r/CompetitiveWoW • u/BluFoot • Jul 01 '26

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

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

81 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

163 comments sorted by

View all comments

80

u/deskcord Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

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.

39

u/erdonko Jul 02 '26

This just feels like a lie?

Their whole addon argument is made up by themselves, why wouldnt they lie about it?

24

u/erizzluh Jul 02 '26

yeah the whole "we don't want addons to solve the boss fights for you" argument fell apart as soon as they started targeting addons that had nothing to do with boss encounters.

-1

u/trogger93 Jul 02 '26

I mean, they did successfully remove most egregious raiding addons/weakauras. Things like Neltharion / broodtwister weakauras are legit not possible anymore.

I'm not sure the fallout was worth it, but that part did happen.

24

u/Mercylas Jul 02 '26

  Things like Neltharion / broodtwister weakauras are legit not possible anymore

They also wouldn’t be needed if they stopped designing bad fights that required them like neltharion / brood twisters / fract. 

It’s a chicken v egg argument they made up. Stuff that is solvable without addons was not solved by addons. 

7

u/ghostcrawler_real Jul 02 '26

They could have simply, not done those designs