The first half of the video also recaps future addon support changes already shared by Blizzard.
Taking place between Mystical (Deadly Boss Mods), Funkeh (Bigwigs), and Senior Game Director Ion Hazzikostas, the meeting was not recorded, but Mystical's notes help clarify the developer's intentions, while also noting several additional features coming in future Midnight Alpha/Beta builds.
Boss Timers
Addon authors will be able to filter spells out of boss timelines, allowing players to choose what alerts they wish to see.
They will not be allowing addons to emphasize cooldowns, with things like external audio countdowns for specific abilities.
There will be a default option to show spell cast count on all abilities (Blast Nova 1, Blast Nova 2, etc), similar to current boss mods.
Raid Warnings
Blizzard does not want raid warnings to be directive, telling players exactly what to do.
There will be additional support for adding sound alerts to important casts (boss casts X).
They will not be allowing sound alerts for debuffs or targets (X mechanic on you).
The developers are looking to ensure that raid warnings and mechanics have adequate visual features for those who are hard of hearing.
Cooldown Manager
Built in sounds don't work for everyone, so developers will be working to allow custom audio alerts via addons (aka custom addon sound packs exclusively used by the cooldown manager).
Miscellaneous
Blizzard will be adding API to report boss health percentages and bosses remaining on wipes, similar to current boss mods. They still won't be able to report that information mid-fight though.
Nameplate timers tracking enemy ability cooldowns will not be allowed, though Blizzard intends to make Mythic+ more approachable through longer cast times, fewer casts per pull, and so on.
The developers are against addons renaming spells in instructional ways, such as "soak" or "frontal," as that helps solve mechanics, rather than encouraging players to be knowledgeable.
They will consider support for unit proximity, but it will be a broad fixed distance such as "within 100 yards" to avoid it becoming computational.
Following the video, Senior Game Director Ion Hazzikostas also reached out on Reddit to provide some additional context to Blizzard's approach in leveling the playing field between players with and without addons.
Ion Hazzikostas
Hi, I just wanted to clarify my comments on this point.
We for sure could have been clearer on our philosophical goals here, which have been spread across multiple interviews and videos over the past year. We're working on a blog that can be a single source of truth there. The overarching goal of the changes in Midnight is to level the playing field and do what we can to make it so that while addons can still thoroughly personalize your experience, they aren't giving you an objective competitive advantage over people using the base UI. In pursuit of that goal, we've made changes to the addon API, to our base UI, and to how we design our combat and encounters.
So in this context, it's not that we view a spoken countdown as a form of automation or as inherently problematic; rather, we feel that it would be inappropriate to allow only addon users to have that functionality. We also have concerns that giving addons access to exactly how many seconds remain before a specific spell is going to fire could open the door to creative problem-solving solutions.
Our focus is on designing our Midnight encounters to have both clear telegraphs ahead of time, and sufficient time to react (more time than we would have provided in a world where we knew the majority of players doing organized content were using addons to ensure they were ready for every major ability). If it turns out that we're unable to hit that mark, we're definitely open to adding an audio countdown solution to help, but we'd want it to be available in the base UI rather than requiring an addon.
