Despite Blizzard's World of Warcraft Midnight changes, the WeakAuras mod team still has no plans to return

World of Warcraft Midnight is pulling out the rug from combat addons, as Blizzard dramatically shakes up what information mod creators are allowed to access and work with. It's a change that transforms the look of one of the best MMORPGs forever, made in pursuit of bringing a halt to the 'arms race' between encounter designers and modders. However, it also means the end of the line for some of the best WoW addons, including tremendously popular framework WeakAuras. Since the launch of the WoW Midnight beta, Blizzard has continued to loosen its restrictions, but the development team behind the mod say the changes aren't enough to reverse its stance.

With the full World of Warcraft Midnight release date now locked in for Monday March 2, 2026, the team took to its Patreon page to confirm that it still has no plans to support WeakAuras in Midnight. The new concept of 'secret values,' which hides all combat information including personal buffs, resources, and cooldowns from mod tools, remains the primary roadblock. "We've seen some people assert that Blizzard has loosened these restrictions significantly," Team WeakAuras writes, "but sadly the changes they have made don't really pass muster."

WeakAuras is so popular because it acts as a framework for players to make and share all manner of on-screen widgets and displays. Whether you want to be warned about dangerous boss abilities, highlight an ability coming off cooldown, or notify you that a buff has expired, you've always been able to do so - but this is precisely the sort of functionality that's going away. Last month, I spoke to project lead 'Stanzilla,' who has worked on the mod for more than 15 years, about the decision. "It seems the core value proposition of WeakAuras isn't compatible with the direction Blizzard is taking the game," he told me.

Despite the changes Blizzard has made, the group reaffirms that its stance remains the same. "We consider tracking your own combat state the core functionality of WeakAuras," it writes. "While technically we could release a WeakAuras version without triggers for your own cooldown, buffs, health, primary power, etc, a WeakAuras version that only consists of e.g. reputation and experience triggers is nearly useless."

While some have called for the WeakAuras team to continue to support the framework as a vehicle to distribute smaller addons, it says it doesn't believe this will be particularly useful. "We sympathize, but frankly the utility of WeakAuras in that role is due to its ubiquity." It also clarifies that the decision "has nothing to do with money," pointing to the roughly $500 in monthly Patreon income the mod receives, and that it isn't about "hurt egos" or encounter design.

Team WeakAuras splits the major changes into three parts. The first is the limitation of addons' ability to send and receive chat messages while in combat; the second hides NPCs identities, buffs/debuffs, and spell casts for nameplates; and the third hides your personal combat state. "This is the change that affects most addons, like WeakAuras, but also ElvUI and ConsolePort," the dev explains.

Breaking a two-year Reddit silence, game director Ion Hazzikostas described the "overarching goal" of the changes to make sure that "while addons can still thoroughly personalize your experience, they aren't giving you an objective competitive advantage over people using the base UI." That's at the core of that third restriction, and Team WeakAuras calls it "the root cause of the 'addon apocalypse,'" noting that it's separate from encounter design.

"Essentially, it seems Blizzard views rotation helpers and WeakAuras HUDs as so detrimental to class design that they're willing to break a lot of addons to eliminate them. Obviously people can disagree whether that was a real problem that needed solving and whether it is worth breaking so many addons," Team WeakAuras continues. "In our opinion, Blizzard has poorly communicated these changes, often conflating them and waiting until late in development to reveal their full scope."

While Blizzard is still in the tweaking phase, it sounds as though its new philosophy is too fundamentally opposed to removing the restrictions Team WeakAuras would need to change its mind. We'll have to look elsewhere for our Midnight addons, then.