Hello,
After testing class changes, one of my first priorities was to create a new UI without addons to see if I could build something suitable and that hopefully matches a lot of the functionality within the cooldown manager and updated UI elements.
I’d like to leave feedback of where I struggled to do this and hopefully it will inspire some changes to the current UI available on Midnight Beta.
- The player/target frame
Customisation here is very limited. We aren’t able to remove the portrait or class icon circle, there is no individual sliders for width or height. Many modern UIs enjoy a bar style player/target frame and it’s currently not possible to implement this ourselves.
Another really important issue is the inability to separate our resources from the player frame. The personal resource display is not a good alternative either. Allow us to position our resources separately with edit mode e.g HP, Runes, Runic Power should all have their own bar we can move without being attached to each other and have them show numerically the resource too!
- Nameplates
Allow us to filter which debuffs of our own we can or can’t see on them. Currently it seems to be the case that all debuffs from everyone are shown (this is probably a bug) but it makes them extremely messy to read. There’s been enough posts about their movement so I don’t think I need to comment on that.
- Cooldown manager.
This feature needs a lot of work to reach what I’d consider good functionality especially making it readable and customisable to each players preference, as of right now it is very basic and the lack of options to edit make it very difficult to use as I’d like to.
There are no anchors or expand/collapse feature for “groups” so it only displays what’s active - this is a common feature in weakauras and personally I find it very hard to read when there’s large gaps between my buffs/debuffs. The padding customisation isn’t enough and there’s no way to edit alpha states either so that you can have dimmed bars outside of combat for instance.
I think adding 1-2 “groups” to each category would go a long way so we can customise them as we like e.g a tracked buffs bars for active cds, uptime buffs and debuffs. It’s also crucial to add Pots, Trinkets and borrowed power effects as soon as possible as these are essential to gameplay.
Finally I think some basic customisation elements would do a lot for the cooldown manager too such as icon border glowing or sound queues on active/inactive buffs - these are invaluable for growing players to prioritise what’s really important.
Otherwise the cooldown manager is shaping up to be a good enough replacement, it’s obviously missing a lot of features that we’ve grown used to but with some work it can be close enough and far better than what the standard UI has provided for decades!
This is what I found to be most essentially missing or needed compared to live while I was testing on dummies mostly as Blood DK. After testing some content I may add more feedback!