WoW addon changes split players as 12.0 patch begins Blizzard's war on mods

A major UI revamp has rendered many mods obsolete or broken, and players are split on the results

Along with player housing, Blizzard has spent a while trailing another big change coming to World of Warcraft — but this was one it knew would be unpopular with many players. It's just gone live in the game's 12.0 pre-patch, ahead of March's Midnight expansion.

The change in question is a major user interface revamp that has, intentionally, killed off many of the UI mods (addons, in WoW parlance) that players depend upon, especially those who raid or run Mythic dungeons at a high level.

The revamp aims to integrate a lot of the functionality provided by these addons into WoW's own interface. Because it changes the way the WoW code tracks and shares information, it has broken many addons — some intentionally as part of the change, some not.

Many mod makers are racing to update their addons and get them working with the new version of WoW. But some are not. WeakAuras was a hugely popular and powerful addon that enabled all kinds of information graphics and interface customizations, giving players cues on when to use their abilities and other situational prompts during boss fights, among other things. Its makers decided to discontinue the addon for modern WoW last year, after grasping the extent of Blizzard's changes. (WeakAuras remains available for WoW Classic.)

For its part, Blizzard has argued that addons like WeakAuras had become so powerful they were taking decision-making out of players' hands and "offering an objective advantage in moment-to-moment combat," as game director Ion Hazzikostas put it in a blog last year. Some guilds and groups were requiring players to install addons, and Blizzard had to design encounters around them. So the WoW team decided to deny all addons access to real-time combat information. This change runs alongside a new design philosophy, aiming to simplify how most classes play and integrating more helpful features within WoW's own UI, such as hints on which skill to use next, or warnings of boss abilities.

With the release of the 12.0 update, "addon disarmament" (as Blizzard puts it) or "the Addonpocalypse" (as the WoW Subreddit calls it) is finally here, and players are split on the results. Many are furious, saying Blizzard's replacement UI tools are not yet fit for purpose ("better cooldown manager wow" is currently trending on Google search). Some are finding they're actually downloading more addons than before as they attempt to replace the functionality of WeakAuras with multiple less well-developed addons. Some are even turning to homebrew coding solutions. There are tributes to WeakAuras everywhere.

Other players who are more willing to let go of the crutches addons like WeakAuras have supplied feel differently, however. "As someone who plays high-end Mythic+ as a healer, tank, and occasionally DPS, and who is used to having WeakAuras, GTFO, and a ton of information on the screen, I feel much better now that it’s all gone," wrote one Redditor. "The game has finally started to look like a game again, rather than a visual info clusterfuck. [...] I really want to thank Blizzard for making the game look the way it should."

Addon disarmament isn't the only controversial change in WoW's 12.0 patch. The transmogrification system that alters the look of your character's equipment has been completely revamped to work on a slot basis, rather than a per-item basis, and players have been surprised to find they need to pay thousands in gold just to re-equip their favorite transmogs. (Blizzard has offered a free transmog change in a future patch as recompense.) And players are grappling with, in some cases, radically simplified ability rotations for their class specs, which are going down better with some than with others.

The update also added the Endeavors progress system to housing, the new Devourer spec for the Demon Hunter class, and deployed a stat squish to bring some of the game's math under control. Next week, on Jan. 27, the Twilight Ascension questline and pre-expansion event goes live. Midnight itself launches on March 2.