- Author: Passion
- Date: November 17, 2023
- Updated: November 21, 2023
- Expansion: WotLK Classic
Post-Publishing Addition
On November 17th, Aggrend has clarified that the API adjustment will not be made to Classic Era or Wrath Classic at the moment, but is being reviewed for inclusion in both the next big Era Patch, and the first Cataclysm Classic Patch. This means this change will not be made until at least next year, but will at the very least not impact Icecrown Citadel raiding.
Original Article
A recent tweet by the official Deadly Boss Mods Twitter account has confirmed that the recent API changes have a more significant impact than players may have initially believed.
An hour ago blizzard put out a hotfix to disable apis used for interact distance between players. As such, the range checker will no longer be possible and will be deleted from DBM shortly.
— ⏱Deadly Boss Mods™⏱ (@deadlybossmods) November 16, 2023
Several bosses also used distance calculations to filter warnings, this will no longer be…
This tweet confirms that as a result, the range checker function of Deadly Boss Mods, and certainly similar addons such as BigWigs will no longer be functional, and in DBM’s case, removed entirely. This will be the case for both Dragonflight and all variants of Classic.
Yes. Blizzard has confirmed they are gutting classic range abilities too.
— ⏱Deadly Boss Mods™⏱ (@deadlybossmods) November 17, 2023
This is a significant change, as a lot of guilds rely on this feature for bosses such as Saurfang, where space is tight and failure to remain spread can have a significant impact on the fight’s difficulty.
The APIs responsible for range checking, CheckInteractDistance, and IsItemInRange have been available since the early days of World of Warcraft, and an integral API to many guild strategies. In the case of Dragonflight, this was dropped as a hotfix in the middle of the Race to World First, with no warning. This is a fairly big bomb to drop on the guilds that had incorporated it into their strategy.
Restricting CheckInteractDistance and IsItemInRange is a massively disruptive change to be doing in a hotfix client build, especially during the race
— WeakAuras (@WeakAuras) November 16, 2023
and with no warnings
We can expect this to also have some impact on the coming Season of Discovery, though the boss fights may be designed with this restriction in mind.