The first addon authors for World of Warcraft are giving up. The restrictions are so great that there is no future anymore.
It was a change that had been anticipated for months. World of Warcraft has declared war on many interface addons that have a large influence on the game and often remove decision-making in battles or are considered “mandatory” to be able to participate in fights at all. With Midnight, many of these functions will no longer be available. Now, the creators of one of the most popular addons called “WeakAuras” have said: That’s it. There will be no addon version for the next WoW expansion Midnight.
What is WeakAuras? Explaining what WeakAuras could do as an addon would probably fill several pages. The addon was extremely powerful because it was essentially a toolkit to add all kinds of functions in the game. For example, WeakAura could communicate with each other and read which players had which debuffs – and then autonomously assign where each affected character needed to go.
What was said? The team behind WeakAuras announced (on wowhead):
Blizzard recently released the technical details regarding the planned changes and API restrictions and gave us access to the alpha to try them out […]. This allowed us to test the impact of these changes on WeakAuras. Unfortunately, the changes are much more comprehensive than expected.
It is important to emphasize that these changes are not final yet and will evolve during the alpha. However, considering Blizzard’s philosophy, it seems extremely unlikely that these core changes will be significantly reverted.
As it stands, we do not expect to release a WeakAuras version for Midnight.
The Classic version of WeakAuras will continue to be supported. So far, such restrictions are not planned, allowing addons to continue functioning with the same features as before.
Will Blizzard eliminate all addons? No, that is not the case. All addons that primarily allow visual customization, i.e., alter parts of the interface or add new elements, such as role-playing addons, will continue to work and be supported.
However, it is obvious that a new era is beginning for World of Warcraft. But don’t worry, not all aids for boss fights will disappear in the future. Many functions of other addons will gradually be imported into WoW – because WoW is getting its own kind of boss mods.
