Private Auras
Private Auras have been a controversial system every since they were added in Dragonflight. They were recently added to most debuffs in the Season 1 Raids, as outlined in a recent Blizzard post to securely prevent addon automation involving auras. While you can argue that preventing addon automation is good for the game, this has had some severe side effects for players even outlined directly by Blizzard themselves:
Unfortunately, as Midnight Alpha & Beta progressed it became clear that relying on Secret Values alone was not going to be enough to prevent addon automation involving auras. And so, we ended up having to go in almost the exact opposite direction: we made MOST encounter debuffs private auras rather than just a select few. While this approach gave us the security we needed for Midnight Season 1, it also came with some significant downsides. Our own private aura displays don't currently have full parity with normal auras, and they aren’t supported in nameplates. On top of that they also require our encounter designers to be very diligent about flagging almost every encounter debuff as private, which is cumbersome and very easy to get wrong.
All this is to say that we are not happy with the current state of auras as they pertain to addons, and we are planning to make some large changes to them. We don't have a hard target yet for when this rework will happen, but just to ease your minds a little it definitely will NOT be in 12.0.5 or 12.0.7.
One of the major issues is that private auras don't show up the same way as normal auras, making things very difficult for players to parse at times. While it is possible to see them, it can be very difficult to see based on how a player's UI is set up, and the addons that they use.
The "Secretness" of Private Auras
Private Auras cannot be read by any addons. This means that the only way to see a debuff is to identify the icon on the frame itself. No glows, or additional effects can be applied to a raid frame that has a Private Aura attached to it. Private Auras are also sometimes shown in a different field than regular debuffs and an incorrectly set up raid frame could prevent the dispel from being shown altogether. There have been many issues with healers and Private Auras in the Season 1 raid with issues such as:
Not being able to see the debuff entirely
A glow not showing up indicating something can be dispelled
Having to identify the tiny icon in your debuff bar.
You can play a little game: here's a screenshot from the Dragons encounter from Megasett on base UI's raid frames. Quickly identify who got hit by Dread Breath so you can (pretend to) dispel them.
That being said, with the recent changes to macro to prevent workarounds for addon restrictions, the old way of using a macro to call for a dispel is very dead. That being said, the WoW community is very dedicated into getting things to work, especially when they feel like they need the information. I wouldn't be surprised to see more workarounds coming soon for healers.
Affected Abilities
These are important abilities in the Season 1 raids that need to be dispelled that are classified as a Private Aura that your healers might have trouble seeing:
Chimaerus (Heroic): Consuming Miasma
Vaelgor and Ezzorak: Dread Breath
Lightblinded Vanguard: Avenger's Shield
Crown of the Cosmos: Null Corona
These are all important dispels that healers should be able to see easily.
Community Reactions
Here are some of the reactions from the healer mains in the community:
