There 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 boss timelines, the DBM style "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 want to 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.
I don't have specific patch dates right now, but we are looking at damage meters, we're looking at nameplate improvements. We're looking at a raid encounter information presentation that shows you timeline of possibilities coming up, things in that general space. You know, I think we're we're looking at all the places where players say right now you need this WeakAura or you need this add-on to be competitive and asking ourselves, how do we change our game to make that not the case?
The single most popular add-on used across the entire game is a damage meter, by like a fair margin. The majority of players, the large majority of players have a damage meter add-on installed. And so that indicates that people want to see that information at least about themselves. We definitely want more nuanced measures of success and understanding, like how successful were you or how much did you contribute on this run?
Highlighting things like interrupts, highlighting things like avoidable damage to give a fuller picture of performance. But at the end of the day, you know, I think for someone who's trying a new spec, trying a new talent build, putting on getting a new trinket, and they want to see like how did this affect my performance compared to the last run? That's that's an important piece of information to have. And so I think, you know, we know that in any world where we were going to limit some of the ability of add-ons to like again, do that real time combat event tracking, we would need to provide a damage meter solution of our own. I think one of the exciting things, I think if we're doing that on our end, we can also have it be server authoritative. So you're not worried about who's in a different combat phase, who's out of range or whatever. It could just be like, this is official and going to be accurate all the time.
