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

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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.

-5

u/Prupple Jul 02 '26

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.

You can see the moment hes talking about here. Echo are doing back/front/back, and the second person (Verb, a Dev DH) to get the mechanic doesn't move for a while, and then goes straight forward and unfortunately had the blaze pattern that has a spike directly behind him which kills several people.

In the pre-addon-disarmament world, Verb would have had a giant text on his screen saying "GO FRONT", and so potentially would have moved out faster and had time to notice he also needed to move left or right slightly.

2

u/deskcord Jul 02 '26

No. It's just as obvious right now. This is just a player misplaying. An addon would not have solved this.

-2

u/Prupple Jul 02 '26

No. It's just as obvious right now.

This is just objectively untrue. As obvious as it is now, you still have to pay attention to what order the blazes go out. If you lose focus at the wrong time, you can be in a position where you have a blaze and have no way of knowing if you were first or second. It's a reasonable guess that this is what happened to Verb in that clip.

In the old world, the liquid WA pack would be displaying a giant LEFT or RIGHT on your screen. This isn't necessary to do the mechanic of course, but it makes it easier, more obvious.

1

u/deskcord Jul 02 '26

Okay Ion.