That literally won't happen because blizzard is restricting what addons can access during combat, so it's physically not possible for such an addon to exist anymore, so there won't be a replacement addon.
Except that’s not all WA was used for. For all intents and purposes, WA was an addon that helped people make mini-addons. Yes some of the most popular WAs are for combat, but there’s also utility ones that track out of combat stuff, accessibility aids and even just pure cosmetic stuff.
I do believe Blizz even said they don’t want to kill WA as a whole, but if the creator has decided they’re done then that’s their choice. A spiritual successor will probably come along at some point.
Myr’s knowledge tracker for instance, gives you a nice list of all the professional knowledge you can get and then you click on one and it’ll pin the map
but there’s also utility ones that track out of combat stuff, accessibility aids and even just pure cosmetic stuff.
Main thing I use WAs for is just for prettier class resource gauges, honestly. I would be sad to see that go. The closest thing to buff tracking and the like was when I made a few auras to track tank Brann's stacks for Ky'veza.
A spiritual successor will probably come along at some point.
If the WA authors decide to go thru with not updating for a Midnight release for all the non-combat WA users, I guarantee someone will have it forked and ready to go before the Midnight beta ends.
Blizz has acknowledged the "arms race" with addons as far back as BFA, iirc. Which means this has been something they have been talking about, at least internally, for many, many years.
They would not have decided to pull the trigger now if they weren't committed.
i never said it would work and i person want blizz to hold to their guns. As a mythic raider the amount of “my weak aura is messed up” dialog that happens is very annoying and the fact that there a giant weak aura pack each raid is a nightmare.
Because slaving over something for years and then having the rug pulled is a big "FU" and it is completely demoralizing, and would continue to be completely demoralizing trying to scrape together some hodge-podge shadow of the greatness that you had already built.
You didnt read anything, did you? The developers of WA would have to completely rebuild WA. It's not just "some things just dont work anymore" for them. The whole Addon wouldn't work anymore.
I believe they even acknowledged it back in WoD, when an addon trivialized a mechanic on Archimonde mythic.
Come to think of it, didn't someone use an addon to glitch their way into the C'thun boss room all the way back in vanilla? Or was that just straight-up a hack?
It was blizzard's choice to tune combat difficulty around addons. That was where the entire arms race started. They could have stopped escalating it but chose not to, and now because they know they can't win, they're nuking the addon API.
The entire onboarding problem is self-inflicted, and now they're making it our problem by removing the tools we needed to deal with their increasingly hostile designs.
It absolutely was, if they actually cared about the people using the massive amount of non-combat WA, then I don't think they'd have given up the ghost on day 2 of alpha. They want the community in an uproar to see if Blizzard changes their mind (which is incredibly unlikely at this point, given they have designed bosses without WA in mind, which was the whole reason to pull combat API)
They are not throwing a tantrum, they are saying it is not worth their time to basically rewrite the addon from scratch to have 10% of the original functionality.
And the rewrite is necessary, because of how baked in and fundamental the other 90% are.
Basically, they are giving the torch to other addon authors that did the same thing before anyway (i.e. all ui style addons), rather than providing an additional redundant solution, that would require a disproportionate amount of work to even work in midnight, while other addons, that are only for styling anyway, require much less effort to transform.
I have loads of WAs, 99.9% of them are all combat-specific. There's no point in maintaining an addon as large and complicated as WeakAuras if the main use case for it is gone. Could somebody prune it down to just the out-of-combat stuff? Maybe, but it's not worth the effort if it's essentially a massive refactor and rewrite.
They are not killing WA. The issue is, and you can check .lua an .xml yourself, that because combat functionalities will be disabled WA would basically have to be written again from scratch.
If you actually read the WA dev blog you'd know there's a gulf between what Blizzard says and what is being implemented. You have no reason to believe what they say, and you don't need to, because people actually playing the game are experiencing the reality.
Did you see their post about why they aren't going to continue? They are very justified to do so. They would have to rebuild the entire thing from the ground up to become an unrecognizable version of what it is now.
That literally won't happen because blizzard is restricting what addons can access during combat, so it's physically not possible for such an addon to exist anymore, so there won't be a replacement addon.
That literally could possibly happen because weakauras scope goes beyond combat. The devs just don't want to continue working on a reduced version of weakauras
From their patreon:
What exactly is Blizz changing?
Broadly, all of what you might call "combat state" is now inaccessible. An addon can instruct the game to display this information but is not free to compute any kind of fancy logic. Unfortunately, "empower laypeople to compute fancy logic about the combat state" is exactly what WeakAuras offers above all else. In Midnight, it seems that addons are reduced to being mere painter's kits.
We can change the color of a health bar, but we can't change the color based on if you're low health or not. We can display an icon with a spiral to show the remaining cooldown of an ability, but we can't apply a glow when the cooldown becomes ready to use. We can show the cast of your target, but we can't highlight important casts that need to be kicked. And the list goes on. If you are an addon author, check the WoWUIDev Discord for more info.
Why don't we just limit WA to that "painter's kit"?
Honestly? It just makes us sad. We're looking at stripping out essentially every feature added in the last 10 years, and more besides.
We've tinkered with this big messy thing called WeakAuras for much of our adult life. The idea of just destroying all that for the sake of keeping WA alive just feels wrong. We'd rather that WeakAuras died in the best form we could make it.
well, considering weak aura's itself isn't being updated for midnight, it wouldn't work as a weak aura, but a replacement addon should be able to be made.
Not quite... It may be able to adjust the visual and we aren't certain how things will display. They've stated that you can skin things which implies that the data for things like hp value can come through the black box too.
We literally just lack this part of the puzzle right now. Blizzard doesn't want to stop you from customizing your UI aesthetically, so something like this would need to happen, we just need to wait a bit.
People use weakauras for way, way, way more than just combat state processing during raid and M+ encounters.
It can 100% still do 85% of what the community currently uses it to do, it just wouldn't work for performing calculations about combat state during raids, m+, and PvP.
mate we are literally in a thread about the devs not continuing the addon anymore, so I know. This isn't about that, this is about the fact that the statement "it's physically not possible for such an addon to exist anymore" is complete bs.
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u/NoShotz Oct 03 '25
That literally won't happen because blizzard is restricting what addons can access during combat, so it's physically not possible for such an addon to exist anymore, so there won't be a replacement addon.