The Queue: Oh what a glorious Wednesday!

Welcome to this post-patch Wednesday. Is it not glorious? A fresh beautiful day with new content before us…

… and LUA errors… and missing addons… and missing talents, missing transmog, crashes, extra downtime, and…

Okay, maybe it’s just an average Monday morning that moved to a Wednesday. But we have to make the best of what we have.

This is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where we answer your questions and everyone wonders why we’re having a random Wednesday afternoon maintenance. Let’s chat.

Now is a great time to re-evaluate addons, simply because you have to re-evaluate a lot of your addons because many of them have stopped working. I usually re-evaluate at the start of an expansion, when we get the biggest UI changes, and when Blizzard initially rolled out Edit Mode I actually scaled back to almost nothing for a while… but kept finding small things I didn’t like and couldn’t change, so I wound up back with addons to customize and rearrange the UI in ways the Edit Mode couldn’t.

I actually think I’ll probably come out of this with more addons than I was using before, and that’s in large part because of WeakAuras. There was a lot of things I did with WeakAuras. It did cooldown notifications, of course, which is mostly replaced by Blizzard’s built-in cooldown manager, but I’m probably going to load up an addon to customize how it looks. One of WeakAura’s greatest strengths was that you could make anything look like you wanted it, and show up anywhere. I had major cooldowns in a row below my character, with different cooldowns displayed in and out of combat. I had buff countdowns on the right-hand side of my character, saying this is how defensives or abilities would last. The whole thing I had designed around me, around the things I needed to know and remember, to display when I needed to know and remember them. The Cooldown Manager is a lot easier to set up, but not nearly as customizable.

It also doesn’t track everything, and I’m not sure what I’ll do for things it doesn’t follow, like trinket cooldowns. There has to be something, though. I also used WeakAuras to track class resources in a clearer and more straightforward way than the built-in UI. My Paladin had WeakAuras that specifically glowed when I had enough Holy Power to cast things. I’m trying something called Sensei Class Resource Bar right now, though I don’t know if it will do the job as well as my WeakAuras, or if it can do the things I want it to do. But it is a crisp, clean resource display.

And one of my most important WeakAuras was a simple arrow that pointed to my character on the screen, so I could find myself in the chaos of a fight. I know, you’re always in the middle of your own screen, but I find it easy to lose sight of exactly where I’m positioned, and while Blizzard has built-in things that can also make your character more visible, they too can get hidden in cluttered spell effects and character models. I don’t have anything to replace that yet, but I’m looking.

But I think I’ll probably wind up with three or four addons just to do cover some of what I did with WeakAuras.

Some addons I can do without and may not bother to replace. But there were no WeakAuras that I had just for the heck of it. I didn’t use a pack I downloaded, which never had quite the right information that mattered to me: I built and customized them myself, based on what I needed to see. And because it took a fair amount of time to set up, customize, and perfect everything so it worked the way I wanted it to, I didn’t just set up WeakAuras casually. I had them because they provided information I really needed to see that I couldn’t easily get in any other way. I wouldn’t have taken all the effort it took to make them otherwise.

The built-in Cooldown manager is quite decent. And I am glad to be able to set up cooldown tracking with so little hassle. But can’t track everything, and it can’t track everything in the way I’d like it to… so, more addons it is.

As for the rest, I probably will pare down things I don’t need, but for many addons I’m finding one-to-one replacement, either as the originals are reworked and updated, or as new addons appear. We’ll see where things shake out in a week or two.

In earlier days I didn’t use combat addons, but I’ve long been spoiled by the joy of having helpful alerts in places the Blizzard UI is unclear. This was the whole point of GTFO, which simply existed to play an alarm if you were standing in something dangerous. The dangerous things you might be standing in can get lost in spell effects and mob clutter. Blizzard loves making dangerous things that are the same color as the floor or as player abilities, so you can’t easily tell — they’ve gotten better about the visual language of the game, but it’s still not perfect. Things can be hard to see, and harder still if you have any kind of visual impairment, from colorblindness to reduced sight. (Colorblind modes can help with some of these visibility problems, whether you’re colorblind or not.)

There are addons that went pretty far to help you play and coordinate a team, and I think Blizzard intentionally meant to get rid of them, like addons or WeakAuras that simply assigned players positioning for mechanics, requiring no teamwork or coordination, simply relying on the addon to say where to go or what to do. But there were a lot of addons that simply helped average gamers who had trouble seeing things in Blizzard’s convoluted visual language successfully play dungeons and delves and raids.

I think GTFO developer Zensunim said it very well:

I always thought Blizzard would kill GTFO eventually by making it redundant, by being better at communicating avoidable damage to players. The swirls on the ground are easier to see and they added full-screen effects for *some* of the bad stuff on the ground, but they haven’t gone far enough, especially when they continue to design dangerous spell effects that match the color and design of your own team’s class spells (or the floor), hide AOE damage areas under staircases, or have tiny mobs whirlwind and clipping into bigger mobs.

At Blizzcon, the Blizzard staff told me half their company uses my addon. J. Allen Brack told me himself his dad used it. I met a couple who thanked me for saving their marriage because the hunter husband couldn’t stay out of bad to his healer wife’s frustration.

I know my addon wasn’t used by top-tier players, but it did help normal, every day, average players that needed just a little bit of help in the form of an audio cue, warning them that they were taking avoidable damage, and I’m sorry this will affect them the most.

The base UI really is good enough for a lot of things. But it could be better at a lot of things, too. And it’s the average player that will suffer most from losing addons like this, while top-tier players will find new technical solutions.

Blizzard has been sending me a lot of marketing emails about what’s in the merch store lately. Lich King tees. Illidan fleece jackets. Tiny replicas of the Butcher’s blade from Diablo. The latest email is a Cute But Deadly wearable blanket festooned with chibi Warcraft characters, which does sort of fit the bill on cute-cuddly-cozy, but I feel like Blizzard has missed the ball here. We get murloc plushies in game and out, as well as tons of villain merch. But Old God merch just doesn’t exist, much less Old God plushies. It’s a missed opportunity.

I think you can preface a lot of classes with “void” and it stops making sense. What’s a void paladin, without the light? A void shaman, without the elements?

… wait, actually those both do sound pretty awesome. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe every class needs a void spec, though at some point they’re all going to start feeling the same. Oh no, this class turned to the void! Oh no, that class turned to the void! Oh no…

Maybe the void offers great benefits. Has anyone asked?

I suspect that focusing on one set of quests for (mostly) everyone lets Blizzard make more content, and more varied content for everyone. Looking back at Legion, and its detailed little storylines for every single class in the game and it’s wild to see how much work that expansion spent on telling stories a lot of players would never see. Battle For Azeroth was the same in its own, faction-centric way. The game spent so much time telling detailed stories for each faction that half of the players would never see… and in that case, it actually made the overall storyline make less sense. Why did the Alliance raid Uldir? Well, because it was there, I guess, but the Horde had a huge chain of quests about chasing the blood trolls and the traitorous Zul into the raid. The Alliance just showed up because it was raid opening day and the raid had absolutely zero narrative context, while it’s a core part of the Horde story.

There’s so much that got lost between the factions, so many stories untold. And when the Alliance invaded Dazar’alor to politely ask King Rastakhan not to join the Horde, he’d just been betrayed by a close advisor (Zul) who had turned to the Old Gods and tried to overthrow him. Horde players had gone through a whole zone and raid to root out the corruption and stop the blood trolls. And then the Alliance shows up and politely asks Rastakhan not to join the Horde.

There’s a world of misunderstanding here. From the Horde side, the Alliance are invaders, a second wave attack on the city after Zul tried and failed to overthrow it. From the Alliance side… well, it’s an odd move to invade a city and politely ask them not to join your enemies and then kill their king when he doesn’t take nicely to his city being invaded (for the second time this week). There could have been an interesting story in that misunderstanding, too, where the Alliance learned about the Zul and the blood trolls somewhere along the way, and maybe even came to some understanding about what was going on, but Blizzard didn’t even try to tell that story. They didn’t run with the Zandalari seeing the Alliance as allied with the blood trolls or Old Gods, and they didn’t run with the Alliance finding out about Zul’s revolt (which could have also been a reason for them to go to Uldir, perhaps thinking to curry favor with the Zandalari, whom they don’t want to join the Horde). But Blizzard didn’t do any of that, and the result was lopsided storytelling that didn’t always work. Some of the individual stories in the expansion were great, and they were full of great character moments, but they didn’t always fit together into a coherent narrative, and some storytelling opportunities were missed in trying to maintain faction-specific stories where the factions were in conflict, rather than telling stories about how we came together to fight the larger threat.

So I don’t see having a more singular narrative as necessarily a bad thing, and I think faction flavor can be added in other ways, in small moments of dialog or side quests, as we go into Midnight. And by the time we get to Northrend in The Last Titan, perhaps we’ll return to some of those faction-specific cities we started in… after all, Dalaran is gone as a hub.

That’s all for today, my friends. Thanks for being here, and I’ll see you in the comments section.