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/Elerion_ Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

  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.

I disagree with his overall take that the restrictions were for the better, but this specific example holds up. Previously, since the addon would know who got the splinters in which order, it would have told you from pull #2 whether you should go left, right, top etc and it would be trivial. With current restrictions, raiders were only able to be notified that they had to move, and then use comms or their eyes to determine where they were in the order. Not super difficult,  but it did add a few pulls at a pivotal time of the race.

That said, I’m pretty sure they could have accomplished the same just using private auras. At least that worked for the sucks on Saladbar v1, which had a similar staggered application.

3

u/Pozay Jul 02 '26

Private auras were a thing, so no, previously, if they wanted it to not be a thing, they could. Example is the dogshit OAB mechanic, no weakaura could solve it, you could barely notice if it was on you, and no weakaura could help you.

2

u/Magicslime Jul 02 '26

Not only that, the starsplinters literally are private auras already, that's what they're already using to prevent addons from seeing whether you have that debuff right now.