ohnoezitsjoez: I wish this discourse would stop being led with "all addons" even in instanced content. Its a "baby with the bathwater" argument. The vast vast vast majority of addons, even in instances, are no problem whatsoever. Instead, they should take a nuanced approach, use a scalpel and not a chainsaw, and address the problematic types of addons (which I understand to be encounter/boss based addons and weakauras). Also zoning into an instance and your entire UI changes sounds INSANE.

bojnebojnebojne: The importance of the UI and the ability personalize that experience is so much much higher than people think it is.

If a game has a UI that i don't vibe with, if doesn't immediately put me off the game, over time it will, because it would start to bug me and i will get more and more resentful towards the game because of it.

And this is a psychological phenomenon that is prevalent in all humans.

For this reason Blizzard would either need to go super in depth on every single possible thing you could customize on a UI, or they need to outsource the ability to do that to addon creators / developers and allow addons to exist.

Which is what they are currently doing.

dark9nine: No. I love addons. Is funny that people that abuse these addons for everything are the ones crying about them existing in the game.

ammertos1517: getting rid of addons would be the final nail in the coffin for me. Catering for non-existent new players makes no sense

dirkgoodman4282: Be careful what you wish for. We asked for no more affixes, and now we have one of the hardest seasons I've ever played.

driiifter: Go ahead and try and play Rogue without weak auras. You only have to track Rupture, Garrote, your Deathstalker mark, the first set of coins you flipped (have fun tracking the coins without an addon), make sure you get Slice and Dice up, track your CDs, the duration of Kingsbane, the duration of Shiv, the little Fan of Knives proc, you have to see if your bleeds are on name plates, need to track Crimson Tempest. Gotta watch combo points, your energy, your health. You actually run out of energy on Rogue and have to use Thistle Tea. You're actually squishy in the raid so you need to be watching Feint. Both hero trees revolve around everything being 5 combo points, so you have to spend at least 5 at all times. Good luck tracking all that with the default UI.

ibMoose2u: I’ve been playing since week 1 Vanilla. Love addons!

kamio932: world of weak auras, the weak aura within

prophet1746: i think the biggest part of this argument that people dont get is theres a huge development cost to "improving the base ui". Dragonflight launched with the edit mode function, which was basically just dominos and moveable ui elements, and that was billed as an expansion feature. Nameplates, buff/debuff tracking, etc would all be individually on the same level as that edit mode functionality in terms of development cost, and while it would be nice to get them in the game, its not really feasible for them to just kill all addons and within 6 months have them all replaced in game while theyre also actively developing content.

danielharvey3662: The core UI and encounter designs are so comically bad that the game isn’t playable competitively without add-ons

kevinjs26: I would definitely play wow more often if add-ons were not a thing.

godsfav7551: so many addon cope, this is why the game will continue to suck ass to any new player.

treyzure: Any game that requires you to download third party software just to play is a failure IMO. It’s 2025, why do we still need to download an addon to see damage meters?

rick5787: People make addons that make this game way better, way more enjoyable. There is no way Blizzard is just going to stop all of that to pay people to do what is already being done for FREE.

linaori: They can't make it impossible to get kick information. They also can't make it impossible to attach cooldowns to nameplates unless they make enemy nameplates function like friendly, this means that no addon can touch nameplates. If they do this I quit. There's no ffin way I can play wow without all the custom coloring and effects to distinguish between different mobs and casts.

mr.h.9103: I am curios how you put addons back in the bag at this point? The default wow UI is quite bad and that is probably too kind of a description. I just do not see how you put the genie back in the bottle? I agree with your take. I like addons, but yes it can get a bit out of control.

Recreantsmile: i just wanna use elvui without being reduced to 50fps during mythic raid fights

VkaraujoHusk: "Remove addons" is, by far, the most stupid take this community has been able to come up with.

riddert4966: Tanking m with 0 addons would be horrendous. The game needs to improve a lot then

danielharvey3662: There is zero commercial benefit for Blizzard to try and compete with add-on makers and get the core UI to even be baseline to what the most common add-ons support. Spending a year or more of dev time and have nothing to show for it for most players is bonkers.

GBobtehPwnzor: "Say they pushed the game live and then everything was broken"

gestures to every major patch in the last year and a half

Kevmoeman: I only use addons to make it easier to see my own buffs/debuffs since those bars have become unreadable in recent expansions. I would be totally fine with them not allowing addons to track actions of enemies and just make the telegraphs more obvious

Theparadoxd7: Yeah don't care for these changes just simply want fps to not be as shit as it is in raids.

richardburke9: addons need to be reigned back in. specifically weak auras.

synchrogods: Well, i´d be on board. For context: Raiding on Worldrank 1000ish, so CE in 3/3 of a patch mostly. And if i think about WA problems on Neltharion for example - 2 evenings busted for WA alone. Blizz needs to adress this shit in the future. And even more private Auras that introduce just more different WAs are not a solution. This change would elimniate that. But seeing how Blizz works these days, nothing would funktion probably and be bugged until forever

blackestmamba: A huge part of the reason why I love wow is because I can customize the UI to fit my liking, i love to spend time creating and changing it to do whatever I want, if that is taken away from me I would never play wow again, and honestly, for that very reason, I believe anyone that dislikes addons is either extremely lazy, incompetent or just very new to the game.

I understand that some fights go overboard and shouldn't require addons to down the boss in the first place, however.

With that being said, If people want a version of wow that doesn't "require" addons to be played, Era servers are right there available for everyone, they can even disable all addons in retail if they want to, they can also just not play WoW at all.

madtrade: NO ! i freaking love my addons

there is sooo much shit that would sucks a TON without addon

the exchange would be a nightmare , a crafting addon like craftsim is goated

there is addon for achievement / tracking quest that are 10x better than the default UI

the ability to color nameplate in a dungeon , i also have weakauras to help me track many buff / proc by playing custom sound

Jan 07 2025

Buy WOW Classic Gold (lvl60)