WoW's classes were pruned for Midnight because many were 'built in a world' where its devs assumed they'd be using addons

World of Warcraft recently embarked on the massive undertaking of redesigning all of its many specialisations to work without the assistance of UI mods (addons) for Midnight—mods which previously automated a ton of the complexity of its classes.

As an outlaw rogue, for instance, I had an addon which told me when I should cast Roll the Bones, because the decision making of that choice involved keeping track of several separate, randomly-generated buffs that each did something completely different from the other.

It was a nightmare of a priority system, but computers are very good at priority systems. Even after two expansions with the spec, I could not have told you what my Roll the Bones buffs do. I heard the funny noise from my addon, pushed a button, and went back to paying attention to the parts of the spec I liked.

Even so, reactions to the pruning have been mixed—for instance, I feel like my spec got on pretty well with the changes, but others aren't too pleased. Classes they've been playing for years have, in some cases, had major pieces of their toolkit removed.

I recently got to speak with associate game director Paul Kubit about all things Midnight but, in particular, this simplification—and I'm assured it's a constant work in progress.

'Passionate' is the word

"The only really all-encompassing word to describe [player feedback] is 'passionate'," Kubit tells me, "People are very tightly tied to their classes. It's your window into how you play the game. It's your avatar: 'That's my Priest, that's my Hunter, it's my Evoker,' and so on, and when things change, then there's always a little bit of figuring out time."

As a matter of fact, some changes have already been reverted, such as those made to the Paladin: "We heard loud and clear from players that it was not what they were looking for, and I would expect that back-and-forth feedback to continue when it comes to class design."

He does get a little into the why of it, using Roll the Bones as a prime example of the kinds of design flaws the team was trying to nix: "This was an ability which was very complicated, built in the world where we settled into an expectation that at competitive high end-play, players who really wanted to maximize their characters were going to use some computational addons."

As for plans to respond to that feedback, Kubit reassures me that it's all up in the air for tweaking. And the playerbase at large has not hit Midnight's final class design, because at the moment, everyone's missing one of the expansion's main features: Apex Talents.

"We do have some plans right now, specifically for tuning … Those are coming. The rest is really just based on listening to feedback, and nothing specific is planned at this time, other than—there's one really big thing coming, and that is on the 2nd of March, people start leveling to 90.

"That's sort of where the other shoe drops for class design changes. Because one of the things to keep in mind right now, we're in pre-patch, which is sort of like this fun, interesting liminal space between expansions where we are playing the content of the previous one and we haven't completely unlocked all the systems of the next one."

As for the Apex Talents themselves, "each one is a different beast, but they're going to change the way those classes play. That's another big piece of data we're waiting on, seeing how the classes are like once those are in place—then seeing how that conversation goes with players."

That's honestly nice to hear. While I made out like a bandit with my rogue (pun intended), as a part-time FF14 player too, I know the malaise that is having your classes' unique complexities and quirks shaved away in the name of homogenisation. It's a fate I wouldn't wish on anyone. That Blizzard is open to reintroducing complexity and finding a happy medium is a relief on my complexity-loving heart.