Ion Hazzikostas on the Emphasis of Addons in Retail WoW
When asked about the continually increasing emphasis of addons in PvE content during his interview with Asmongold, Game Director Ion Hazzikostas had a lot to say, acknowledging a shift from informational to computational addons which solve encounter mechanics for players automatically, which has become more difficult to design around. While it's something they want to solve, the intent isn't to fully break mods that provide buff and debuffs tracking or rotation helping, though the new customizable UI update incorporates many of those elements to at least reduce the need for 3rd party addons.
Having WeakAuras or having DBM is pretty much required and it creates this artificial gap between causal players and hardcore players. It's kind of a two-part question; number one, does like the team design these Heroic and Mythic encounters for addons, same with Mythic+, and the second part is, are we going to see more of these features incorporated into the game? That's an awesome question, it's something we spend a lot of time, especially recently, debating.We design acknowledging the existence of addons — I think we have to. Sometimes we're actually designing and implementing mechanics in ways that are going to try to work around addons — whether it's entering the code to disarm the bomb on Mekkatorque, or the Among Us game on Lords of Dread, and fixing stuff to plug loopholes that people've found, because we know that we have this idea which could be really fun gameplay, but if an addon solves the whole thing for you, then what's the point? So we have to acknowledge its existence.
Ultimately, we're tuning raid encounters in particular with two goals — one, it should be fun. Goal number two is that it should provide an.
Read more on wowhead.com
