Blizzard shuts down hopes for a major quality-of-life change in WoW SoD phase 2

World of Warcraft Classic Season of Discovery phase two is just around the corner. While fans are patiently preparing for it to drop, assistant lead WoW Classic designer Tim Jones and senior game producer Josh Greenfield revealed a major quality-of-life change won’t be coming in phase two.

During an interview with WoW content creator Josh “Countdown” Corbett on Feb. 5, first noted by Wowhead, Josh Greenfield announced that the nameplate distance won’t be increased to 41 yards in phase two.

“There’s also a couple of things in there like the 41-yard nameplate distance; we kinda take a little exception to calling that a quality-of-life change. That’s actually objectively a major systemic gameplay change […] If you go into a cave, for example, a multi-level cave, and you have a 41-yard nameplate distance that drastically impacts the available information to you,” Greenfield explains.

But not all hope is lost. The senior game producer said the devs might implement this change further down the road. Once they increase nameplate distance range to 41 yards, they “probably won’t be able to unmake it,” and the Classic dev team needs to be very careful about changes that impact gameplay. Fans have been crying out for this quality-of-life update for a while now, especially ranged specs like Marksmanship Hunters and Frost Mages. Many players were hoping the change would arrive with the phase two patch, but we’ll have to hold on a while longer.

If you’re unfamiliar with nameplate distance in WoW Classic, I’ll quickly explain. It’s the range from which you can see creatures’ nameplates (including their name and health bar) in Azeroth. This gives you more control in combat, as you can easily spot enemies from a greater distance and keep track of their health and position. In WoW Classic, nameplate distance is only 20 yards, but the standard range of many spells (like Blizzard for Mages) is 30 yards. So, you often can’t see enemies’ health bars even though you need to keep them at bay. Hopefully Blizzard will increase the nameplate distance for phase three.