An Inside Look at Private Auras
WeakAuras (WAs) have been a quintessential part of the WoW experience since time immemorial. For many, the game would be borderline unplayable without the visual and auditory help and support of WeakAuras. Cooldowns, buffs, debuffs, timers for fight mechanics…the list of information that can be tracked, shown and heard with the Addon is endless – or rather, it was.
In Patch 10.1, Blizzard introduced a new way to hide information from Addons like WeakAuras, making it impossible for them to use and display certain debuffs and boss mechanics. Aberrus only had three abilities hidden this way. However, as initially reported by Wowhead, the upcoming raid, Amirdrassil the Dream’s Hope, has a staggering 20 private auras, and Blizzard may add even more abilities to that list.
Today we’ll be taking a quick look at what private auras are, how they function, and how we think that private auras will shape and transform the RWF for years to come.
Table of Contents
For some, WeakAuras are an invaluable tool that enables and improves accessibility and inclusivity to the game’s hardest content. For Blizzard, however, WeakAuras have spurred on an arms race as encounter designers work to come up with increasingly complex and convoluted mechanics in the hopes that WeakAura authors will finally be unable to solve them.
Over the years, there have been a few standout Addons and WeakAuras that the community felt were “too powerful” to be used by just a few top guilds, or were deemed too important to be part of a mod instead of being a part of the base game. Some of these features eventually made it into the game, like World and Target Markers, but more often than not, Blizzard blocked certain WAs from working one way or another in order to limit the playerbase’s ability to trivialize or circumvent boss mechanics.
The Power of Addons and WeakAuras
In recent years, the complexity and level of sophistication of WeakAuras, especially for raid encounters, has increased tremendously. In fact, many of the Race for World First (RWF) guilds began employing developers to create custom-made WAs and Addons for their raiders. This added another layer of competition to the RWF, as it was no longer just about the players, strategists, and analysts that were responsible for the success of a RWF guild, but also the design, speed, and skill with which the developers produced WAs or Addon solutions to the problems the teams encountered on each boss fight.
One of the first and most well-known (some might even say infamous) cases of the power of Addons was AVR in Wrath of the Lich King. This Addon not only tracked buffs, debuffs and raid mechanics like many similar mods, but it also allowed the raid to draw and share markers in the 3D game world for precise positioning and boss assignments, which updated dynamically with the state of the encounter. In a previously unseen reaction by Blizzard, the Addon’s functionality was swiftly blocked in Patch 3.3.5.
AVR AVR in action on Sindragosa, before the addition of World Markers to the game. Source: YouTube
However, AVR was seemingly ahead of its time. The rise of WeakAuras gave birth to a new era of providing game information to the user, both visually and aurally. Now, over a dozen years after the ban on AVR, WeakAuras are just as powerful a tool, and some might argue they have gone far beyond the initial power of AVR. Blizzard also continued to add some of AVR’s features as new tools to the game itself, like World Markers or the new Ping system that was introduced with Patch 10.1.7.
WeakAuras have also developed tremendously over the years, with the Mythic Archimonde World First Kill by Method being one of the most talked about and groundbreaking examples of WeakAuras trivializing mechanics since AVR. One such mechanic was Archimonde’s Wrought Chaos mechanic, which would shoot a beam between 2 players, for a total of 10 beams between the entire raid. Standing in anybody else’s beam was a guaranteed death, so spreading out accordingly was paramount in dealing with this mechanic.
Dealing with the Wrought Chaos mechanic was a lot simpler thanks to this WA. Source: Method Archimonde World First
Mythic Archimonde was also the first time that WeakAuras were used to assign players specific positions for a mechanic that applied to multiple players at the same time, requiring players to spread out into specific positions. WeakAuras solved this by utilizing a list of assignments from another Addon – back then, it was Angry Assignments. All the raid leader had to do was to pre-assign players to a specific position via a list, and once players were afflicted with the Mark of the Legion debuff, the WeakAura would immediately tell each player where to run.
This style of assigning players to specific positions, targets, or interrupts via a pre-written list has since become a staple for almost every single raid encounter today. From assigning players on The Jailer with the bombs to individual holes to jump into, or having marked players assigned to dealing with the runes during the intermission on Fatescribe Roh-Kalo, WeakAuras have functioned as quality-of-life improvements for raiders by doing a majority of the “thinking” for them, thus reducing the need for the raid leader to call out individual assignments or multiple players’ positions every single attempt.
To combat this level of automation for raid assignments, Blizzard developed a way to hide specific abilities to no longer be trackable by Addons and WeakAuras in Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible – giving rise to the new “private auras”.
Private Auras
Private auras are a way for Blizzard to hide the information that Addons or WeakAuras would use to track whether a player was afflicted by a specific debuff, or targeted by a specific mechanic. While the player will still be seeing the debuff on their UI themselves, a WeakAura or BossMod won’t be able to detect this debuff for a custom-made visual or auditory warning. It also prevents developers from creating tools that will automatically assign markers to players with these debuffs, or use a pre-written list to give multiple players different assignments based on their position in the list.
Prior to this change, it was easy to guide players to specific positions, or prioritize certain players over others for dealing with a mechanic. Typically, a WeakAura had a hard-coded priority for assigning players; for example, if all 20 players’ names were listed, it would automatically pick the players that were listed first over players that were listed last. This was incredibly helpful for dealing with mechanics that were difficult to deal with for one group of players, (i.e. melee), by simply putting them “lowest” in the priority list. It could also be used by raid leaders to ensure that the players they trusted the most in dealing with a mechanic would be prioritized over those who had a steeper learning curve during progression.
Players from Liquid and Echo were automatically assigned positions on The Jailer and Fatescribe Roh-Kalo.
Aberrus was the first Raid that included some mechanics that were no longer trackable in this way, and as a result, players and developers for these RWF guilds had to come up with creative solutions for these mechanics. The most notable example is the Volcanic Heart debuff on
However, top guilds found a workaround soon enough. While the debuff was not trackable by WAs, it still showed on the raid frames. By showing the entire raid’s frames in a list, debuffed players were quickly able to see what number (from one to five, top to bottom) they were. Another WeakAura would then show a map with the five intended debuff positions, and players were immediately able to see which position they would have to take. This WeakAura strategy was far from perfect or elegant, and making it work often required multiple attempts of the raid running around like headless chickens, but it was a workable albeit frustrating solution that eventually allowed guilds to take down the boss.
One of many images that helped guide players to the correct position on Echo of Neltharion.
Although this was a solution that exclusively used in-game tools, others used a second screen that showed each of the positions, and some even considered capturing parts of their screen or having a third-party software overlay to help with this mechanic.
The Echo of Neltharion WeakAuras are a prime example of the trouble with private auras – dealing with them cannot be too punishing. If a mechanic is designed to be executed flawlessly, with no way of recovery, limited space, and only a short time to react before it wipes the raid, using a WeakAura or Addon to help guide that process is no longer just a helpful tool, it becomes a requirement for success.
Community Reaction
Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible, only had three Private Auras that were hidden in this way: Rending Charge on the Forgotten Experiments encounter, as well as Volcanic Heart and Rushing Darkness on
Rushing Darkness and Rending Charge, both very similar mechanics, were easily dealt with, but managing the Volcanic Heart mechanic took dozens of wipes and adjustments for the RWF raiders. For the many guilds that followed those RWF teams, the boss took over 100 attempts. A vastly higher pull count for guilds that do not play at the RWF level is often emblematic of an encounter that requires incredibly high levels of coordination, or sophisticated tooling of WeakAuras that are not publicly available or are difficult to configure.
Echo of Neltharion provided a uniquely difficult challenge: While the boss area was very limited, the large debuff AoE radius required incredibly precise positioning in order to leave just a small safe spot. This issue was compounded by the high damage the debuff dealt, making it almost impossible to have players stack on top of each other with defensives to conserve space in the room, while also having such a short duration before it exploded that quick movement was vital for success.
If the debuff was trackable via WeakAuras, a WA would’ve been able to tell players where to go, leaving more time for players to move out, significantly lowering the risk of raid wipes as a result. The workaround solution that ultimately led to Echo of Neltharion’s demise was far from elegant and due to the compounding issues surrounding the mechanic (as well as another unique P3 mechanic that also required a complex WeakAura to plan out), many a player felt like the boss was completely solved by WeakAuras.
Since this was the first time that Blizzard added private auras to hamper the player’s ability to automate assignments for complex mechanics, it was to be expected that players would feel very strongly about the decision. Many lessons were learned from the Echo of Netlharion progression experience, for both Blizzard and Addon and WA developers. Blizzard likely applied those lessons to the multitude of abilities that will be hidden in a similar fashion in the upcoming raid, Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope.
Predictions for the Amirdrassil RWF
The idea of limiting the power of Addons is nothing new, but the RWF guilds employ many analysts and developers that are capable of finding solutions regardless. While having outside staff of the RWF guilds be responsible for the success, or lack thereof, of their raid teams is something to be commended, it ultimately only ends up limiting the amount of people who can design, develop and program WeakAuras or Addons to solve problems like this, while making it harder for more guilds to break into the Race for World First. Thankfully the RWF guilds are happy to share their WeakAuras once their progression has finished, allowing regular raiders to benefit from their fruits of labor, but configuring and maintaining these complex WAs is not something every raider or raid leader is capable of.
Looking forward to Amirdrassil, it seems that many of the mechanics that will be hidden this way are on the simpler side and do not require much thinking or complex assignments. It is unlikely that we will see a repeat of something like the Volcanic Heart fiasco, which begs the question: Why are Private Auras a thing? There are many workarounds for them already, whether it is a somewhat complex solution like in the case of Volcanic Heart, or, as some have mentioned, the player’s ability to simply press a macro that would send information to a WeakAura, to inform it that the player has a debuff – at which point such a WA can still automate the process.
Being able to fully customize the warnings for raid mechanics enables many players to raid who struggle with the visual clarity, encounter design and limited customization options of the standard UI. Preventing abilities from being trackable might seriously hamper accessibility and limit inclusivity, while doing very little to stop players from automating certain mechanics. While hidden auras will temporarily prevent players from solving complex raid mechanics with the help of an Addon or WA, it is only a matter of time until additional workarounds are developed in this continuous arms race.
It remains to be seen how the Race for World First in Amirdrassil will be affected, and what magic solutions the developers of the RWF guilds will come up with this time. We are certainly looking forward to the start of the race on November 14th, and how private auras will change the scope of the RWF in the future.
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About the Author
Seliathan has been playing Rogue for over half his life, since the initial release of WoW over 18 years ago. After a long career of Raid Leading, Theorycrafting, and pushing Mythic+, Seliathan enjoys creating all kinds of PvE content on Twitch, co-hosting the Tricks of the Trade Rogue podcast, contributing to Raider.IO as Staff Writer, and writing guides for Icy Veins.
