World of Warcraft has officially shared its reasoning for the sweeping addon changes in Midnight, revealing that it hopes to level the playing field so that players with third-party tools no longer have a competitive advantage over those using only the base UI. Blizzard wants to restrict what sort of addons fans can use to help them in combat, while still letting them personalize their World of Warcraft experience.
The Midnight expansion is adding a lot of exciting content to World of Warcraft, including Housing, the Devourer Demon Hunter, and a revamp of Quel’Thalas. However, some of these features come at a high cost; World of Warcraft is making some big changes to its API that will heavily restrict what addons can be used in it. New UI features will replace many third-party tools that will no longer be usable in World of Warcraft, including ElvUI and WeakAuras.
World of Warcraft: Midnight Addon Changes Explained
Understandably, this has caused concerns for many addon users and creators. WoW game director Ion Hazzikostas recently spoke with Mystical and Funkeh, creators of Deadly Boss Mods and Bigwigs, respectively, about these changes. While the interview itself was not captured, Mystical’s recap of Hazzikostas’ explanation confirmed that, while some addons will be able to modify their new UI elements, such as by filtering out elements from the new Boss Warning UI feature’s timeline, they do not want these tools to automate, simplify, or solve challenging encounters for players. This means no more directive functions like audio cooldowns or countdowns, raid warnings, or renamed spells. Barring a few exceptions, players will only be able to rely on the information displayed by World of Warcraft in battle from now on.
In a comment on a Reddit post discussing this interview, Hazzikostas chimed in to clarify why Blizzard was making these adjustments. “The overarching goal of the changes in Midnight,” he said, “is to level the playing field and do what we can to make it so that while addons can still thoroughly personalize your experience, they aren’t giving you an objective competitive advantage over people using the base UI.” The director emphasized that they were not against most of these addons, but they want every World of Warcraft fan to have the same arsenal of tools in any given battle, and do not want combat plugins to “open the door to creative problem-solving solutions” that go against their encounter design philosophy.
On one hand, these changes make sense, as combat addons have become a required tool that has taken a measure of control over combat difficulty out of Blizzard’s hands. On the other hand, many fans think WoW’s native UI features like the Cooldown Manager do not compare to their previous third-party counterparts, and fear critical accessibility functions covered by addons will not be replicated, leading to the exclusion of players with disabilities.
For better or worse, many addons will no longer be supported in World of Warcraft in Midnight. The expansion doesn’t have an official release date yet, but evidence suggests March 10 could be the big day. That said, fans might see these API changes go live as early as the World of Warcraft: Midnight Pre-Patch, suspected to arrive on or around January 20.
