Howdy all, taking a further look into the crazy world of addons, we sat down with Stan, the project lead on Weakauras who gave us a ton of information on how the tech works and what he thinks of the controversy surrounding this addon. This was recorded last week before the recent news regarding Private Auras coming in 10.1, so this is why it wasn't mentioned. We'll look at that in another video soon. So what's your take on Weakauras? An addon that is bad for WoW, an innocent tool being misused, or something which is good for the game?
@@keithb6344 Personally I would argue more of a stance of "Its a hammer, it isn't inherently evil, but we're currently in a fine china shop and are working on how to solve the issue of too many things being broken. Maybe we don't need a hammer involved." Personally I think the possibilities with weak aura's have gone way farther than addons were ever meant to be taken. Although I certainly have no good ideas on how to find the proper middle ground, Pandora's box is either open or its not when it comes to addons.
@@MrRusty103 agree. Blizz has done a good job with the new UI and the current raid really doesn’t need weakaura so ( heroic and down at least), but they have a lot more to do.
@@MrRusty103 I dont understand what you mean? taken it too far? Weakauras can and just runs some LUA code, now LUA is what addons are running in wow, so Weakauras just execute ''mini'' addons with in the game, so for EVERY single aura you could make an addon for it completely standalone, Weakauras just makes this easier and it has some more restrictive in what a potential standalone addon can (like what he said with making clickable auras) it does nothing a tiny addon could not do, it just makes having the ''collection'' easier to sort
@@Shelarya I understand that weakauras itself isn't doing anything inherently too far, its just an addon, doing addon things. Like previously mentioned its a tool, its how the tool is being used and in what environment that causes the problem. Weakauras just ends up being the face of the problem because its the easiest way to achieve that. Yes technically the issue is with what Blizz enables addons to do, not weakauras itself, but unless things have changed drastically in the last year or so that I haven't played, weakauras was the only actual game in town for that level of customization. Its more that the possibilities that addons can achieve has reached heights that were absolutely not the original intention. "We should let them change up their UI, adjust timers, cast bars, etc." is a long way from "If you wanted you could build a UI that tells you everything to do in every reasonable situation and almost completely plays the game for you, just hit the button it says, move where it says." They need to find some middle ground. As it is, designing fights around the upper end of addon possibilities while also needed to keep things accessible to the entry level user really limits the design space they can work with. Mythic mechanics that virtually require a weakaura to solve in time, vs stuff like Azshara were the weakaura basically just lets you ignore a mechanic completely. Neither of those are good results for an encounter.
Just out of curiosity...do you know Stans country of origin or linguistic background? I thought he had an accent that reminded me of germans, but on the other hand his vocabulary was extensive and didn't seem like that of a foreign speaker at all.
Creating an UI from scratch with weakaura has been an incredible enjoyable experience, learned and failed an lot but thats part of the process. The archimonde weakaura from back in the day was beyond unethical fortunatly neither blizzard nor the players seems reluctant to go down that path again.
Loved such a crunchy interview, thanks Mike! Edit: As for my personal view on WA's, I guess it depends on the WA and what it does. I use/depend on a very specific WA for monk stagger. The standard UI answer to provide info on stagger SUCKS, having a much larger green light/yellow light/red light helps tons. Someone could take a hard stance and say "NO ADDONS!". Mine just enlarges the standard UI information so I don't have to scramble to find out how much trouble I'm in, it doesn't play the game for me, just expedites info.
@@Gomdeezy Yeah, Mike is great at asking follow-up questions, and repeating questions or going more in-depth about stuff so everyone can understand. I don't normally even watch interviews but this one just flowed so well, and I don't even care about the subject either.
the follow thing - it seemed like you weren't aware. basically in tbc classic you could share around a weakaura that used "/s !!follow" or whatever, and then if someone said that in chat they would follow the leader. this enabled people to pay for hours of dungeon boost runs, and the booster could just use !!follow and everyone with the weakaura could be dragged out of the instance to reset and back in.
Weakauras is a rabbit hole and I love it. I've spent hundreds of hours modifying weakauras, even helping others with theirs now. It's such a great system and I love that Blizzard promotes the use of tools like this. Ironically, it's made for weakaura packages that helps condense information (CDs, health, mana, resource, etc) into one central location because until recently you couldn't do that.
I usually don't comment but I will say thank you for weak auras, this addon made my life so much better even for someone who plays private servers since I live In a third world country in Africa with no online payments. I enjoyed his work for many years and for that thank you sir
Omg, I never could figure out why the game would blame random addons, that's so cool to learn. The fact that the taint system is so ungodly sensitive that it will block it's own UI at times is crazy.
I remember back in WotLK, there was an addon called AVR (Augmented Virtual Reality) or something like that, which completely trivialized raids in the same way Weakauras does today. It would just draw circles on the ground. A chain lighting is going to hit? All players get a circle of the jump radius and you just spread out so circles aren't touching. Boss is doing a big AoE? A circle shows the radius so you don't get caught in it. And so on. The circles would even have a clock timer in them so you knew when the attack was going to hit. Blizzard decided this was gamebreaking enough that they purposefully broke that addon. Then Wildstar came out and this style of graphic was their main selling point. It only took a few expansions for Blizzard to turn around and bake those AVR type graphics into the game. The addon they purposefully broke, within 2 expansions, they put into the base game. I think we'll see the same happen here.
Almost all of my weakauras are from the template thing. Super easy for what I do. All 40x40 icons since I just use them to track buffs that get lost in my buff bar. Sometimes there are things missing though like outlaw rogue's audacity (free ambush) proc.
Does anyone know whether you can still get the Displate with Hydalyn in front of Amaurot? I haven't been watching the stream so I don't know if it was an exclusive or not
I am surprised that Preach was unaware that Blizzard uses hidden auras to tune damage numbers, it is explicitly mentioned in patch notes from time to time... especially in pvp, blizzard uses hidden auras to tune damage of certain abilities with respect to pve combat, they usually mention the hidden auras at work there
just recently started using Afenar though i have found some minor changes have not been updated since the start of the xpac. Does luxtros keep up to date
Omg, as someone who runs a lot of different auras for different situations I would absolutely love a tool that runs and lists the issues that the auras are causing 🤤
Stan seems like such a level headed and aware dude. I don't use WA myself, but I agree 100% with him. Its encounter design that's the huge issue. That, and I also agree that you should want to use WA, not feel like you need to. It felt so vindicating to hear him also not like that people use WA just because their guild leaders force them to. I've had that issue and its incredibly frustrating and turned me off raiding basically all together.
That attitude in general that developed in the first few years of wow turned me off. Requiring X addon. Loot add-ons or assignment add-ons aside there were many times where a certain wa or addon were less intuitive to me than the standard information which added a layer of challenge. Not everyone thinks the same 🤷
Players (at least in pugs and LFR) seem to randomly ignore even obvious mechanics that don't need a WA. Or they just start trolling for reasons 🤔 So I'm not sure that this upcoming change will have much of an effect.
When I played last both LFR and Normal were joke difficulties. Always thought it was just a lack of care since healers in most fights can power through any damage (of they themselves are trying). I really do believe with M+ low keys being a buffer of difficulty to raiding, LFR and Normal should be one, unqueuable difficulty. But I would also like to see world gearing for people to be more engaging and not take months to get passable gear so what do I know anymore.
Regarding send stuff to your alts weakaura. I dunno if it was a TSM-operation or if it was a weakaura, but Krakenlatte had a guide about how to get gold by just casually playing. What it did was that it saved 10k gold on the toon, rest was send to a decided alt, and that made it simple to collect gold and not spend it on stupid shit.
Ha love that around 32 mins talking about feature requests. Im a software dev for a company and explaining to people some times how its not that there idea is shit but that it may not be worth the investment of my time, or the investment of processing and computing to add the feature. Everything has a cost and i cannot just add everything.
I don't even rely on these but I appreciate the amount of customization it can bring. As a developer it's really inspiring to see the passion the WA developers bring, almost makes me want to dabble in LUA for the fun of it.
@@joshua_lee732 Ah I never worry about syntax when it comes to learning anything new but tables being the main datastructure is interesting to say the least!
So okay, with the specs being tuned by invisible auras and so on... When they add 5% flat in 1 patch, then 3% in another patch, do they change the 5% to like 9.57% total or whatever, or is it 2 buffs? Because if the latter, suddenly *alot* of the lag makes *alot* more sense.
Dude I bow to you. Your addon makes it possible for me to play WoW. Good to hear you're such a nice and collected guy as well. Thanks a lot and all the best to you guys!!!
while I am on the side of addons in general have gone to far, I will say making my UI for my class is probably one of the best things to have come to wow.
Well it looks like you wont be playing after that patch then, they are bringing the nerf hammer down hard. They are working to hide away game systems from mods so they can not work as they do now.
@@TENGILL They're just making auras that can't be seen by addons, not the first time. Most people that enjoy WAs use it for custom UI stuff, tracking mechanics in raids/dungeons is just a bonus
@@TENGILL No one knows which debuffs will be affected by this new hidden aura API, it's even possible not a single debuff will be affected, it's just a tool they add for encounter designers, so please don't spread disinformation and fear
I totally understand what you're saying, and it's really impressive. But at the end of the day I would rather have had a game that didn't essentially require add-ons like these. I would rather them not have to develop and balance a game around these add-ons. Because that's what they've had to do for years and years.
Misumi here, creator of the biggest holy priest lightweaver weakaura, you might know me, I'm kinda a big deal. I just want to say I almost exclusively use the template feature, it makes this addon very easy.
If they do this nerf to the game so that mods like WeakAuras do not work like today, I am out for good. Do not mess with the mods Blizzard!! If you do, your game is over!
A lot of Ex WoW players like myself wish Blizz took a harder line on Addons back in the day. Might not be this bad, the gap between base UI and information displayed. That being said, its a needed crutch now with the current playerbase so taking it away now or changing it will do more harm than good. Its the bed Blizzard has made.
I never found WA to be intuitive or user-friendly in it's interface and function structure. Bloated with too many options that the regular user doesn't need while the expert has everything they want. No wonder this all turned into copy-pasting strings and PUG raids or even mythic guilds ending up with 2 different Auras for 1 boss that mess each other up.
It's a lot to take in, but it's a thing you have to learn. I can do it, you can do it. Plenty of great resources to help. Worst case, important and forget. Just learn how to modify with the Display part of it and that goes a long way.
This argument would be true in sepulcher with anduin,lords,rygelon and jailer having multiple busted weakauras but this tier in vault genuinely doesnt require any weakauras to complete the raid, aberrus the next raid seems similar in that aspect
Really to make it intuitive they would have to dumb it down. The vast amount of things you can do in WAs is what makes it so useful. I believe their belief is that if you can't figure out to make your own WA then just use some elses. Since making an addon yourself is 10x hard than making a WA, it's a great middleground to creating your own UI without being overly complicated having to deal with the barely documented internal WoW API
@@VulpineDemon “having to learn” an add on to play the game is a ridiculous concept to me, I’m not going to tell people how to enjoy there game, if you enjoy having to use addons to clear content then I’m happy you are having a good time but for me I look at mythic raids and there just waay too much going on for me to take an interest to it.
its not a encounter design problem, with the catalyst of addons they wouldnt have to pile on and pile on extra mechanics. blizzard never really had a chance to figure out how hard things had to be, bcs addons always got in the way.
The whole snail races thing - didn't WoW have those types of races during Legion, and even earlier out near Tanaris? I KNOW there were snail races in Legion, though. It was in a cave in Highmountain. Definitely not a steal from Guild Wars.
I loaded up WoW to play dragon flight. Looked at the ui, menus and just thought…na. I should not need to use an add on. Blizz should provide a better ui. That being said it’s awesome your giving these guys an audience
Just looking at how many weak auras there are gives me a headache how can people play with all those charts and things on there screens..I'm a minimalist..that would drive me bonkers..I cannot do that..
Don't particularly like WA. I returned to Dragonflight after quitting at the end of Cata. I got KSH and AOTC this tier, but I never used any WAs. I have to say, the gameplay feels harder now and I feel more mad at the game whenever I fail. Honestly thinking of uninstalling. Therefore, I get why people want to use all the addons, all the help, all the guides. You are impairing yourself if you are playing without them, in my opinion, at least for some encounters/affixes. Hoping to see a fresh Vanilla or Vanilla+ season that is more casual for my tastes.
I just think Vanilla WoW needs to go through an OSRS arc. They need to have fun solo leveling content and perhaps a new end game raid per year. That would stimulate the playerbase, one that have been returning to Vanilla over the past year as is. It needs systems in place for a slow, low population growth. A lot of the systems in WoW were designed for groups, and you simply can not find them for most of your playtime anymore.
Imagine people actually playing and being good at MMO and game content without add-ons! My goodness how in the world did we ever accomplish anything without them?
There's been add ons since vanilla. And blizz have outright said that they design bosses around the myriad add ons raiders use. It's been a 20 year long arms race
I've only ever used weakauras to monitor maelstrom stacks and that recent stacking dmg thing for Earth Shock/Ele Blast. That is all. Whenever my raid leader told me to use this weak aura, I told him no, I'll just follow the other melee dps with what they're doing. Chances are its not an individual mechanic and if it is, you just learn it and become better. Weakauras keep people...well...weak, for lack of a better word. They're not good players without the addon. They're clueless and blind puppies walking into the darkness.
Interesting Interview! I just don't like the video title. I was hesitant to even watch the video because I expected another drama inducing video, but I'm glad that it was just a knowledge expanding interesting interview...not sure what exactly the TRUTH was though. Keep making great content and cut down on the drama and clickbait please, we watch your videos for the quality that you are known for, not because your video titles are so attractive, you aren't running a new channel that needs to do that.
I appreciate people thinking this and I would love not to have to do them - but it really does matter with the algorithm, especially on a video which is itself not performing great overall. Eg I did test a more basic title during the first hour, and it saw a 40% performance reduction over this one. Just can't argue with the numbers at that point.
@@TheChunkeyNinja Mkay, guess I really can't argue with that, clickbait and drama rules in the social media and news world. It just deters me, so I can only speak of my personal experience. I think clickbait clickers wouldn't watch such a specific and detailled video till the end, so an audience that isn't drama seeking but content orientated would potentially lead to more watchtime. But with pre-roll ads maybe the sheer amount of clicks from clickbait creates more revenue. I haven't figured out the YT algorithm, not sure how much it values % watchtime vs clicks. But you probably know what you are doing and your answer at least reassures me that you are doing it intentionally for a legit and thoughtful purpose. =)
Biggest ? In which sense? I mean that does not even matter he's not the biggest by any metric, he's not the most used, downloaded or the biggest in size, so this tittle is both wrong and weird af.
I use around 100 addons (a lot of those are plugins for other, bigger addons like handynotes) and have been playing wow for over 16 years. Regardless of what version of wow I play, whatever xpack I am playing, I need most of my addons. To me the game would be basically unplayable without them. The default game without them is god awful and I'd literally rather not play the game than play without my addons. In terms of WAs specifically, I use it to track my buffs/debuffs and as a reminder to buff myself so I don't go a whole 8 hour AV game without having demon armor up (which is something I did during the very first anniversary AV years ago on retail) I also use it to remind me I have lets say my carrot on a stick equipped ect. I have *never* used it to track pve encounter mechanics and wouldn't even know how. I rely on DBM for stuff like that.
Money wins races. No longer about skill or dedication, just time and money. When half your team is scripters, who is really playing the game? The people on stream or the guys figuring out how the fight works.
I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of accounts kept paying Blizzard exclusively even though WeakAuras provided half of the software necessary to complete several raid tiers?
Funny how this guy has been using the addon for 10 years or more and "only" now talks about it cuz FF doesnt have and its so much better... Why do people even see this guy.
because he at some point was turbo critical of blizzard, but also never "left" wow as a game, he just stopped covering it. And now he's broke after the flood and either thinks this content is good monetization prospect or blizzard paid him to praise them for no reason also ask yourself how much ff14 he enjoy? class variety? lore? extremes? god forbid ultimates? he only ever play casual shit with his bootlickers and msq not long ago he advocated that wow and addons are inseparable, and addons in general are good thing
remember when you stopped doing stuff with blizzard because of the lawsuit and legal issues? And now you're all up in them again. Clearly the only thing you value is money.
Weakauras ruined the game years ago for me. No hard feelings to the devs but it's just too powerful. And yes, technically weakauras doesn't do anything but give players the tools. But maybe the building blocks themselves have gotten too powerful. So either blizzard needs to limit how far addons can go.
Let's reduce even more challenge, let's reduce any opportunity to think or learn. Go weakauras. Loving the salty noob replies, touched a nerve with this one 😅😅.
@@keithb6344 hahaha the old 'it's for disabled people argument' really it's not for disabled people it's for people who don't want to learn to play. I've got over 20 years professional experience with disabled people and I don't but the accessibility argument - really there is a cross section with capacity which means things like weakauras aren't helping with.
@@keithb6344 link 2 or 3 examples of disabled people saying they need weakauras otherwise it's a false argument. There are lots of disabled people who can actually play the game and well too.
I kept getting errors with weak auras this xpac soon as I downloaded last month. Updates and redownloading does nothing so I haven't bothered with the addon this time around. Too much work to keep it updated. I'm tired of addons in general this xpac. I hate having to spend the start of every play session manually going through my addons for updates for 30 minutes before I can actually play or risk getting addon errors in the middle of a boss fight or have a boss ability DC me because of an addon. Not going to use a desktop updater app and risk spyware from China. I've been going for a less is more approach. With the base ui now, I don't really need all the memory black holes like fancy ui apps. Can edit so much, don't need healer frames either. I have maybe 10ish addons now. Dbm, auctionator, 2 panel frame movers, postal, details, tomtom, Rio, rarescanner and CTA.
its almost insane that we havent gotten any actual relevant content from preach interviews in months the last time there was a current one was the first one from his trip but since you guys drip feed this content everything is immediately out of date from snaking your friends to fleecing your fans
This was a great interview. While using my toe knife to clean out under the sides of my toenails on by 2 big toes. Took quite a while to diligently detail these claws. But I was thoroughly impressed and entertained thanks to you Preach.
Howdy all, taking a further look into the crazy world of addons, we sat down with Stan, the project lead on Weakauras who gave us a ton of information on how the tech works and what he thinks of the controversy surrounding this addon. This was recorded last week before the recent news regarding Private Auras coming in 10.1, so this is why it wasn't mentioned. We'll look at that in another video soon.
So what's your take on Weakauras? An addon that is bad for WoW, an innocent tool being misused, or something which is good for the game?
All 3 options are correct. It’s a hammer. It can be used for good or evil.
@@keithb6344 Personally I would argue more of a stance of "Its a hammer, it isn't inherently evil, but we're currently in a fine china shop and are working on how to solve the issue of too many things being broken. Maybe we don't need a hammer involved."
Personally I think the possibilities with weak aura's have gone way farther than addons were ever meant to be taken. Although I certainly have no good ideas on how to find the proper middle ground, Pandora's box is either open or its not when it comes to addons.
@@MrRusty103 agree. Blizz has done a good job with the new UI and the current raid really doesn’t need weakaura so ( heroic and down at least), but they have a lot more to do.
@@MrRusty103 I dont understand what you mean? taken it too far? Weakauras can and just runs some LUA code, now LUA is what addons are running in wow, so Weakauras just execute ''mini'' addons with in the game, so for EVERY single aura you could make an addon for it completely standalone, Weakauras just makes this easier and it has some more restrictive in what a potential standalone addon can (like what he said with making clickable auras) it does nothing a tiny addon could not do, it just makes having the ''collection'' easier to sort
@@Shelarya I understand that weakauras itself isn't doing anything inherently too far, its just an addon, doing addon things. Like previously mentioned its a tool, its how the tool is being used and in what environment that causes the problem. Weakauras just ends up being the face of the problem because its the easiest way to achieve that. Yes technically the issue is with what Blizz enables addons to do, not weakauras itself, but unless things have changed drastically in the last year or so that I haven't played, weakauras was the only actual game in town for that level of customization.
Its more that the possibilities that addons can achieve has reached heights that were absolutely not the original intention. "We should let them change up their UI, adjust timers, cast bars, etc." is a long way from "If you wanted you could build a UI that tells you everything to do in every reasonable situation and almost completely plays the game for you, just hit the button it says, move where it says."
They need to find some middle ground. As it is, designing fights around the upper end of addon possibilities while also needed to keep things accessible to the entry level user really limits the design space they can work with. Mythic mechanics that virtually require a weakaura to solve in time, vs stuff like Azshara were the weakaura basically just lets you ignore a mechanic completely. Neither of those are good results for an encounter.
Stan is a really dedicated, hardworking person
Thanks to you and your team for making WA!
Just out of curiosity...do you know Stans country of origin or linguistic background? I thought he had an accent that reminded me of germans, but on the other hand his vocabulary was extensive and didn't seem like that of a foreign speaker at all.
@@moos5221 I'm German, yeah! Thank you :)
@@Stanzilla Ah, also doch ein Landsmann. =)
I figured Stan sounds so american, but it's your last name. :D
Creating an UI from scratch with weakaura has been an incredible enjoyable experience, learned and failed an lot but thats part of the process. The archimonde weakaura from back in the day was beyond unethical fortunatly neither blizzard nor the players seems reluctant to go down that path again.
This was an amazing chat! Love this type of content
Loved such a crunchy interview, thanks Mike! Edit: As for my personal view on WA's, I guess it depends on the WA and what it does. I use/depend on a very specific WA for monk stagger. The standard UI answer to provide info on stagger SUCKS, having a much larger green light/yellow light/red light helps tons. Someone could take a hard stance and say "NO ADDONS!". Mine just enlarges the standard UI information so I don't have to scramble to find out how much trouble I'm in, it doesn't play the game for me, just expedites info.
Stan is a great conversationalist. Sometimes you get some really awkward interviews because the interviewee isn't used to it, but this was so fluid.
Agreed and Mike is a great creator and host
@@Gomdeezy Yeah, Mike is great at asking follow-up questions, and repeating questions or going more in-depth about stuff so everyone can understand.
I don't normally even watch interviews but this one just flowed so well, and I don't even care about the subject either.
the follow thing - it seemed like you weren't aware. basically in tbc classic you could share around a weakaura that used "/s !!follow" or whatever, and then if someone said that in chat they would follow the leader. this enabled people to pay for hours of dungeon boost runs, and the booster could just use !!follow and everyone with the weakaura could be dragged out of the instance to reset and back in.
Weakauras is a rabbit hole and I love it. I've spent hundreds of hours modifying weakauras, even helping others with theirs now. It's such a great system and I love that Blizzard promotes the use of tools like this. Ironically, it's made for weakaura packages that helps condense information (CDs, health, mana, resource, etc) into one central location because until recently you couldn't do that.
What a great guy! Thanks for doing the interview.
I usually don't comment but I will say thank you for weak auras, this addon made my life so much better even for someone who plays private servers since I live In a third world country in Africa with no online payments. I enjoyed his work for many years and for that thank you sir
Omg, I never could figure out why the game would blame random addons, that's so cool to learn. The fact that the taint system is so ungodly sensitive that it will block it's own UI at times is crazy.
Good interview and look forward to the templates one!
Excellent interview! Thank you very much to Stan and the whole WeakAuras team as well as to Preach and his team to do the interview! 👍
I remember back in WotLK, there was an addon called AVR (Augmented Virtual Reality) or something like that, which completely trivialized raids in the same way Weakauras does today. It would just draw circles on the ground. A chain lighting is going to hit? All players get a circle of the jump radius and you just spread out so circles aren't touching. Boss is doing a big AoE? A circle shows the radius so you don't get caught in it. And so on. The circles would even have a clock timer in them so you knew when the attack was going to hit.
Blizzard decided this was gamebreaking enough that they purposefully broke that addon.
Then Wildstar came out and this style of graphic was their main selling point.
It only took a few expansions for Blizzard to turn around and bake those AVR type graphics into the game. The addon they purposefully broke, within 2 expansions, they put into the base game.
I think we'll see the same happen here.
Almost all of my weakauras are from the template thing. Super easy for what I do. All 40x40 icons since I just use them to track buffs that get lost in my buff bar. Sometimes there are things missing though like outlaw rogue's audacity (free ambush) proc.
That right here is some banger of content ! Love it !
Does anyone know whether you can still get the Displate with Hydalyn in front of Amaurot? I haven't been watching the stream so I don't know if it was an exclusive or not
Im a programmer working at minecraft and while I can do weakauras through code the templates are simple to use and very fast, would recommend!
This has been very interesting to watch
I am surprised that Preach was unaware that Blizzard uses hidden auras to tune damage numbers, it is explicitly mentioned in patch notes from time to time... especially in pvp, blizzard uses hidden auras to tune damage of certain abilities with respect to pve combat, they usually mention the hidden auras at work there
Anyone else have the "in theory" trigger Siri at 24:00 ? (just a bit before, possibly)
Huge to showcase Luxthos, arguably the best WA UI creator for the every day player. Thank you for doing this insightful interview though.
just recently started using Afenar though i have found some minor changes have not been updated since the start of the xpac. Does luxtros keep up to date
@@ryanpower1291 he does his best to update as often as he is able to.
The devs of weak auras are single handedly the worst thing to happen to WoW ever. These clowns don’t know when to stop ruining a game.
Omg, as someone who runs a lot of different auras for different situations I would absolutely love a tool that runs and lists the issues that the auras are causing 🤤
this was crazy good interview
I use the pre made weakaura stuff in game all the time. So much easier then doing it from nothing.
I will wait for someone to make a strong aura addon.
Mythic Dathea was kind of a weakaura needed fight for the dumping of marks, but otherwise the raid was super nice and fun
Stan seems like such a level headed and aware dude. I don't use WA myself, but I agree 100% with him. Its encounter design that's the huge issue. That, and I also agree that you should want to use WA, not feel like you need to. It felt so vindicating to hear him also not like that people use WA just because their guild leaders force them to. I've had that issue and its incredibly frustrating and turned me off raiding basically all together.
That attitude in general that developed in the first few years of wow turned me off. Requiring X addon. Loot add-ons or assignment add-ons aside there were many times where a certain wa or addon were less intuitive to me than the standard information which added a layer of challenge. Not everyone thinks the same 🤷
Players (at least in pugs and LFR) seem to randomly ignore even obvious mechanics that don't need a WA. Or they just start trolling for reasons 🤔
So I'm not sure that this upcoming change will have much of an effect.
When I played last both LFR and Normal were joke difficulties. Always thought it was just a lack of care since healers in most fights can power through any damage (of they themselves are trying).
I really do believe with M+ low keys being a buffer of difficulty to raiding, LFR and Normal should be one, unqueuable difficulty.
But I would also like to see world gearing for people to be more engaging and not take months to get passable gear so what do I know anymore.
Preach learning about FOSS. Great!
Regarding send stuff to your alts weakaura.
I dunno if it was a TSM-operation or if it was a weakaura, but Krakenlatte had a guide about how to get gold by just casually playing.
What it did was that it saved 10k gold on the toon, rest was send to a decided alt, and that made it simple to collect gold and not spend it on stupid shit.
Hey I use the template function in WA! Its super easy to use
I feel like Neo finding out about the matrix here 😅
Great interview, this guy is awesome !!! Love WOWACE !!
Ha love that around 32 mins talking about feature requests. Im a software dev for a company and explaining to people some times how its not that there idea is shit but that it may not be worth the investment of my time, or the investment of processing and computing to add the feature. Everything has a cost and i cannot just add everything.
this interview is so good.
I love WeakAuras, I actually learned the LUA language because of WeakAuras!!!
I don't even rely on these but I appreciate the amount of customization it can bring. As a developer it's really inspiring to see the passion the WA developers bring, almost makes me want to dabble in LUA for the fun of it.
Lua is actually pretty simple. 33 reserved terms, no whitespace enforcement, and the only paradigm you have to worry about is tables.
@@joshua_lee732 Ah I never worry about syntax when it comes to learning anything new but tables being the main datastructure is interesting to say the least!
Premade template in WA is goated.
Thank you, Stan, WA is an incredible addon.
As someone who used to spend hours fiddling with add-ons I'm kinda glad ff14 doesn't have them
One game is healthy and the other is trying to get back. I'm playing wow but I hate to need addons.
So okay, with the specs being tuned by invisible auras and so on... When they add 5% flat in 1 patch, then 3% in another patch, do they change the 5% to like 9.57% total or whatever, or is it 2 buffs? Because if the latter, suddenly *alot* of the lag makes *alot* more sense.
They edit the same modifier, wowhead make a great job with their patch notes between version to show these changes
Dude I bow to you. Your addon makes it possible for me to play WoW. Good to hear you're such a nice and collected guy as well. Thanks a lot and all the best to you guys!!!
while I am on the side of addons in general have gone to far, I will say making my UI for my class is probably one of the best things to have come to wow.
I always thought it was just a facelift to Power Auras
I always use templates. Weird to hear people don't use the feature. :O
Lol...
I can’t believe Mike didn’t know about the hidden class buffs, they’ve been using it for ages and it’s sometimes in the hotfix notes!
I would literally NOT play WoW without WeakAuras! Such a great addon.
Well it looks like you wont be playing after that patch then, they are bringing the nerf hammer down hard.
They are working to hide away game systems from mods so they can not work as they do now.
@@TENGILL They're just making auras that can't be seen by addons, not the first time. Most people that enjoy WAs use it for custom UI stuff, tracking mechanics in raids/dungeons is just a bonus
@@TENGILL No one knows which debuffs will be affected by this new hidden aura API, it's even possible not a single debuff will be affected, it's just a tool they add for encounter designers, so please don't spread disinformation and fear
I totally understand what you're saying, and it's really impressive. But at the end of the day I would rather have had a game that didn't essentially require add-ons like these. I would rather them not have to develop and balance a game around these add-ons. Because that's what they've had to do for years and years.
Weak Auras is amazing. Love it. Donate to them.
Never used it,never will,i actually enjoy playing the game
Misumi here, creator of the biggest holy priest lightweaver weakaura, you might know me, I'm kinda a big deal. I just want to say I almost exclusively use the template feature, it makes this addon very easy.
23:20 You were unaware of this?
That's what he says
If they do this nerf to the game so that mods like WeakAuras do not work like today, I am out for good.
Do not mess with the mods Blizzard!!
If you do, your game is over!
A lot of Ex WoW players like myself wish Blizz took a harder line on Addons back in the day. Might not be this bad, the gap between base UI and information displayed.
That being said, its a needed crutch now with the current playerbase so taking it away now or changing it will do more harm than good. Its the bed Blizzard has made.
You shouldn't require/use add-ons like that. Makes balancing impossible. So weird.
I never found WA to be intuitive or user-friendly in it's interface and function structure. Bloated with too many options that the regular user doesn't need while the expert has everything they want. No wonder this all turned into copy-pasting strings and PUG raids or even mythic guilds ending up with 2 different Auras for 1 boss that mess each other up.
It's a lot to take in, but it's a thing you have to learn. I can do it, you can do it. Plenty of great resources to help. Worst case, important and forget. Just learn how to modify with the Display part of it and that goes a long way.
This argument would be true in sepulcher with anduin,lords,rygelon and jailer having multiple busted weakauras but this tier in vault genuinely doesnt require any weakauras to complete the raid, aberrus the next raid seems similar in that aspect
Really to make it intuitive they would have to dumb it down. The vast amount of things you can do in WAs is what makes it so useful. I believe their belief is that if you can't figure out to make your own WA then just use some elses. Since making an addon yourself is 10x hard than making a WA, it's a great middleground to creating your own UI without being overly complicated having to deal with the barely documented internal WoW API
@@VulpineDemon “having to learn” an add on to play the game is a ridiculous concept to me, I’m not going to tell people how to enjoy there game, if you enjoy having to use addons to clear content then I’m happy you are having a good time but for me I look at mythic raids and there just waay too much going on for me to take an interest to it.
its not a encounter design problem, with the catalyst of addons they wouldnt have to pile on and pile on extra mechanics.
blizzard never really had a chance to figure out how hard things had to be, bcs addons always got in the way.
The whole snail races thing - didn't WoW have those types of races during Legion, and even earlier out near Tanaris? I KNOW there were snail races in Legion, though. It was in a cave in Highmountain. Definitely not a steal from Guild Wars.
This guys voice reminds of Giovanni Giorgio.
I loaded up WoW to play dragon flight. Looked at the ui, menus and just thought…na. I should not need to use an add on. Blizz should provide a better ui. That being said it’s awesome your giving these guys an audience
You don’t need to? I’ve never touched weakauras and I play fine.
There are blind wow players? How does that work?
No idea M8 but i am sure there are a few in my guild.
@@greetdekeizer4369 I'm honestly confused.
Not necessarily fully blind, but partial sight.
@@Dan-qx4vn That is more understandable.
They would also need to prune some classes to because u need weakaruas to keep track of spells, looking at u Afflic Lock.
DoTs showing when they are in pandemic range should be baseline UI
Yeah old school wowace is why I posted my addons to wowinterface. That shit was cancer back in the day and I'm glad they moved away from svn
not to be that guy, but its not wow's BIGGEST addon. it has 1/4 the downloads of DBM.
Just looking at how many weak auras there are gives me a headache how can people play with all those charts and things on there screens..I'm a minimalist..that would drive me bonkers..I cannot do that..
Don't particularly like WA. I returned to Dragonflight after quitting at the end of Cata.
I got KSH and AOTC this tier, but I never used any WAs. I have to say, the gameplay feels harder now and I feel more mad at the game whenever I fail.
Honestly thinking of uninstalling.
Therefore, I get why people want to use all the addons, all the help, all the guides. You are impairing yourself if you are playing without them, in my opinion, at least for some encounters/affixes.
Hoping to see a fresh Vanilla or Vanilla+ season that is more casual for my tastes.
I just think Vanilla WoW needs to go through an OSRS arc. They need to have fun solo leveling content and perhaps a new end game raid per year. That would stimulate the playerbase, one that have been returning to Vanilla over the past year as is.
It needs systems in place for a slow, low population growth. A lot of the systems in WoW were designed for groups, and you simply can not find them for most of your playtime anymore.
Imagine people actually playing and being good at MMO and game content without add-ons! My goodness how in the world did we ever accomplish anything without them?
There's been add ons since vanilla. And blizz have outright said that they design bosses around the myriad add ons raiders use. It's been a 20 year long arms race
I've only ever used weakauras to monitor maelstrom stacks and that recent stacking dmg thing for Earth Shock/Ele Blast. That is all. Whenever my raid leader told me to use this weak aura, I told him no, I'll just follow the other melee dps with what they're doing. Chances are its not an individual mechanic and if it is, you just learn it and become better. Weakauras keep people...well...weak, for lack of a better word. They're not good players without the addon. They're clueless and blind puppies walking into the darkness.
THere are some insane players in my guild, but if they didnt have weakaura, they would be pretty mid.
Interesting Interview! I just don't like the video title. I was hesitant to even watch the video because I expected another drama inducing video, but I'm glad that it was just a knowledge expanding interesting interview...not sure what exactly the TRUTH was though. Keep making great content and cut down on the drama and clickbait please, we watch your videos for the quality that you are known for, not because your video titles are so attractive, you aren't running a new channel that needs to do that.
I appreciate people thinking this and I would love not to have to do them - but it really does matter with the algorithm, especially on a video which is itself not performing great overall. Eg I did test a more basic title during the first hour, and it saw a 40% performance reduction over this one. Just can't argue with the numbers at that point.
@@TheChunkeyNinja Mkay, guess I really can't argue with that, clickbait and drama rules in the social media and news world. It just deters me, so I can only speak of my personal experience. I think clickbait clickers wouldn't watch such a specific and detailled video till the end, so an audience that isn't drama seeking but content orientated would potentially lead to more watchtime. But with pre-roll ads maybe the sheer amount of clicks from clickbait creates more revenue. I haven't figured out the YT algorithm, not sure how much it values % watchtime vs clicks. But you probably know what you are doing and your answer at least reassures me that you are doing it intentionally for a legit and thoughtful purpose. =)
Biggest ? In which sense? I mean that does not even matter he's not the biggest by any metric, he's not the most used, downloaded or the biggest in size, so this tittle is both wrong and weird af.
I use around 100 addons (a lot of those are plugins for other, bigger addons like handynotes) and have been playing wow for over 16 years. Regardless of what version of wow I play, whatever xpack I am playing, I need most of my addons. To me the game would be basically unplayable without them. The default game without them is god awful and I'd literally rather not play the game than play without my addons. In terms of WAs specifically, I use it to track my buffs/debuffs and as a reminder to buff myself so I don't go a whole 8 hour AV game without having demon armor up (which is something I did during the very first anniversary AV years ago on retail) I also use it to remind me I have lets say my carrot on a stick equipped ect. I have *never* used it to track pve encounter mechanics and wouldn't even know how. I rely on DBM for stuff like that.
DatSheffy
If the Race to world first had no addons, Echo and Limit would not be the frontrunners of the race. That's a fact.
Money wins races. No longer about skill or dedication, just time and money.
When half your team is scripters, who is really playing the game? The people on stream or the guys figuring out how the fight works.
I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of accounts kept paying Blizzard exclusively even though WeakAuras provided half of the software necessary to complete several raid tiers?
first
5th?
Funny how this guy has been using the addon for 10 years or more and "only" now talks about it cuz FF doesnt have and its so much better...
Why do people even see this guy.
because he at some point was turbo critical of blizzard, but also never "left" wow as a game, he just stopped covering it. And now he's broke after the flood and either thinks this content is good monetization prospect or blizzard paid him to praise them for no reason
also ask yourself how much ff14 he enjoy? class variety? lore? extremes? god forbid ultimates? he only ever play casual shit with his bootlickers and msq
not long ago he advocated that wow and addons are inseparable, and addons in general are good thing
@@oreshe yeah he kinda became an idiot.
So vain and proud of himself, for what?
"Im a mythic raider" , are you? or a mythic boosted?
pog
The problem is WoW failing to provide all important information in default UI
false addon andy spotted.
remember when you stopped doing stuff with blizzard because of the lawsuit and legal issues? And now you're all up in them again. Clearly the only thing you value is money.
Weakauras ruined the game years ago for me. No hard feelings to the devs but it's just too powerful.
And yes, technically weakauras doesn't do anything but give players the tools. But maybe the building blocks themselves have gotten too powerful. So either blizzard needs to limit how far addons can go.
Ban that shit. It's getting ridiculous
No
Provides botting software is surprised people call out on botting software.
First!
Let's reduce even more challenge, let's reduce any opportunity to think or learn. Go weakauras. Loving the salty noob replies, touched a nerve with this one 😅😅.
Let’s remove functionality a lot of people need, particularly people with disabilities.
Let's post the dumbest take ever.
@@keithb6344 hahaha the old 'it's for disabled people argument' really it's not for disabled people it's for people who don't want to learn to play. I've got over 20 years professional experience with disabled people and I don't but the accessibility argument - really there is a cross section with capacity which means things like weakauras aren't helping with.
@@keithb6344 Calling wow players disabled is going a bit far, but ok dude
@@keithb6344 link 2 or 3 examples of disabled people saying they need weakauras otherwise it's a false argument. There are lots of disabled people who can actually play the game and well too.
Weak auras should be banned in pvp and heavily controlled in pve.
Might as well use bot software.
Hey yo Mike you blink a lot
Literally never used this addon. Never needed it.
I kept getting errors with weak auras this xpac soon as I downloaded last month. Updates and redownloading does nothing so I haven't bothered with the addon this time around. Too much work to keep it updated. I'm tired of addons in general this xpac. I hate having to spend the start of every play session manually going through my addons for updates for 30 minutes before I can actually play or risk getting addon errors in the middle of a boss fight or have a boss ability DC me because of an addon. Not going to use a desktop updater app and risk spyware from China.
I've been going for a less is more approach. With the base ui now, I don't really need all the memory black holes like fancy ui apps. Can edit so much, don't need healer frames either. I have maybe 10ish addons now. Dbm, auctionator, 2 panel frame movers, postal, details, tomtom, Rio, rarescanner and CTA.
I hate WA.. I've never ever thought that a barrier to raid entry would be an addon like this.
lotta talk from addon creators since WoW said they're hiding some weakauras
If you watched the video before commenting you would know the video was recorded a week before this hidden aura announcement
its almost insane that we havent gotten any actual relevant content from preach interviews in months
the last time there was a current one was the first one from his trip but since you guys drip feed this content everything is immediately out of date
from snaking your friends to fleecing your fans
This was a great interview. While using my toe knife to clean out under the sides of my toenails on by 2 big toes. Took quite a while to diligently detail these claws. But I was thoroughly impressed and entertained thanks to you Preach.
People don't want to work for loot they let dbm play the game for them.
so you are saying you just need dbm to clear the raid ? please link your mythic kills
you are wow ga7ba