BigWigs has announced their latest update today which includes some some new features, one of which is allowing players to rename boss abilities on bars and the alerts that will pop up when you get the mechanic.
This can be particularly useful for reminding yourself what to do when you get a mechanic, and can be helpful for teaching new players what mechanics do. Essentially, you can take out needing to learn the connection between ability name and the effect, and another new feature is that you can export this and share it to your friends and raid team!
It's unclear how Blizzard feels about this, as simplifying enemy or cast name on timelines was never directly covered. Blizzard did address this functionality on Nameplates, announcing that they wanted to lock down the API to prevent this behavior.
Blizzard via WoWUIDev DiscordWhile this functionality may seem somewhat benign at first, it has played an important part in reducing the challenge level in end-game content over the last several years, particularly in M+. For most of WoW's history, learning which enemies were the highest priority or what to do when a certain spell is being cast has required knowledge, built up through practice and research. But when addons are able to call out exactly which enemies to kill first, which casts to interrupt and which enemies to run away from, that knowledge is no longer necessary. With that knowledge and mastery no longer required, we must compensate through other means in order to maintain a satisfying level of challenge for players. Larger packs of enemies become the norm, as do shorter cast times on lethal spells. Essentially, we are forced to replace mastery and knowledge gained through time with twitch gameplay that punishes players who aren't using addons and/or have slower reaction times. We recognize that our current naming approach does not always provide enough clarity, especially with longer creature or cast names, so we are also working on ways to address this on the design side for Midnight.
APIs Affected: APIs that allow addons to identify specific enemies and enemy spellcasts are the primary ones that need to be locked down to prevent this behavior.
While this doesn't directly address timeline, the same reasoning would make sense for Timelines as well.
