Weakauras
The addon Weakauras was a very well known addon across many layers of the game from end-game content, to professions, to collections. With the Midnight expansion, Weakauras announced that they will not be releasing an update for Midnight with many of the addon changes. They later updated with another statement announcing that Weakauras still has no plans for Midnight during the Beta, and now that Midnight has launched, there is still no Weakauras from the original team.
However, with the launch of Midnight, players have started to fork Weakauras, and some versions have started to come out. Weakauras recently released a statement discussing forks, and confirm that they are proudly an open source addon and forks are okay, but would prefer if WeakAuras are not used in the name.
Team WeakaurasAs you may have noticed during the RWF, some tools look suspiciously like WeakAuras, and we have received a few questions about this. So, let us try to answer the most common questions.
Is this allowed by us?
WeakAuras is proudly an open source addon. This means anyone can take the WeakAuras' source code and modify it to suit their needs. The only requirement is that any derived version must also be open source. This process is called 'forking' in the open source world. This is a perfectly normal practice. We generally ask that forks do not use 'WeakAuras' in their name.
Is this allowed by Blizzard?
As far as we can tell, RWF guilds are not exploiting anything through their use of WeakAuras.
Can I use similar tools?
Yes you can. The Northern Sky Raid Tools by Reloe contains many tools for the current raid. For example it already contains a memory game helper. It also contains a "WeakAura" for the dispel assignment. That WeakAura builds on a WeakAuras fork, which you have to install manually. Note that the boss was nerfed from 8 dispels to 4.
Why aren't we releasing a similarly WeakAuras version?
Because these boss mod auras are essentially custom auras that uses only trivial amounts of WeakAuras code.
In our opinion, the core part of WeakAuras is tracking your personal combat state, which is no longer possible with the current 'secret' design. Currently, the only way to customize the display of your personal combat state is by building on top of the CDM.
Even simple things such tracking individual buffs/debuffs are not possible. While there are still some use cases for WeakAuras that work, this core functionality of WeakAuras has been undermined by Blizzard.
Blizzard has recently revealed their plans for future API changes, which can be summarized as further restrictions. It remains very unlikely that WeakAuras will support Midnight.
Introducing M33kauras
With the release of Midnight, the dominant Weakaura fork for the high end community has been M33kauras. You can download this directly from Github.
As this is a fork, please do not message the official Weakauras devs or Discord with questions or for help.
M33kauras has the same familiar UI as old Weakauras and if you still have old Weakauras that you haven't deleted, they will show up here, but many of them will no longer work due to the addon restrictions.
Reloe has created many M33kauras that can be imported to help you on your raid journey. We're highlighting some of these below, but there are more in Northern Sky Raid Tools.
Paladins Dispels
On the Lightblinded Vanguard encounter, Avenger's Shield is a nasty DoT that needs to be dispelled quickly. On Mythic difficulty, there are 4 that need quick dispels and during the Race to World First, there were 8 dispels which many guilds solved by having 6 healers and 2 warlocks for an imp dispel. How do you coordinate 8 dispels quickly? You make a computational addon of course!
Despite Blizzard wanting to curb computational addons with the secret values system, the Paladins Dispel Assign M33kaura has managed to sneak it's way into the tier. If everyone has this M33kaura, healers, warlocks and Dwarves are told who to dispel, or to dispel themselves to make dispels easier.
Alleria Stack Tracker
In Phase 1 of Alleria, the Void Droplet debuff is very important, as it's the only way that you can kill the 3 Sentinels before the enrage. On Mythic, it's even more important as there are a certain number of stacks that you want to track before you want to not waste any more. How do you track this debuff in a sea of debuffs? You use a M33kaura of course.
Using the Alleria Add Debuff on Nameplate M33kaura, players will see the number of Corrupting Essence stacks attached to the nameplate, allowing you to know just how much bonus damage you're doing.
Belo'ren Feather Tracker
Do you forget what colour you are on Belo'ren fairly often? Check out the Belo'ren Color Tracker, which places the feather color debuff on your screen in a customizable location. If you used Weakauras in the past, you're recognize the customization options, as you can move the square to wherever you want on your screen and adjust its size.
Why Does This Matter
As of right now, with certain M33kauras returning, it very much seems like the addon disarmament has done little, especially in Mythic raiding and the Race to World First. If you ask players who weren't aware of the addon disarmament, they probably wouldn't be able to notice a difference in combat UIs; there are still custom timers, audio alerts, text reminders, custom UIs and more. A lot of computational addons are now gone which is a goal that Blizzard wanted, but it does seem like at least one has slipped through. While Weakauras was very accessible in making something that you wanted in the past, it seems to have gotten a lot more complex now, and that could be a problem for the future.
