Addons: what's restricted, and what replaced it

Careful with addon advice for Forever. Most of it is Classic advice, and a chunk of it is now wrong.

Forever uses retail’s addon and API restrictions. So the combat addons Classic players treat as mandatory either don’t work, or work in a reduced form.

That’s the biggest practical difference between Forever and any other WoW ruleset. Almost nobody covers it.

What changed

The restrictions are about what an addon can read during combat. Health, auras and threat come back as protected values. An addon can show them. It can’t act on them.

So:

• WeakAuras-style combat tracking is heavily limited. The most common beta forum thread is asking for it back. That tells you what happened.
• DoT tracking is off, in the form players expect.
• Rotation and decision automation is out. That part is deliberate. Nobody is promising it returns.

Some long-running addons also stopped maintaining retail builds entirely. They’re out of the Forever pool whatever the rules say.

What Blizzard built instead

Three things that used to be addon territory are native now:

Built-in	Replaces
Cooldown Manager	WeakAuras-style cooldown tracking
Damage meter	Recount / Details, for basic numbers
Statistics pane	Third-party character addons

The Cooldown Manager landed mid-beta and is still being tuned. Players want missing-buff tracking and off-cooldown alerts. Sounds like a first pass, not a finished feature.

The Inspect window got real improvements too. Longer range, and talents visible by default. Another slice of what people used addons for, gone.

Blizzard is closing the gap with built-ins. Not loosening the restrictions. Plan for a UI that looks like retail’s, not Classic’s.

What still works

Anything that doesn’t need protected combat data. That’s the boring, useful half of the addon world:

• Quest and map addons — tracking, points of interest, rare scanning
• UI addons — action bars, unit frames, minimaps. One developer shipped a whole replacement interface built around Forever’s restrictions
• Bag, mail, auction and inventory addons

The community is rebuilding the restricted parts as interface packages, not combat logic. That’s the direction that works.

How to install them

CurseForge is the practical route. The client is already registered with Blizzard.

1. Install the CurseForge app. Standalone build, not the Overwolf wrapper — several creators warn against the wrapper.
2. Open Browse and pick Forever from the game version dropdown. Missing? Update the app.
3. Install like normal.

One snag. At least one popular addon (HandyNotes) has a dependency that isn’t listed on CurseForge, so the app won’t pull it in. Grab the dependency by hand and drop it into Interface/AddOns. RareScanner covers similar ground and installs cleanly if you’d rather skip the hassle.

The beta bug you’ll hit

Addon saved variables don’t survive a client restart in the beta.

Settings write to disk fine. They just aren’t restored on load. So every addon resets to defaults each time you log in. It’s on Blizzard’s known-issues list.

Setting up a UI in the beta right now means doing it again tomorrow. Beta defect, not a Forever design choice.

Coming from Classic

The advice that carries over is about information, not automation.

WeakAuras won’t play your rotation. But the things that made Classic bearable all still work: quest markers, rare alerts, a minimap that isn’t hostile, bags you can sort. Several now have first-party versions.

Short version of the beta consensus: you need fewer addons, and the ones you need were never controversial.

What we can’t confirm

• The restriction details come from beta testing and forum posts, not a published Blizzard spec. Addon authors are mapping the exact boundary in public.
• Whether the Cooldown Manager gets buff tracking before launch is unknown.
• The saved-variable bug being on the known-issues list means it exists. It doesn’t mean anyone said when it’s fixed.