With Shadowlands, WoW grabs a feature that has only been possessed by addons like BigWigs or DBM. From now on, all players will be able to use it.
World of Warcraft and interface addons have a long and eventful history. In WoW, players can customize the interface on a large scale and have often implemented features that were too powerful. But it also works the other way around. Over the years, WoW has adopted many functions from addons and simply brought them into the game. We have the 9 most important addons for BfA here.
This is exactly what is happening again in the next expansion Shadowlands, as reported by wowhead.
What feature is it about? Various boss mods have had the ability to broadcast a timer for a long time. Then all players within the group who also have such an addon will see a countdown. This is used as a “pull timer” to coordinate the exact timing of the attack. This way, things like an early potion (“Pre-Pot”) or the timely activation of abilities can be precisely timed.
How does the feature get to WoW? In the Shadowlands alpha, players can simply use the command “/countdown XX” to start a countdown. “XX” stands for the duration in seconds. These can be short countdowns of a few seconds, but also very long times over several minutes – perfect for clearly defining a raid break.
The last seconds will then be displayed in large numbers in the center of the screen – virtually impossible to miss.
Can all players use this? No. As with the addons DBM (Deadly Boss Mods) and BigWigs, this command can only be executed by the group leader or assistants. So no one needs to worry about the entire raid suddenly spamming countdowns to troll the group in LFR.
Whether WoW will adopt other features from other addons remains to be seen in the coming weeks and months as further updates to Shadowlands are released.
