when any new players have interrupts especially for healers or for casters. It's currently being handled by add-ons. Any thoughts there?
Right now, there's no exceptions for the addons in terms of the type of gameplay mode that you're in, so that does include PVP. However, we are taking the opportunity to improve the nameplates as well to make those more effective. So things like being able to see your team's status on their cooldowns, that will be a part of the HUD itself, as well as nameplates that will now show things like crowd control effects during PVP matches. So right on your nameplate, you'll be able to see which person has crowd control effects on them much more clearly. And even in PVE situations, you'll be able to see who needs to be interrupted. It should have a stronger callout for someone that needs to be interrupted if they're casting something important. So all of this is really just to try to make things easier for you to see at a glance.
Ion HazzikostasOne very small caveat to what Crash just said, there's some aspects of our new addon logic, such as addon communication rules that only apply in instances, and don't apply in the outdoor world. In general, the focus here and the focus of this of this initiative on our part has always been basically instance competitive gameplay, where you're getting an advantage over other people, whether it's in a PVP match head to head, or just trying to push a key or kill a raid boss before someone else in a way that can give you a leg up over other players, and we've taken every possible steps to avoid disrupting RP add-ons, quest helpers, anything in the outdoor world that don't really implicate those sorts of moment to moment in combat decision making.
Warcraft Logs Is Fine
There are no plans to change data that Warcraft Logs reads.
Will data from the new in-game damage meters be available via combat logs like WCL? Will DPS, HPS be included to increase accessibility of this type of data?
I'm not totally sure I understand the question. If you're talking about the slash combat log functionality, advanced combat log, exporting for parsing by other tools, all of that is going to remain completely unchanged. The only changes are about the in-game add-on API and what is available to you via the WOW UI while you're playing. So I think, you know, the combat log system, the external exported one is very, very robust and has everything you would need to analyze your performance or others, and no plans on changing any of that.
Midnight Reveal
Midnight Deep Dive Liveblog
Midnight Dev Q&A Liveblog
Alpha Development Notes
Midnight Physical Collector's Edition
Developer Insights & Classes
All Alpha Talent Trees
Healing Changes
Systems & Content
Season 1 Mythic+ Dungeon Rotation
Class Appearances Unlock Lower Difficulty Variants
Combat Addons Disabled in End-Game
Valorstones Removed
