World of Warcraft director admits it's too hard without combat mods and explains how bosses will change in Midnight: 'We're not looking to turn all our raid encounters into giant puzzles for people to solve'

World of Warcraft will strip away mods, or addons, with the ability to process information in combat when the upcoming Midnight expansion releases. And that idea is now changing many core aspects of the game, its director says.

In an exclusive PC Gamer interview, senior game director Ion Hazzikostas says that over the years, the game has gotten increasingly complex. He goes on to explain upcoming changes to encounter and class design.

"If you're playing it out of the box, no addons whatsoever, and trying to play at the highest competitive levels, I do think that it is too hard," he says, "and I think that consequently, hardly anyone is attempting to do that."

Midnight aims to change that dynamic. Initially the team focused on trying to limit the impact of combat-related mods, but soon realized it wasn't feasible to carve away bits of their functions. But the idea of taking away mods and WeakAuras' ability to read combat information swiftly required tweaks to nearly every part of the game's group activities.

Every Warcraft class is changing at Midnight

Encounters had to become easier for players to read, since addons couldn't give them simple instructions. Complex interactions in player abilities, or buffs/debuffs that drove when they should fire off certain abilities, were also rough to track with the base UI, and needed to change if there were no WeakAuras or addons to help players.

"A lot of the class changes [in Midnight] haven't been in the works for years," Hazzikostas says. Instead, he says they popped up over the past few months. "When we first began our conversation with the community around the philosophy of where we were thinking we wanted to go with addons, we heard a lot of feedback immediately of, 'That's all well and good, but how am I supposed to track this mechanic?' Internally we were like, 'They're not wrong.' "

Classes that require players to evaluate four separate variables within 0.7 seconds to pick the correct next action nearly require WeakAuras to manage, he says. "Then it becomes pretty straightforward—push the button when my UI tells me to. But that's not the game we were actually designing."

Early changes on the Midnight Alpha test removed restoration druids' need to place healing circles on the ground, and beast mastery hunters' need to maintain a three-stack of their pets' Frenzy buff, for example. The ability to even see Frenzy stacks only became part of the base UI recently, so nearly every hunter tracked them with a WeakAura.

Many raid and dungeon bosses are changing as well

On the raid fight side, designers were well aware of what WeakAuras could do, and so they avoided putting in mechanics that would be trivialized by those addons. Dylan Barker, lead encounter designer, told me in an interview that the team classifies mechanics for raids into three categories: dexterity, strength and intellect.

Dexterity is the "we're going to ask you to dance" category, he says. Strength challenges pose a DPS or healing check. And intellect challenges you to react to a variable situation with a fight. There's a bomb on you and four other players, he gives as an example: Where do you take it?

"An intellect-based encounter is the sort of thing that addons have historically solved pretty well," Barker says, and as a result, the team has been using less and less of them. To make an encounter with an intellect coordination challenge that might require four players to move to specific spots, they can't just make one more player have the debuff, for example.

"We've had to layer on dexterity and speed and pace and lethality to make things that were coordination tests harder," he says. "In Mythic [difficulty], I have to pull out six shooters and I am firing swirls at your feet, so you do both at the same time. It's a very different axis of skill."

Skill ceiling should remain the same—but the floor should rise

Hazzikostas says the idea is when all the changes are done the level of challenge, particularly at the highest tiers of gameplay, should be about the same.

"I don't think it's going to look all that different," he says. "I think the skill ceiling should be in about the same place, and the ways in which it's measured should be fairly similar for people."

The floor, the average level of gameplay, should rise as people take advantage of better-designed fights and classes that are easier for people to read without help, he says. But the challenge for great players should remain, even with easier to see mechanics and less-complex character spell rotations.

"The progression from being a beginner player to a good player lies in mastering a rotation to the point where you can execute it on a combat dummy," Hazzikostas says. "I know what buttons to push, I am gearing correctly, I can execute close to my maximum potential damage in a completely static situation.

"Now let's throw some raid mechanics in the mix. Every player's damage goes down. When you're distracted, everyone suffers some throughput. If you're focused on PVE skill, a lot of it is what percentage of your theoretical damage you can do while multitasking."

Coordination challenges take center stage in raids

Those challenges will remain and will separate the great players from the good ones, he says, and fights will be balanced around that level of gameplay. Fights are currently tuned assuming you have WeakAuras and mods to help. Take the current Fractillus raid fight, he says, which has strict player positioning challenges.

"Many players rightly look at the Mythic version of that fight and say, 'We don't think this is possible without an addon.' Honestly, I wouldn't say it's not possible—I would say it's unreasonably difficult," Hazzikostas says.

Without WeakAuras trivializing the encounter by telling players exactly where to go, the team can tune it to give players a few seconds more to get there, or by reducing the number of players who need to move, or tweaking the damage required to kill the boss.

"Now, that [coordination] becomes a hallmark of the encounter in a way that we honestly haven't been able to do for a long time, because we knew what WeakAuras would do to it," he says. "We're not looking to turn all our raid encounters into giant puzzles for people to solve."

"But I think coordination and figuring out the solutions to these multifaceted problems has long been one of the more interesting parts of raiding, instead of the first three wipes are because someone had their WeakAura misconfigured," he says, "and then after that all you have to know is [how to] run to a star."

Accessibility and audio will be in the mix

Blizzard is working hard to ensure that the features of necessary WeakAuras and mods—including those needed to assist players with disabilities—remain. After recent feedback from the Undaunted guild of deaf and hard of hearing players, the company invited some of their members into the Midnight testing program to keep receiving their feedback, Hazzikostas says.

"Accessibility remains a top focus for the team, especially as it relates to this initiative, so we want to hear from all our players, and especially from those who rely on special setups to play our game," he says.

Crash Reed, lead user experience designer, says Blizzard will also be adding customizable audio cues, specifically for the player class cooldown manager tool. Options will include assigning sounds or text-to-speech to abilities coming off cooldown or a variety of other event states, he says.

"Personally, I'm a UI person, but I would much rather hear it than stare at my UI," Reed says. Boss warnings will also come with sound cues, but at this point those are locked in by the team and not customizable. "That would be something we could look at over time," he says.

According to Reed, nameplate changes will help players track mobs that have aggroed on them even if they're off the screen, as floating nameplates for those monsters will appear at the edge of the display. Some other visual clutter that players leaned on heavily, including raid markers used by WeakAuras, may no longer be necessary after the Midnight changes go through, Hazzikostas says.

A large number of players have been invited to participate in Midnight's alpha tests to give feedback on all the addon, encounter and class design changes, he says, and their thoughts will cause further tweaks. "This is the starting point of iteration. This is definitely not set in stone."