The loss of WeakAuras kills accessibility. Blizzard has added new accessibility features, but nothing to the extent that WA’s offer.
For example, how in the world are Deaf/HoH guilds or individuals (e.g. Undaunted) supposed to play endgame content in Midnight? Devs want everyone to communicate more with other players, but WA’s are how they communicate.
This also affects people who are colorblind (the base options aren’t great, from what I’ve heard), or have impaired vision or limited motor functions or ADHD or any other disability.
Are people with disabilities not allowed to play higher end content in Midnight? It’s great that Blizz wants to lessen the necessity of add-ons, but there must be better ways to do it.
I agree with this, one button rotation and rotation helper was one step forward but these changes are a full decade backwards.
I will always advocate for increased accessibility but these changes are not it. Why does blizz have to kill addons in order to force adoption of in game equivalents ? There’s no reason to take away choice from players.
2 decades backwards*
It’s not even just combat addons. The basic api functionality of sending and receiving messages is being broken too, which means RP addons like TRP are being caught in the crossfire.
Honestly the more I’m reading the bigger rock and hard place I realize Blizzard is in.
They made it very clear they didn’t want combat addons to work and to do so would greatly restrict what WA can do.
But in doing so, WA just threw in the towel and declared Midnight not worth the effort, and with it taking just about everything else with it.
So Blizzard can either try and make the alternatives themselves and fail, or the community figures out a way to make new addons themselves, if they can.
Or just go back to doing nothing and leaving things as they are, which just continues the addon arms race they clearly don’t want.
Blizz literally manufacturing the arms race and then taking addons down when while using them as a scapegoat. What is the problem with giving players a little more time to react to things without taking weakauras out back? Why do encounters have to require multiple points of coordination at the same time?
There’s no reason for them to make these changes and complete nonsense that they’d blame weakaura for their own design choices. The more angry I am about something the more active I am on the forums so I apologize if people keep seeing me making the same points everywhere
feels like youve built a really niche strawman to burn just because you cant play without weakauras.
Youre arguing accessibility issues AND weakauras. There is a colorblind mode, a one button rotation, gcd helper, and etc. Weakauras just told you what to push and when, and with the pruning of class abilities and streamlining how they play there is nolonger a real need for weakauras. I dunno, it just seems like you’re being disingenuous, using accessibility as a vehicle to keep weakauras.
Bro. That is so rude you don’t know other peoples challenges. And seriously the real point is who the f*** cares if folks want their colorblind mode to be customized ? Just let people have things
I liked that WA was a lightweight way to move Ui elements across my screen. The default blizz stuff is a pita to customize exactly how I want. Not everyone uses WA like one button helper.
I am sympathetic to the accessibility plight. Hopefully someone else can take up the mantle and deliver accessibility customizations for those who need it under the new framework.
dont try to virtue signal on me, its a waste. OP is going off what they heard without experience so i would say they dont actually use or care about the accessibility options.
You didn’t read my post. The colorblind mode does not always fix things (source: colorblind tanks I have played with), not to mention that besides the most common red/green colorblind, there’s also blue/green, blue/purple, monochromancy, and other types that aren’t solved by that mode.
One button rotation and GCD helper are great, but just because they exist doesn’t mean that every disabled person can magically play.
Weakauras did a lot more than just tell you what to push and when. Have you even used weakauras?
I have NESD which means I blank out or forgets snippets of time. I rely on addons like Hekili to be able to remember rotations and jump back into content.
Trp allows me to remember 100s of people I interact with in RP.
One button rotation, wow rotation helper do not fix accessibility problems it takes a step not just backwards but back to warcraft 1.
It sucks but hey we aren’t worth the paper written on as players
How?
The apis they use are the exact same apis that enable the WAs that sparked all this and contributed almost single-handedly into the arms race.
Nobody says they cant if they want, but if the changes to make for a better game in general in the coming years, then they absolutely should go with them.
Native accessibility tools can and will be improved and as everyone could have seen, classes are being adjusted to the changes. Soon manaforge will also be adjusted to these new conditions during the alpha and the new raids will hopefully now have a different design, without addons in mind.
My favorite WA is ultimate mouse cursor. Playing with a bold circle around my cursor is way better than anything blizz had to offer all this time, they better make up for it.
its not virtue signaling to say you could use some empathy. Do you really feel that threatened when people with disabilities play the game better than you ?
The more people who can play the game comfortably the better.
Don’t design abilities that require you to coordinate 20 people to reposition the entire raid in a six second window? Make bosses that have reasonable mechanics with reasonable timing to communicate where people need to go?
WeakAuras was never designed as an accessibility add on. It’s a powerful customization tool that players used to fill gaps, but it was never built specifically to address disabilities. Real accessibility means native support features deliberately designed, tested, and maintained by the devs.
What you’re really asking is for Blizzard to design the game to account for every possible disability under the sun. Do you actually think that’s feasible or reasonable for a video game company? No developer on earth can perfectly design for every individual need. What they can and should do is provide a solid baseline of accessibility features, visual cues, colorblind options, audio support, customizable UI, and keep improving them. But outsourcing the job to WeakAuras and pretending that’s accessibility isn’t sustainable or fair.
If the expectation is that Blizzard must design for every possible disability, then the only outcome is impossible standards and inevitable disappointment. The goal isn’t to cover every edge case, it’s to design a flexible system that can handle the most common accessibility needs natively. That’s how you make the game more inclusive without making design completely unmanageable.