Addons and World of Warcraft are an everlasting story. As the bosses grow stronger, the interface addons also gain power.
World of Warcraft is one of the MMORPGs where players can make many choices about the interface. Almost every element of the user interface can be customized through addons, giving the game a completely different look. Addons are particularly relevant for players in PvE, as they provide a variety of assistance.
PCGamer conducted an interview with Morgan Day, the lead game designer of WoW. They talked extensively about addons and brought some interesting details to light.
Addons have been a problem since Classic: WoW has always been quite open to interface modifications, and the first truly “bad” extremes of this appeared already in WoW Classic. We still recommend some of these today.
Many players may still remember the golden days of the addon “Decursive.” There, you just had to press a button, and the addon automatically freed cursed (or poisoned) teammates from those debuffs. Independent thinking was no longer required. Blizzard blocked this function quite early.
But even in recent years, such restrictions still existed, for example, during the times of Warlords of Draenor. In the final battle against Archimonde at the Hellfire Citadel, some addon authors developed programs that allowed players to “paint” and display arrows “in the game world.” This trivialized one of the core mechanics of the fight. Day commented:
I didn’t even know people could do that. That’s so clever. It’s something that is actually a core functionality of WoW, but they had learned how to apply it in a way that made the raid encounter easier.
The corresponding function was also removed by Blizzard shortly thereafter.
This functionality in a raid went too far for us, and we made changes to the rules of World of Warcraft so that such addons were no longer possible.
Addons sometimes become WoW features: It is particularly interesting that some elements from addons have become a fixed part of World of Warcraft. A notable example would be the “bars” from addons like DBM, Bigwigs, or WeakAura. These are progress bars that display the elapsed time until a skill is used. Blizzard has adopted this in some cases and given bosses an energy display that fills up slowly. Whenever the energy is filled, the boss uses its most devastating ability.
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Also, one of the most important raid features back then was just an addon. If you wanted to see all 40 players in a raid group in your interface, you needed a corresponding addon for that. This was naturally a problem for healers and meant that raid leaders had to assign each healer individually. To bring an end to this problem, “Raid Frames” soon followed, allowing players to see all 40 players.
Despite everything: According to Day, Blizzard internally tests the boss fights always with the standard interface and tries not to consider addons. However, when it comes to the details later on, they closely examine which abilities or mechanics an addon can read and utilize.
Cortyn says: Between addon developers and the developers of the boss fights in World of Warcraft, there seems to be a kind of “hidden war” going on – and has been for many years. After Classic, boss mechanics kept increasing. In the past, you only had to pay attention to one or two mechanics, if at all.
Today, boss opponents often have dozens of mechanics and abilities, and without addons, you can quickly lose track in some fights (especially at higher difficulties). By now, everything seems to have settled into an acceptable range – but in a world where almost every player uses Deadly Boss Mods or BigWigs, there is no need for even more effects that the addons then loudly warn about.
How many addons do you use in WoW? What kind of addons are they? Or do you avoid interface expansions?
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