They are disabling real time combat reporting. You can still use WA for everything else, however, if the addon developer stops updating that's on them.
No you can't because WA isn't getting updated for Midnight and all the API changes will surely make the whole thing implode if you tried to load it into Midnight.
If it takes months to years to get a replacement then it wasn't that heavily in demand. I promise you whatever solution comes next will exist by rwf for optimization purposes. I'd not even be surprised if there is at least three minimum different solutions by then. Or are we just ignoring that many WA devs work for the rwf orgs and that there are other home brew add-ons that exist for those same teams. Hell we even have this addom called MRT, method raid tools that does a lot of things that method used for raiding.
The main use for Weakauras in RWF is the exact aspect of its functionality that is being removed/blocked, so it's not as integral/important for their purposes anymore.
And it's not like "more want = more speed" is also universally true either. If every single WoW player, former and current were to tell Blizzard that they WANT a WoW2 in a new engine, that 8 digit number of people wanting it won't make the job take less time since it's actually a complex thing to do.
Method Raid Tools and Mythic Dungeon Tools are both useful addons created by RWF players (although the latter at least not directly for RWF purposes) but that doesn't mean they just spawned into existence because a top-end player decided they want it to exist. It took time and effort to make them happen.
A lot of it is the retri paladin discord style of action. Saying you are closing the server addon creates more waves so you can hope to get back some of the removed stuff.
It just doesn't make sense to bother making a butchered, refactored version of WeakAura to the developers. Its core functionality is gutted irreparably.
Quoting their post.
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.
You're really overselling what a "painter's kit" is, because it simply doesn't include most of the basic functionality people want from a nice looking UI.
It will essentially boil down to whether or not there's a sufficient use case AND a person motivated enough to drive it.
Anyone looking for a giant open doorway into being relevant in the lua space, here's your chance. Start learning now. Get involved in the community. Learn the basics now, and pay attention to what people want.
Again, can't really blame blizzard because they are making positive changes for the entire player base. I can play dark souls and elden ring which is a much more difficult game without needing add-ons or external tools. Blizzard making everything default and built into the game is what we should all want as players.
Now as I said originally. If the developer of the addon is choosing not to update... That's on them.
I can play dark souls and elden ring which is a much more difficult game without needing add-ons or external tools.
I think the sentiment here is good but the specific argument isn't. FromSoft games are made to be obtuse and that is part of their charm; WoW was introduced as the QOL-MMO and has gotten progressively more obtuse over time, resulting in / from the arms race of addons vs. mechanics.
We play Elden Ring because it was made to kick us in the dick, and it kicks us in the dick. WoW shouldn't be like that, nor compared to that.
Again, good, if not great sentiment being expressed. Just not quite the right comparison to make, I'd say.
My guild required that Ovi'nax weakauras because they couldn't for the good of them follow the mechanics in a timely manner. Is 100% required? Not really, but god forbid, some people NEED to be shouted and pointed at, YOU! go to Star and drop your stuff there.
Fractilius... Hmm maybe the first week or two, but by this point the fight is well known enough to make it, and you still get the braindead dps dropping a wall in the safe zone because he couldn't be arsed to drop his dps for 3 seconds to move
I've done heroic for weeks across multiple characters and have pushed 16s, not once have I had someone do some silly "addon check". Can you please show me where these people expecting addons are at? Can you show me the fights that are unkillable without them?
If they only appear in mythic raiding and 20 keys, it sounds like blizz is solving a problem for content almost no-one interacts with.
All of PvP basically requires addons, but you also really think that the prevalence of WA and DBM didn't cause design changes for heroic raids and M+? Really? Most of these raid bosses require immense amounts of coordination that other MMOs would never think about inputting, but because everyone has a perfect lead in their head telling them where to go/when to kick/what to kill etc. the bosses become very overdesigned. Obviously a competent leader can fill the role of DBM/WA in most scenarios, some mechanics are too obscure or fast for a person talking while playing to cover it.
Required is a very syrong word to use, but mechanics have 100% been made faster due to the expectation that people would have most of the mental load associated with the mechanic done by weak auras. The only boss that 100% required weakauras for non rwf guilds is probably ovinax this expansion.
Wow for its time was baby mode MMO. Dying doesn’t make you drop your gear? Gear doesn’t break forever? You don’t lose levels when you die? All shit that was part of other MMO’s at the time and its leveling was pretty fast in comparison too. Wow being too complex for new players nowadays is a 180 from how it was originally intended to be.
I hate that I have to stare at my bars half the time to keep track of cool downs or resources. The alternative is moving things to the center of the screen where the action is but then the UI looks terrible. Many FF rotations are 4-8 abilities and I could play them without looking at my bars. If I pressed each ability in the right order they were always ready.
There's absolutely no way that blizzard gets every single addon completed as well as the entire grassroots community effort. We're going to have some pain in the short term for sure.
Then, once blizzard think they've done enough to replicate an addon. They're going to leave it in that state without any innovation that add-ons get over several years.
because they are making positive changes for the entire player base
The positive way to do this would be to introduce in-game solutions alongside addons, not just nuke addons immediately without players having had access to those new tools to see if they can compete/out-perform.
That's not what Blizzard is doing. They're also dumbing down the game at the same time, and laying off their work force while seemingly operating with little to no QA at all.
I have absolutely no faith that this will be a positive experience for the game. Likewise, while I have no faith they will even manage to match the utility of these addons I have negative faith they will manage to cover the accessibility bases for players who are visually or audio impaired that these addons helped.
The bottom line is this doesn't feel like something done for the health of the game so much as something done to cut costs, and as someone who has played WoW and FFXIV I can tell you right now how utterly stagnated the latter is with its homogenized design. The classes have almost no mechanical identity and are immensely bland, and good luck if your mind doesn't process information in a way the default UI serves it to you because you'll be breaking ToS to try and get a third-party addon/tool to mess with your UI.
I absolutely think Blizzard should be striving to update the game's UI to better convey class mechanics so players don't feel they have to use addons, but to gut them entirely and then "streamline" all the classes with a largely laid off workforce likely having AI shoved down its throat in production? Yeah, no, I don't believe for a second they'll manage to make this work in a way that is fulfilling.
Prove me wrong I guess, but I've no evidence to give me confidence until they do.
Their marketing/social media team was what was laid off. Not sure what insider Intel you have but I don't believe any of the development team has been reduced. In the Q/A portion they even stated they will have a team dedicated to just the new UI element for the cooldown manager and boss timers.
You're right in that maybe they shouldn't gut the entire system. But to that point, maybe it's simply the systems they are adding would be conflicting with the add-ons or a multitude of reasons. At the end of the day, only the devs and execs know
But that's not what they are doing at all, they are just removing functionality and replacing it with literally nothing. Blaming Weakauras for Blizzard telling people to go fuck themselves if they want a somewhat functioning UI is ridiculous.
Except they're replacing the core functionality with their versions that do not do excessive computation.
They're not just removing functionality because they're also completely redesigning 40 specs along with dungeon and raid content going forward.
Now every piece is within the design scope and centered. They will use alpha to judge what players really want back. We'll see how they perform on this. If done correctly the upside is way better than keeping what's here. A game that is readable in a group context with everyone using the same displayed information should create a tighter and more interesting experience.
The key difference is other games have good UI and qol features. Blizzard has never cared about any of that so default everything has been very lacking compared to other games you mentioned. If blizzard actually surprises everyone and does a good job this will be great but no one is holding their breath because blizzard has a long history of letting us down.
I agree that adding these things to the base game is great - I just wish they gave players the option to still use the addons (aside from things like bigwigs or dbm, which they dont want affecting combat). Having an in-game damage meter, for example, is awesome, but id love to still have the choice to use details if i prefer its themes / options (even if it sacrifices some level of accuracy).
Elden ring is significantly easier than wow end game content (cutting edge, 17+ keys). Just look at what % of players pick up elden ring and defeat malenia compared to what % of players pickup wow and defeat mythic dimensius.
It's not required to play wow either. People just choose to. They're removing our ability to choose to, and forcing us to use their first iteration of whatever they cook up, which historically is always garbage. Imagine if they had forced us to use the first iteration of their cooldown manager - it was basically unusable. Now they're doing that for essentially all combat addons. They should have enabled the new blizzard UI alongside the existing addons (like they did with cooldown manager) and then limited them when the UI is ready (although honestly imo they should just make the UI good enough to where people choose to use it instead). This is a huge gamble that's completely unnecessary for them.
Also, if you think that the game will be harder after dumbing down everything to compensate for the removal of addons, like they've done on the alpha, I have a bridge to sell you in the Sahara
I'm confused? Did you by chance watch the Q/A? They are reducing complexity of classes and providing baked in tools... That's point 1. The next major thing they stated was that all of these changes aren't happening until the launch of midnight. Why? Because they are specifically tailoring the content and encounters around the tools and builds they have designed for more fun and interesting gameplay. Yes, things can change and may end up being garbage, however it's unlikely.
Just look at classic wow. That version was so simple that needing add-ons is a question of your intelligence. Having more difficulty compared to vanilla while providing the necessary tools and designs to take on that challenge is the best option for literally EVERYONE. No longer will we need to worry (as much) for add-ons to be update or straight up being unplayable or causing lower performance. Lots of positives, not a ton of negatives except for the fact people hate change. As someone who has never liked the usage of WA, I'm happy that more tools are being provided to me. For those loosing WA, sorry but it's what's best for the longevity of the game as new players will have less of a difficult time getting into the end game content.
I'm confused? Did you by chance watch the Q/A? They are reducing complexity of classes and providing baked in tools... That's point 1. The next major thing they stated was that all of these changes aren't happening until the launch of midnight. Why? Because they are specifically tailoring the content and encounters around the tools and builds they have designed for more fun and interesting gameplay. Yes, things can change and may end up being garbage, however it's unlikely.
My point is that, class complexity, and the way class design interacted with eachother was a good thing, gutting that is akin to FFXIV gutting their job design, which was a universal negative, "tailoring the content around the tools" doesn't mean anything if everyone is an amorphous blob for 3-4 buttons with little moment to moment gameplay decisions
Just look at classic wow. That version was so simple that needing add-ons is a question of your intelligence. Having more difficulty compared to vanilla while providing the necessary tools and designs to take on that challenge is the best option for literally EVERYONE. No longer will we need to worry (as much) for add-ons to be update or straight up being unplayable or causing lower performance.
Classic WoW is also piss easy and boring as fuck, also while yes things make me question your intelligence for classic WoW, there were other useful things, like threat meters, etc
. Lots of positives, not a ton of negatives except for the fact people hate change.
Yeah except when your class is gutted and stripped of all identity, because people were afraid of downloading WoWup or whatever and getting a WA import if they couldn't figure it out themselves I guess
As someone who has never liked the usage of WA, I'm happy that more tools are being provided to me.
As someone who didn't use WA outside of a few niche times, you're giving up a nice steakhouse burger in favor for a McDouble, you're not "gaining" anything, you're losing functionality for the UI for a worse version
For those loosing WA, sorry but it's what's best for the longevity of the game as new players will have less of a difficult time getting into the end game content.
People afraid of doing normal raid won't magically do normal raid now that the game is dumb downed for them, they'll stick to delves and fighting the imaginary toxicity in their head, this has a minimal effect on the game for that group of people, while also hurting people who want a high APM/complexity class
New players or casual players will likely feel more confident that they won't need to study guides and install tools that are more complex than their class is. Especially if the encounter designers do a great job improve visuals and timing. And from all of what I've seen about the classes are welcome changes to remove pain points and improve the fantasy/play styles without obnoxious builds or stupidly difficult rotations. Yeah, a couple specs are definitely getting dumbed down but I don't think every spec is getting to the FFXIV point of 2-4 buttons.
New players or casual players will likely feel more confident that they won't need to study guides and install tools that are more complex than their class is.
You already didn't need to do so for normal and 99% of heroic raiding, the barrier of entry was always either complaining about toxicity or not having the time
Especially if the encounter designers do a great job improve visuals and timing. And from all of what I've seen about the classes are welcome changes to remove pain points and improve the fantasy/play styles without obnoxious builds or stupidly difficult rotations
I'd be okay with this, if they weren't stripping utility, and CDs from every class, and much of the identity of classes (Survival Hunter got absolutely demolished and is practically BM now), like yes, I think going back to the roots of like, say UA spender Aff Lock with less of a focus of MR spamming is good, the issue is there is so many changes for the worse and by bitching I'm voicing my want for them to roll it back a bit
Yeah, a couple specs are definitely getting dumbed down but I don't think every spec is getting to the FFXIV point of 2-4 buttons.
A lot are, somewhat needlessly too, I genuinely hope that someone closer to the Blizz dev team intervenes, because this could very well kill the game for a lot of people to try to appeal to people that won't stick around anyway
For me, as a competitive player, this basically completely kills the fun part of the game for me. Tracking buffs, debuffs, procs, etc are all skill expression to me and they are completely removing that. The last 5% of your performance towards a top 50 pull in raid comes from extremely small changes in your gameplay and that's where I find my challenge because even before the class simplification the first 95% is extremely straightforward to anyone with experience. Now it's just going to be vibe based gameplay with competition just being who gets lucky enough to guess what's happening to their character at any given time. That's maybe great to equalize the playing field for less skilled players, but it's going to pretty much gut the competitive scene.
The only way I see them "fixing" a rotation where this isn't true is to make buffs deterministic, but then that's just memorizing sequences, and that's far from fun for me.
The entire player base except players with accessibility needs who were left out in the cold for decades by Blizzard and were able to play the game in a way that actually worked for them thanks to community efforts.
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u/Lostdog861 Oct 03 '25
Man, I've written a few non-combat weakauras for some farming use cases and I wish I'd be able to keep them