Making WoW more AuDHD Friendly

So, I first noticed I was having "bandwidth" issues back in the Emerald Nightmare in the Legion expansion. Back then I was a tank, and began having real issues with the Ursoc fight. It was something that had never happened before, and it manifested in me taunting the boss off my co-tank at the wrong time fairly often.

From memory, which may well be faulty mind you, it wasn't just a "taunt on X stacks and take the boss". There were other factors involved, which meant that the time to taunt the boss was more liquid, and you had to taunt it on X or Y, conditional on other factors.

And my struggling with this confused the hell out of me. I didn't know why I struggled with it, and it bothered me a lot. But eventually the tier ended and I wrote it off as "one of those things".

Fast forward to later in Legion, and I've main-switched to a DPS (Hunter), and the Mage Tower is released.

And I struggled, a lot.

Turns out, my keeping up a well-executed rotation and managing multiple simultaneous mechanics, all of which can be deadly, was overloading me cognitively. But yet I still didn't realise what it was, or why I was still struggling with these sorts of conditions.

In the end though, I got them all done. The ones I wanted to at least. The hardest one for me was the Frost Mage run. It took dozens upon dozens of attempts, and when I finally beat it I nearly cried with relief.

Back then, I was still doing YouTube, albeit getting towards the end of my time posting to it. I managed to capture my successful MM Hunter attempt, and you can see in the video my coping strategy: massive buttons with macros to target and stun/interrupt specific targets throughout the fight.

The combination of having to:

• Target the right mob at the right time.
• Concussive shot on Karam (the mob that chases you) every 5 seconds.
• Targeting the spawns of Hand from Beyond, and interrupting their cast and killing them.
• Keep away from the random mob spawns that pop in during the fight and whittling them down when possible.
• Standing in the rune spawns before they despawn and summon in a huge mob that WILL kill you.
• Targeting Raest (the enemy in the centre who is the one that you need to kill) and burning him down in between all of that.

All of that, on a spec I wasn't familiar with (Frost Mage), caused me HUGE cognitive overload. But again, I didn't know that that was what it was, or why.

Off on a tangent? Me? Never...

Fast-forward several years, and I get a text from my sister to tell me that her social worker she's seeing for her mental health issues asked her has she ever been diagnosed with Autism?

When I read that I thought, nah, no way. I've seen autistic people, and my sister definitely ISN'T autistic. Nope, definitely wrong there.

Then she told me I should look into it, because siblings tend to share the symptoms, so I started researching the condition...

It was like a bomb went off in my head and everything suddenly made sense.

Mostly. It still felt like something was missing from that autism "self-diagnosis".

Fast-forward another 6 months and I'd started looking into ADHD symptoms and again, suddenly everything made sense, and this time, the missing piece clicked into place.

I wasn't simply Autistic.

I didn't just have ADHD.

I had both.

Autism and ADHD have a high co-morbidity rate. This means that if you have one, there's a higher than even chance that you may have the other as well.

Both Autistic and people with ADHD struggle with cognitive bandwidth. More so ADHD'ers.

Both conditions cause Hyper-focus, where you can tune the world out and people literally shouting at you will be ignored - just ask my wife when she's trying to get my attention when I'm watching something I enjoy on the TV!

They do have significant differences in some areas though.

Autistic people love, nay crave routine. Doing the same thing, the same way, day after day? Like heaven. It makes things predictable, which means coping strategies that have worked previously can be employed again and again, if they're even needed.

ADHD'ers? Fuck that, they get bored doing the same things over and over. They crave novelty, new things. Why?

This is because ADHDers have at least one gene, which is the DRD2 gene, that doesn’t work as it should. This makes it harder for the nerve cells or neurons in the brain to respond to dopamine.
https://add.org/adhd-dopamine/

ADHD brains get dopamine ok, but they're resistant to it, which means they need more of it than a neuro-typical brain in order to get the same "hit" off it. They get it by doing new things, new experiences and the likes.

This dissonance, this battle between the need for routine, yet craving new experiences, is the fun fight that AuDHD brains get to live through every single day. Woop.

And typical ADHD'er, going off on a tangent!

Getting back to the main thread here...

Cognitive Bandwidth.

Imagine people's brains have slots for memory. A number of things that they can cope with simultaneously.

Neuro-typical people? Say they have 5 slots. They can cope with 5 simultaneous things at once, or hold 5 different portions of information in their memory etc.

People with ADHD are lucky to have 3. More severe cases can have 2 or even just 1.

And this is where my struggles in WoW came about. I realised that I struggled to keep track of more than a few simultaneous threads at a time because of ADHD.

Is it really a disability though?

Well, yes. I struggle in work to remember to do stuff unless I take a note of it, because I sure as hell won't remember being asked 5 minutes from now. ADHD'ers struggle with verbal instructions, often dumping them out of memory very quickly.

So in work I've developed coping strategies that include the use of my Outlook Calendar, the application TickTick, digital post-it notes etc, to note down requests ASAP.

In my personal life I've purchased apps to help me remember to drink enough liquids (something I struggled with for years), TickTick again, and now I'm actively trying to lose weight, MyFitnessPal to track my calorie intake.

So yeah, it's been a problem that is seemingly getting worse with age.

The fact that my mother, from whom I inherit most of my physical characteristics, has very recently been officially diagnosed with sudden onset pre-frontal Alzheimer's, leads me to believe that I likely inherit my AuDHD from her as well.

FYI, there's a proposed link between ADHD and Alzheimer's in later life. Wonderful.

Anyhow, getting back again to the main thread of this post...

WoW: The One Button Rotation Helper

This was introduced with patch 11.1.7, and essentially it will allow you to fire off the majority of your important DPS abilities by constantly pressing just one button.

Things it won't do:

• Move your character
• Use defensive cooldowns and health pots
• Use offensive cooldowns and dps pots
• Focus fire on one enemy when others are present

What it does do though, is afford someone with limited cognitive bandwidth, the extra bandwidth that they'd otherwise have if they didn't have ADHD, in order to cope.

Being able to carry out damage rotation while only having to worry about mechanics and cooldowns? Amazing. Takes a lot of the cognitive strain out of mechanically complex encounters.

Would I use it in raids?

No.

Raiding, while difficult, isn't in the main cognitively overwhelming to the point where I struggle like that. The difficulty with Mythic raids come from their mechanics, and there's always lee-way to hold back on pumping damage to handle complex mechanics. After all, there are other people there to help pump damage in momentary glitch events.

By that I mean that yes, sometimes it still manifests in raids, insofar as I cognitively freeze-up for a moment or two when the old memory slots get filled up and something deadly comes along.

But fuck it, that's what immunities are for, right? 😆

I mean there's a reason why I play BM Hunter - because it's a simpler spec.

It also happens that I love the spec, the pet-collection aspect, and I find it a really satisfying spec to play. I hate playing caster specs because my ADHD demands movement dammit, and BM's instant cast abilities mean I can move, spin, hop and run to my little ADHD-heart's content.

Where I do use it

I only started giving it a go a couple of days ago. Yes, it leads to a large loss in DPS due to the 25% additional GCD penalty (Global Cooldown, the wait time between pressing one ability and being able to fire off another one), but there are scenarios where maximum DPS isn't important, but mechanics are.

Such as the Underpin ?? difficulty. I did the first challenge delve, Zekvir, back in Season 1 and it was relatively bandwidth-friendly. Not much going on at any given time, but a few mechanics that needed to be addressed otherwise the encounter would end.

Underpin though is more on a par with the Mage Tower challenges. There are a lot of things you need to do simultaneously, to avoid, to kill and dodge in order to beat it, and even playing as BM, where you can't have your pet tank as it instantly dies to boss melee swings, reduces it not one bit.

So I gave the one-button thing a go and beat it inside of 2 pulls as BM. The difference was I was able to concentrate on mechanics such as:

• Kicking the bombs into the adds
• Dodging their lava blasts
• Avoiding the boss's flamethrower ability
• Avoiding the boss's crush ability
• Damaging the boss's occasional shield lest he heal for 25% of his health
• Being in the right place to spawn the adds on one side of the arena in range of bombs

So yeah, a lot going on there.

So after that, I decided to start going back to the place where the struggle became real. The place I've largely avoided going because I knew I'd struggle.

The Mage Tower

The Mage Tower is still active, and has been since BFA when Legion Timewalking was released. This time, instead of weapon appearances, you get armour appearances as a reward.

So, I decided to jump in at the deep end, and back to the MM Hunter challenge. The hardest one for me. And while it still took a few pulls, around 8/9, I was successful. Entirely with the one-button assistant, along with my old macros, which I still had hanging around.

After that, I decided to give the Guardian Druid challenge a try.

Now here's where the one-button thing falls down somewhat: Tanks and Healers don't really gel well with this helper. For obvious reasons - their game-play and ability rotations are more dynamic than DPS specs.

So, I used a combination of one-button for the moments where I just had to do damage, then used abilities manually in more situational moments, such as defensive usage, mob targeting, interrupts etc. And it went down in around 4/5 pulls. I've also managed to get the Ret Paladin and Survival Hunter challenges completed, leaving me just two to go - Agatha and the healer challenge.

So I've decided in the two months or so left of this season, given that I have nothing else left to do other than farm Mythic Undermine with my guild, that I'll be pushing for these remaining encounters for the Tour of Towers achievement, which rewards the Mage-Bound Spelltome mount. Given there's only two left I should get them done fairly quickly...

In Summary

Do I feel guilty? Nah. Well, maybe a wee bit, but this tool, this helper, is designed to help folks like me, people who can sometimes find it difficult to cope. For me it's cognitive issues, but for others it could be a physical disability where pressing a large number of keys for any length of time might be painful or impossible.

A good move overall on Blizzard's part I feel, and lets a lot more people play to a higher degree of proficiency, even if the priority list it follows isn't anywhere near 100% cutting-edge or best practice. Even for people playing alts in content such as m+ or LFR it'll be a huge help.

So yeah, I'm glad they brought this in. My use of it will certainly be situational, and only for solo challenge stuff, if I even need it depending on the encounter, but I'm more glad it's there for those who physically can't play without something like this present.

Good job Blizz 👍