Private Auras - Were They Successful?

Over the last few years, WeakAuras, or WAs, have become an essential part of World of Warcraft that few players could do without. Particularly for raiding, WeakAuras have always been an important tool that allowed players to optimize their gameplay, and sometimes even to automate certain assignments or otherwise help with complex and difficult mechanics. In fact, the top-end Race to World First (RWF) guilds employ multiple dedicated WeakAura developers and analysts on their teams, proving just how integral WAs are for progression raiding.

In order to combat some of the incredible innovations these RWF developers have made to automate assignments and trivialize entire boss mechanics, Blizzard introduced Private Auras in the second half of 2023. Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible only had a handful of mechanics hidden this way, but Amirdrassil dialed it up to eleven, with the last three bosses all having one or multiple untrackable mechanics. It’s clear that Blizzard feels the core issue at work in Mythic raiding is the relative ease with which WeakAuras can automate and trivialize Mythic boss mechanics, but have Private Auras really solved this problem? Let’s talk about it.

Table of Contents

What are Private Auras?

Before we dive into several examples of actual mechanics that were hidden by Private Auras, let’s recap what a Private Aura actually is. To put it simply, Private Auras are a way for Blizzard to hide the information that Addons or WeakAuras would use to track whether a player is afflicted by a specific debuff, or targeted by a specific mechanic. This means that no WeakAura or Addon can tell that you have a “hidden” debuff, even though it shows on your UI’s debuff bar, because its duration, stacks or any other kind of important information is not shared through the API.

Without comprehensive communication through the API, advanced WeakAuras that had once been used to assign players a specific position or order of execution for a mechanic can no longer do so, as the WAs no longer know which players even have the specified mechanic. The goal behind Private Auras was to force players to actively make a decision themselves, instead of having a third-party tool do it for them solely based on information from within the game.


Throughout past raid tiers, an increasing number of mechanics were automated either partially or in their entirety, and players had to put little thought into how to manage those mechanics, other than following the pre-coded and pre-ordained assignment that the WeakAura would show for them. Since the RWF guilds continue to put more and more effort into that crucial race through Mythic progression, this naturally also meant that RWF developers created more advanced and complex WeakAuras with each raid tier.

With many mechanics being either partially or fully trivialized by WeakAuras, it was only a matter of time until Blizzard curtailed the power of the addon. Blizzard did not formally announce this change, but the developers of WeakAuras seem to have been informed of the change ahead of time. Blizzard also enabled a way to track Private Auras for visibility purposes, allowing players to at least have an enlarged icon on their screen to identify when they are affected by an otherwise “hidden” mechanic.



Blizzard introduced Private Auras in Patch 10.1, alongside the Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible raid, and used them very sparsely. Going into Amirdrassil, however, Blizzard made it clear that more mechanics would be untrackable; they added a stunning 20 Private Auras in total, with multiple mechanics on the final two bosses being hidden from the API.

What's the Workaround?

It didn’t take long for players to come up with ideas to circumvent the restrictions put forth by Private Auras. If the game no longer forwarded information on which players were affected by a certain debuff, then players could simply send the information themselves, which would then be used by a complex WA to assign them specific positions.



All the player had to do was send a specific macro which would be read by a corresponding WeakAura, allowing the automated assignments to happen once again. While there was some slight delay as each of the affected players pressed their macros, the old type of WeakAura that did all the thinking for the player could still work almost just as well.

Macros sending information to WeakAuras is nothing new, as they had been used for dispellable debuffs at many points in past tiers. On Halondrus, for example, when afflicted by Crushing Prism, all the player had to do was to hit the macro once they moved into position, and the player’s frame would glow for the healers, signaling that the specific player could be safely dispelled. This removed the risk of an early dispel that could cause a wipe.

Given that macro-driven WeakAuras were already an occasional practice, and with Private Auras as a minor hurdle, WA developers quickly found a work-around for many situations in which the raid would want the WeakAura to do most of the assignments. These WeakAuras often included priority lists that ranked certain classes or roles of players over others, making them incredibly useful. If a mechanic affected multiple players and different assignments carried different levels of complexity with them, a priority list within the WeakAura ensured that a healer almost never had to move if someone else could also do the mechanic instead, or at least gave the healer the easiest assignment, allowing them to focus on keeping the raid alive instead.

Of course not every mechanic required hard assigned or pre-determined positions or orders of execution, and only a handful of the 20 mechanics in Amirdrassil really required a specific work-around – the others were simply played by ear. But for the more complex mechanics, Private Auras caused at least a few issues both in Aberrus and Amirdrassil.

Examples of Private Aura Mechanics

In order to understand the effect that Private Auras had on the players’ gameplay, we’ll be taking a closer look at three mechanics that required specific workarounds. While many of the mechanics that were tagged as Private Auras did not require any such workarounds, as players could basically just “wing it”, some mechanics were far more demanding and fight-altering, and these are the ones that caused aggravation for many players and guilds.

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ECHO OF NELTHARION

The first case of Private Auras that really caught everybody’s attention in Aberrus was the Volcanic Heart mechanic on Echo of Neltharion, the penultimate boss of the raid. While this wasn’t the first Private Aura players ever encountered, it was the first time in the history of the game that players were unable to automate assignments for a mechanic that affected multiple players at once while also requiring quick movement and perfect positioning.


The mechanic itself was simple: five players would be affected by a debuff, and once the debuff expired, they would explode, dealing damage to everybody around them in a wide area and applying a DoT debuff to anybody hit by the explosion. In its release version, both the explosion of the debuff and DoT were almost lethal, and keeping the affected players alive with all the other damage in the encounter was tough. To make matters worse, the radius was very large, and players only had a few seconds to get into position. If a player didn’t make it out in time and clipped part of the raid with their explosion, or accidentally hit another player who also had the debuff, it was a guaranteed death. Furthermore, the boss arena was limited due to many area denial mechanics, making it almost impossible to spread out with these debuffs while still leaving a safe spot for the rest of the raid.

While players quickly learned the spots for each set of Volcanic Hearts throughout the fight, Private Auras made it impossible to pre-assign these positions. In a world without Private Auras, the afflicted players would’ve simply been assigned a spot from 1 to 5, and with the help of a Raidplan or the pop-up map images that players utilized during the fight, they would’ve immediately known where to go.


Instead, players had to have a list on their screens that allowed them keep track of every player that did and did not have the debuff, and then each player had to manually count which position they were in or have it called out by their Raid Leader. This caused considerable delay in players’ movement, and because of the very short amount of time between the application and explosion of the debuff, any further hesitation or confusion on a debuffed player’s part almost guaranteed a raid wipe. Thus, the Volcanic Heart mechanic was one of the worst, most frustrating mechanics players had ever encountered.


Blizzard ultimately nerfed some aspects of the mechanic, most importantly its radius, making it much easier for the unaffected players to find a safe spot. Just a small decrease to the explosion radius already made a huge difference, despite Volcanic Heart remaining untrackable; the change allowed players to grasp which positional assignment they were given and still have time and space to spare when moving into their safe spot.

After this unfortunate first showing of Private Auras in Aberrus, Blizzard had a lot of time to rethink their approach to mechanics that were hidden in this way, and they acknowledged that the Volcanic Heart mechanic in particular didn’t give the player enough time to react and position themselves. Still, as one of the first Private Auras in the game, it left a very sour taste in many players’ mouths and memories.

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SMOLDERON

While players hoped Blizzard had learned some important lessons from Aberrus, Amirdrassil boasted a number of Private Auras, 20 in total, and some of them were a lot more problematic than others. One such mechanic was the Seeking Inferno mechanic on Smolderon, the 7th boss of the raid.


Whenever the boss casted Seeking Inferno, four portals would appear around the raid team, and one by one, an orb of fire would travel from the portal and fixate on a random player. Whenever an orb reached its targeted player, it exploded, dealing high raid-wide damage and applying a 3-second debuff to the entire raid. Any further triggers of this mechanic within the 3-second window would instantly wipe the raid, requiring players to trigger these orbs in a staggered fashion. Since Seeking Inferno was a Private Aura, there was no easy way to have a priority-based list WeakAura indicating who would break their orb first, second, third or last.

The solution to this problem, which is still being employed as of this writing, was the aforementioned button-press macro. The affected players would simply press their macro the moment they realized they were fixated, and the Raid Leader would then call out the order in which the players would trigger the orb. Some guilds instead chose to simply let players trigger these in the order in which the players used the macro, from fastest to slowest, which worked just as well, although it didn’t always allow for prioritizing certain players to go before others.

With the addition of the button-press macro, Seeking Inferno was a fairly simple affair, but many guilds still suffered from individual players struggling to press the macro quickly enough, or a player pressing it by accident when they weren’t affected at all. This showcased one of the downsides of the macro as a Private Aura workaround; any player could potentially mess things up for everybody else by accidentally pressing the macro. If this happened, it almost always ended up in a wipe. By the time the raid figured out who actually had the mechanic and who didn’t, too much time had usually passed to deal with the remaining orbs properly before the next mechanic began.

All things considered, Smolderon was a simple enough fight that Private Auras didn’t make a big difference, and the mechanic itself was tuned with enough room for delay and error so that even triggering the orb a second too slow would not cascade into a series of mistakes and result in a wipe. As long as players were diligent in pressing their macros, or careful not to press if they weren’t targeted, Seeking Inferno did not present too great a hurdle for most guilds.

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FYRAKK, THE BLAZING

While Smolderon was an example of Private Auras causing relatively few issues, Fyrakk was a different beast entirely. As the final boss of the tier and the entire Dragonflight expansion, Fyrakk was bound to have a lot of complex and challenging mechanics, and some of the fight’s most demanding mechanics were unfortunately hidden via Private Auras. Once again the WA developers reached into their bag of tricks and pulled out the macro as a workaround for not just one, but multiple mechanics throughout the fight.

The first situation that required a WeakAura to fully assign multiple players to very specific positions occurred during the first intermission. The boss landed in the middle of the room, and every puddle dropped in Phase 1 spawned a set of Flame and Shadow Orbs that traveled towards the boss. If any of them reached the boss, the raid wiped instantly. Since the puddles from the previous phase are necessarily very spread out, raid teams had to form an organized half circle around the boss to intercept these orbs.


At the beginning of the phase, each player was also assigned either a Shadow or a Flame debuff at random, ten each, and players could only soak the orbs of the same color, or they would be one-shot. This meant that players could not just memorize their spot from the get-go, but had to be assigned based on their own and everybody else’s debuffs, which differed every pull.

The solution to this mechanic came in the form of the macro once more. This time around, only the players who had the Flamebound debuff would be pressing it. Once ten players pressed, the WeakAura in charge of assigning players would know each player’s debuff, correctly assuming the other 10 players all had the Shadowbound debuff, and assign everybody to a specific position.


Players only had about 2 seconds to press the macro before having to run to their spots, and any player not pressing the button would cause considerable delay in the assignment, or even straight-up break the WeakAura. The same WA problems happened if a player pressed their macro on accident despite not having the fire debuff, or even if there was a dead player going into the phase. Consequently, malfunctioning WeakAuras caused many wipes, and with only a few people able to develop and write such a complex WeakAura in the first place, many guilds were reliant on the WAs that were provided by the RWF guilds. Tinkering with or troubleshooting a WA that isn’t working is incredibly difficult, unless someone in the guild knows Lua code and has some basic knowledge of how the WeakAura works.

On February 1, 2024, about two months after the World First Kill on Fyrakk, Blizzard decided to remove the Private Aura tags from the Intermission 1 debuffs. This meant that WeakAura developers were now able to automate the process without requiring any player input, but with most of the high-end WA coders already having cleared the content, there may be little incentive to remake the WA for a raid team that has already gotten used to the macro system.

Fyrakk also had another mechanic that required quick movement and positioning in Phase 2. The two big colossi adds in this phase casted Molten Eruption and Shadow Cage shortly after spawning, and once more if they were not killed in time. The players affected by Shadow Cage would get stunned once their debuff expired, while damaging and stunning every player within their small radius. The players with Molten Eruption had to break out these cages with their own explosion, which happened two seconds after the Shadow Cage debuff expired. Both of these abilities were Private Auras and affected four players each.



Two of each of the players affected with the Shadow Cage had to stack up on a ground marker on top of each other, while two of the Molten Eruption players would then break out these players, while the remaining players with the fire debuff simply stayed away from the rest of the raid.

With Private Auras getting in the way of any kind of automation for such a mechanic, all the flame debuff players had to press their macros once more, sending a signal to another WeakAura. This WA would then pick the first two people who pressed the button, with the fastest being assigned to one of the ground markers, and the second fastest the other one. With the Shadow Cage players stacking on top of the two ground markers of the same color, this solution quickly handled the mechanic.

There were a few issues with this macro method, of course. First, there were no automated assignments for the Shadow Cage players, leading to the occasional pull where instead of splitting two and two, three players would run to the same spot. This would often kill all three players due to the high initial damage of the Shadow Cage explosion, or lead to last second attempts at adjusting their position, which caused just as many issues.

Secondly, the WeakAura assignments for each marker only happened once at least two of the four players pressed their macro. Sometimes the presses could be late, pressed by accident, or not pressed at all, and as a result, one set of players would not be broken out of their cages, almost assuredly leading to a wipe; any delay or mistake on a mechanic that had to be played so quickly on the parts of four different people could only result in disaster.

If Private Auras didn’t exist, a WA would’ve likely been developed to assign every player to a specific spot, automating the entire process while also deprioritizing healers and those DPS that were carrying the damage on the colossi at that point. Instead it was a messy affair, with many sources of error that weren’t just due to bad execution, positioning or movement.

While the Private Aura mechanic in the first Intermission can now be automated thanks to the hotfix from February 1st, the Phase 2 mechanic, as well as the ones on previous bosses, still need a work-around via the macro at the time of this publication. Players are left wondering, though, would Fyrakk have been significantly easier if WAs were permitted to automate some of the more complex moments of the fight? Are Private Auras serving their purpose?

Closing Thoughts

So how useful are Private Auras, actually? On a technical level, they certainly do prevent automation of difficult mechanics. However, WA developers had predicted and quickly implemented the macro-press fix for Private Auras as anticipated. Practically speaking, mechanics are still easily automated, but they simply require one extra step – players have to press their macros at an appropriate time.

This workaround brings about a few interesting questions: is there any true difference between a mechanic made easier by an automated WeakAura, or one that requires an additional moment of input before automation kicks in? Has it made a difference if a mechanic and its assignments are fully automated and players only have 2 seconds to react, compared to having 3 seconds instead, but having to spend ~1 second to for that extra macro-press input?

Personally, I do not believe there is any significant difference in using an automated WeakAura or one that requires a button-press macro. There were many other Private Aura mechanics in Amirdrassil that did not require specific positions or assignments, but for the mechanics that did, Private Auras seemed to have only one effect: they widened the gap between the guilds who had dedicated WA devs, and those who did not, making the game less accessible. Most guilds below the RWF level must wait for WeakAura packages to be released, and struggle through Lua code to get some of these WeakAuras working in the first place, despite in-depth instructions from the original creators on how to use and implement them. But compatibility issues or duplicate WeakAuras can still mess things up for the entire raid, and configuring and troubleshooting these WAs is something no raider wants to spend even a minute on, let alone hours. Numerous guilds lost entire raid nights of valuable Fyrakk progression time because they could not effectively troubleshoot their WeakAura packages, resulting in slower progression and hours of frustration from raiders.

After two tiers’ worth of Private Auras, I think they add very little value to the Mythic raid environment, while causing more trouble than they’re worth. I would even go so far as to say that they have had the opposite effect – the further away from the RWF rankings we move, the more we find that Private Auras caused excessive frustration and wasted raid time. It may also be worth considering how many other Mythic guilds would manage to progress through future Private Aura bosses at all if Echo, Liquid and a few others like Northern Sky did not continue to share their progression WeakAuras. Are Private Aura-coded mechanics still solvable in some way for guilds without a WA expert in the midst?

Whether with Private Auras or without, the difficulty of a mechanic simply comes down to how much time players have to actually move into position and deal with that spell or ability. This holds true for all three of the examples we explored in this piece, and it will likely hold true for any future mechanics hidden by Private Auras. When difficulty no longer comes from actively playing the game, but the juggling of third-party tools, something is amiss.

WeakAuras are supposed to be about accessibility and improving visual clarity, not making the game or encounter playable in the first place. Breaking the functionality of automated WeakAura systems with Private Auras ultimately did not significantly alter the Mythic raiding environment, and instead only furthered the gap between RWF-ready guilds and those below them in progression. There may be middle ground yet between automation WeakAuras and blank-slate progression without leaning on third-party solutions, but Private Auras do not seem to be the answer we were looking for.

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