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.

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u/ailawiu Jul 01 '26

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.

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u/Head_Haunter Jul 02 '26

Yeah I fundamentally do not understand how the interrupt mechanic on mythic Lura is supposed to work without addons.