[WoW] The Macro Lockdown in Burning Crusade

[Athryn]

There's an interesting change coming to WoW with the burning crusade expansion.

Hi there, this notification is meant to inform you of some significant changes regarding the way we're handling UI addons. Over the last few years, we've seen a number of awesome, gameplay-enhancing UI mods along with a fair number of UI mods that run counter to our philosophies regarding what addons should and shouldn't be able to do.

Essentially, we don't want UI mods to make combat-sensitive decisions for players and as such, we've made some changes that block functionality that we feel is counter to the spirit of these philosophies. As such, AddOns and macros can't make decisions on who to target or what spells to cast.

That being said, our programmers have implemented a host of new functionality in order to allow many popular and benign UI mods to continue to function (once those mods are updated to take advantage of the new functionality), and will be providing some follow-up information on these forums as to how to take advantage of the new functionality.

That's the official mumbo jumbo. A copy of the original leak is here.

Basically, you will no longer be able to UseAction() or CastSpell*() of any kind in Lua.

In order to enable bar mods to still work, they will be creating a new kind of ActionButton frame. This frame will be associable with a "hard coded" action/unit (for instance, cast the spell Flash Heal(Rank 4)) -- but NOT a Lua script.

While OUT OF COMBAT, you will be able to change what the ActionButton frames do. Once you go INTO COMBAT, the frames will be locked. (This will prevent you from making an ActionButton that represents a unit, and dynamically updates itself in combat with a different spell)

What's even more interesting is that these new ActionButton frames will be *physically* locked while in combat, which means you can't move them around the screen with SetPoint(). This seems deliberately targeted at RDX and other mods that let you choose units from a sort (eg CTRA Emergency Monitor) -- dynamic unit lists will no longer be clickable for spellcasting.

This is a huge change, especially for healing classes, also noteably with any class that cleanses, as this will essentially disable mods like decursive. As someone who primarily plays healing classes nowadays, I dunno what to think about it. I like being able to click on my party windows to be able to heal people, rather than pressing 4, and then trying to find the person in the sea of bodies. There's a lot of addons (lazyscript, for example) that do go too far though.

It hasn't quite set in with the community, mainly because the addon forums are often cryptic and hard to understand. But I can forsee a lot of unhappy players possibly come Burning Crusade.

[Nathan Phoenix]

I think it sounds like a great move. One of the reasons I avoid WoW is that I think they have let these UI mods do way too much of the player's job. I always thought it was lame that you could effectively put scripts into place to play half the game for you.

[Kareem]

Decursive is not playing the game for you, it's merely solving a retarded design problem where a decursing class has to click on the portraits of a dozen raid members at lightning speed to remove curses, diseases, etc. If you've done any of the WoW high level encounters like Chromaggus or some encounters in Naxxramas it really seems insanely difficult to be able to keep up decursing at a timely pace.

I know people will adapt and maybe things will be better with just 25 people in raids but as it is now some dungeon encounters are just insane in the amount of decursing that is needed and something like decursive really helps dispelling classes getting around some very stupid situations.

[CustodianV131]

Its tricky business. What's not to bad and what goes to far. But I admit that, without decursive active, I would decurse about 90% less. If they want to make PvP combat longer... this is not the way.

Also on healing... I'm a PvP healer and its tricky ennough as it is already, to try and heal people. Using Quickheal now, if they go back to manually targetting and pressing the heal key, then I'll heal a lot less people.

I know I can use say CTRaid or what's is it called (use that also but don't recall the name :D) But I'm just not going to stare at healthbars all the time. I want to see and enjoy the action on screen. I'll simply switch from healing to DPS then.

I'm not to bothered. Not getting rewards from healing anyway, so its not me they are hurting.

Will be a shame for all the people thanking me for heals though.

[PeterGinsberg]

I think it's a great change.

I play a 60 priest, and the sad fact is you can "play" a pretty good healer by installing a few mods and repeatedly pressing one button. Right now, there are mods that will do this:
-Find the most wounded person in the raid, target them.
-Judge how much health they have, take into consideration your +healing gear, and then autoselect the most efficient rank heal to cast.
-Toss up a warning if they go to full while you are channelling.
There are even one's that can coordinate this action between several healers to prevent overlap. That, decursive, and your movement keys and you're pretty much set. It sucks.

I know I can use say CTRaid or what's is it called (use that also but don't recall the name :D) But I'm just not going to stare at healthbars all the time. I want to see and enjoy the action on screen. I'll simply switch from healing to DPS then.

PvP? Macros suck now healing in PvP anyway, since it's all situational awareness. Don't use CT Raid, use the friendly name plates to see who is wounded nearby. In battlegrounds, I usually pick one or two people to keep up during a fight, and try to keep myself relatively hidden. It's amazing how long people will keep beating on a warrior whose health keeps going back up.

[Balasarius]

The health bars over a player's head only extend out about 15 yards or so, far too short. They're also very difficult to click on when the players are all moving about.

I'm not sure what I think about this change to the macro system. The only automated tool I use is decursive, because manually decursing is a pain in the ass.

[DeepT]

Ok so these 'dynamic' frames will not be click able. So those giant raid panels of people's health will be informational only? You can't click on them to target them?

The removal of decursive? Yeah....

I hope blizzard is going to re-do most of their end boss scripted fights. The reason all these mods exist is because of their stupid bullshit encounters.

Hey, lets make a boss that puts curse on the enter raid every 20 seconds that will do 2k of damage. WTF do they expect to happen?

Thier defualt us is totally insufficent to deal with keeping 40 people alive when there is all this "wandering" damage going around.

[PeterGinsberg]

Ok so these 'dynamic' frames will not be click able. So those giant raid panels of people's health will be informational only? You can't click on them to target them?.

No no, Emergency Monitor style mods will not be clickable. "dynamic unit lists will no longer be clickable for spellcasting".

You could still use a CT Raid (or Blizzard Raid Frames) and click heal, you just can't have a mod that puts the most injured people on top dynamically, and then you click to heal them.

[HRose]

The health bars over a player's head only extend out about 15 yards or so, far too short. They're also very difficult to click on when the players are all moving about.

Why would you do that?

You still have the health bars for everyone on the UI. After all that's what is the "healer game".

Watching colored bars moving up and down.

[RichardC]

That's not a fantasy game, it's the bridge of the starship Enterprise...

[HRose]

That's not a fantasy game, it's the bridge of the starship Enterprise...

You summarized perfectly what's wrong in current fantasy mmorpgs :)

[NI]

Decursive is not playing the game for you, it's merely solving a retarded design problem where a decursing class has to click on the portraits of a dozen raid members at lightning speed to remove curses, diseases, etc.

I really agree with this. In most encounters, decursive doesn't make any interesting choices on behalf of the player, it just removes tedium.
In encounters where you have interesting choices wrt. decursing (for example Huhuran in AQ40 where my raidgroup's strategy involves only removing poison from tanks without aggro), you can't use decursive anyway.

I really hope Blizzard keeps this in mind when designing BC encounters.

[Gordon Cameron]

Maybe eventually playing a healer will look so much like a spreadsheet that you don't even need to alt-tab out when the boss comes walking by...

[Balasarius]

Why would you do that?

You still have the health bars for everyone on the UI. After all that's what is the "healer game".

Watching colored bars moving up and down.

I was responding to malphigian's comment about healing in PvP. You can't use CTraid for that, since 3/4s of raid will be out of range. You need to watch the little bars over people's heads, but they only go out 15 yards or so, when your heal range is 30 yards.

[Misguided]

Hmmm...I'm guessing that means Ralak's Needy List won't work either. Ugh. Targeting people is so difficult in the darned game, it was nice to be able to click on the icon by their name to heal them. It doesn't choose the spell or who to heal, but does alert you when someone has low health/is poisoned etc. then you click the icon to cast the spell you want.

[mouselock]

The fundamental problem is that Blizzard tried to make healing "more active" than the previous EQ model by requiring lots of small consecutive casts to be efficient. They then designed a system which had holes in it. (Deranking heals with +healing, decursive, etc..) Rather than fixing the design problems, they figure just plugging the "holes" is sufficient.

At some point I really hope that MMO makers will realize that when players take their game in a totally unexpected (and undesirable) direction, it points to a fundamental problem in the design of the game systems and, therefore, if you're going to make large scale changes, you need to change the underlying system.

In this case, that's changing the stupid curse spam fights in MC/BWL/AQ/Naxx. Dollars to donuts they don't change these because these zones aren't their 25 man zones. Further, I predict some equally stupidly retarded mechanism will show up in the 25 man raid zones in the expansion.

[CustodianV131]

Why would you do that?

You still have the health bars for everyone on the UI. After all that's what is the "healer game".

Watching colored bars moving up and down.

LOL Great screenshot!

Illustrates exactly what I mean. I did that as a druid in DAOC for a while. That healer game is certainly not my game. Luckily the WoW druid has more options available to him.

I even turned off the nameplates long ago. Don’t want all those silly name dancing through my screen. If others enjoy that, fine. Not me though. Although I've to admit that "pick the most wounded" manually using nameplates in a 20 vs 20 PvP battle is indeed a exciting game in itself :)

Still as said I don’t mind the changes. Hey, I’ll even do better if mages, hunters, warlocks, warriors ect have to work harder for their kills. I’ll have more mana for DPS now.

There are certainly upsides to those changes and there will be healers that keep healing only they’ll be harder to find then already is the case.

Think goldfarmers will soon setup paid healer services :D

[Lorini]

Any chance there will be a change to how decursing works? Maybe Blizz will make decursing easier? Otherwise, I agree, I don't see value in what essentially becomes a "fielder's choice" type of situation. Meaning that as a Mage I am now forced to manually decurse everybody and then watch them die because I wasn't providing the necessary DPS to keep them alive in order to keep them decursed. I mean, how is that fun or even challenging?

How final is this, do you think? It doesn't seem well thought out to me.

Lorini

P.S. New thought--what if they take decursing away from Mages? Then this change would make more sense.

[mouselock]

P.S. New thought--what if they take decursing away from Mages? Then this change would make more sense.

God please, no. I don't want to have to decurse even more while still trying to heal.

(Really, if you think decursing is annoying as a mage, try to consider a healer's viewpoint. As a druid I potentially have to worry about: Decursing, depoisoning, and healing.)

The problem is that if you're not a tank for your fight, the vast majority of UI manipulation gameplay falls upon the healers. There is a bit of a discrepancy for mages who have to decurse on occasion, but generally it comes down to this:

If you're a DPS or a tank (on a single monster) you have to focus on one target and choose from all your abilities.

If you're a healer you have to focus on between 5 and 40 targets and choose from all your abilities.

[Charles]

The other problem with decursing is that doing so outside of your party is difficult as hell. I've never had a problem with decursing within my 5-man group because I can simply cycle through the F-keys and hit my decurse. Easy. I've found that decursive can actually make that process *more* complicated.

But jesus christ it's a life saver to be able to put a few high priority targets at the top of the decursive list and just hammer the button or click in the window. IMO, I'd be fine with picking a cursed target from a window and then hitting the decurse key. Would feel more natural to me anyway.

So with that in mind I don't think this is really going to ruin anything.

[mouselock]

IMO, I'd be fine with picking a cursed target from a window and then hitting the decurse key. Would feel more natural to me anyway.

So with that in mind I don't think this is really going to ruin anything.

Your "window" will have to contain all the people you could possible want to decurse. It will no longer be possible to build dynamic windows which select out a subset of people (say, only those who are cursed) with the UI changes.

So basically you're looking at manually decursing by hunt-n-peck amongst the CTRaid or innate Blizzard raid UI.

Every thread I've seen pop up on this subject elsewhere devolve into "It won't ruin the game" and "It's still possible to decurse manually and win fights".

Yep, it sure is. But it's more tedious because there's no interesting gameplay mechanism involved I heal manually because I like having control over which heal goes where, and how I prioritize targets. (I often don't want to try casting a 2s heal on a mage if they have aggro.. they're either going to live because they drop aggro on their own in which case I have time to hit them with a heal later, or they're not. Often there are better priority targets, but it depends on the fight.) Unfortunately, decursing or depoisoning is nothing like this. If there's a curse on someone, at best it's a binary decision: Do I remove it or not. I know whether or not I care before the fight even begins. (I never remove the curse that ancient core hounds drop because once it hits it has already done the damage of reducing mana pool by 50%.)

The underlying problem is that (aside from warlocks) cursing is a stupid, mindless, binary affliction. If it's on you either want it off or you don't. There's not really a middle ground. In the few cases where there are, unsurprisingly, decursive becomes a useless tool.

The underlying problem is game design, not people "hacking" the UI.

[Supertanker]

One of the questions and answers so far has been this:

Q: "Are there raid encounter design changes being made to go along with these changes to what can be done with the UI?"

A: "Sort of off topic, but yes, the designers no longer have to account for decursive-style addons in their dungeon design, which was one of the biggest driving factors for these changes."

What this doesn't say is they will make any retroactive changes to existing dungeons/raid encounters.

[BobM]

If you can easily program a robot to play your game, eliminating the robot is not the correct answer.

[Linoleum]

Dammit, the only thing worse than having to use Decursive is going to be not being able to use Decursive.

[Stroker Ace]

Maybe they're phasing out PvE raids altogether! I have a dream that one day these gamers will rise up and PvP in bright arenas instead of languishing in musty dungeons...

[Gordon Cameron]

What if you don't particularly like raiding or PvP?

Back to single player CRPGs I suppose. When they come out. Well, there's always Jeff Vogel...

[Stroker Ace]

What if you don't particularly like raiding or PvP?

Back to single player CRPGs I suppose. When they come out. Well, there's always Jeff Vogel...

What sort of things do you like? Repeatable PvP and farmable raids are the only indefinitely sustainable sources of WoW entertainment I've seen. Do you want randomly generated quests a la SWG?

[dannimal]

If you can easily program a robot to play your game, eliminating the robot is not the correct answer.

I suppose then Blizzard's stance from the start should have been a tightly locked down UI. Instead, they did a good thing and made the UI very mod-able. The implicit understanding was that "Don't write robots to play the game". People have done just that, so they're saying "We told you not to do that, and you did it. So now we're stopping you from doing that."

That's independant of the debate as to whether or not the content for which the robots were used are poorly designed such that the robots are required or not.

[Stroker Ace]

I don't think there's much debate on that point - the raid instances seem to be balanced against the performance of the top guilds, and they're all using these mods. You don't see anyone beating one of these instances on release day.

[dannimal]

That doesn't mean that the instances would be unbeatable without them. There's a point where you can't act fast enough without certain mods to do all the stuff needed to beat an instance.

If the instances are beatable (just "harder") without the mods, that's one thing. If you flat out can't do it without them, it's another.