Watch out, because the Empowered Artifact weapon animation may cause seizures

This week the quest to deal with that giant sword that’s stuck in Azeroth’s side went live, allowing us to empower our Artifact to level 126 and 75 Concordance of the Legionfall. One of the consequences of the questline is that we drain the Sword of Sargeras of the power that’s poisoning Azeroth, using our Artifacts to absorb it. You’ve all seen people screenshotting themselves doing so dressed up as a horse’s butt or a dragon or a hamster of whatever. But now, some people are reporting that after they did the quest, the constantly flickering Artifact pane is causing them some trouble.

Specifically, that it’s causing them to have seizures. That’s a pretty big problem since you have to open your Artifact pane if you want to change relics, check traits, or just see what happened to your artifact after draining the sword’s power.

Blizzard has responded with CM Ythisens saying that they’re looking into the situation, which is good — it’s really awful to log in to your favorite game and suddenly find yourself having a seizure. And they also make a good point about the problem — just because an animation doesn’t do anything to you doesn’t mean that it isn’t causing problems for other people, because seizure disorders are extremely complex and no two people’s brains process input in exactly the same way at all times.

I feel like maybe this should have been caught in testing but when I went on the PTR the weapons were already disabled because the PTR was post 8.0, and so the screen in question didn’t come up for you when you looked at your Artifact. That’s an unfortunate oversight, but it’s good that Blizzard is looking into the problem now.

Update: If you’re one of the people having this issue, there is a workaround. Adam Williams, responsible for Deadly Boss Mods and other addons, has this macro that can shut down the Artifact animation if you run it before opening the Artifact pane.

If for some reason, you want to disable the animation on unstable artifact weapons, you still can with this macro (but only if you run it BEFORE opening artifact and starting animation loop)

/run C_ArtifactUI.IsArtifactInstabilityInEffect = function() return false end

— 🧔🏽Adam (@MysticalOS) June 28, 2018

Hopefully that will help people until Blizzard comes up with a fix. Please be careful if you have any sort of photo-sensitive seizure disorder and stay safe.

Update x2: Mr. Williams now has an addon that disables the instability animation, and also disables it on the Artifact Fishing Pole so you can keep leveling it up.