World of Warcraft without addons in battles will be good. At least one fight in the beta clearly shows how mechanics will operate in the future.
A world (of Warcraft) without strong addons in combat is not only possible, but it will also come in Midnight. This especially gives developers more creative freedom to design boss mechanics and fights that need to be solved by players and not by addons that have become increasingly powerful over time. An inadvertently available boss in the Midnight beta impressively shows what this can look like.
Note: The boss fight against L’ura was not supposed to be part of the beta. However, due to a bug, it was accessible for a while, allowing some groups to attempt the boss. Therefore, we know what mechanics exist and how they will operate as of now.
What kind of mechanic is this? In the fight against the dark Naaru L’ura, there is a phase where the raid group must remember the order of the appearing symbols and then must respond correctly. It goes like this:
- Over L’ura, 4 different symbols will appear in a random order over 6 seconds: Such as Triangle, X, Moon, and Diamond.
- Subsequently, 4 characters in the raid group will be assigned exactly those symbols.
- L’ura will then charge a beam and begin to rotate in a circle.
- The characters with the symbols must position themselves such that the beam passes through the symbols in exactly the same order as they were previously displayed over L’ura.
If one fails at the mechanic by creating the wrong order, the entire raid will be punished with high damage and a DoT (which did not function in the test).
This kind of mechanic naturally leads to some panic and mistakes during the first attempt, as this short raid clip shows:
How would this have gone with addons? If there were still the previous addons in Midnight, the process would likely be quite different. Only one player – presumably the raid leader or a selected person – would remember the order and input it into a Weak Aura. Subsequently, the addons of the affected characters would communicate among themselves and give clear instructions on who should move to which position.
That would effectively turn the task from a group attention check into a task for a single person. The rest could largely ignore the mechanic or only have to follow the instructions on the screen.
Of course, this fight is just an example of what mechanics are now possible and how they will play out in Midnight. However, it is already clear that such mechanics will not overlap with other mechanics so much in the future, and in return, the whole group must engage with them.
That is precisely the goal Blizzard also wanted to achieve. Mechanics should be clear and appropriately challenging without an addon taking over all the “thinking work”. The clip is therefore a nice example of how raids will operate in the future. In such fights, the Shadow Priest is also fun again, who was rescued in the last beta update.
