Hello. I’d like to express my love for this add-on and how much it helped me as a person with various visual disabilities and mental disabilities. I do not expect to be specifically catered to, I am more than fine with having to create my own environment but please, even if it’s just rumors do not remove WeakAuras.
If you are curious how this addresses and helps my own disabilities I can go into detail further in the topic. I am also curious if any other people with similar disabilities feel this way about this add-on.
Weakauras are basically a necessity at this point for UI customization, and I will still disagree with anyone that tries to say they’re only used as a crutch or to solve mechanics for you, the addon is basically anything you want it to be, it’s just giving you the tools to be able to personalize things for your own specific needs, like for an example, I’m an idiot so when I was playing Enhancement Shaman I made a Weakaura to make my Flametongue/Windfury weapon start glowing if the buff was missing on my character because I kept constantly forgetting it
Weakauras are an insanely powerful tool that grab from pretty much every datapoint the game offers. I think this is going to fall into the restricted/heavily restricted area and less so completely removed.
Either way, it’s likely to take them years to implement these ideas they keep talking about, and they’ve said already they have no interest in completely removing addons.
I can see them limiting what Weakauras can do but not fully removing it now addons like Omnibar and OmniCC will probably get gutted from what I gather they don’t want us tracking party members/enemy cooldowns
Don’t call mythic tryhard raiders disabled. Just because fights and many specs are so overly convoluted and complex with often faster and faster demands of quickly executing on a very quick and specific set of conditions that ultimately “need” the mental crutch of a computer tracking lots of information and parsing and distilling it into a simple visual and/or audio blip for the simple human monkey brain to respond to.
And let’s not pretend that Blizzard isn’t keeping true disabled people in mind with features like the built in 1 button rotation tool…especially since the vast majority of actual disabled people aren’t pushing tippy top tiers of content anyway where the already miniscule GCD increase penalty will not matter.
Plus it isn’t like cheap auras are being removed. All Blizzard “promised” was it was EVENTUALLY losing the ability to track certain combat mechanic blips…basically what many people using it for to trivialize and “solve” mechanics that are otherwise “impossible” for a reasonable group of humans to as quickly coordinate and do at the pace Blizzard designed it for ironically BECAUSE cheap auras exist to do it…aka the arms race.
So Blizzard not creating stupidly obnoxious mechanics in the first place and designing encounters to be reasonably done at simple human monkey brain processing power capabilities is a good thing…if they actually accomplish this is entirely up in the air at this point.
I do similar things. The reason I love WeakAuras is because I know how my attention works and how to solve a reoccurring mistake I will make. The flexibility of WA, whether it be an audio cue, visual cue, or where the visual cue is placed is highly specific and important to me.
I think Blizzard should keep the option open, only because I know it would be very difficult to please everyone with a built-in alternative.
One major issue I have whether this be attention or visual is the need for a moving visual reminders. Static reminders tend to get lost on me.
exactly. i made a quick WA to show my outlaw rogue’s subterfuge buff as a large, semi-transparent icon off the to the left of my character. this is a very important buff for outlaw and trying to hunt for the remaining time on it in the OCEAN of buffs in the upper right of my screen is just not feasible.
this isn’t playing the game for me. it’s not showing me info i shouldn’t have. it’s just putting the info in a place i can see it quickly during combat without having to take my eyes off the endless fire puddles around my character.
I am talking about myself. The reason I did not mention any specific disabilities is because I don’t want to lump in others, everyone is different. There is nothing wrong with being disabled and if I said anything that implied that I would apologize a lot. It’s important to me.
I am not someone who is looking to min/max my screen for M+ or even Arena stuff. I am talking about quality of life improvements that I can create catered to me thanks to the flexibility of WeakAuras. They may seem silly or pointless to some which is why I caution mentioning exactly how I use WeakAuras to help my experience.
Then it’s highly unlikely you have anything to worry about. What Blizzard has stated they want to target is the combat-enhancing capabilities cheap auras gives and drawing back this arms race developers keep engaging in with players which seems very much like a love/hate relationship (but more on the love side).
It’s also no secret WoW is being pushed to consoles ASAP…consoles that are impossible or next to impossible to modify for the average lay person hence making addons unfeasible thus making console players strictly inferior to PC without being able to have the crutch addons too.
To be clear, I have minimal faith Blizzard will fully go through with this. I suspect no matter what Blizzard gives us, it’ll ALWAYS be deemed “not good enough” because people “need” Blizzard to fail because it’s become their persona to be an addicted hater of the game and given Blizzard won’t go full tilt to nuke addons entirely means they’ll still be powerful thus “required” but hopefully far less than they are today where it is very hard to argue against the fact you are straight up a subpar performing player if you aren’t using them even if you still manage to do content (likely being carried even if mentally by people with said addons letting you focus more on your own individual performance).
Oh now this is beginning to make more sense. Honestly, I welcome the opportunity of console players joining us and I hope they can have a fair shake but not at the cost of PC players.
I’m struggling to imagine how you could possibly play… let’s say a Shaman with a console though. There simply isn’t enough buttons on an xbox controller. Wouldn’t they need to automate a lot of things? The game is just so dependent on so many keys.
Hence why I argue the game needs toned back both from a spec and an encounter perspective. Not to the degree naysayers go to the extreme with and whine that it’ll all be “attack” and “defend” 2 buttons if any kind of cut happens but specs like enchance shaman and feral druid are borderline stupid with how many keybinds they need to micromanage when specs like guardian druid and BM hunters exist in contrast.
But that said, strictly speaking, controllers have plenty of potential bids too when you factor in their like 4-6 or whatever modern XBOX controllers have for shoulder and back buttons on top of the D pad and/or other buttons just like PC players can effectively quadruple binds with ctrl, shift, and alt modifiers on all their keys even if, in a practical sense, it’s functionally difficult to setup all those bind permutations let alone train yourself in using them…at the core it’s still possible though.
What is most egregious though is the encounter mechanics where fights basically become kitchen sink encounters not only chock full of a sheer number of mechanics…all of which have massively punishing “1 shot” (or near enough) effects but also faster and faster resolution timers along with stupid mechanics that are impractical to solve without the addons basically divining the information and spitting it out for players who aren’t doing any mental work themselves but trusting the addon to have parsed it out and just told them what to do…it’s those kind of mechanics that Blizzard is looking to cut from cheap auras solving meaning it either needs to just not even BE a mechanic or it needs to be an intuitive and human-solvable mechanic with more than enough freedom for humans and our significantly slower and imperfect deduction capabilities handling.
There is a grand canyon wide gap between “vanilla” class and encounter designs and modern spec and encounters. Most people don’t want the game to devolve into 1 button spam patchwerk raid difficulty encounters like what gets alluded to when the prospect of changes comes up and for those that do…well LFR and the 1 button rotation exists
