We've all accepted this, but why is modern WoW's combat text still stuck in 2004?
I'd like to bring up something that I feel has been completely overlooked: Combat Text. Blizzard restricted the APIs that combat addons relied on, and since then we've basically lost the ability to customize Combat Text. The weird part is unlike damage meters, Blizzard never replaced it with anything ...
Im attaching screenshots of different combat texts - Just look at the default! It has barely changed in DECADES. It's still just big yellow numbers flying all over the screen, like in Vanilla. During bigger pulls it turns into complete visual clutter, and it's hard to tell what actually hit, what was just a dot tick, or where is trinket proc and where is a filler spell.
Combat text literally looks worse than it had been for years - we could customise it, now we cant. Why is nobody talking about this? Why is this still not in dev interviews?
Before 12.0 combat text was customisable, and it served an important purpose - making the gameplay feel more impactful and informative!
Mik's Scrolling Battle Text and Nameplate Scrolling Combat Text (and many others!) weren't just making things prettier, they made combat much easier to read and WAY MORE satisfying! Now that customization is gone and we cant enjoy the combat as much.
Yes there are some players that are ok with the current text. There are some, who prefer no combat text at all, as it distracts them. Totally fair, not asking to force anything onto them. But there are still a lot of players that would appreciate and enjoy an option of customisation, that used to be available for everyone for years.
I'm not calling Blizzard to revert the API restrictions. But loosening them a bit to an extent where Combat Text is customisable again would be a great start! Or maybe offer some of that functionality as baseline and out of the box.
I believe the community would be happy if they give us a modern built-in Combat Text system, or expose enough safe API for addons authors to build one again.
Because right now it feels like we lost something genuinely better, and got nothing in return.
Posted Jul 30, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC