World of Warcraft calling curtains on combat-based UI mods (AddOns) has been a bit of a mixed bag—while I’m personally more than fine having a class I don’t need constant auditory pings and klaxons to play, there have been some missing functionalities and hiccups along the way.
One element of this is, at least, somewhat understandable: Blizzard isn’t able to pre-empt every customization desire of its playerbase with nearly the same rapidity that an enthusiastic modding community will, which was one of my fears back when Blizzard first announced it.
The tuning-down has been twofold: Firstly, Blizzard’s been gradually adding extra utilities to its new base UI offerings—for example, the upcoming Patch 12.1 will let you keep track of potions and trinkets with its cooldown tracker. But other changes create a lot more leniency with what mod authors can do.
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As explained here by WoWHead, Blizzard’s API—the set of functions the studio purposefully provides to mod authors in the client itself—will be allowing AddOns to “read” buffs and debuffs. This means that WeakAuras—a widespread AddOn that was discontinued after Midnight took the axe to it—is back. Well, in spirit.
The mod allowed players to create a set of custom alerts that could trigger on a programmable set of “if > then” statements. For instance, my Outlaw Rogue’s “Roll the Bones” ability had a bunch of optimisations that a WeakAura automated for me, making a loud bleep whenever it was time to push the button again.
It’ll be much diminished from its former glory days, though. Players will only be able to track debuffs on enemies, and buffs on allies—as opposed to the pre-Midnight state of affairs where you could track buffs and debuffs on anybody. This should, in theory, prevent WeakAura-style mods being developed to solve boss encounters.
Still, it’s a major jump in power for what post-Midnight combat AddOns can do, and it’s one of Blizzard’s biggest concessions yet. Now, that could just be based on Blizzard’s own objectives with its UI shifting—a hint that we might be getting more powerful Cooldown Manager options natively that simply didn’t make it in time for this patch.
But it does grind up a little against the mission statement of these changes. That being, not giving AddOn users explicit advantages over players using the vanilla UI. Like it or not, what’ll now be offered by WeakAura-lite addons, such as Northern Sky Raid Tools, will give you finer control over the alerts displayed on your screen—which could make the management of a lot of classes a lot easier.
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