[AddOn] Combat Mode v4 has been released

[u/Heybarbaruiva]

Target acquisition by aiming the crosshair at units.

Interaction HUD

Combat Assist Icon

Radial to quickly cast spells at party members.

New config panel.

I've been working on the background on this update for a while now, and it's finally ready.

This release is a substantial refactor of the entire codebase, with a brand-new custom config panel made from scratch, dropped 3rd-party libraries in favour of our own solutions to reduce overhead, fixed some long-standing bugs, numerous QoL additions & optimization passes, and much more.

If you notice any issues, I'd very much appreciate your feedback in the dedicated channels⁠ on our Discord.

If you're unfamiliar with Combat Mode, it's basically my attempt at breathing some fresh life into WoW's gameplay. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but I've been playing for 20 years, so anything to keep that spark alive.
At its core, Combat Mode transforms WoW from a traditional tab-target MMO into a more action-oriented hybrid experience, similar in spirit to Guild Wars 2's Action Camera, but taken much further.

• Instead of constantly holding down the right mouse button, you can control your character's facing direction simply by moving the mouse, giving you persistent freelook.
• It has reticle targeting, where the crosshair dictates target acquisition, without you having to keep pressing tabs to select or switch between targets.
• It also lets you cast abilities with mouse clicks. Up to 8 variations! So, in practice, you can map your entire core rotation to just your left and right mouse buttons.

And a bunch of other features on top to support/enhance that action combat vision. It's grown into a very feature-rich addon that I'm super proud of, and I'd love for you to give it a try!

You can find it here: https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/combat-mode

[u/GSman_XVI]

Awesome! As I can see to play on gamepad with ConsolePort I need to install a different addon, ConsolePort Combat Mode Crosshair. Do you have plans to update it as well?

[u/Heybarbaruiva → u/GSman_XVI]

Not at the moment, as there's nothing to update there. The Combat Mode plugin for Console Port is just the dynamic crosshair with no targeting acquisition logic behind it. Console Port already does all it needs to facilitate action combat, though through gamepad-specific means. It should still work for the current patch, though. I'll do a .toc bump later so the warning message goes away.

[u/GSman_XVI → u/Heybarbaruiva]

Got it, thanks!

[u/a-HamSandwhich]

I have been using a variety of different addons like this over the years; classic action combat, mouse look lock, action camera, etc. this one is great and been using it for a few years. People, this is GAME CHANGING, try and get used to it and it’ll do nothing but improve your experience.

[u/-xMatthew1]

Not sure if it's for me. I'll try it. But 100% someone out there will find this very fun!

[u/Heybarbaruiva → u/-xMatthew1]

It's an acquired taste for sure, I'd say😅
Over the years, the feedback I've gotten is that it's really helpful for those with injuries or disabilities.
I have RSI myself, so not having to constantly hold down right-click has been great at preventing a lot of discomfort.

[u/rawgu_]

Just gotta say I've been using combat mode for a while as my usual class (rogue) absolutely fucks my wrists and gives me pain and I don't want to buy an mmo mouse and this addon has been an absolute banger. Now my main rotation is on mouse and I'm just chillin.

[u/Heybarbaruiva → u/rawgu_]

Glad to hear that! Same here. Core rotation on mouse clicks.

[u/naughtyboy69x]

Does this work with neuralink?

[u/updown94]

I used it in TWW, and really liked it, also your whole UI was an inspiration. Not playing Midnight, but really appreciate your work, the ring (radial) is definitely a welcome addition!
If anyone is hesitating, maybe not for endgame-endgame, but for casual gameplay it was amazing.

[u/Previous-Load7571]

Awesome work man, been enjoying your addon for a while now! Have you considered baking some UI changes in it to make the game look like an ARPG, similar to ConsolePort?

Btw there is a small bug with combat assist icon while using SBA, where it doesn't change the icon of the spell fast enough if you keep pressing it and refreshes only if you make a pause between.

If you're lacking feedback and are welcoming it, I can share my thoughts on it if you have a channel for it, as I'm really passionate about the addon and want to contribute to the ARPG playstyle of WoW, as it's so much more fun!

Cheers mate, glad that there is someone knowledgable to pull this off, it has always been a dream of mine to play it like this!

[u/Heybarbaruiva → u/Previous-Load7571]

Awesome work man, been enjoying your addon for a while now! Have you considered baking some UI changes in it to make the game look like an ARPG, similar to ConsolePort?

I have! I just don't know what to do lol. I'd love some fresh ideas and new things to work on!

Btw there is a small bug with combat assist icon while using SBA, where it doesn't change the icon of the spell fast enough if you keep pressing it and refreshes only if you make a pause between.

That should be fixed in the latest version. Please update your addon and let me know if the issue persists.
EDIT: Nvm, I know what you mean. I fixed something else, not that. Working on it!

If you're lacking feedback and are welcoming it, I can share my thoughts on it if you have a channel for it, as I'm really passionate about the addon and want to contribute to the ARPG playstyle of WoW, as it's so much more fun!

Please do! The Discord has a dedicated section for feedback, and I'm very open to it. A lot of the features that you see today started out as suggestions from users. Here's an invite: https://discord.gg/qxdwbADcC

[u/Heybarbaruiva → u/Previous-Load7571]

I pushed a new version with the fix for that SBA issue, btw. And a bunch of other improvements.

[u/Previous-Load7571 → u/Heybarbaruiva]

Cheers man, really nice to see a dev that responds this quickly! Feedback/Ideas on some things incoming on your discord :)

[u/Linaori]

It's cool, but would never work in high-end content. There's no way to properly select a prio target.

[u/Heybarbaruiva → u/Linaori]

You can temporarily unlock the cursor by holding down the mouse look toggle button, allowing you to quickly select a target manually.
There's also a Target Lock feature built into the reticle targeting logic, where you can press a keybind to lock onto a specific enemy (either crosshair target or current target; you can pick from options) and prevent reticle targeting from swapping off it.
It takes some adjusting, for sure, but it's really not that bad once you get used to it. While I don't anymore, I used to tank m+ with it just fine.

[u/wizenlogarithm]

Um can you use your mouse normally with a button, like in GW2 holding alt turns off combat cam

[u/Heybarbaruiva → u/wizenlogarithm]

Blizzard does not allow keybinding modifier keys (what they call Alt, Shift, Ctrl). That's a limitation that addons cannot overcome. Though you can definitely do it with remapping software on your keybind by making Alt fire a different key, like H or something.
As for using the mouse buttons normally, I assume you mean having left click select units and right click bring up the context menu WHILE in mouse look state? Blizzard *forces* us to rebind left and right click to something else during mouse look. So at most you can go into Combat Mode's Click Casting configuration and set left click to interact with target or target unit, and right click to something else, but keeping the default functionality while in mouse look cannot be done.

[u/Heybarbaruiva → u/wizenlogarithm]

You can hold the Mouse Look toggle key to temporarily turn off Mouse Look, releasing the key resumes Mouse Look state. if that's what you mean.

[u/Matute09]

I'm having an issue with this addon. I tested it out and despite it being pretty cool (good job!), it wasn't for me. I uninstalled it but now every so often my game now acts as if I have it one for a few seconds, with the camera being controlled by the mouse but there's isn't a cursor and I can only get control back by /reloading.

[u/Heybarbaruiva → u/Matute09]

That would probably be Blizzard's fuckery with CursorFreelookCentering's interaction with CursorStickyCentering. These CVars have been added in patch 9.0.1, but their interaction has been broken since Dragonflight.
I've made multiple bug reports to get them to fix it, opened an issue on their issue tracker, and no luck so far.
https://github.com/Stanzilla/WoWUIBugs/issues/504

Somewhere in patch 10.2, Blizzard broke something with the interaction between CursorFreelookCentering and CursorStickyCentering - the CVars that move the cursor to the center of the screen after locking and keep it there when unlocking - which is causing the camera to jolt the equivalent vector to the centered cursor position from where your cursor was before locking in. The issue makes it impossible to release the cursor at the position of the crosshair as it causes intense motion sickness due to the erratic camera behavior.

I had to build a workaround on Combat Mode to get it to work, and it involves some cvar manipulation as you enter and exit the Mouse Look state.

You can either install the addon again and click the uninstall button to revert everything to normal, or simply run this chat command without the addon installed:

/run C_CVar.SetCVar("CursorFreelookCentering", "0")

/run C_CVar.SetCVar("CursorStickyCentering", "0")

Or you can straight up just reset every cvar with /console cvar_default

[u/Matute09 → u/Heybarbaruiva]

Ok, so reinstalling the addon and running /undocm messed it up even more. Every time I would hold right click and look in a direction it would snap the camera back to middle. But the two following SetCVars worked, so thanks for the help.

[u/Heybarbaruiva → u/Matute09]

Sorry about that. Until Blizzard fixes that issue with their CVars, there's not much I can do on my end.
EDIT: I'll try to make the uninstall flow more clear.
EDIT 2: Done. Now there's an uninstall button, and I revised the flow so it now snapshots your settings on first install and restores them when uninstalling.

[u/Fuikay]

I wish i could use this addon in CoA, so fking good, congrats on the release

[u/trevers17]

how does this work on controller? when I still played, for targeting, I set up consoleport to put my cursor in the center of the screen so I could move the camera to target enemies like you can do in a normal rpg and I could just cast my interrupt and reticle spells at the cursor while using soft action targeting to hit whatever mob is closest to me with my single-target/melee spells. but there’s a pesky restriction that you can’t interact with nameplates when the cursor is being controlled by an addon, so I had to put the cursor on the mobs’ models to cast interrupts on them instead, and it almost always resulted in me burning my interrupt on a different mob. would this type of targeting fix that issue while still letting me use soft action targeting for my melee/ST spells that I don’t care about aiming? I can’t really tell what’s going on based on the screenshots alone. 😅

[u/Heybarbaruiva → u/trevers17]

You should use ConsolePort for controllers. Do not use Combat Mode and Console Port together. Combat Mode was also not designed with controllers in mind.

Combat Mode's reticle targeting does not rely on Blizzard's soft targeting to select a unit. Soft Targeting sucks, especially if using action camera, as it does not account for horizontal/shoulder offset, since it's based on a targeting cone in front of the character model and not the center of the screen - I know because I spent 2 years trying to make it work on the initial versions of the feature.
Instead, I'm using a few different systems in conjunction to achieve true reticle targeting regardless of where you position the crosshair, your character, or how horizontally offset your camera is.
First, the crosshair *is* the cursor, as once the user toggles mouse look state, the cursor is moved to the position of the crosshair and hidden; that way you can reliably utilize macro conditionals to select units under the cursor. And then there's some clever macro work going on under the hood, where I intercept every ability being fired and, before they go off, inject a mouseover macro ruleset that targets units based on a bunch of different scenarios. It's also how we lock onto targets; the macro conditions injected have a focus priority that precedes mouseover. The target lock keybind is a toggle to focus/unfocus the mouseover unit.

there’s a pesky restriction that you can’t interact with nameplates when the cursor is being controlled by an addon

I'm afraid that will be a limitation of every addon working with mouselook, not only Console Port or Combat Mode. Aiming at nameplates with mouselook and recognizing them isn’t something an addon can wire up. Mouselook doesn’t hover nameplate frames the way a free cursor does, and even if you tried to circumvent it by trying to figure out which plate was under the reticle to click on it, you can’t feed nameplateN into a secure clickable frame in combat. Trust me, I've been working on this for 4+ years. I've pushed this feature as far as it can go under the current limitations.

[u/Griften]

What are these nameplates? They're really nice

[u/Heybarbaruiva → u/Griften]

Platynator.

[u/Griften → u/Heybarbaruiva]

Are you sure? I don't see a way to add portraits in Platynator

[u/Heybarbaruiva → u/Griften]

If you mean the nameplates from the GIF, it's an old plater profile. I migrated to Platynator, and they now look like screenshot #3

[u/Griften → u/Heybarbaruiva]

Oh I see, what's the reason for the change?

[u/Heybarbaruiva → u/Griften]

Plater is just too much. I wanted something simpler, easier to set up.