The Addonpocalypse

It has begun! The addonpocalypse is coming!

"What the hell are you talking about Sar?" I can hear most of you saying.

Well, with the release of Midnight, the next World of Warcraft expansion which has just entered Alpha, Blizzard are making the largest changes to the game's ideology towards addons ever seen.

No addons will be permitted to have access to the so-called "combat state" of the game in-combat. This means that dozens of widely used addons will no longer function, at all.

Some add-ons that have declared that they are done as of the Midnight pre-patch include Weakauras & Hekili.

Now I use both add-ons, primarily Weakauras obviously, as do millions of raiders, mythic+ players and hell even just casual players for stuff like dynamic flight.

Hekili is a great add-on, especially when I'm playing an alt that I have no clue about rotation and what buttons are best to press, without reading up for ages on best rotational practices.

Blizzard currently have their own in-house rotation assist feature, as well as their own one button rotation assistant available in the game. However, whilst these might be fine for casual play, they are next to useless for competitive players as they are never up to date with any sort of current APL (Action Priority List, the best-simming rotation/prio list for a given spec to get the best output).

The one button rotation helper in particular, as much as I personally dislike it, is egregiously poor, as it not only uses the same bad "APL" used by the rotation helper, it also has an increased global cooldown, which determines how fast you can press your next ability.

Which is in fairness an understandable penalty for its use, because if you could do 100% optimal damage with one button why would you bother with other damage buttons?

As for Weakauras, at this point it's one of the most ubiquitous add-ons in use today by WoW players. As mentioned above, it's used by players from right across the spectrum from casual players, to RP'ers, pet battlers* (although that is another story - see below) PvP players, M+ junkies, hardcore world first raiders... every segment of the WoW playerbase sees usage of WAs.

The fact that the WA team have publicly stated (along with Hekili) that come the 12.0 pre-patch that they will be shutting up shop is HUGE.

Following up, as an aside, there will be no new pet battles or combat pets added in Midnight. Instead there will be a Wild Catch system to pick up "vanity pets". As of Alpha, it looks like Pet Battles are going the way of Archeology - still available in older content, but expect nothing new going forwards. As it is there were no new wild catchable pets added to Karesh in the most recent patch - that will continue to be the new normal going forwards.

It's not all bad?

The one saving grace of the above sweeping changes to add-ons is that all 40 specs in the game appear to be getting simplified to a significant degree, as Blizzard appear to be well aware of the cognitive load that Weakauras and Hekili help offload.

Well, probably aside from BM and Ret Paladin that is 😂

Frost Mage appears to be for example a simple builder/spender spec, building stacks of Freezing with most abilities to spend on boosting damage of spenders, with about 6 buttons in total for its rotation.

Hell, even BM is seeing a lot of abilities pruned, such as Call of the Wild, and cooldown reduction effects such as Barbed Shot reducing the cooldown of Bestial Wrath are now gone too, with BW now being a flat 30s cd with appropriate talents.

But maybe it is? Accessibility Concerns!

Disabled and neurodivergent players, all with differing accessibility needs are going to be varyingly screwed over however.

This is a Reddit thread where players such as those mentioned above, are demonstrating very real and understandable fears about being able to not only play the game at a competitive level, but to even be able to play the game period.

Undaunted, a guild comprised entirely of profoundly deaf and hard of hearing players have very real fears that they will no longer be able to play the game they love and have played for over 20 years. All because their ability to compensate for their disabilities by using Weakauras specifically tailored to their individual needs will be taken away from them.

Neurodivergent players who use and rely on Weakauras and Hekili to cut through the information overload and present only essential information will be in a similar situation to members of Undaunted.

Blind and visually-impaired players will also have their ability to use Weakauras for mechanics' audio cues for and the likes of TellMeWhen for ability cooldowns (also handled by WAs), taken away from them, meaning their time playing the game will also potentially come to a premature end.

This potentially will reflect very badly on Blizzard, cutting off entire disabled sections of their community and walling them off from being able to play the game at all. It's a very worrying time for these players.

Whilst Blizzard do have some accessibility tools available in-game for helping players with Colour-Blindness for example, the options they offer obviously fall incredibly short of the assistance afforded by add-ons.

I have no doubt that Blizzard will (hopefully) pull back on some of the restrictions that they currently have in place over the course of the Alpha & Beta phases.

They've already rolled back on a 100% ban on combat addons inside instances, and now are only enforcing them during combat in raids, or after the m+ timer has activated. Prior to this rollback, things like RCLootCouncil and simple things like Break Timers were, unbelievably, dead in the water come Midnight as well.

Thankfully they will now continue to work as expected, as restricting them from working would've been a step too far for even regular guilds & players.

Final Thoughts

It will be hard to know for sure how things will shape up until the changes go live with 12.0 and addon authors have all had ample time to see what sort of things their previous works can continue to do, be adapted to offer, or not.

There's little doubt in my mind that the experience of being a competitive PvE player in World of Warcraft will be vastly different from what it is right now, and whether that final vision is fair for everyone, or even playable for some disadvantaged sections of the community remains to be seen...