Blizzard dropped a hell of an announcement today for World of Warcraft players. During a new developer broadcast, the World of Warcraft team says that at some point in the near future, they will stop allowing add-ons to read combat events and auras.
Mods that display information related to damage meters and boss encounters will no longer work. This means that some of WoW's most popular modifications will soon cease to function. Some of these mods include the popular Deadly Boss Mods and essentially all mods using the WeakAura framework.
That's the bad news. The good news is that a lot of the functions covered by these mods will be added to World of Warcraft by Blizzard.
World of Warcraft senior game director Ion Hazzikostas said during the stream that Blizzard is working on building this functionality natively within World of Warcraft. Many of those features will start to be added into WoW when patch 11.1.7 goes live. That update will soon hit the Public Test Realm (PTR).
As it is, a lot of these mods make most encounters trivial. They tell players where and when to move during a fight, or when to interrupt, or when to cast certain abilities. Hazzikostas says this near automation from the mods made it difficult on their designers. The team had to make encounters more and more challenging to combat against those mods.
Blizzard will add in native functionality for systems such as UI movement and customization options, damage meters, customizations to the Cooldown Manager, improvements to nameplates, improvements to how raid encounters are presented, and a "timeline" of boss abilities.
Once these functions are built directly into World of Warcraft, they will begin restricting access to add-ons being able to read live combat events.
Fans are already speculating that a lot of these changes are because Blizzard is gearing up to bring World of Warcraft to consoles at some point in the near future. Beyond that, fans seem to be quite positive about these changes coming to World of Warcraft.
