WoW devs plan to 'whitelist' spells for use in combat mods and addons, and while it looks like Blizzard's going soft, I'm not sure that's the whole picture

World of Warcraft, as you might've heard, is taking combat mods (addons) to task—the philosophy being that combat addons shouldn't provide a competitive advantage in WoW anymore. That means no more WeakAuras, no more programmable boss-fight mechanics, and no more addons that can straight-up if>then entire parts of your class for you.

Well. Kinda. In recent beta builds, Blizzard has been loosening up some of these restrictions for select spells—or "whitelisting" them, as Blizzard puts it. That's per a dev post to the WoWUIDev Discord, shared here by WoWhead.

In the "currently being worked on" section of the post, Blizzard stated it's "Adding numerous spells to the whitelists for cooldown/aura secrecy: Skyriding spells, the GCD spell, Maelstrom Weapon, Devourer DH resource spells, Combat Res spells." Simply put, there'll be certain spells whose data will be available to AddOn creators, allowing them to make UI mods for them.

In particular, the mention of Maelstrom Weapon and the demon hunter's Soul Fragment abilities is interesting. Here we have two class resources that are important to track and, more to the point, making it easier to track them absolutely is a competitive advantage over non-UI authors, because there's no way to really track them outside of keeping an eye pinned to your teeny-tiny buffs.

Blizzard adds that players should "continue to call out spells that you think should be whitelisted, we will evaluate each of them individually." So, alright, what's going on here? There are a few options:

1. Blizzard's gone all soft from its previous hardline stances.
2. This is a beta, and Blizzard's just exploring its options.
3. Blizzard is only whitelisting options it'll be adding to the base UI in the future.

If I were a betting man—I'm not, Christmas is expensive this year—I'd say it's a mixture of two and three. Two because, well, one should never read too deeply into choices made during a beta. But three because, as game director Ion Hazzikostas said late November:

"If you think the default UI is ugly, or you prefer your secondary resources displayed in a certain way, that's entirely your prerogative, and we want there to be as many possible AddOn options to allow you to change the size, shape, color, texture, and location of every element (as long as those changes aren't driven by real-time combat logic) in Midnight and beyond."

Unless the plan has changed—and I would be surprised if it did—I reckon these spell whitelists are just step one of a plan to also include better resource tracking for those spells as part of the game's base UI, either through class-specific UI elements ala FF14's job gauges, or working in improvements to the cooldown manager.

It's just simpler for Blizzard to, when given pain-points, whitelist those specific spells while it works on a solution, which I'm broadly in favour of. It'd be petty to keep glaring holes in its class/UI open without letting AddOn creators fix them, all because it hasn't gotten around to patching them up itself yet.