World of Warcraft is on the cusp of one of its boldest gameplay pivots in years. With Patch 11.1.7 on the horizon, Blizzard is drawing a firm line in the sand: the age of mandatory combat add-ons is coming to an end. In a recent WoWCast, game director Ion Hazzikostas laid out a sweeping set of changes aimed squarely at the longstanding dominance of third-party tools like WeakAuras.
What’s driving this? According to Hazzikostas, it’s an “arms race” that’s gone on too long. Encounter designers making increasingly dense mechanics, and add-on developers answering with increasingly advanced solutions. The result is an MMO where the configuration of external tools takes precedence over the nature of the proposed content. Understandably, Blizzard wants to flip that.
A Shift Away From “Required” Add-ons
Anyone who’s stepped into raiding or Mythic+ dungeons knows the dance: install DBM, import your WeakAuras. These tools don’t just assist, they structure the entire experience. Real-time warnings, boss timers, cooldown trackers, custom callouts for every debuff and phase. The problem is, it’s not just convenience, over time it became an expectation. It took such proportions that even Blizzard, by their own admission, has built encounters around them. From Ion Hazzikostas about 16 minutes into the video above:
Down the line, eventually that may mean, I think you know, so some broader restrictions on specifically what information add-ons have access to about combat events in real time.
At the same time, we know that that’s not a thing that we could just do right now without providing a lot more on our end.
Both in terms of, you know, just UI-type functionality, but also looking at how we’re designing some encounters, how some of our classes work.
I think there are tons of add-ons that are healthy and valuable and really important to how players play the game that do rely on that flow of information. Everything from something as simple as damage meters to like, you know, honestly boss time like mobility timelines, like the DBM style, like when is this next ability going to fire that people have basically been raiding with forever? That’s not the computation that WeakAura is.
That’s just hey, this ability is gonna happen in 15 seconds. We wanna build in our own version of that. I think down the line we’d love to see a place where there is a boss timeline as just part of the encounter UI and that’s not something you need an add-on for.
And that way we can hopefully eventually get to a point where we’re really just cutting out the WeakAura that solves the mechanic for you, but not the informational stuff, that you feel like the game should have really been telling you all along where add-ons are admittedly kind of filling in some gaps there.
Blizzard’s intent here is fairly clear: phase out the add-ons that do the thinking for you, not the ones that fill in the gaps the base UI has left unattended. Tools like WeakAura, which can reduce coordination to a series of pre-scripted reactions, are on the chopping block. Meanwhile, more subtle aids like damage meters, timers, or positional alerts may still have a place, at least as long as the game itself steps up to offer those features natively.
And frankly, that’s a good thing. These changes could mean a shift in encounter design philosophy. As Hazzikostas points out, bosses today are tuned with the assumption that players have all the “right” add-ons. Strip that away, and designers may be free to craft fights that are cleaner, more readable, and still just as challenging.
The goal is not to make it easier. The goal is to make it less complex. And I think that there is a key distinction there. – Ion Hazzikostas
Such a shift could pull WoW’s endgame out of the artificial complexity it’s been mired in for years. Right now, too many fights hinge more on whether your add-ons are shouting the right thing at the right time than on your actual awareness. If Blizzard follows through, we could see a return to more mechanical encounters. Fights where reflexes, timing, and coordination matter more than it is now.
It’d be a move that echoes the design ethos of older expansions like Mists of Pandaria, where success mainly came from playing your class well and working as a team. Over the years, we’ve seen Race to World First teams commissioning custom WeakAuras, paying developers to engineer fight-specific tools. That doesn’t make their kills any less impressive, but it does show just how far the reliance on external scripts has gone. When victory hinges not just on execution but on who has the best coder in their corner, something’s gone sideways.
The One-Button Controversy
Of all the announced features, Rotation Assist is easily the most polarizing. It’s a built-in ability suggester (similar to what Hekili and other addons offers) but with an optional twist: a one-button assistant. Press a single key, and the game will choose and execute your next attack (with a 0.3s global cooldown penalty, which, fortunately, make it far from being optimal).
Originally Posted by Blizzard(Blue Tracker
Kaivax
Community Manager
#1 – May 1, 2025, 11 p.m.
In the Legacy of Arathor PTR, there are two new ways to interact with the game, the Single-Button Assistant and the Assisted Highlight mode. These are designed to help new players, players who are trying out a new specialization, or those looking for additional guidance on ability usage.
These new modes only manage your damaging spells and are primarily designed to be used by damage specializations. Both will still function if you try them out as a tank or healer, but they will only cycle through your damage abilities, and not any of your healing spells or survival abilities.
As with the new Cooldown Manager added in the 11.1.5 update, these will continue to evolve over time.
Single-Button Assistant
The Single-Button Assistant is a new spell you can click-and-drag to your action bar from the top right of your Spellbook and then use just like you would any other spell on your action bar.
This Single-Button Assistant will cycle through a prioritized list of abilities that your character knows and automatically use them against your current target. To see the full list of abilities that your current specialization will use, you can right-click on this ability while looking at the top right of your spellbook to expand or collapse the list of spells that will be cycled through. Using this Single-Button Assistant will impose a penalty to your Global Cooldown (GCD).
Assisted Highlight
The Assisted Highlight is a slightly more advanced version of the Single-Button Assistant. To use this feature, you will need to enable the “Assisted Highlight” option in the Advanced Options tab in the Gameplay Options menu.
The Assisted Highlight doesn’t automatically cycle through your abilities for you like the Single-Button Assistant does, but rather it recommends a button to press for your next action by highlighting a button on your action bar with a green border. There is no penalty to the Global Cooldown (GCD) for using this mode.
Design Guidelines
The Single-Button Assistant and Assisted Highlight modes do a lot of things, but they will not fully play your character for you. There are several decisions we made about our expectations for what these functions perform or recommend for you:
The Single-Button Assistant and Assisted Highlight modes will:
Adjust to abilities you know from changing talents and include them in the cycle of abilities used or highlighted.
Swap between single target and AoE damage spells based on proximity of enemies near your primary target.
The Single-Button Assistant and Assisted Highlight modes won’t:
Move your character around in the world, or use any mobility buttons like Blink, Sprint, or Heroic Leap.
Change targets for you if your target dies or you want to debuff multiple different enemies.
Use major offensive cooldowns like Avenging Wrath, Bladestorm, or Ascendance.
Interrupt enemies or otherwise use utility or crowd control spells.
Heal your low health character or use defensive abilities.
Use any trinkets, potions, tradeskill items, or other similar items in your inventory.
Feedback
The useful feedback we’re looking for are:
Your thoughts on abilities that are used improperly in a sequence
Abilities that are not used at all
Any bugs you encounter
Thank you very much for your testing and feedback!
It’s a design leap for WoW, and Hazzikostas didn’t mince words on why it’s here. “If you ask people, ‘How can I get better?’ The first answer shouldn’t be, ‘Download this add-on’”, he said. “Ideally, the game should teach you.”
The reported goal is to open the door to newer or returning players, as well as those with accessibility needs. The intention behind Rotation Assist is commendable. WoW’s combat, after all, has grown dense to the point of alienation. I mean, what’s the point of having essentially three variations of fear (if not confuse people)?
If the goal is to help players learn, then maybe the better path isn’t to layer on another tool, but to revisit the fundamentals. The same way Blizzard is aiming to rethink irrelevant complexity in encounter design, perhaps it’s time they reevaluate things like debuffs, ultra situational spells, how many buttons truly need to be there, and why.
As for the one-button mode… that’s a harder pill to swallow. It is far from a full autoplay, but I feel like it tugs at the same thread. If the MMO genre has resisted the wave of mobile autoplay games, it’s precisely because the core audience values doing over watching.
Even if, pragmatically, it’s still an addition in terms of accessibility, there are more meaningful solutions. Like supporting alternative inputs (eye tracking, adaptive controllers), that preserve the experience rather than dilute it. Personally, I stand for the idea that helping more people access the game should mean removing the barriers that stop them from sharing the same challenges, joy to master a spec; In a word, the same game.
It might sound like a stretch, but the one-button combat system honestly reminds me of when you go to a restaurant with a vegetarian friend and the only “option” on the menu is just the regular dish, minus the meat. Technically, it works. But it’s not really what anyone was hoping for. After more than twenty years at the top of the MMORPG genre, is this really the best solution Blizzard can offer players with accessibility needs?
An Evolving UI with Player Feedback
The add-ons rollout won’t be immediate or absolute. Patch 11.1.7 will focus on Rotation Assist and visual updates, with the add-on restrictions to follow later (only once the in-game replacements are robust). Hazzikostas emphasized that feedback will be essential to getting the transition right. “Nothing here is locked in”, he said. “This game belongs first and foremost to our millions of players”.
The vision is a WoW where add-ons can still flourish but not dominate. UI tweaks, quest helpers, roleplay enhancers? Still welcome. But when it comes to combat, Blizzard wants the player to think by himself.
Which make me realize there’s something contradictory in all this. On one hand, Blizzard wants to reclaim agency for the player, cutting out the add-ons that do too much thinking, too much reacting, in your place. That stance makes sense. It respects the idea that playing should mean playing. But then, in the same breath, they introduce the one-button assistant: a system that strips away decision-making pretty much entirely, in the name of accessibility.
If the goal is to help more people engage with the game, fair enough. But partially reducing combat to an automated sequence feels like a shortcut that misses the point. I don’t think that players who’ve been locked out by traditional control schemes are asking for less game. They’re probably asking for the same game, just made playable for them. Accessibility should be about adaptation, not abstraction. Otherwise, we’re just building a watered-down version of WoW that solves a problem by sidestepping it.
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