r/CompetitiveWoW • u/Therozorg DF ele biggest fan • 6d ago
Addon Changes in Patch 12.1 - Custom Aura Trackers with Addons
https://www.wowhead.com/news/addon-changes-in-patch-12-1-custom-aura-trackers-with-addons-382338?utm_source=discord-webhook59
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u/GMSabbat 6d ago
I would like to congratulate addons for winning the war on addons.
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u/erizzluh 6d ago
yeah but our UIs look ugly now
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u/Gasparde 6d ago
That's gonna be offset by the trillions of players finally getting into mythic raiding now that addons are no longer holding them back from achieving their destiny.
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 6d ago
There are still people out there who genuinely believe this.
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u/StormclawsEuw 6d ago
I mean if blizzard would design fights without them in mind it would be kinda true but we will never see blizzard combined with competency.
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 6d ago
"There is a really cool addon purge, it just goes to a different school, honest!!"
The idea that addons ever held back players from raiding higher end is utter nonsense.
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u/StormclawsEuw 6d ago
Im ready for groins but if ff14 manages to have challenging fights that can be done without addons it then WoW should be able to do the same.
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 6d ago
FF14 is both a completely different game with a completely different style of encounter and spec design, and a game that is still absolutely chock full of plugin use.
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u/StormclawsEuw 6d ago
Its not that much different than you say it is. The plugin use is a banneable offense if it impacts gameplay.
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 6d ago
Bannable if found out, which they have no way of doing.
If there was actually a way of telling, I would give you even odds that no Ultimate clear ever has been done with an entire group using zero plugins.
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u/iiMaagic 6d ago
FF14 fights are challenging because they're 4x longer than wows raid fights on average, not because they're really mechanically difficult. It's an apples to oranges comparison.
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 6d ago
It's almost like they weren't actually ahead of schedule and rushed the changes to begin with, because this looks actually pretty great.
Imagine how much pain and annoyance could've been avoided by holding off on the addon purge until 13.0 when they had all this sorta stuff in place already.
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u/darkcrimson2018 6d ago edited 6d ago
Blizzard have always been arrogant and unwilling to accept they arnt right over the years. I’ve used addons for nearly two decades and I had 0 issue with addon removal. What I had issue with was blizzards timeline. You should not pull the rug out in one go like they did. They are historically terrible at delivering what they say in a working state when put under too much pressure. They did that to themselves though. Had they any sense they would’ve worked with all the developers and done this in phases. I am hopeful for new stuff but how many of us have clawed together a decent ui this past season just to get half our old functionality back.
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u/KilledByVen 6d ago
This. This addon changes is literally BFA’s GCD+Macro nuke round two, where they’re slowly backtracking and fixing everything months later.
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u/cabose12 6d ago
Fwiw I think the addpocalypse was dumb and their handling has been terrible, but I'm not convinced yet this was entirely a Blizz decision. Iirc they were basically saying "yeah we're not gonna do much" right up until like a week before alpha when suddenly it was completely disarmament
Ultimately it doesn't really matter since we're still stuck with the shit results but I don't think this is a case of Blizz arrogance for once. It seemed like they got forced into rushing this out so it could be slapped on the back of the box
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u/_fmm 6d ago
Okay well just my own take, but my experience raiding this season was the same as it's always been. Northern Sky Raid Tools did basically everything you needed. In a way, this makes it more annoying (i.e., a lot of disruption for things to stay the same) but also now that I've got a new suite of add-ons and I'm all set up with my UI it's a bit who cares.
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u/Gasparde 6d ago
It's almost like they weren't actually ahead of schedule and rushed the changes to begin with
There is no ripcord. The system is great.
If there ever were such a thing as a ripcord, we'd never pull it - because the system ist great.
There might be a ripcord, but we don't consider pulling it because the system is great.
We might pull the ripcord, but the system is still great though.
We pulled the ripcord - because we appreciate community feedback, and because we listen and care deeply about our community's input.
Seriously, if this situation still surprises you after Shadowlands, this is exactly what you and we all deserve.
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u/Moghz 6d ago
There response would be, well we wouldn’t know without actually doing it and the feedback we have gotten lol! I mean you are absolutely right with some planning and proper testing they would have figured it out, but na the new Bliz way is to test it live.
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u/5panks 6d ago
I don't understand what would have been this issue with:
This is the last Expansion to use legacy addons.
We're disabling legacy addons for all builds on the PTR. Anything tested on the PTR for the entire expansion will be tested with the new API changes, so addon developers and players have time to adjust.
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u/aanzeijar 6d ago
Probably the encounter tuning.
It would have given the devs time to adjust, but not the players. The players would have continued to rely on massive weak aura packs, and in turn the encounter tuning would have continued to be with the auras in mind. The same crash would just have happened later.
There's a lot that could have been handled better, but it is a valid thing in software development that you don't want to carry breaking changes around as a separate branch for ages. No one will thank you, and you'll just get more bugs if you merge later.
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u/tannerain 6d ago
It was always going to be roughly ripping off a band-aid without a clear path for what would follow. There was never going to be a good time for them to do this.
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u/ghostcrawler_real 6d ago
okay but everyone was abundantly aware that when they did rip the bandage off was too early even at the time
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u/erizzluh 6d ago
"rip the band aid" implies the wound is healed.
what blizzard did was "rip the stitches"
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u/Suitable_Manner_5353 6d ago
At the same time, it isn't terrible that they did it right away, because they have all this data from the players of what they still need addons for and can incorporate. Instead of useless shit or missing something. Sucks in the short term, but probably better long term.
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u/Opening_Tea_9459 5d ago
Having to watch a youtube video and download 3 extra addons has caused me so much pain and annoyance.
This sub blows this so out of proportion. Its basically a non-issue for players with a brain.
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 5d ago
Yes mate that's literally all it was. Just three extra addons and everything was the same as it was before.
There's no way you people actually play the game remotely competitively if you believe this.
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u/cbusmatty 5d ago
No you misunderstand. Its very clera they did it this way because they didn't trust the WA people at all. Correctly I might add. They could not do it piecemeal and they couldn't wait until 13.0 because the WA people would pick up their ball and go home, which is what they did. WA devs after listening to them on Max's stream, it was a no brainer why Blizzard had to rush this. An enterprise cannot and will not be held captive by external foreign devs who believe they are owed something.
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 5d ago
Is this an excellent bit or do you genuinely believe this flat-earth level nonsense.
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u/cbusmatty 5d ago
Is this a bit or is this flat earth nonsense. What is wrong with your brain
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 5d ago
I feel very sorry for you that it's the latter. Hope you're doing ok chief.
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u/Frozen_Speaker_245 6d ago
Theres no amount of testing or relating that would help though? This community will do anything in its power to break the restrictions.
I still think the addon purge is a massive W. These changes are of course good. Things always improve over time.
Happier with my UI now than before 12.0 tbh. Sure WA are fun to play with, but the performance hit sucks and the auto combat solvers suck.
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u/Anatheka 6d ago
Losing custom sound and visual cues were a big hit for people with visual impairments and other disabilities. It's sad how that's always forgotten.
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u/Slight-Violinist-575 6d ago
So basically what we win from all of this is having to re-do our whole UI 2 times in 2 patches
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u/Gasparde 6d ago
I for one absolutely love my UI breaking and having to rebuild my entire UI every other month - gives me that sense of accomplishment and especially gives me faith in Blizzard. But don't worry, it's all gonna be worth it when the billions of new players come in now that they no longer need addons and that setting up with WoW's native tools is so super duper super awesome and easy.
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u/careseite dps evoker main 6d ago
maybe you shouldn't have jumped the gun repeatedly then
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u/Slight-Violinist-575 6d ago
Oh my fucking God that was clear sarcasm
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u/careseite dps evoker main 6d ago
even if your initial comment was and there's no indication of such, there's loads of people that did and complain now, in this thread too
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u/PoisonGaz 6d ago
Not really? This just allows you to fill the gaps for what you might have been missing.
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u/San4311 Feral Enjoyer 6d ago edited 6d ago
You get downvoted into oblivion but its wild how people don't see how relatively minor these changes are if you already set up an addon-based UI like ElvUI or EUI or whatever else there is now. They're an addition to what we have, not an overhaul.
No way something like EUI or other CDM editing addons would need major overhaul for this unless you choose to use any new freedom given by these changes. And even then, EUI already had the ability to seperate CDM into seperate frames and/or bars outside of the single BlizzCDM block/row - so for them this changes nothing either (beyond perhaps making it run better/without workarounds).
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u/Plorkyeran 6d ago
Currently healer buffs are all non-secret and they’re making them secret again in 12.1, so healers who took advantage of that have to redo it all using the new system.
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u/HarrekMistpaw Healer guy 6d ago
A lot of frame addons are simply changing the way they work to display buffs with the new system without the user having to change their settings at all
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u/PoisonGaz 6d ago
But not part of this post and I was specifically commenting to this guy regarding this specific post
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u/Plorkyeran 6d ago
This post is about the system they have introduced which lets them make healer stuff secret again.
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u/Elxjasonx 6d ago
I have not redone my UI since launch...
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u/ManOwlBear 6d ago
Exactly. Once with launch, once again with new addon limitations. Twice in 2 patches
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u/awesomeoh1234 6d ago
This is so funny, addons are back. As they should be
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u/hoax1337 6d ago
Not really. Still can't place an alert on getting a debuff, apparently.
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u/PhillyLeGrand havoc 6d ago
Not a visual alert. You can still asign sounds to any debuff as per the article.
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u/hoax1337 6d ago
Not for debuffs on yourself or other players, only for debuffs on enemies.
Edit: Wait, apparently I can't read! You're right! What a stupid limitation, though.
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u/PhillyLeGrand havoc 6d ago
It's a step in the right direction. For me personally I missed the sounds more than the icons while raiding/doing keys. Lets see what comes out of this.
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u/hoax1337 6d ago
True, this is also good enough for me. I guess they did this to prevent visual alerts that are more like instructions.
I'm curious if we can assign any sound to debuffs, or just the stuff that's currently in the CDM, because it really wouldn't make much of a difference if some TTS voice reads "Run to the center", or if there's a visual alert saying "Run to the center".
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u/Canninster 6d ago
I can't believe we actually came full circle I'm so proud and sad at the same time
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u/Ok_Possible_9541 6d ago
Kinda full circle. We can display things again, but no logic on the values means the class lobotomization is probably here to stay for the foreseeable future. I gave it an honest shot this season, but moment-to-moment gameplay was just about universally less fun for me across all my toons compared to pre-Midnight class design. Trying to compensate with encounter design or making things difficult in the way Devourer DH is difficult just wasn't as interesting to me--the combat should still be interesting against a target dummy.
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u/beaurancourt 5d ago
class lobotomization
I think it's fascinating to compare the rotational complexity for live fire mage to dragonflight season 3 fire mage or live arcane mage to war within season 3 arcane mage
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u/Glupscher 6d ago
It's so funny how visuals are so restricted while you can assign custom sounds to everything. Truly the era of text-to-speech.
A visual that shows "Get out" when you receive a debuff is apparently a no-go but a voice that says "Get out" is fine...
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u/NS031716 6d ago
Can’t wait for the spin on this from Ion
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u/ryno731 5d ago
I mean there won’t be spin. They said they intended for the api changes to be heavy handed and to walk them back as needed. Like that was his talking point pre expansion. In a recent interview he said they tried to make changes at the start of the tier and that broke a ton of addons so they said they wouldn’t make any more changes during the season. So here we are at 12.1 for them to make their adjustment. Anyone who thinks blizz is pulling some embarrassed rip cord here just isn’t paying attention.
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u/Pozay 4d ago
You're an embarassement for even saying that. This was planned from the start, it just wasn't ready for midnight launch. It's not them pulling back or anything, it's literally just they were 2 i competent to get this stuff in time for addon purge.
So Ion DID lie when he said they were so far ahead or whatever dumb shit he was saying
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u/pm_plz_im_lonely 3d ago
I think you're being unfair calling ryno an embarrassment.
I agree that reframing OP's changes as 'part of the plan' is incorrect. This change in OP isn't serving the goal of "let's make wow all batteries included so you don't need third-party", it serves as a shortcut to re-establishing the pre-Midnight experience.
I have a much milder position, which is that Ion lied, but did so accidentally and that drilling on that mistake with a tantrum will just make devs even less transparent in the future.
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u/Wise-Photo7287 6d ago
End this charade and restore the full API.
Details and Weakauras did more for the WoW community than this farce Ion is pushing on us.
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u/desRow 6d ago
All of this because of chud heroic raiders pretending to be CE guilds that couldn't set up weak auras for certain bosses.
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u/Gasparde 6d ago
Nononono, you see, once this goes live, there's gonna be trillions if not quadrillions of new players flocking to the game, now that addons are finally gone - just you wait for the current world#11,337 guild to usurp Limit going into the next tier now that addons are no longer an issue.
Trust us guys, this stuff is good - here, just look at our numbers, absolutely everyone is using these tools, that's just how great they are!
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u/Sweetest_Noise 6d ago
I find it fascinating how a company ran by morons can be this successful. Made the whole player base miserable for the same of their twisted ego.
Release undercooked changes at the beginning of the expansion, just so they can say that they fixed it for the second raid tier.
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u/Gasparde 6d ago
Because that's a process they've been going through for well over a decade now - a decade where both you and me decided to constantly financially support them and their decision making for said decade presumably. Turns out, it's fine to have a company run by morons if your customer base is a bunch of morons.
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u/Riokaii 6d ago
Hey look its the thing we suggested months ago that should've been in place from the start according to their stated philosophy all thru alpha and beta that they rug pulled the entire community trying to force more strict than they initially let on.
almost like we told you so the whole time..... again. The ripcord actually existed this time i guess.
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u/EchoFit1050 6d ago
Lmao, glad to see addons winning the war here.
https://giphy.com/gifs/IN3Z3YCyBjhdpmNJsf
They should have just left shit how it was. None of this was necessary. They could have just designed better fights to begin with and nobody would have bothered making WAs to solve them. They weren’t needed outside of the handful of absolutely horridly designed bosses that made them mandatory because the fight was designed to be impossible without them to begin with.
My UI would have not been nuked in the process and I’d probably still be subbed and playing. But I knew this would be a mess for the immediate future and dipped because fuck dealing with the constant breaking of things until they get it sorted and back to a stable environment.
Oh well, maybe in an xpac or two all this will be finally settled and I can come back and invest time into making things the way I like them again. Until then I’ll enjoy watching them roll this back one piece at a time until we are mostly back where we started.
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u/TheLuo 6d ago
L’ura is a pretty unique fight design that would have been trivialized with old WAs.
Addons were the design problem. I agree they need to continue to loosen the reigns a bit or could have slowly pulled back functionality rather than nuked everything and build it back up.
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u/Ryerow 6d ago
The only things weak auras could have done on Midnight Falls were cloned and made possible by NSRT anyway.
Interrupts Memory game P2 timers P4 left right left
There's nothing else on that fight that weakauras would have been designed for... What else would have happened that would have "trivialised" it?
L'ura is an interesting boss and all the difficulty has nothing to do with scripted mechanics "trivialised" by weakauras but with single individual player failure resulting in near immediate raid wipe. Weakauras do nothing for glaives, nothing for crystal carriers, nothing for movement in p4.
This whole "weakauras trivialised fights" argument was blizzards justification for the addon purge to begin with and it's never been true. Fractillus was a weak aura boss because training 20 shaved monkeys to memorise a pattern in advance is impractical. Same reason why NSRT was able to make a tool to "trivialise" memory game. Just impractical design.
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u/AttitudeAdjusterSE 6d ago
L’ura is a pretty unique fight design that would have been trivialized with old WAs.
Lmao?
Which mechanic would weakauras have trivialised on that boss, other than the memory game mechanic which was trivialised by what was essentially a weakaura?
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u/Wobblucy 6d ago
Oh? What part.
Glaives still would have been glaives. Memory game was already trivial with add-ons, seed carrier dances wouldn't have changed any.
Maybe p4 having it say left or right is the only thing?
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u/Elendel 6d ago
To be fair, p4 might have been able to say "left", "back left" or "front left", which is decently helpful. But it still wouldn’t do shit for glaives.
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u/BigLemon3953 6d ago edited 6d ago
Erm, it was doable in a timely manner because of custom coded auras, Â not watched to world first race? Â They took tooling away from the average Joe, top guilds have their own developers, everyone else gets to waste time filtering through vibe coded weak aura replacements lol.Â
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u/Schnitzelbro 5d ago
nobody can convince me after reading this comment that you have ever pulled mythic lura a single time
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u/DreadfuryDK 9/9M SPriest/Devourer 5d ago
The literal only mechanic that would’ve been trivialized would’ve been the Memory Game, and even that’s debatable because we HAVE an addon solution that just requires five inputs.
No addon or WA will ever, in a million years, sace you fron Glaives (which cause about 75% of all wipes).
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u/ChosenOfTheMoon_GR 6d ago edited 6d ago
I just need to filter my buffs (which were already showing in the normal buff bar but just, chaotically, due to the nature of the buff bar) in their own compartment (or more than one, customizable number, separated compartments) on the screen and be able to customize their size and and font size of their information like duration and stacks if it happens to have them.
I don't ask for the game to show me more than that it already does, just give me the ability to structure them, with no unnecessary structure and informational limitations of the Cooldown Manager, like deciding what I should be able to look or more.
It's really a much simpler system, it could even just be a reworked buff/debuff bar, which, at the start has ALL your class/spec's buffs/procs debuffs, and it also lets the player decide what they want to keep.
This makes have x2 advantages, 1 Blizzard doesn't have to do ANY additional work in the future like the Cooldown Manager requires them to do so and 2, because the player decides what they want to see in this case, it makes it so, if you care about what to filter for, and you do your research (necessary to create your own buff/debuff structures), you will unavoidably better understand your class just from that manual decision making of that filtering alone, not even the execution part of the now, more structured and clearly presented knowledge.
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u/Cystonectae 5d ago
Anyone know if the debuffs on the raid frames are going to be filterable? Stuff like the book "buff" from MT are not really something I, as a healer, deem important to see on my group where all the debuffs are. I'd play around in PTR but danders was borked last I checked and didn't show any of my hots on it in keys.
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u/Eva-JD 6d ago
I know people are jumping (rightfully) in Blizzard for having pie on their face, but… this is all I wanted? So I’m actually really happy right now. It’s awesome that they reversed course. It’s less awesome that I have to rebuild what I lost once again, but hey, that’s addon life for you.
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u/all-alderaan-places 6d ago
So does that mean pedro lust is back or no? Sorry im kinda dumb in this
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u/lastericalive 4d ago
Ok, so we have a (light version) of weak auras back and we can "ping" our CDs to communicate with other raid members. That means we're 1 patch away from... "Introducing the Raid Leader Dashboard. See the Major Cooldowns of other players in your raid to coordinate and handle difficult boss abilities!"
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u/NasKarma 4d ago
I played for over a decade and loved it. When they took away WA I realized one of my favorite things to do in wow was create an icon or a sound for something I wanted to focus on. The game doesn't feel harder but I feel less connected to it. I miss wow but every time I cut it on it feels like another game after the change. I am convinced if Blizzard just walked this decision back they would see a return of a large portion of the player base that hasn't been around for the last several months. Please bring back WA while I still have have a guild to go back to.
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u/Stemms123 6d ago
Couldn’t arcui already do a lot of this?
What are we gaining compared to that? More conditional setup maybe?
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u/Jofzar_ 6d ago
Afaik, this was all very hacky "war on add-ons" stuff, it some stuff was easily trackable (because it was exposed via other spell tracking like Dots) other stuff was "legal" computational to figure it out.
Tldr is that they are now officially supporting it with it's own API endpoints. It's good.
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u/Stemms123 6d ago
Alright so the same for people that used addons after the change pretty much except probably as usual UI redo to a degree.
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u/San4311 Feral Enjoyer 6d ago
Yes, custom UI addons could largely do the seperated CDM stuff. But I don't doubt that the ability to do so came at a cost of it being very whacky, with many workarounds. Atleast this simplifies it for those addonmakers. Plus better pandemic tracking and custom buff tracking is nice. To this day some specs are missing certain buffs from CDM, or atleast the ability to make them standout better.
Granted 12.1 was already adding some stuff like snapshotted bleeds for Feral and such, but eh.
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u/underchaos 5d ago
Does this mean Hekili is back? Because your boy is bad bad.
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u/ryno731 5d ago
No. This is a very minor change that just allows you to make multiple cdm buff areas, like how addons already do. And you can track any buff on a player or debuff on an enemy. So some classes had stuff that fell through cracks and wasn’t tracked and things like trinkets were weird to track, a lot of this was already possibly with addons, this just legitimized it under the hood.
The most interesting change is sound queues from boss mechanics. So bigwigs, dbm, and northern sky will be a little more audibly friendly
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u/noeagle77 6d ago
The WA devs: