World of Warcraft mod WeakAuras "isn't compatible" with Blizzard's new direction

World of Warcraft Midnight is bringing the hammer down on combat mods, and it's having serious ramifications for some of its most popular and beloved addons. Among them is WeakAuras, a tool used to customize your WoW UI with all manner of helpful information and notifications. In light of Blizzard's new restrictions, the WeakAuras team announced that it was no longer planning to support the mod once the MMORPG's new expansion arrives. I spoke to project lead 'Stanzilla,' who has been developing it for more than 15 years, to ask how quickly the decision was made and whether there's still a chance to turn the ship around.

The World of Warcraft Midnight alpha began on Thursday October 2, and almost immediately we began to see responses from the creators of the best WoW addons. While Deadly Boss Mods author Adam 'MysticalOS' Williams was quick to say that he would continue to develop the tool "around the kind of game Blizzard wants in Midnight," the WeakAuras team came to the conclusion that it would instead be pulling the plug. "As it stands, we do not expect to release a WeakAuras version for Midnight," it wrote. "We will continue to support WeakAuras for Classic."

"I'd say we went through all stages of grief pretty quickly," Stanzilla tells me. "It was pretty clear around the time we received the PDF with more details from Blizzard's developer team and 99% clear after we did some tests after the alpha servers went up." WoW game director Ion Hazzikostas might have claimed that Blizzard had no intent to kill WeakAuras, but the team felt differently: "It seems the core value proposition of WeakAuras isn't compatible with the direction Blizzard is taking the game."

In case you're not already familiar with the functionality of WeakAuras, it's essentially a framework that allows players to create and share their own on-screen widgets and UI elements. Most commonly, it's used to highlight key abilities coming off cooldown, warn you about a dangerous boss attack, or remind you that you're missing a buff. Its flexibility makes it easy for people to adjust the layout and look of all these custom displays to your liking, which also means it's very popular as a way to boost accessibility.

At the core of the problem is Blizzard's new 'secret values.' Basically all combat-related data is now contained inside a black box. In Hazzikostas's words, "The UI and addons can know that box exists, they can display information about it […] but what they can't do is know definitively what's inside that box and run any kind of logic based on it." Stanzilla actually thinks this is "fine and technically a good workaround," but that it "lacks tools to get to a point where we could really replace or replicate what we currently offer to users."

"What fundamentally breaks WeakAuras is that we've lost access to the player's own combat state: your cooldowns, your buffs, your debuffs, your resources," he explains. "This is the core functionality that people use WA for, and it's now completely gone. The encounter information restrictions are whatever in comparison - what really kills WeakAuras is losing the ability to track and display your personal character state during combat."

He says that the WeakAuras team might reconsider its decision to step away were the addon allowed to combine some of these secret values without actually seeing them; for example, testing if 'the Icy Veins ability is on cooldown' and, simultaneously, 'the Icy Veins buff is not currently active on the player.' Alternatively, if just the user's personal combat state was visible to them, "we would still be willing to maintain the addon," although this "would be a severe reduction in our capacity compared to before Midnight."

Stanzilla doesn't believe that such a dramatic turnaround will happen, however. "We just don't see Blizzard reversing these core restrictions." He points to the rumored Midnight launch date in late February, giving just four months, some of which would include the winter holidays, to overhaul the system. "Decisions like these also affect their encounter design and many other aspects of the game so that is a very tight timeframe."

Some users have asked if WeakAuras could remain in a simplified form to make cosmetic tweaks, but Stanzilla says this is out of the question. "The core issue is that the current World of Warcraft API is too limited. We can no longer replicate even basic functions that the default UI handles, such as custom health display formats (changing a long number to '15k'). A non-combat-focused 'WeakAuras 3' would be a shadow of what WeakAuras 2 is and would offer less customization than even Blizzard's built-in tools. The advanced ways we calculate and present information are simply not viable with the new API restrictions.

"Consequently," he continues, "any hypothetical WA3 would be restricted to simple features like reminder or farming auras, which are already covered by other addons. The team has no interest in spending months of free time developing a highly restricted version that wouldn't be worthy of the WeakAuras name, especially given our past experience with Blizzard's inconsistent support for promises made in previous interviews. There are other addons that can step in and take over that market if they want to."

Despite this, Stanzilla agrees that the 'de-escalation' of the long-running arms race between WoW's encounter designers and modders is "100% necessary." His main complaint is with the change in rollout: "They previously stated it would happen in phases and slowly, only killing addons' access to the information when their own tools are up to snuff and ready to be real replacements. Now they've done something completely different."

Blizzard has already begun to walk back some of its more extreme changes. Specifically, it plans to reverse the full lockdown on the parsing of chat and communication between addons while in instances, which were preventing the use of many other tools such as loot councils, break timers, and pre-planned raid notes. "We agree that this is starting out excessively broad," community manager Randy 'Kaivax' Jordan writes, explaining that adjustments will be made "so that tools that facilitate sharing information before or after combat won't be impacted."

That's certainly good news for many mods that would have been broken. "Feedback is very important here," Stanzilla says, "let Blizzard know that this is not what you want but remain constructive and civil." It doesn't solve the issue for WeakAuras, however. "We can change the color of a health bar, but we can't change the color based on if you're low health or not. We can display an icon with a spiral to show the remaining cooldown of an ability, but we can't apply a glow when the cooldown becomes ready to use. We can show the cast of your target, but we can't highlight important casts that need to be kicked. And the list goes on."

As for whether you'll see Stanzilla in Midnight, he says, "Yeah sure, I'll play it. How active though really depends on what happens with it. I've been pretty casual in recent years because I lack the time and motivation to do top-end raiding again." While he remains in a top-100 guild with long-time friends, he says he only joins them for heroic raids nowadays, "and it's likely going to remain that way going forward."

As for Blizzard's plan to replace some of the lost functionality with its own offerings, Stanzilla says these will always feel inferior to community-created tools because Blizzard "won't and can't cater to all requests for customization - hundreds of open-source developers just have way more team and freedom to do things, if allowed to." He continues, "But I also think that is fine, they only have to build a good baseline and then let the community take over with endless customization. That should be their goal and we hoped it was, but it currently does not seem that way."

Are you a long-time WeakAuras user? Drop by the PCGamesN Discord server to let us know what you think of Blizzard's changes, and whether they make you more or less excited about WoW Midnight. Alternatively, you can check in with our pick of the best new MMOs in 2025.