This is good, but what it effectively means is that’s we need an addon anyway…
I’m really not impressed with the cooldown tracker - and I’ve always used cooldown trackers in the sense that I hide my action bars and instead use action bars 8 and 9 usually to show rows of cooldowns.
Also, unlike Blizzard’s solution, my utility and defensive buttons are actually bigger than my ordinary damage cooldowns because they’re further away from the centre of the screen, but this can fortunately be changed.
I think this feature can become good, but right now it’s really not.
For this feature the keyword should be “customisable”. It is great that blizzard tries to add this feature, but it should be better then the weakaura’s now. For now i stick to weakaura’s, but i hope this feature will be improved in the future.
I dislike the fact that blizzard is making now the decision for the players what is trackeble and what issn’t. This should be a players choice.
How to improve this?
Extend the customidable options for all cooldowns and buffs, so that players can decide what to track.
This is actually debatable. It all depends on who the target audience for the feature is. If it’s just the average casual player, then they probably need to be steered into a solid default, and one that cannot be messed up too much. Complexity is not always helpful for those, and not being able to tweak the cooldowns would be fine if it was made for them.
However, they messed up badly with the selection of the abilities. Non-cooldowns are now considered essential cooldowns, and actual cooldowns are not considered a cooldown. Whoever designed (not implemented) this feature may have faced some scope creeping issues.
I’d go as far as to say that rotational abilities should never, ever, have been part of this feature. Yet half of the abilities in it are just…that…rotational abilities. In the current state it’s utterly useless, and it even works against the primary reason why players tend to put up their important cooldowns in a more prominent place in the screen; clarity. Now it all just clutters the screen with information we do not need.
You are definitly right that the feature should have a solid default for the casual player.
The customisable part in edit mode is probebly something they won’t tuch anyway. That one should be in dept, so players who use weakaura’s can decide what they want to track.
I completely agree, although you can turn the old style back on in settings. Under “Combat”, there are checkmarks for showing personal buffs under and over your “party frame”. (going from memory here, so might be slightly misnamed.
