World of Warcraft will strip away mods, or addons, with the ability to process information in combat when the upcoming Midnight expansion releases. And that idea is now changing many core aspects of the game, its director says.
In an exclusive PC Gamer interview, senior game director Ion Hazzikostas says that over the years, the game has gotten increasingly complex. He goes on to explain upcoming changes to encounter and class design.
“If you’re playing it out of the box, no addons whatsoever, and trying to play at the highest competitive levels, I do think that it is too hard,” he says, “and I think that consequently, hardly anyone is attempting to do that.”
Midnight aims to change that dynamic. Initially the team focused on trying to limit the impact of combat-related mods, but soon realized it wasn’t feasible to carve away bits of their functions. But the idea of taking away mods and WeakAuras’ ability to read combat information swiftly required tweaks to nearly every part of the game’s group activities.
Every Warcraft class is changing at Midnight
Encounters had to become easier for players to read, since addons couldn’t give them simple instructions. Complex interactions in player abilities, or buffs/debuffs that drove when they should fire off certain abilities, were also rough to track with the base UI, and needed to change if there were no WeakAuras or addons to help players.
“A lot of the class changes [in Midnight] haven’t been in the works for years,” Hazzikostas says. Instead, he says they popped up over the past few months. “When we first began our conversation with the community around the philosophy of where we were thinking we wanted to go with addons, we heard a lot of feedback immediately of, ‘That’s all well and good, but how am I supposed to track this mechanic?’ Internally we were like, ‘They’re not wrong.’ “
Classes that require players to evaluate four separate variables within 0.7 seconds to pick the correct next action nearly require WeakAuras to manage, he says. “Then it becomes pretty straightforward—push the button when my UI tells me to. But that’s not the game we were actually designing.”
Early changes on the Midnight Alpha test removed restoration druids’ need to place healing circles on the ground, and beast mastery hunters’ need to maintain a three-stack of their pets’ Frenzy buff, for example. The ability to even see Frenzy stacks only became part of the base UI recently, so nearly every hunter tracked them with a WeakAura.
Many raid and dungeon bosses are changing as well
On the raid fight side, designers were well aware of what WeakAuras could do, and so they avoided putting in mechanics that would be trivialized by those addons. Dylan Barker, lead encounter designer, told me in an interview that the team classifies mechanics for raids into three categories: dexterity, strength and intellect.
