A Player’s Feelings on the Changes to Add-ons in Midnight

Today, two add-ons for World of Warcraft have decided they will close up shop once World of Warcraft's Midnight release. Hekili and Weak Aruas. They have posted their reasons on their sites, which you can read here and here. 

My first thought was of outrage at the WoW team, although I’ve calmed down. I'm still disappointed at how they are going about their changes with add-ons. I’ve always hated the fact that I needed to have things like Deadly Boss Mods or Weak Auras to play the game.

I've always used some kind of add-on since I was leveling in Burning Crusade, but most of the add-ons I used were cosmetic and well-added on to the game, like having an in-game calendar. I used UI add-ons that made the game look different. It wasn’t until I hit max level in Wrath that I started using Deadly Boss Mods, and it scared me at the time cause I thought I was going to get banned for using it. It basically told me what the game was going to do before it did it, and that didn’t feel right to me. 

But of course, DBM became the most required add-on out of any, so I really stopped thinking about it until recently. Over time, the WoW team has made improvements to the game that have made the add-ons I used way back in Burning Crusade and Wrath irrelevant. The in-game versions of the add-ons were either better than the add-ons or good enough. Most recently, in Dragon Flight, the default UI changes have become good enough that I no longer feel I need Elv UI. But for some people, they didn’t feel like it was good enough and still use Evl UI or other UI add-ons to this day, cause the add-ons are still around and for now at least the WoW team hasn’t changed the add-on API to stop them from existing. 

Unlike the changes made for combat add-ons like Weak Auras. In this case, they are trying to add a watered-down version of it to the game and saying no one else can do this but the WoW team. They are taking choice away from the community. If they wanted things like Weak Auras and Deadly Boss Mods to go away, they should have competed with them or just made boss fights that wouldn’t require groups to use those add-ons.

I know the WoW team has said they plan on making fights in the future that won’t require these add-ons, but I don’t trust their judgment. I feel like they have said similar things in the past, and whoops, we still needed an add-on to defeat a boss. This time, when we are in the first tier of Midnight and we find out a boss is hard for most of the player base there won’t be an add-on or Weak Aura to help us and even if the wow team reverts the changes midway through  Midnight it will be too little too late cause the add-on developers will be off doing other things by then. 

I feel like the best thing the WoW team can do right now would be to just leave things as is and prove to the player base first that they are changing their boss encounter design, so the player base doesn’t need Weak Auras or Deadly Boss Mods. Now, this would probably mean things like the race to world first would be over in like a week, but I’ve always felt like balancing the raids based on the world first raiders was poor design anyway.

For me, I will wait and see what happens in Midnight, but I’m not looking forward to heroic raiding. I think by the end of the expedition, the WoW team will admit they messed up with how they approached the changes to the add-on API, but I don’t think they will revert the changes; they will just tell us how they will make the in-game tools better.