WeakAuras has recently announced that they "do not expect to release a WeakAuras version for Midnight," after reviewing the impact of the Addon API in Midnight. After Blizzard confirmed that their philosophy removes all combat-related addons in end-game content, the WeakAuras team has been hard at work evaluating what could be done.
Unfortunately, it looks like the decision has been made to end the project. You can see the intro of the statement below, but there are also Personal Notes on the post itself from each member of the team.
Thank you to the whole Weakauras team for creating an addon that so many WoW players used over many many years.
Blizzard has recently published the technical details of the planned API restrictions, granted us access to the alpha to test them out, and elaborated on their design philosophy. This has allowed us to evaluate the impact of these changes on WeakAuras. The changes are unfortunately much more extensive than expected.
It's important to note that these changes are not final and will evolve over the course of the alpha. However, given Blizzard’s stated philosophy, it seems highly unlikely that the core restrictions will be meaningfully reversed.
*As it stands, we do not expect to release a WeakAuras version for Midnight.*
We will continue to support WeakAuras for Classic.
The restrictions are so severe that core functionality, such as Conditions or Actions, or having multiple triggers in one aura or a cloning trigger, would become impossible. Producing a stripped-down version of WeakAuras without these features would require several months of refactoring. The result would be a barely recognizable version. Given that, we have made the difficult decision not to create a WeakAuras version for Midnight.
These changes obviously do not affect just WeakAuras. While we can’t speak for other addon developers, we know that many combat-related addons, such as nameplates, damage meters and unit frames will face similar challenges and may take the same approach. Also these changes don't just affect combat related addons, but also severely limit for example chat addons.
Regrettably, Blizzard has downplayed both the scope and timing of these changes in past statements. Back in April, these restrictions were supposed to come at "the end of the process" and would not affect "most add-ons."
Ion Hazzikostas in that interview said:
"And I think that some of that gets back to us knowing that we need to really ease into this, that any world where we just kind of rip the band-aid off, and say alright have fun. We are in a new world. As opposed to, you know building up more built-in functionality, starting to have clearer visuals, simplify some mechanics."
Well, the plan now is to rip the band-aid off, so that does not leave us with much choice other than closing shop.
We would like to thank each and everyone of you for your continuous support over the many years. We would not be here without you.
We also want to thank the many other contributors we had over the years as well es our Discord crew that keeps helping our users around the clock.
This has been a very tough situation for us. We're sad, we're mad, a lot of feelings. We just hope Blizzard reconsiders a few things and we can keep this going.
The WeakAuras Team
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Many players use WeakAuras outside of combat for things like Skyriding or Rare farming and it'll be sad to see them go. There are a couple of things that the Weakauras team has mentioned that would make them reconsider in their post.
What would make us reconsider?
There are a few things we can think of:
1. The ability to compute new secrets
- To go into the technical details a bit, combat state APIs no longer directly return information addons can use, but rather return "secret" values, which can be piped into other APIs that interpret those secrets to display combat state to the user without exposing it to the addon itself. You might have heard of private auras before, and secret values can be considered as an extension of that to the entire combat state.
- Blizzard maintains that addons don't necessarily need to see all that information, and for WeakAuras we'd agree, if addons could compute new secret values. As an example, if it were possible to do things like combine the secret "is the ability Icy Veins on cooldown" and the secret "is the buff Icy Veins not active on the player" could be combined into the secret "is the buff Icy Veins not active on the player AND is the ability Icy Veins on cooldown", then we could retain much of the utility of WeakAuras.
- Unfortunately, we did already ask about that, and it was indicated to us that it's very likely policy that Blizzard doesn't want exactly this kind of power in addons' hands. Best as we can tell, this is a philosophical stance along the lines of players shouldn't need addons to fill gaps in the information the game gives them, and Blizzard seems like they want to ensure that is the case by making it impossible for addons to fix those kinds of mistakes. Put that way, we almost love the change, but it does put WeakAuras in a weird spot, since "fixing gaps in information" was our bread and butter.
2. Revert this change for personal combat state only
- Before this week, we had assumed that personal combat state (so, your own buffs, cooldowns, resources, etc.) would still be available, and that WeakAuras would converge into something like a hyper-customizable Cooldown Manager. We think this is still just about plausible, and while it would be a severe reduction in our capacity compared to before Midnight, we would still be willing to maintain the addon in this scenario.
3. Revert this change entirely
- Yeah, we don't think this is likely. "Addons gone" is all but a flagship feature of Midnight at this point; those are the breaks.
