One of the most controversial bits of World of Warcraft: Midnight was Blizzard taking aim at UI mods (addons) that impacted combat, with the idea that you probably shouldn’t have to make your game look like an airplane dashboard designed by a drunk person just to play a videogame. Something that I’ve come around to, for the most part.
In a recent interview with PCGamesN, game director Ion Hazzikostas has affirmed Blizzard’s choice to revoke addon author’s access to combat information (with a few exceptions): “I know this may be a controversial statement, but I will say that, overall, [the new UI] has been successful so far. It’s not done, it’s not perfect; there’s more work to go, and we are continuing to undertake that work.”
“Controversial” is somewhat correct, mind. While I’ve been handling the shift absolutely fine, I’m also primarily a DPS guy—during the last raid tier, healers were suffering due to a complete mismatch between Blizzard’s encounter design and their UI’s ability to track dispellable debuffs.
Essentially, while Blizzard has touted that it’s designing its encounters with an addonless world in mind, a raid encounter in Midnight’s first season, Crown of the Cosmos, had a debuff called Null Corona that needed to be dispelled. However, because the studio’s changes made it impossible to track dispels, healers were forced to squint at their party member’s health bars to find a tiny purple jpeg.