World of Warcraft has begun the fight against addons. Many abilities in the next raid will be encrypted so that interface addons cannot recognize them.
An eternal battle takes place in World of Warcraft. No, not the conflict between Horde and Alliance, that has now come to an end. But the duel between the game developers and the addon writers has flared up again in the past few months. Blizzard is now rolling out new guns and trying to hide more mechanics so that addon writers can no longer access them.
What kind of conflict is this? Boss battles in World of Warcraft have become increasingly extensive and complex since the game’s launch. In order to be able to defeat such bosses better, fans are developing better and better add-ons – such as “Boss Mods” or “Weak Auras”. This allows a lot of information to be displayed on the screen.
While Blizzard is largely okay with the use of such addons – after all, they allow it in the first place – addons have become increasingly efficient and smarter in recent years. Mechanics that are supposed to be solved through attention are sometimes trivialized by addons.
Blizzard has found a solution here. Certain in-game effects are “hidden” so that addons cannot access them. In the last raid, Aberrus, there were only 3 abilities. However, in the upcoming raid “Amirdrassil” there will be 20 skills.
What does that mean? If an effect is “hidden”, then it cannot be read by addons. For example, the duration of a debuff cannot be recognized or which player is affected by it. Therefore, addons are not able to interact with this effect as usual. Complex add-ons such as “Weak Auras” cannot then make any predictions or calculations to say exactly which character needs to be dispelled or what action needs to be taken.
This is how the community reacts: The reactions to this in the WoW subreddit are mixed. While many agree that the use of add-ons has become rampant, others point out that it is only because of the increasingly complex bosses that such add-ons even exist.
Basically, most people agree that current mythical bosses basically cannot be defeated without add-ons. So if Blizzard starts to slowly exclude addons, then in return the bosses should become a little easier.
What do you think about this whole topic?
We have the most important addons for World of Warcraft here.