Blizzard will disable the minimap addon technique that raid modules have used throughout The Venomous Abyss, the studio said in the WoW UI Discord. Wowhead reported the announcement, noting that the change is coming as a hotfix rather than waiting for an upcoming patch, and that it is not yet known when it will reach the game.
The technique works off the API for minimap rotation. Because the compass turns with the player, an addon can swap in a custom compass texture and make arrows or lines appear to sit in the game world, which authors used to build direction-finding modules for boss mechanics. Wowhead, which had already covered the addition of the modules, said the approach has produced tools for Vashnik, Sszorak and Ula'tek in The Venomous Abyss, as well as for the Delve boss Azta're.
What the hotfix changes
Blizzard set the restrictions out in the WoW UI Discord. They apply only while a player is inside an instance and has the rotateMinimap CVar enabled; outside those two conditions the compass is unaffected.
We are working on a hotfix for 12.1.0 to prevent custom minimap compass assets from being used to display mechanic-solving cues. Compass rotation can make custom assets such as arrows or lines appear to exist in the game world.
- Addons can no longer configure MinimapCompassTexture with a custom asset or an override supplied as a loose file. Replacements will be ignored, and the texture resets to the standard game-provided asset once the restrictions take effect.
- Addons can no longer call GetRotation, SetTexture, SetAtlas or SetSVG on MinimapCompassTexture. Attempts to do so will produce a Lua error.
Wowhead listed the modules that stop working once the hotfix lands: Vashnik aiming lines on Mythic difficulty, the Sszorak marker map, Ula'tek aiming lines on Mythic, and Ula'tek intermission directions on Mythic. The site said losing them can make some of the bosses slightly harder.