WoW's game director thinks its UI overhaul has been 'successful so far,' even if it's 'not perfect'

One of the most controversial bits of World of Warcraft: Midnight was Blizzard taking aim at UI mods (addons) that impacted combat, with the idea that you probably shouldn't have to make your game look like an airplane dashboard designed by a drunk person just to play a videogame. Something that I've come around to, for the most part.

In a recent interview with PCGamesN, game director Ion Hazzikostas has affirmed Blizzard's choice to revoke addon author's access to combat information (with a few exceptions): "I know this may be a controversial statement, but I will say that, overall, [the new UI] has been successful so far. It's not done, it's not perfect; there's more work to go, and we are continuing to undertake that work."

"Controversial" is somewhat correct, mind. While I've been handling the shift absolutely fine, I'm also primarily a DPS guy—during the last raid tier, healers were suffering due to a complete mismatch between Blizzard's encounter design and their UI's ability to track dispellable debuffs.

Essentially, while Blizzard has touted that it's designing its encounters with an addonless world in mind, a raid encounter in Midnight's first season, Crown of the Cosmos, had a debuff called Null Corona that needed to be dispelled. However, because the studio's changes made it impossible to track dispels, healers were forced to squint at their party member's health bars to find a tiny purple jpeg.

This was eventually hotfixed, but that's far from the only issue. The homegrown DPS meter could, er, be better. It's missing a huge amount of functionality that was there with meter addons before, a step back by pretty much every metric. And it's not like Blizzard isn't working on it, but it's easy to feel salty about a sweeping lack of convenience—the rapidfire development cycle of hobbyist mod builders absolutely beats the often-complicated and difficult tasks of a major development studio.

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"I think that, by and large, the vast majority of people are completing the same level of content that they were before, and far more are doing it without feeling like they need to seek out external tools. There have been some exceptions to that where the community has figured out ways of making some computational logic work, and we didn't want to keep breaking things in the middle of a patch."

That's another asterisk to the whole thing—many high-end raiders have figured out ways to gain the same functionality they'd lost before, but because of both the new rules around addons and the usability lost from the death of something like WeakAuras, these addons mostly aren't accessible to the general public.

Hazzikostas says that patch 12.1 should iron out a lot of those kinks, though: "The 12.1 update has what we think is a more comprehensive overhaul of the security backend of our addon interface, which should make it a little easier for addon authors to write addons, but also close some of the loopholes we've seen pop up here and there. Alongside that, we're continuing to improve our base user interface."

Ultimately, Hazzikostas says that "I think, while it's certainly been a transition with its challenges, we're excited to have this new baseline and foundation, and things will only continue to get better from here, both as we continue to add functionality to the base UI, and we continue to empower addon authors to add customization options.

"And as we, frankly, internally relearn some aspects of how we can build encounters in this new world. I think that's going to open up new doors and possibilities for players in raids, dungeons, Delves, and everything in between."