WoW is adding a Hekili-like Combat Assistant in patch 11.1.7 — plus more on Blizzard’s long-term UI goals

In patch 11.1.5, WoW introduced a new UI element called the Cooldown Manager, intended to mimic popular WeakAura packs that display key class cooldowns and ability procs to help players stay on top of their abilities. But adding this functionality to the core UI was only the beginning of Blizzard’s plans to integrate more features from third party addons into the base game, aiming to make the game more accessible to casual and new players by having everything you need to play right there. Now the team is building on this with a Combat Assistant tool that will help you through complicated rotations by suggesting which abilities to use, and even includes an option for a one button rotation.

A large part of the long term success of World of Warcraft has come from the ability to customize the appearance, the information you see, or how you interact with various systems — which Ion Hazzikostas, WoW’s Game Director, acknowledged in an interview about the future of the game’s UI. However it creates an enormous barrier to entry for new players as learning where to find addons and which ones to use can put them at a significant disadvantage to more experienced players.

Planned for the release of patch 11.1.7, Combat Assistant is an optional interface element designed to help players pick up a new spec or help new players understand which abilities they should be using. Heavily inspired by Hekili Priority Helper, the tool will highlight the recommended next ability based on a number of conditions such as your current class resources and what’s going on around you. It can detect the number of valid targets within range, the direction you’re facing, and can adjust for single target vs AOE, and understands your current talent build to make appropriate recommendations.

Combat Assistant is designed for DPS specs only at this point. Its ability selection will based on the latest theorycrafting and would be updated over time — but we don’t know if this means Blizzard theorycrafting or using information from community resources. There’s no word on whether tanking or healing rotations might be added in the future, but both tend to be far more reactive than the DPS, without the same kind of strict rotation.

Playing WoW with a single button rotation

It won’t be optimal, but it will be a n option. A surprise addition to this Combat Assistant is an option to keybind a Single-Button Assistant version of the rotation helper, which will automatically cast the recommended next spell when pressed. Using this option won’t provide optimal DPS, because it will incur a small GCD penalty to offset the benefit in not having to actively chose your next cast, and if you were wanting to cast a different ability, you would still need to actively cast the alternative — for example, if instead of casting your next DPS skill, you wanted to sprint out of a frontal cone boss ability. It’s probably tailored more towards PVE content than PVP, as PVE content tends to be more predictable and has a lower requirement to respond to the unexpected immediately. 

Ion described this as an accessibility option, and it would certainly help people who have vision or manual dexterity issues that impact their ability to situationally select and accurately press the correct ability given the number of options most classes now have at maximum level. With the changes to Warbands and warbound gear, Blizzard is also seeing more players trying out other classes — this new tool will help players rapidly pick up the recommended play-style for entirely new classes with minimal friction. This could be a good path to help people learn how to play a new class or specialization: starting with the one-button option, transitioning to recommending your next cast, and then to player actively picking and casting abilities on their own, and having developed the muscle memory then transitioning to a more self-determinative method of play. The Combat Assistant is not intended to give you perfect play or top-tier parses, but it should allow players to participate effectively while learning to play.

When Blizzard introduced Edit Mode and built-in Click Casting with patch 10.0, it was the first step in what will be a longer journey in uplifting the base UI to better reflect how modern players engage with World of Warcraft. Players can still choose to use third-party addons to achieve the same goals if they prefer, but they don’t have to go looking for addons to perform a lot of functions.

Blizzard on balancing encounters for addons

However Blizzard’s recent move towards private auras — in-game information that can only be seen by the player and can’t be detected by addons or shared automatically with your group — is a step towards their longer term plan of limiting
problem solving addons that can make decisions for you on how to execute certain boss mechanics or react to encounters. 

In recent years Blizzard has struggled with how to design challenging high-end encounters that are not trivialized by addons, but also don’t require addons to defeat. Much of the recent dependance on move-to-avoid random damage placements in encounter design has been a direct reaction to the way addons have been used for much of the on-the-fly team coordination and role assignments that were more common in older raid design.

Ion says much of the goal of these design changes is to move away from Blizzard blocking certain functions and addon developers constantly looking for workarounds, leading to an escalation of restrictions and exploits. Instead Blizzard wants to disarm and de-escalate, opening up more options in the types of encounter mechanics they can use without worrying about players automating the fun out of it. That means the game should provide key information about mechanics in ways that will make it easier for players to identify organically and react to it, rather than needing to rely on a computational addon to detect mechanics and provide alerts.

And there are some more likely candidates for UI uplift in the future. Ion mentioned were damage meters to allow players to benchmark their performance (like Details or Skada), nameplate improvements, and some kind of encounter ability timeline for predictable events within an encounter (like DBM or BigWigs/LittleWigs), making this information readily available in real-time to all players.

The patch 11.1.7 PTR should be available very shortly, with early versions of the Combat Assistant available for testing and feedback. If you’re interested in this function you should ensure you give it a try and let Blizzard know what you think about it.