I Tested Out World of Warcraft Retail’s No Addons Era and it Felt Fresh

World of Warcraft has come a long way in updating its UI over the decades. Their biggest change was in the Dragonflight expansion, when they overhauled their UI, making it more customizable.

However, the biggest change is their removal of add-ons from World of Warcraft: Midnight. Add-ons or mods have been among the biggest lifesavers since the vanilla era. In past expansions, add-ons like the DBM have been staples, with some of the design built around players having them. It was tricky to run the game without them since players got used to them so much; it feels like it was built into the game already.

With World of Warcraft: Midnight looming closer, a fresh batch of new and old players returning will experience a completely different game. Raids and dungeons were always tough, even with mods alerting you what to do, but with them gone, there’s much more preparation needed.

I ran a few dungeons to get some gear and prepare for the World of Warcraft: Midnight launch, and get my Discipline Priest ready. It was a weird experience, especially since I was so used to playing with so many add-ons.

I’d look at the unit frames and positioning differently, since I’m used to using ZPerl or ElvUI. My skill bars were from Bartender, but they did a good job making them as customizable as any add-on. The minimap was very different, especially since there aren’t many add-on icons nearby to easily access the settings of installed add-ons.

I am also used to using Auctioneer and TSM to help with the crafting and auction house UIs, since they have a lot of quality-of-life improvements, but those features are completely manageable without the add-ons for sure… it just feels awkward.

As for the biggest changes, the DBM or DeadlyBossMods and WeakAuras will be gone. As someone who has done multiple Mythic raids in different expansions, losing WeakAuras is already so significant; it’ll make certain raid boss mechanics exponentially harder, especially ones that require certain players to all go to a specific place without crossing to anyone in the raid group.

Losing DBM will make it harder to just casually run all the dungeons, even at M+0 levels. LFR and normal raids will also be harder. Apart from these, progressing in Heroic and Mythic raids will also be a bit harder since progressing in a raid group usually means you are wiping multiple times on a single boss.

When you wipe several times, even up to a hundred, you’ll start to feel sluggish and forget certain callouts or mechanics. DBM helps with this as the mod screams stuff at you, which is now gone.

Things will be extremely different from now on, but it does feel like it is the right direction.