WoW Midnight combat addons disabled: What you need to know
Midnight expansion removes combat addons like DBM in end-game, with addon restrictions possibly arriving as early as the Midnight Pre-Patch.
Table of Contents
Key takeaways
- Blizzard is disabling combat addons like DBM in Midnight raids and dungeons.
- The changes may arrive as early as the Midnight Pre-Patch.
- Built-in UI tools will replace boss mods and combat trackers.
- Other addons like quest helpers, damage meters, and RP mods remain untouched, but Blizzard is also creating its own alternatives to these tools.
- Encounter design (Manaforge Omega raid included) will be adjusted to stay challenging without addon assistance.
Its official! Midnight expansion is bringing one of the most controversial changes in WoW’s history: the removal of combat addons in raids and Mythic+ dungeons. Popular tools like DBM, long considered essential for high-end content, will no longer function as they once did.
Blizzard’s goal is to reduce reliance on third-party tools, make encounters more self-contained, and put the focus back on player coordination. But while the plan sounds straightforward, many players are unsure whether Blizzard’s built-in solutions will truly match the reliability of the addons they’ve depended on for years.
WoW combat addons problem
For years, combat addons like DBM and others have held a near-ubiquitous role in the World of Warcraft endgame experience. They help players by parsing real-time combat events, tracking cooldowns and debuffs, and issuing visual or auditory alerts during fights. But the strength of these tools has also become a liability: WoW designers are forced into an arms race where encounters must grow in complexity just to counter addon assistance.
This arms race ends up punishing regular players who don’t use addons. Setting them up can be complicated and time-consuming, so many avoid them. The result is that encounters feel overwhelming without tools like DBM, to the point where even Heroic raids, let alone Mythic, almost expect you to have addons running. What was meant to be a challenging but fair experience instead becomes dependent on third-party software.
Another issue is that addons are not Blizzard’s own product, which makes them very difficult to control. While the company can step in and ban specific problematic addons, that only addresses symptoms, not the root of the problem. A long-term solution means making the game self-sufficient, so players can fully experience its content without needing to install and maintain outside software.
Midnight combat addons ban
Blizzard’s response to the addon issue is to ban combat related addons in Midnight. This step stems from a desire to reassert control over encounter design and balance. In their recent statements, Game Director Ion Hazzikostas and UX designer Crash Reed confirm that any addon that reads real-time combat events (cooldowns, buffs, debuffs, etc.) will be cut off. They argue this allows Blizzard to design content without needing to compensate for addon assistance.
By placing a “black box” around combat data, the game can preserve aesthetic customization while preventing addons from being fed the same level of information that could automate or shortcut decision-making mid-combat. The change is controversial, but it’s a deliberate attempt to shift more agency back onto the player and away from the addon ecosystem.
Players won’t be left completely defenseless in the upcoming Midnight raids and Mythic+ dungeons. Blizzard plans to roll out its own built-in interface tools to provide combat assistance in the way the developers intend. On paper, this sounds like a fair solution, but in practice, Blizzard doesn’t always deliver smooth implementations.
Features such as Assisted Highlight mode have shown that new systems can be clunky or less useful than expected. That’s why many players anticipate that the replacement for boss fight assistance in Midnight may feel underwhelming, as well as improved nameplates, damage meter, and other integrated WoW interface elements Blizzard hopes will take the place of addons.
Future encounter design and MFO
Heroic and Mythic content will remain challenging, with bosses still demanding multiple attempts to defeat. However, Blizzard intends to introduce subtle but impactful adjustments to the way raid and dungeon encounters are designed. Players can look forward to:
- Boss mechanics that are more clearly telegraphed.
- Hazardous effects and key abilities made visually clearer. While swirly ground effects were improved in Patch 11.1, further refinements are on the way to ensure they’re easier to read in combat.
- A reduction in random ground effects, giving casters more breathing room.
- Group mechanics with slightly longer reaction windows, lessening the dependence on scripted WeakAura alerts.
- Fewer interruptible abilities with longer cast times, reducing the burden on comps that rely heavily on interrupts.
These changes will also extend to PvP, where Blizzard is working on clearer systems to show and manage crowd control diminishing returns, making them easier for players to track and understand.
“In terms of existing encounters, we are going to be doing a pass on Manaforge encounters for example that people will be engaging in Pre-Patch. That pass hasn’t been done in Alpha yet, but before things go live those will be tuned and tweaked and in some cases meaningfully changed to make sure that they’re still fair and the appropriate level of challenge. Broadly speaking though, I think the intent here is not to make raiding harder, or Mythic+ harder, it’s more about leveling the playing field and focusing some of the decision making, some of the challenge on coordination and sharing that responsibility with guildmates, with your teammates, as opposed to offloading it to an add-on that some people may have and others may not. So whether that takes the form of giving you a couple of extra seconds to get in position before something blows up, whether it takes the form of having one or two adds fewer or mechanics fewer than we might have in the past, our goal is to hit the same general difficulty target. If you’re a guild that gets Cutting Edge or is in the Hall of Fame, or is aiming for Ahead of the Curve, and you typically achieve that X weeks into the season. Our intent is that in Midnight, your guild is typically achieving that roughly the same amount of time into the season with the same amount of time and progression involved. It’s just that it will be a product of your own coordination, your own problem solving, not spending 30 minutes configuring a Weak Aura before you pull the boss for the first time, so that everyone knows when to run to star or circle.”
— Ion Hazzikostas, Blizzard
Are all addons banned in Midnight?
No, Blizzard is not banning all addons in Midnight. The restrictions apply mainly to combat-related tools, especially in raids and dungeons. Many other types of addons will remain unaffected, including:
- Quest helpers
- Gathering assistants
- Role-playing mods
- PvP utilities (excluding cooldown tracking)
- Visual customization tools and UI enhancements, though some condition-based features may face limits
- Damage meters
- Certain WeakAuras functions
Additionally, all addons for WoW Classic will continue to work without any changes.
“I just want to super clarify there, a lot of the shorthand here has been like, “oh, Blizzard’s killing Weakauras”. That is not what we are doing. We’re going to have a technical blog rolling out for addon authors in the next day or two that lays out the system we have in place, but it’s really focused specifically on reading combat events and combat state whereas in the past when we disabled, like we wanted to break add-ons or limit what add-ons could do.
For those of you who are familiar with how add-ons work, there was a system called taint basically where um a portion of the UI could be protected and add-ons weren’t allowed to manipulate it in combat, and if they tried to, it just kind of broke the UI. That’s a very heavy-handed approach. We didn’t want to take such a heavy-handed approach because we want to preserve aesthetic customization, that core functionality of just what people have used add-ons for for 20 years. The new system that our UI engineers have come up with is what we’re calling secret values, where basically the UI still works as before, except that when there is a buff on you or a damage event that has happened in combat, those items are inside a black box. The UI and add-ons can know that that box exists, they can display information about it in a larger way, smaller way. They can make it pink if they want, whatever you prefer, but what they can’t do is know definitively what’s inside that box and run any kind of logic based on it. Again, the goal specifically is to just restrict that problem solving real-time computation that’s used to aid moment to moment combat and do the least possible damage to every other add-on that millions of people use and enjoy.”
— Ion Hazzikostas, Blizzard
What are your thoughts on the situation? Will you miss DBM and other combat-related addons? Can Blizzard replace them effectively and make fights more dynamic? And how will this change Midnight Race to World First? Share your thoughts in the comments!
With or without addons, our WoW raid carry service is always here to help you.
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