Blizzard's Goals with Addons
While the disarmament of addons started without clear goals set by Blizzard, Ion Hazzikostas and the WoW UI team have now made multiple public comments on the goals and direction of the addon disarmament:
Initial Announcement (April 30th, 2025)
Midnight Confirmation in Interview (October 1st, 2025)
No Exclusive Functionality (November 5th, 2025)
Public Announcement (November 13th, 2025)
WoW Ui Discord Announcement (November 13th, 2025)
There appears to be one main goal from these posts from the addon disarmament: preventing addons from providing a competitive advantage in combat.
"The overarching goal of the changes in Midnight is to level the playing field and do what we can to make it so that while addons can still thoroughly personalize your experience, they aren't giving you an objective competitive advantage over people using the base UI. it's not that we view a spoken countdown as a form of automation or as inherently problematic; rather, we feel that it would be inappropriate to allow only addon users to have that functionality."
"Ion covers this subject in much more detail in his post, but perhaps the simplest way to express the overall philosophy of this project is: Addons should not be able to provide a competitive advantage in combat. While preventing addons from being able to trivialize encounter mechanics is certainly part of this goal, that isn't the entirety of the goal. Any time a plurality of players agrees that a certain addon is required to perform competitively in end game content or with a certain spec, that is a problem. While we have no issue with addons customizing how combat information we show in our UI is presented to players (whether for accessibility or personal preference reasons), players should never feel like they are at a competitive disadvantage if they choose not to use an addon.
Available Addons
As we quickly approach the Midnight Pre-Patch and ultimately Midnight, has Blizzard accomplished this goal? Absolutely not.
Let's go through some of the most egregious examples of how things haven't changed. Many addons that are "overpowered" continue to exist, and are just more frustrating to use. The only things that are fully gone are dynamic assignments, and everything else remains in a mostly accurate way. Many of the same uses of addons can be used by hard coding timers and durations.
Addons are here to stay and many players will likely be continuing to use them in Midnight for a competitive advantage. Computation addons are very dead though and likely not possible without exploits.
Reminder Addons
Reminder addons are back in action, and almost no different than before. What you could do with Method Raid Tools before and in-combat announcement addon like Kaze's MRT Timers, you can do the same with one of a couple new addons developed for Midnight. Addon support for Reminder addons is continuing, and aided by development of Viserio Cooldowns which allows you to copy a note into the game.
Almost nothing is changing on this front, and healers who don't like setting up a note beforehand, and then having an addon tell you in game are likely going to be solely disappointed. Want a reminder to press a defensive or hold your offensive CD to save it? You can still do all this and more in Midnight. One of the addons that some raid groups will be requiring is Northern Sky Raid Tools which has this functionality and you can see a demo in a video and screenshot below.
It's no secret that having reminders will improve your combat performance, and the default UI definitely doesn't have this type of reminder system.
Reminder Assignments
Assignment "Weakauras" are back, but they are a little different. Hard-coding reminders are the new "assignments" in Midnight, as the current dynamic assignments are very dead and these can remind you of important times to "soak", based on pre-set assignments. Coded by Reloe, Northern Sky Raid Tools, outlines a lot of these assignments for the upcoming raids in his video. These assignments work similar to reminders and can tell you to "Soak Now", or "Go to X".
Assignment reminders for bosses are going to continue, so instead of a Weakaura Pack, your guild will likely ask you to pick up a new set of addons instead. With the philosophy change seen in Season 1 of Midnight, there's not many dynamic assignments, which means these types of assignment reminders even more useful.
As examples from this tier, reminder assignments would help with:
Dimensius' Devour Assignments in Phase 3
Nexus King's "Go to Left/Right on Phase 2
Soul Hunters' "Soak Ire from Person"
Araz's "Soak Now" or "CC Now"
... and so on
Reminder assignments will not be able to directly assign:
Dimensius' Phase 1 Gravity Assignment (Front/Back)
Fractillus' Assignments (Lanes)
Soul Hunters' Intermission Assignments (Positions)
However, there are ways that you could use reminders to help with some of them, such as reminding all players where Nexus King's stars drop in Phase 3, but it would show every time, even when you don't have the star itself.
Addition Boss Help
There are other aspects that are not directly related to reminders, but just showing information in a different way that makes it more easily digestible. Each of the 6 adds on a Mythic boss has between 0 to 5 stacks of a buff that shields them. When one add is interrupted, the rest lose one stack. This means that you're supposed to interrupt all the adds in an order and this addon is definitely very good for identifying that order.
Completely Custom Boss Mods
One of the most important addons in raiding and Mythic+ has been Boss Mods -- Deadly Boss Mods and Big Wigs. With the addon changes coming in Midnight, Blizzard has added in a default version of boss mods to the base UI. This version contains a timeline version of boss mods, and does not contain any options for bars, if you prefer them. Blizzard has mentioned that players can get bars back by installing addons which both Big Wigs and DBM support. With the timers in boss mods containing secret values, boss mods by default should not be able to filter out spells or timers, rename spells or change the position of individual timers.
However, with addon reminders, players are able to create their own timers from scratch. This allows players to add any custom timers, sounds and rename any abilities as long as they know the boss script. The only hurdle that makes this difficult is for bosses with multiple phases, as if you don't push at the exact time you code for, your timers will be permanently off. Players have found a workaround, and that is the ability to track when Blizzard sends new timers to their timeline. While boss mods are not able to track what timers got sent by the server, addons are able to ping and identify when a payload of new timers are being sent -- and when are new timers being sent? On a Phase transition and can adjust timers dynamically.
Because of this, it's likely that we will see completely standalone boss mods that do not use Blizzard's timeline as a baseline. This allows for more customization on sounds, renaming abilities, placement of alerts, and the ability to filter out specific abilities. This customization makes things a very clear advantage over the boss UI and timeline tool, and as of right now it's looking like players will have the exact same functionality as before.
Colored Nameplates
Color coding nameplates are back in Midnight, though in a slightly different way. Obviously, color coding nameplates are not possible in the base UI, despite the UI updates, so this is a clear advantage. Players will no longer be able to code nameplate color based on NPC ID, but based on different general criteria. These changes still allow players to identify important mobs to interrupt, which is a clear advantage in Mythic+.
Additional Spell / Item Tracking
While Weakauras are being removed in Midnight, players have found a special way to track the cooldowns of their own items and spells in a Weakauras-like way, especially for a item/spell that is not tracked by the Cooldown Manager. Take your 5 minute potion cooldown, or trinkets for example -- if you wanted to track the cooldown of this, there is no way to do this using the default cooldown manager.
Players have discovered that there is a way to hard-code around this limitation, as addons can see when you cast a personal spell or item. If you know that your trinket has a 2 minutes cooldown, or your potion has a 5 minutes long cooldown, you can start a hard-coded timer of that length with an icon which acts a pseudo-Weakaura. This should work in 99% of cases, except for things like Cooldown Reduction or Slow/Fast Time mechanics are put into play. This is clearly something that is not available in the base UI, with no other way to track items, and spells not in the Cooldown Manager.
As of this time, there are a couple of these standalone addons in development to my knowledge, but they are not completely released at this time.
Targeting Spells
One of the improvements that has come out recently is Targeted Spells. This addon isn't as advantageous as the rest, but the goal of this addon is to make players aware of when they are targeted by a spell. In Midnight Pre-Patch, players who are targeted by a spell can automatically receive a TTS alert with the base-UI. This addon improves on this functionality, giving players a better and more customizable way to know when spells are on you with the removal of Weakauras.
