WoW's combat UI mods break with this week's pre-patch, marking an enormous change for the 20-year-old MMO

World of Warcraft's changing in a big way—announced a while back, Blizzard's decided that you shouldn't have to download a huge list of UI mods (addons) just to play at a competitive level with others, and will kneecap the ones related to combat in this week's patch. Depending on when you're reading this, it might've done it already, given the patch launches on January 20.

Alright, "kneecap" is harsh. Blizzard's made an effort through rounds of beta testing, and continual conversations with addon developers, to try and thread the needle between functionality and form. Basically, the developer doesn't want addons to be required—but anything that's cosmetic can stay.

This means obvious things, like roleplay, map, and bag addons are all fine; It also means there's wiggle room in the combat addon sphere for presentation, which is nice for customisability, but it also means that certain accessibility features made by addon creators over the years can be maintained. Or so, Blizzard hopes.

This also involves a lot of class redesign. Take my Outlaw Rogue's "Roll the Bones" ability, for example: Outlaw Rogues are an incredibly fast-paced class, but Roll the Bones saw you managing a set of different buffs that you had to memorize. Each did something entirely different, and had its own priority that determined whether you rerolled your buffs or not.

It wasn't even a case of "more buffs is better", either. Some of these boosts were more valuable than others.

I don't know what my Roll the Bones buffs even did, because actually making use of it is an "if > then" scenario, a decision a computer can solve pretty much immediately. I downloaded a WeakAura (a kind of addon) that made an ugly noise and flashed a big, blaring UI element when I needed to hit the button and literally never looked back.

With the pre-patch, Roll the Bones is completely changed: Instead of a random grab-bag of buffs, you simply get one buff to look out for that scales from one to four bonuses. Every bonus includes the prior buff's perks, so now all you have to do is go: "Did I roll low? Okay, I'm hitting the button again". No addon required. I can't say I'll miss it.

On the other hand, I mourn custom WeakAura to keep track of my Fatebound coinflips. Being able to handcraft entire UI elements to help keep track of your classes' resources was rad as hell, even if it was time-consuming. I will miss my little pirate flag that popped out of my health bar whenever I got my lucky coin.

Still, Blizzard's also made efforts to cover a lot of the functionality that some of these addons tackled—an improved cooldown manager, updated nameplates, home-grown DPS meter, and more are all part of this update, which you can read about via the patch notes on the game's site.

I do not envy the task Blizzard's got ahead of it, even if it's clearly done a ton of work to get the game's combat mostly addon-free. What we're going to see is a constant series of negotiations between what the community wants and the studio's own capabilities. We've seen some of that already, with certain spells whitelisted for use with addons—either in preparations for changes Blizzard's not yet made, or for concession's sake.

Still, I've come around on the idea from my initial scepticism. I think this marks the start of a healthier WoW, even if our skin's gonna sting for a bit where the band-aid was ripped off.