![]() When it comes time to actually implement their ideas, though, they have to be more wary about how players might use mods to navigate, or sometimes even entirely circumvent, a challenge. In fact, their internal raid team uses the stock interface when testing new bosses. WeakAuras is so ubiquitous that it has been downloaded nearly 69 million times since 2013 from just one of the several websites that hosts it.ĭespite the proliferation of flexible and powerful addons like WeakAuras, Day says that Blizzard still does not design fights with the use of addons in mind. Pay enough attention to races like this one, and you'll see just how common WeakAuras 2 is, and just how much tinkering guilds will do between each attempt to kill a boss. "Once upon a time you had to tell a person you made a custom mod for this one boss, and you had to alt-tab and go to this one website," Day laughs.Ĭomplexity Limit recently became the first guild in the world to defeat Battle for Azeroth's final boss, the Old God N'zoth, in his Lovecraftian home of Ny'alotha. It is not only powerful, but it can be modified in-game, and it allows those modifications to be shared on the fly. This highly customizable mod displays a variety of alerts, countdown timers, and debuff warnings that can all be tuned to fit any battle or specific player need. He points to the ever-evolving and versatile WeakAuras 2 as an example. "It's been more of an evolution recently as the mod makers have gotten much more familiar with the toolset and are just getting more experienced with it," Day says. He's seen Warcraft's raid bosses became more elaborate and demanding, and how the sophistication of the addons raiders used to beat them kept perfect pace. Late in The Burning Crusade, Day became an encounter designer, and eventually became lead encounter designer throughout Legion. Blizzard later patched the game to neuter this mod's ability to streamline cleansing, forcing healers to be more alert and aware of who was afflicted with what debuff. Instead of having to manually select each cursed player, Decursive gave them a single button to spam that would automatically target and cleanse afflicted players. An addon called Decursive trivialized this daunting task. (Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment)Ĭhromaggus would draw on the themes of the game's color-coded dragons to afflict raiders with poisons, diseases, curses, and magical ailments that healers would have to quickly and frequently cleanse. ![]() Around that time, players were already finding ways to use the game's mod support to navigate challenges like Blackwing Lair's seventh boss Chromaggus, a two-headed demon pup.Ĭhromaggus was one nasty boss. When Blackwing Lair first released in 2005, he seized an opportunity to join Blizzard as a raid quality assurance tester. To compensate, raiders have become accustomed to addons plastering their screens with an ugly explosion of bars, notes, alerts, and radars to help them survive and navigate complex multi-phase fights.ĭay was a dedicated raider back when WoW was in its infancy. Back then the challenge was more akin to herding cats-assembling a team of 40 warm bodies who could all agree on a time to raid together.īy comparison, the strategy guide for any given raid boss in the current expansion could fill a small pamphlet. In WoW's very first raid, Molten Core, the denizens of Blackrock Mountain were mechanically simple and required much less situational awareness and coordination to take down. In the 15 years since its release, Warcraft's villains have not only grown from terrestrial threats to cosmic gods, they've become more demanding challenges too. For Day, this addon was just another chapter in a long history of Warcraft's most competitive players finding ingenious workarounds to cruel boss battles. "That's functionality that in a raid we feel kind of crossed the line, and we made changes to the rules of World of Warcraft so that an addon like that wasn’t possible ," Day explains. It enabled modders to ascertain the distance between players, making that custom minimap possible. Blizzard quickly found the culprit, a humble facet of code that addon makers could use: an called API UnitPosition. ![]()
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