There has been a lot of back and forth on the addon apocalypse in Midnight. Blizzard stated they’d be tuning the extent of their addon functionality limitations as they go. There have also been many instances of them enabling certain features they had previously locked off. The biggest effect the limitations have had in the addon community is that WeakAuras stated they would not be continuing development in Midnight.
Still No WeakAuras in Midnight
Today, we have another statement from the WeakAuras team. They responded to recent changes as well as comments from Blizzard on how they were going to loosen the limits further. The main message is that they are sticking to their decision not to continue development in the next expansion. Their stance is that the changes are technically fundamentally incompatible with WeakAuras. They also comment on their finances and other reasons players have been assuming for the development cancellation. There’s also information on the hidden nature of NPC and player information. Combat chat messages sent by addons and how they affect aura assignment also get discussed.
You can read the full details below, or over on the WeakAuras Pateron.
The Statement
Now that the Midnight release is announced, we wanted to give an update on our plans for Midnight.
As mentioned earlier, we don’t currently plan to release a WeakAuras version for Midnight.
We are discontinuing support primarily because the “secret values” concept, when applied to one’s own combat state (i.e. personal buffs, resources and cooldowns) greatly limits a player’s power to represent their combat state how they wish. It’s to the point that as of the time of this post, it’s impractical to replicate the functionality of the builtin Cooldown Manager with an addon.
We’ve seen some people assert that Blizzard has loosened these restrictions significantly, but sadly the changes they have made don’t really pass muster. The changes they have made generally either accommodate simple features (e.g. there exists a method to interpolate between colors using a secret number, which allows coloring unit frames red if they’re low hp), are (possibly) temporary concessions in the service of making a functional product in time for Midnight (secondary resources like holy power & stagger are declassified), or were all but impossible to fully hide from an addon (personal spell casts (but not cooldowns!)). None of these indicate any kind of significant walkback in our opinion.
We consider tracking your own combat state the core functionality of WeakAuras. While technically we could release a WeakAuras version without triggers for your own cooldown, buffs, health, primary power etc, a WeakAuras version that only consists of e.g. Reputation and Experience triggers is nearly useless.
It’s a purely technical issue, a tool like WeakAuras is fundamentally incompatible with Blizzard’s vision for addons.
We’ve heard feedback that some people would want WeakAuras to exist as a vehicle for distributing mini addons. We sympathize, but frankly the utility of WeakAuras in that role is due to its ubiquity. Without that, we doubt this role has much of a future either.
Since we’ve seen some people speculating, we’ll address a few common misconceptions:
- No, this has nothing to do with money. Our Patreon monthly income is public, it’s around $500. There are a few other income sources, e.g. CurseForge and Wago, but it’s not a very significant amount of money for any of us.
- No, this isn’t about hurt egos.
- No, this isn’t related to encounter design.
There are three largely unrelated changes happening simultaneously. The first change disrupts automated assignment auras by limiting addons’ ability to send and receive in combat chat messages.
This change alone only impacts chat addons and encounter assignment auras. If that were the extent of the changes, most addons would remain unaffected.
The second change targets Mythic+ by hiding NPC identities, (de)buffs and spell casts for nameplates, which is the core selling point of nameplate addons.
The third change is hiding your own personal combat state from addons. This is the change that affects most addons, like WeakAuras, but also e.g. ElvUI and ConsolePort.
Blizzard has the technology to add restrictions on a per-API basis, per unit and on a per spell basis. They can choose which of those 3 areas they want to restrict independently.
For the third change, Blizzard has given this reason: “Addons should not be able to provide a competitive advantage in combat.” This is the root cause of the “addon apocalypse”, and it’s unrelated to encounter design.
Essentially, it seems Blizzard views rotation helpers and WeakAuras HUDs as so detrimental to class design that they’re willing to break a lot of addons to eliminate them. Obviously people can disagree, whether that was a real problem that needed solving and whether it is worth breaking so many addons. In our opinion, Blizzard has poorly communicated these changes, often conflating them and waiting until late in development to reveal their full scope.
It’s clearly spelled out not in the communication to players, but in the communication to addon authors, which you can read here.
There was a recent Wowhead post that contains a paraphrased claim: “If WeakAuras existed, this mechanic could not exist”.
Hopefully, the explanation above clarifies that WeakAuras could be allowed to still track personal combat states without interfering with encounters, and thus that statement is flawed.
But the author is, in our opinion, also wrong on how the mechanic would work in an unrestricted addon world. The boss’s symbols are clearly designed to resemble world marker symbols. Thus the easy solution for that boss is to put down world markers while the boss presents the symbols. And the raider’s job, once assigned a symbol, is simply to run to their world marker.
This method is quicker and easier than any assignment WeakAura. Thus, we believe that this mechanic would play out the same way even in today’s world.
Do you think Blizzard and the WeakAuras team will find common ground before Midnight’s launch? How much will the lack of WeakAuras impact your WoW enjoyment?
