Isn't Weakauras Dead? M33kauras, a fork of Weakauras, is significantly less powerful with the addon changes, but it can still do certain things. Read up more on M33kauras here.
Private Aura Dispels
Over 2 months ago, when Season 1 first launched, the community noticed a rather large problem with the implementation of Private Auras and the addon changes. When something needed to be dispelled AND the debuff was a Private Aura, the raid frames would not show the typical colored border that typically accompanies a dispel. Because of this, it made finding dispels on raid frames very difficult, especially without a filter.
Because of this feedback, Blizzard removed a bunch of dispellable debuffs from being Private Auras, allowing healers to see the glow on their raid frames again. However, removing the Private Aura flag from these debuffs allowed addons to see and make computational decisions based on them, if someone desired.
Well someone desired because, in addition to this change, Blizzard buffed Lightblinded Vanguard for the Race to World First and made World First Guilds deal with EIGHT debuffs at a time. The Avenger's Shield debuff hits very hard and basically needs to be dispelled immediately, and Blizzard buffed the boss to require 8 coordinated dispels. This is an absolutely absurd requirement and getting eight people to coordinate dispelling the correct targets with minimal overlaps is very difficult, so of course a computational solution was made. This was nerfed shortly after, but the addon and aura were already made, so even though there were only 4 dispels now, why would raid teams not use it to coordinate dispels and make it easier?
Goodbye Dispel Weakaura
On Wednesday night, a hotfix was pushed to live servers which seems to revert Dispels being removed from Private Auras, adding them back to the Private Aura system.
The following spells are now Private Auras (again):
Blinding Light
Rending Tear
Fearsome Cry
Avenger's Shield
Blisterburst
Tail Lash
Black Miasma
The only relevant one here is the Lightblinded Vanguard's Avenger Shield, and this means that the Lightblinded Vanguard Dispel Weakaura no longer works. Healers will need to focus on making sure to get dispels, which might cost a few extra globals if you target same person as someone else. One of the easiest ways to coordinate this is for players to assign rough positions in raid groups, with one healer targeting the person highest in raid frames, one healer targeting the person lowest in raid frames and then filling in the gaps after. You can also have extra dispels from Warlock's Imp, Mass Dispel, and Stoneform.
Why Now?
It's unclear why exactly they decided to make this change on a Wednesday night. One thing to mention is that around 12.0.5, the default raid frames seem to have been updated and now correctly show the dispel glow colors on Private Aura dispels. Because of this, it's possible that Blizzard is resecuring these debuffs as part of their original goal but the damage of the removal of Private Auras and the comeback of a computational addon has already been done for this tier with the Hall of Fames for Season 1 already being closed.
Now that healer dispels shouldn't be an issue going forwards with any new Private Auras (if they stick around in Season 2), it's likely we'll see this problem again, but it's definitely interesting that this hotfix went in this week and not even on the Weekly Reset.
