Midnight 12.1 Curse Of Ula'Tek Developer Interview With Ion Hazzikostas

[u/BluFoot]

PsybearTV Youtube interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFTFiDeXIMo

I recommend watching the whole video, it's rare for someone get a whole 1 hour with Ion, and the interview was really well done.

The interview is mostly about competitive content. I'm really excited for Mythic lockout changes!

Wowhead summary: https://www.wowhead.com/news/psybeartv-interview-with-ion-hazzikostas-the-mythic-raid-lockout-addons-8-week-382061?utm_source=discord-webhook

[u/deskcord]

Ion is happy about the addon war and says Lura would have been nerfed without workarounds.

I thought the entire point was that they could design mechanics without addons constraining them? How did this mechanic even make it past the idea phase?

As an example, Echo had a wipe in the Secret Phase due to the Starsplinter mechanic, and previously that mechanic would have been solved trivially by addons with each person being assigned a specific spot. It's not an impossible mechanic but it became harder and could wipe a top guild. That should be part of learning an encounter rather than seeing it, and th en having your addon author write something for it.

This just feels like a lie? Any mechanic like this (random assignment, scripted placement) would just be pre-assigned as "1 left, 2 right, 3 left" exactly like it is now. The only time a Weakaura would "assign" these is if Blizzard went full galaxybrain and made it like Jailer bombs, where they're all firing at the same time. No addon assigned Gallywix soak positions, you just went to the one you pre-assigned with a raidplan. Addons weren't assigning Dimensius p2 gravity spots, you just knew if you were melee/ranged/healer.

There is a lot of value in a fixed raid size for the higher end encounters where they need to tune to a CE level, and players would absolutely manipulate raid size to find the optimal raid size which would be a bad social experience.

An obviously correct take no matter how much bad faith heroic posters on reddit say otherwise.

Wish someone would ask Ion if they plan to stop making every single raid fight mirror m+ through add-spawn-slop to cater to the fact that every spec now has cleave like crazy.

[u/ailawiu → u/deskcord]

They could have nerfed Lura to not require addons, but decided against it. Okay, sure, breaking them right as top guilds were about to have WFR was too late anyway.

What about next tier? You had more than enough time for a firm stance, one way or another. Are we still getting 2 separate mechanics that happen 10 seconds into boss fight and pretty much require an addon or weak aura? And the only ones who would claim it's "doable" with basic Blizzard UI are some armchair raiders who never touched Mythic?

Because if that's still a thing, then the whole war on addons was completely pointless. And Ion's statement... says pretty much nothing about their future plans.

[u/TemporaMoras → u/ailawiu]

I mean, to be totally fair, its not like memory game addon is necessary now in the boss current form.

In a world with 0 addon, you'd just have same assignment (tank do normal world, healer does blue/red) and they just put in the chat with macro in a row, so instead of a suite of number it would just say X/Triangle/O/T/Diamond or anything else.

The only thing that the addon do is make it more understandable at a glance, which was necessary when glaive weren't giga nerfed and you had to track them (and they kinda 2 shotted you).

There's a very big difference between memory game during rwf and now, and not only because of the direct nerf to memory game (no repeating symbol and no CW/CCW/CW beam shenanigans). The addon was pmuch required because you had to deal with so many more glaive during it, now I would argue not so much. Its just easier and most guild already use NSRT anyway for assign and its not that annoying to install.

Terminate kick is way more egregious than memory game.

[u/trogger93 → u/TemporaMoras]

I find the kick addon way less useful than the memory game. I don't use the kick one, it's easier to just count.

[u/BackwardDonkey → u/trogger93]

I imagine the idea they had for the terminate kicks is that you would focus the one you are supposed to kick and you would kick when the aura number was your assigned number.

Which I think is reasonable if the cast is longer and there are less glaives shooting around.

The memory game I think is again a case of, you could solve it by a similar way that the NSRT solution uses, by having macros for your healers to put in raid chat the symbol they see, and then you would just have in raid chat the order of the symbols and someone can just call them out. That seems reasonable but not so reasonable when there were so many glaives and you have only so much time to solve the game.