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Retail World of Warcraft - A Passionate Rant

Retail World of Warcraft - A Passionate Rant

Photo by Sonia Dauer on Unsplash

Intro

Recently I watched Dratnos' 11 Rants about current World of Warcraft which has led me to formulate my thoughts on this topic too.

It's important to remind both myself and the readers that - just like Dratnos's video - this is first and foremost a love letter to the game. We all know however that it's not flawless. In my opinion, most issues could be solved by better communication. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

Note that I'm also speaking from a specific point of view:

  • I'm a developer myself, working on Archon and thus Warcraft Logs, so I have a fairly specific perspective on the game from that alone
  • as a considerably competitive player I have certain expectations of endgame content
  • as a co-maintainer of Jundies Plater and a bunch of complex WeakAuras, I'm also considerably familiar with the WoW interface

Some of my concerns don't and shouldn't apply to theoretical business decisions a game developer like Blizzard could make when reading feedback like this. That's ok, but it's still worth voicing.

Table of Contents

Bugs and Feedback

Bugs happen, that's a given. What I'm not so happy with is how long presumably easy to fix bugs are left in the game. I'm obviously reaching here regarding the difficulty. That said, in contrast more complex bugs that we read of getting fixed in Hotfix Notes, these seem trivial.

Sweet Souls

Did you know there's a Warlock class tree talent that heals the Warlock whenever a party or raid member uses a Healthstone? Except it only heals the Warlock if the other player is on the same realm, and modern parties/raids only rarely have a considerable amount of players of the same realm.

This is known since Legion.

Dimension Ripper

Did you know the Destruction talent Dimension Ripper doesn't actually have a 5% chance, but instead somehow 2.25%? Could of course be a tooltip bug only, but 2.25% would not only be a very underwhelming near-capstone talent, but also a surprising number in general.

Known since at least Jan 10 2025, three days into the 11.1 PTR.

Seeds of Their Demise

During the 11.1 PTR, the Hellcaller talent Seeds of Their Demise was changed to no longer grant Blackened Soul a 30% damage increase.

At least the tooltip was. The talent still grants this increase. In all fairness however, removing this effect would require compensation buffs for Warlocks as Blackened Soul is a considerable part of their damage.

Known since at least Mar 25 2025.

Reactivity

Reactivity doesn't replicate 50% but 100% healing.

Known since the talent was implemented during TWW Beta.

Consume Flame

Consume Flame ignores damage taken modifiers.

This is both good and bad:

Known since the talent was implemented during TWW Beta.

What gives?

These are just a couple examples, I linked the community Bug Tracker. I've chosen both positive and negative bugs intentionally, these were also fairly easy to explain which won't be the case for further problems below.

They all have one thing in common however: they've been reported not once, not twice, but countless of times, through various channels.

Now there's two possible answers to this:

  • it's a bug, but low priority
  • it's not a bug

The former I'm ok with. Unfortunately we don't know, also ok.

The latter, I'm also ok with! But here not knowing is worse. The team would've already stopped thinking about it but players don't forget that easily. Please let us know if something isn't a bug. There's passionate players out there that maintain SimC, addons, WeakAuras, participate in theorycrafting in general, participate in testing, you know it. I'm also aware that people come, people go, it's only natural. That doesn't mean it doesn't hurt when messages like this reach me:

... or there's a third answer which as optimist I'd rather not believe: that PTR feedback isn't particularily well dealt with. Of all bugs I've reported in recent history (since TWW Alpha), exclusively those I've reported after going live were fixed.

Version Management Problems

For a while now we've seen bug/hotfixes introduced during one patch getting unintentionally reverted in the next .5/.7 or .0 patch.

Reintroduced Bugs

Unfortunately I have only edge cases available at the top off my mind, but they're still good examples.

Fixed On PTR, Somehow Reoccuring Later

Fixes that were made during the PTR cycle somehow get reverted later on, when the patch has been live for a while. For example we recently discovered that the Rumbling Earth talent extends Ebon Might when casting Breath of Eons due to the 11.1 tier set effect. During the 11.1 PTR, this was one of the changes made:

Upheavals from the Liberation of Undermine 2-set bonus no longer increase the duration of Ebon Might.

Fixed In The Past, Somehow Reocurring Later

Plenty of examples here. I'm sure you know, here's one I found without digging too long: Liberation of Undermine Raid Skip to One-Armed Bandit Option Removed in Patch 11.1.5.

Partial/Missing Tuning

Additionally, hotfixes promised such as e.g. class/spec tuning doesn't get deployed in the same quantity as it was announced. A couple examples:

  • simple numeric mistakes are being made, e.g. recently Subtlety was buffed by 10% in weekly class tuning but it should've been only 5%.
  • in the same set of changes, Diabolist was supposed to receive buffs to 5 abilities. 4 are missing, one was deployed with a lower value than announced.
  • in the previous class tuning, feral buffs were entirely missing
  • in March, Mistweaver received only half of its tuning, resulting in the spec being extremely strong until the accompanying & promised 25% damage nerf was also deployed
  • in the same set of tuning, none of the announced Hunter buffs went live

Talent Tuning

This list would be long if I could be bothered and you can already guess what this is about. There's so many talents across all the trees that do little to nothing, are dead on arrival and/or have never seen tuning.

Lack of Iteration / Not All Talents Are Made Equal

Back in early Dragonflight, my go to examples here was the Vengeance Soul Barrier / Bulk Extraction choice node, but that's over 2 years ago and I've given up on complaining about it. Both still haven't seen any kind of numerical tuning since the introduction of the talent trees with 10.0. At least the spec is doing fine right?

People are probably gonna lynch me for advocating for improvements to Augmentation talents, notably Symbiotic Bloom and the Prolong Life / Dream of Spring choice node below it, both not only extremely bad, they'd also cost 3 talent points in total, but even Augmentation Evokers deserve good talents.

Similar Talents Between Specs Have Major Tuning Differences

Destruction has this Ruin talent, increasing critical damage done by 5% - this is 200% * 1.05 however, so it's 210% effectively. Notably, the spec has no other talent blanket increasing crit damage done, there's only Mark of Peroth'arn increasing crit damage of Wither specifically.

Now Devastation enters the chat: Spellweaver's Dominance increases all critical damage by 30%.

Yes, specs can and should have different fantasies.

Yes, there's also the trade-off between Devastation not having general crit chance % increases other than conditionally Conduit of Flame.

Yes, Ruin probably shouldn't have 30% either because Destruction has plenty of crit % increases so some of the talent differences is offset by simply critting more often. But if both of these specs have a similar relation to crits, then maybe their crit damage talents should be tuned similarily too.

Honorary mention of Contagion which is only 1 row above Spellweaver's Dominance but costs 2 points and is limited to 3 spells.

Many such cases!

Do... Something

Blizzard has the data. Blizzard knows which talents are never ever taken. Tune them, replace them, or prune them. Not like anyone would miss them currently anyway!

And that's already all the energy I have for this topic. What's the point of these talents? Nobody knows.

Item Tuning

Dungeon Trinkets

Not entirely fair to start this section without mention that it also applies to some raid trinkets. But at least raid ends up always having very good trinkets anyway.

The general TLDR here is that more often than not, the majority of dungeon trinkets are badly tuned. The season gets released and dungeon trinkets get, at best, a couple bugfixes where needed.

I do have to mention that this season is technically doing better in this regard, so let's hope this trend continues. We've seen two trinket tuning sets:

However, especially the former was fairly hit/miss and also buffed raid and delve trinkets.

Left for dead currently are:

My favorite example here is Gigazap's Zap-Cap: not only was it bugged at the start of the patch and had only half the proc chance it promised, even after the fix it's still doing miserable damage.

How miserable? Well, buckle up. At itemlevel 700 its just barely winning over 684 Carved Blazikon Wax. At 697 it's breaking even but well within margin of error.

I'm not expecting all trinkets to be equally valuable. Again, this season there's also competitive dungeon trinkets, in the context of raid trinkets.

But I'm baffled why developers are ok with the trinkets they designed to not see any play. Sure, different teams are in charge of different things, e.g. a rewards team doesn't necessarily have a say re tuning but surely the goal of tuning should be to begin with that the majority of trinkets are roughly equal and not that the majority of trinkets are so far behind that you'd never consider picking them beyond temporarily for itemlevel.

Embellishments

Dratnos already brought these up so I don't wanna go too deep into details here, he's already formulated good examples of this that I can only repeat.

Something that he has not mentioned however is that Embellishments aren't evergreen even within the same expansion. Embellishments like Dawnthread and Duskthread lose value due to stat inflation over time.

If the goal is to always have people use two crafted items for embellishments, these need revisiting in some form. Make them grant a % of your current stat amount so they instead scale the opposite, or just tune them. At the time of writing, 11.2 PTR isn't out yet so this might of course be happening soon, here's to hoping.

Lack of Ongoing Tuning

Here's the Psychic Link tuning since 10.0.0:

  • 10.0.0 - Mind Blast, Mind Flay and Mind Spike deal 15%...
  • 10.0.5 - Mind Blast, Mind Flay, Mind Spike, Mindgames, Void Bolt and Void Torrent deal 15%...
  • 10.1.0 - Your damaging single target spells deal 40%...
  • 10.1.0 - Your direct damage spells inflict 30%...
  • 10.1.5 - Your direct damage spells inflict 25%...
  • 10.1.7 - Your direct damage spells inflict 15%...
  • 10.2.5 - Your direct damage spells inflict 25%...
  • 10.2.5 - Your direct damage spells inflict 30%...
  • 11.0.2 - Your direct damage spells inflict 25%...
  • 11.0.5 - Your direct damage spells inflict 30%...
  • 11.1.5 - Your direct damage spells inflict 35%...

I'm not here to debate whether that specific ability nor whether the AoE of Shadows in general needs this much attention.

I do want to highlight that it's receiving constant small tuning changes to keep its AoE damage in line, the only patch it wasn't touched in was 10.2.7. I wish this kind of attention to more specs. And yes, I've chosen a problematic ability here. It getting tuned this frequent with literal back and forth between values should be testament of design problems. Take it as a metaphor for "please tune more often".

And I'm even going further. Back in the day (ugh), before my return to WoW, I like many others played League of Legends. Even now I remember League had bi-weekly tuning. WoW also has frequent tuning cycles early into a patch and then it just kinda fizzles out. More of it please.

The Other Side

Up until recently, it was possible to pre-cast Summon Infernal during the countdown before starting a key while talented into Crashing Chaos to receive its buff and then change talents. You'd begin the key with a refunded Summon Infernal cooldown, but the Crashing Chaos buff remained, effectively granting you an extra talent for the first pull.

Degenerate gameplay, as Ion would say, and he'd be right.

Yet... Shamans continue to be able to pre-stack Tempests.

Now these things aren't perfectly comparable, as you'd naturally pre-stack Tempests at the end of a pull in preparation for the next, you don't need to change talents, you don't effectively gain a point for a pull etc., so allowing this is technically just bringing the specs throughput up to the level of an average pull. I'm perfectly ok with this.

So why is Ritual of Ruin (or rather, its buff Impending Ruin) getting removed when a key starts then? It's a buff with permanent uptime in a key unless there's extended downtime.

Repeated Dungeon Design Problems

Graveyards

Every defeated encounter should trigger a respawn point unless it's a dungeon with wings like The Stonevault.

These current season dungeon encounters do not trigger a graveyard:

  • The Rookery, second boss
    • respawn point is below first boss
  • Priory of the Sacred Flame, first boss
    • respawn point remains the dungeon entrance

These NOT unlocking a graveyard are ok because they make use of wings:

  • Operation: Floodgate, first two bosses
  • Cinderbrew Meadery, first two bosses
  • Theater of Pain, any boss

Similarily, last season, these do not trigger a graveyard:

  • The Dawnbreaker, second boss
  • City of Threads, neither second nor third boss
    • extra painful because this was apparently done knowingly because there's transportation available. unfortunately however said transportation is a massive time loss
  • Necrotic Wake, third boss
  • The Stonevault, first boss

Encounter Design

I'm firmly convinced no dungeon boss should take as long as or longer than raid bosses.

History

Remember when the Primal Tsunami, last boss of Halls of Infusion, encounter was reworked between Dragonflight Season Two and Four?

In Season Two, roughly every minute the boss sent the group into gauntlets, then spawned four adds that would empower the boss the longer you need to deal with them, only to repeat the cycle.

It was a common occurrence for the boss to take 6 minutes or longer in high keys, especially on Tyrannical.

For Season Four, this would only occur twice - at 70% and 30% health - and as a result, on a roughly comparable key level, the encounter took less than 5 minutes.

Now ironically the same dungeon also had a very good example of lack of tuning paired with percentage-based phasing: the first boss Watcher Irideus shields himself once at 50% (effective) health and the following second phase is empowered. However, his health budget is so massive that the encounter went from sub 5 minutes to above, despite the comparable key level, so percentage-based phasing isn't a silver bullet.

Problematic Encounters

That said, the following encounters would've been significantly less problematic with percentage-based phasing:

Honorary mention of Azerokk, second boss of The MOTHERLODE!!. Commonly lusted and still takes about 4 minutes to kill, only not problematic because the adds have no unfair amount of health / the ticking damage isn't excessive etc.

Common Problems

The common problem with these encounters are usually at least one of these, but often a combination of them:

  • immunity phases with adds that simply have too much health and thus cost lots of time and do lots of damage
    • Surgeon Stitchflesh himself can only be damaged for ~30s every window
      • his adds have 55% of his own health pool
  • near-immunity phases that are additionally punishing by adding party-wide damage
  • massive shields
    • each of Iridikrons shields is an additional 13% boss health
    • each of Voidstone Monstrositys shields is an additional 40% boss health (this is factoring that you exclusively hit the bosses actual healthbar during the damage amp)
  • frequent shields
    • Nalthor the Rimebinder shields himself every 25s for 2.2% of his health, but you're commonly down a dps and the healer can hardly contribute damage due to the party-wide damage inflicted by the shield

Healthy Time-Based Phasing Encounters

Now you might say it's limiting design options if time-based phasing was generally avoided and it's obviously not entirely incorrect. For me this does beg the question however: why is it that some encounters received that kind of phasing out of the box?

To name a few:

  • Mistcaller, second boss of Mists of Tirna Scithe, phases at 70/40/10% health
    • boss immunity of variable length depending on how long the party takes to find and kill the right Illusionary Clone
  • Speaker Shadowcrown, first boss of The Dawnbreaker, phases at 50% health
    • forced downtime of 15 seconds, once
  • Brewmaster Aldryr, first boss of Cinderbrew Meadery, phases at 66/33% health
    • entirely player controlled downtime, usually around 15 seconds only per

Possible Solutions

Now revisiting the problematic encounters above, I would've loved to see these changes:

Lack of Upholding Competitive Integrity

Tempered Hero

Last season's exploits were plentiful. Wowhead has a good writeup about the various bugs/exploits with varying impact we saw last season, so I'll assume you're familiar with that.

Unfortunately, it seems this had zero repercussions. Early on, briefly after the 11.0.5 patch, some of the leaderboard runs were rolled back but not only did it not affect all, to my knowledge not a single player was punished. Ultimately, since it was still early into the season, this was minor in the bigger picture. There was worse to come.

Later on, people were shamelessly abusing a variety of bugs on stream and faced no consequences at all:

  • Follower Dungeons/Story Mode raid buffs were abused
  • really niche bugs like mindcontrolling Legion NPCs and bringing their buff into M+ were abused
  • world event buffs were brought into M+ and raid
  • additional niche shenanigans with Control Undead specifically in Necrotic Wake

What came from it? Absolutely nothing. It's also extra disappointing because NetEase took the opposite approach and removed the title from 9000 players, issuing harsher penalties to some..

And if that wasn't even enough, here's the cherry on the pie.

At least on EU, people got awarded the Tempered Hero achievement for score earned including the Post-Season/off-season week where 11.1 was already deployed, which is commonly a time where keys become 1-2 key levels easier because of the changes.

This wasn't even recognized as mistake. No word on it. I agree with Jordan that it doesn't impact many people on both ends in the end, but it's still tainting everything.

Liberation of Undermine Hall of Fame

Another hot topic left and right for a while. To recap: due to single-digit lockout sells and concerns from the community, Blizzard decided to require the last three bosses for the Hall of Fame: Chrome King Gallywix achievement as guilds started buying lockouts for Mythic Gallywix as the encounter was deemed considerably easier than Mug'Zee and One-Armed Bandit.

Technically a good change. Unfortunately however, this broke their own Hall of Fame tooling.

So badly, that guilds that already had earned the relevant achievements had to rekill the other bosses to earn the HoF achievement. And we all know early reclears aren't all that nice and clean as during farm later on.

It gets better (or worse, depending on how much you're munching popcorn at this point): even after reclearing, guilds didn't necessarily get the achievement, stuck in an entirely intransparent state.

... and better. It appears, Blizzard eventually recognized some of this mess and started awarding eligible guilds the achievement manually and were so careless to award the wrong guild the achievement, although this got fixed soon after.

To round it off, despite the Hall of Fame being already filled, it was then extended by another week. This is a move I can understand because some guilds were likely pushing for HoF during the reset where it "suddenly" filled. Of course it should've been visibly filled before. Still only fair to not rugpull them.

Blizzard making these changes is good. Blizzard salvaging this by manually correcting this is good. Making these changes mid-season: not so good.

Special Treatment of RWF

Remember when on Nexus-Princess Ky'veza, Mages were targeting god knows what and used @focus on all spells in order to abuse a bug known since Beta to not proc Embedded Arcane Splinter and stopped in an instant the moment people picked up on it?

Remember Plunderstorm being won by terrain exploits.

Remember Sneak.lua.

Yeah...

Actions (Should) Have Consequences

If you want people to stop abusing exploits, there need to be consequences. It doesn't need to be as harsh like NetEase putting up the character names of those that exploited. Hand out some temporary bans, strip away seasonal rewards.

Give people a reason to not exploit, otherwise "exploit early, exploit often" becomes more than a meme.

Tips Welcome / Resilient Keys

An expected side effect of Resilient Keystones. People put up their resilient keys and ask for tips in the group finder. All you need to do is search for "tip" in the tool and you'll find a couple.

Some are also trying to circumvent making it too obvious and use a description like "note why you and not others" or "notes welcome".

And there's the even more shameless ones:

This is of course against the Terms of Service:

Individuals (...) selling boost or assistance in (...) dungeon (...) activities for gold is allowed but can only be advertised in-game through the Trade Services chat channel. This includes any and all references to "tips", "tipping", or other synonyms of these words. (...) This means there should be no cross-realm advertising (...).

While there's been rumours of people getting chat muted, I know multiple players that are actively participating in this and have not been muted despite definitely getting reported (you know who you are).

There's no easy solution here beyond more aggressively muting people. Resilient Keys in general are a separate topic, one that I'm in general very happy with, but I'd like to repeat a couple community ideas here regardless:

  • resilient keys should be the key level you've completed +1
    • this entirely removes "homework keys" which currently are still a thing, albeit less than before
  • resilient keys only are resilient when starting the key if everyone in the party has the same resilient key level
    • clearly aimed at preventing boosting/selling. not opposed to this, but a bit one sided
  • resilient keys have charges instead of being permanently resilient
    • similarily aimed at boosting/selling and in my opinion the better solution of these two

A combination of option 1 and 3 would be something I'd be very interested in exploring.

Lack of Communication

Dinars

Nope, this won't be another rant about inability to buy the best items available without having stepped into Mythic Raid.

Communication

Again, Wowhead has a lengthy piece about this already which I can only recommend reading.

What becomes evident from this 4-5 month ordeal is that there were a lot of internal uncertainties about how this should actually play out. From the very beginning it was tainted due to the in retrospect needless comparison to the by now only faintly similar systems we had in Shadowlands and Dragonflight Season Four.

What surprised me most about this is that they should've known better and not announce it this early. Hell, it dwelled on PTR without any visible iteration for around 8 weeks before getting removed and only vaguely hinted on to be added at some later point in some different fashion.

It feels like they tried to force this feature into this patch despite not having laid out, mostly finalized plans, just becasue it fits the patch thematic.

Arbitrary Restrictions

Multiple annoyances here.

That the Miniature Roulette Wheel isn't available, I'm ok with as it would need special treatment. Reloe had a hilarious idea about this that I wouldn't object to, although in a probably less aggressive fashion:

That no jewelry beyond very rare items is available feels very arbitrary however. Why are all raid weapons included, even if they don't have a special effect? Yes, weapons are a larger source of power but why draw a line in general?

And this brings me to the massive, massive oversight of not having added Dungeon trinkets out of the box. Oh lord, what were you thinking?

And here too of course. Why aren't all dungeon items available? Especially the cantrip items. Why do I continue to have to rely on Great Vault luck to replace a crafted ring with that one specific ring I need out of Theater of Pain because all raid rings are downgrades, unless it magically happens to be the perfect Miniature Roulette Wheel?

Now you've replaced chase items from raid that at least had a chance to drop on a weekly basis with chase items from the Great Vault because Myth track dungeon drops aren't a thing.

Remove arbitrary restrictions on which items are available on the Dinars vendor.

Catchup

Not having catchup for these is a decision. I'm not affected by this and I can also see the rationale of "if you haven't played that toon in a while, you haven't accumulated bad luck yet!" but come on. We're half way through the season, already had an artificial item level increase with the Turbo Boost, Crests are unlocked, Valorstones are transferrable. Why of all things is this set up to be punishing for alts?

AddOn Restrictions

Ironically, literally while writing this, Blizzard forwarded a message to the addon developer community with some word. While it's great that there's this kind of exchange, unfortunately there was very little actual info in there.

My two cents on this: having the initial message targeted at press and by their own words, the general player base, is a mistake, especially with no follow-up to "the rest" in a timely manner. It's been weeks! All you've done with this is to offend basically the entire competitive player base in addition to the addon community.

Still, I'm personally optimistic, in contrast to the overwhelming majority you read about on Reddit, Twitter, the Discords, etc.

As mentioned, I'm also maintaining a bunch of things that Blizzard probably doesn't like me doing, such as dynamic nameplate scaling based on whether you're fixated by an add or not, or an aura that clearly lights up when you should press Engulf. I'd prefer if I didn't have to maintain these.

I'm personally less worried about which features Blizzard is intending to ship out of the box (damage meters, boss mods, nameplate features). I'm more worried about the features Blizzard is not intending to ship and we learnt nothing new about this today.

An early look into what the team cooking could be eye-opening, along with the implications around dungeon/encounter design. Are we heading into a transition phase where dungeon trash has very few mechanics because there's no ability to scale or color nameplates? This implies we'd first have an era of mass pulling as much as possible because it's possible, only then to hear from developers that they're unhappy with large pulls so trash gets more mechanics again? Will this lead back to a stop meta - except this time it's harder because we cannot track party cooldowns? Do we then end up in an arms race of third party tools trying to solve what addons did before?

I'm not expecting answers to all of this, but these are obvious concerns, so obvious that Blizzard also must've thought about this, but neither messaging so far implied acknowledgement of this. It'd go a long way.

Cooldown Manager

The state the cooldown manager got released in is concerning in relation to the aforementioned addon restrictions.

We're currently living in a WeakAuras world where everything is possible: want these 40s of Le SSerafim - Crazy playing during Lust? Sure. Want a cat jumping across your screen for the duration of Arcane Surge? No problem.

Naturally the Cooldown Manager doesn't need to do that. Neither is it intended as a general purpose tool, nor are customizations of that kind reasonable to expect.

The obvious assumption in context to above is that the intention of the Cooldown Manager is to eventually replace spec WeakAura packs. We don't know of course. But if that's the case, then we have a long way to go and this is where I start becoming a pessimist.

It was introduced as a first version. It was also mentioned that there's plans to allow you to hide or rearrange elements [...] in a future patch but this remains to be seen.

It is not without irony that only briefly after the 11.1.5 release, an addon was published to add some options to the Cooldown Manager.

This is also a concern voiced on Reddit: addon developers aren't bound to whatever design/planning/iteration process Blizzard has internally. If the goal is to truly replace some addons with builtin solutions, then the pipeline needs to be significantly more flexible and speed up.

I'm aware that there's new backend code for the Cooldown Manager but in the current form, it's a low effort downgrade to any spec WeakAura pack. Hell, I could've written the frontend code for the Cooldown Manager myself in maybe a week or two, with the same lack of flexibility. And then added more features the week after. And the week after.

Instead we've seen no progress on this front at all.

Lack of Interface Changes

This is something that might finally be happening with general updates to the UI due to addon restrictions. It's long overdue of course. But some things even addons can't properly remedy. My biggest pet peeves here are:

Friends Frame

It's 2025 and it's still tiny. I need an addon to have groups. I cannot remember all the Battle.net names or names of 123789 alts people have. Without notes, I'd literally ask every 2nd person whispering me who the heck they are.

Let me assign groups. Groups need to be collapsible. Add a search so I can find people easily. FriendGroups does most of this well.

Let me nickname people. This should get propagated through all levels:

  • /w <nickname> finds the player in the background
  • unit frames use the nickname across all characters the player might play
  • /cast [@<nickname>, help, nodead] [] Rescue finds the player

Let me drag the frame and support an expanded mode where its more than a fraction of my 1440p screen.

Group Finder

Same thing here: it's 2025 and it's still tiny. Some features were already adopted from PremadeGroupFinder but quite frankly, it's not enough. UX of this thing is still terrible, or in more fair words, dated.

Let me set a note that's automatically used when applying to groups with a single click. Sizing. Draggability.

Spell Book

The new Spell Book is visually appealing and artsy, it fits the modern game aesthetic of course yadda yadda. But whyyyy is it not resizable or draggable? Why does it have so much padding between the elements? Feels like they preemptively took the above feedback and massively overcorrected.

The End

Yeah. This turned out to be a bit longer than anticipated. If you made it this far, my condolences, this yap was badly needed.

Game good. Could be better.