How are you coping in Midnight’s new addon-light era?

It’s been several weeks, and we’ve all had time to settle into the Midnight addon environment — have you been handling the transition with grace, or are you mashing your keyboard randomly and being repeatedly eaten by lynxes just outside of the Silvermoon gates without your meticulously crafted addon-heavy UI?

We’re now well past the addon apocalypse that blasted Azeroth in the Midnight pre-patch. While the stated overarching goal was to prevent addons from feeling necessary for end-game content by blocking their ability to access certain parts of the back-end game code, what ended up happening is a whole host of intricately customizable UI, cooldown alert, and damage meter addons being restricted to the point that their developers simply ceased to continue working on them.

WeakAuras was one of those hit hardest by the Midnight changes, and I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that it feels a bit like I’m playing a different game. I played World of Warcraft for about 14 years without any tweaks to the default UI, but during Shadowlands I finally decided to dip my toe into being able to track Phoenix Flames cooldowns without staring at my action bar. Over the following five years I progressively expanded and tweaked my WeakAuras to give me feedback on every part of the game across most of the classes. From movement abilities to cooldowns to a giant reminder to always have Arcane Brilliance active, I had everything customized down to the pixel. Finding out that it was all going away upon Midnight’s launch was definitely a bummer, and having to make do with the “we have WeakAuras at home” in-game attempt at a cooldown manager has been frustrating.

What it all comes down to is customization. I miss the tiny things that really fit my play style, like an enormous glowing Blink cooldown tracker for transmog runs that would only display in an instance when I was not in a group. Sure, I could most likely re-create that with a different addon or three, but I’m barely keeping up with the content fire hose as it is.

People have different learning styles and different ways of processing information. I loved having bars that would slowly deplete until a spell’s cooldown was ready. Two months into Midnight I’m still attempting to cast spells when they’re on cooldown because my brain didn’t process the icon’s color correctly.

Others have similar stories. The in-game damage meter seems to be lacking some critical functionality (and accuracy). Those who relied on addons to allow them to play the game at all due to accessibility issues obviously have the most at stake, but I haven’t heard of too many cases where players have had to walk away entirely.

So how has your Midnight experience been? Which addon have you had the most trouble adjusting without in this new time? Or are you happy with the increased built-in UI because you have never downloaded an addon in your Azeroth questing career?