Feedback: Cooldown Manager in 11.1.5

In Development The War Within Patch 11.1.5 PTR
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In the 11.1.5 PTR, there’s a new User Interface feature called the Cooldown Manager. The Cooldown Manager’s purpose is to help inform you of the state of your important class and spec cooldowns in a consolidated space on your UI.

The Cooldown Manager is a new display that can be enabled by opening the Options Menu, navigating to Advanced Options, and checking the box labeled “Enable Cooldown Manager”. There’s also a search bar at the top of the Options menu! Once enabled, you can make further adjustments to the size, position, opacity, and other options in Edit Mode, just the same as you would adjust any other User Interface element.

The Cooldown Manager has four parts to it that can all be adjusted and shown or hidden separately based on your preferences.

Essential Cooldowns

Essential Cooldowns are where any ability you currently have access to that has a cooldown is displayed. These are where your core rotational and big impact abilities are found, such as Crusader Strike, Judgment, and Avenging Wrath.

Essential Cooldowns show whether an ability can be used, the remaining duration of any effects is applies, and its cooldown once its effects are no longer active. Highlights that appear on abilities in action bars also appear on Essential Cooldowns, so you have all the information you need to play your spec in the Cooldown Manager, in the form you’re used to seeing it.

Utility Cooldowns

Utility Cooldowns is for buttons that are situationally useful, such as interrupts, mobility, or crowd control. You’ll find spells like Counterspell, Blink, and Ice Block here.

Tracked Bars

Tracked Bars appear for effects where it’s important for you to be able to see their exact duration. For instance, spells that change your rotation like Combustion, effects that are important to maintain like Shield Block, or effects where it’s helpful to know exactly when they will end, like Eclipse.

Tracked Buffs

Icons appear in the Tracked Buffs section for effects where it’s important for you to know that you have the effect, but its duration isn’t especially significant. Buff icons like Nether Precision for Arcane Mage, Backdraft for Destruction Warlock, or Maelstrom Weapon for Enhancement Shamans show up here.

Tracked buffs show icons, durations, and stacks of the effect. Tracked Buffs do not appear for effects that are fully indicated by ability highlights in the Essential Cooldown section.

Feedback

This first version of the Cooldown Manager is a designer-curated list of abilities; which abilities are shown and the order in which they appear is not customizable. While you can adjust the size, opacity, location, and other properties of each section of the Cooldown Manager in Edit Mode, you cannot control what abilities show up or the order in which they are shown.

The most useful feedback we’re looking for are your thoughts on abilities or buffs that you feel are missing, extra icons or bars that do not feel important to you, and obviously any bugs you encounter.

Feedback about how you play is also extremely valuable to improving it in future patches. We have plans to add new features and customization tools. Are there important aspects of playing your spec that you cannot do with only the Cooldown Manager? What information do you need to track, and how do you currently track it?

Thank you very much for your testing and feedback!

3 Likes
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As an affliction warlock, I am also particularly interested in the debuffs I have applied. I do have these displayed on enemy unit frames and nameplates, but since they are not fixed positions (or even in any particular order) it can be harder than it needs to be to determine which debuffs are missing on a given mob.

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If this means we’d gain access to a buff list—like Shamans’ Tidal Waves—that would already be a huge improvement. As a player, you often don’t even know which spell generates which buff. I see that customization isn’t available at the moment, but it’s clear there’s a hidden definition list for these buffs.

With this, previously unknown buffs—some of which appear for just a few seconds and are nearly impossible to read in that short span—would become readily accessible in a previewable list.

Of course it has to be editable - at least order. I used to use TMW exactly for this, and I have grouped spells for cc, interupt, def cds, off cds and misc.

I like the attempt of categorization however I think that for each category there is no reason to restrict to just one bar. Also I am not sure why there are different settings options for each - ie display mode could be generic. Seems like an overcomplication for both users and development.

For my shaman I do not really care about Flame Shock on my bars - I rather look at target frame to see whether target is affected, and that is also a place where I need to know, if it is not applied, that I can / should apply it. Having it in separate place, among with other “essential cooldowns” not really helpful.

I am also overall missing what is the issue we are trying to address here. To some extent this just looks like something that either could be adressed by action bars? What is the reason you are creating this, where do you see this useful, how do you expect this to be used by players?

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Okay I have tried it. It does look great, its just like weak auras, BUT. The fact that you cannot choose which buffs or talents to track but blizzard is the one who decides which ones…defeats the point? I would keep using weak auras if this is the case. I do not need all of my abilities to be tracked just above my abilities bars. Whats the point? Why can i not choose two or 3 inportant ones that i want and change the size of them?

Also some buffs are not included and there is no option to include them.

I would like if the edit option was a bit more flexible. Right now it allows you to customize the whole bar, but it does not let you choose which buffs or cooldowns to track and individually change their size. I might have a specific buff that I would want to track very big, but i cannot without increasing the size of the bar of the whole cooldown bar, whuch i would of course not do.

So it looks great and it is very promising but it need to be able to edit and move around ans choose INDIVIDUAL buffs and CDs, otherwise no one will use it. One size cannot fit all. Playing PVP i dont need to track the same stuff as playing raid. I need to be able to choose different buffs and cd and change their individual size and placement as pvp plays entirely different to m+ for instance, different talents etc.

As a side note, it would be very cool to have a tool like weak auras to create your own visual aura for different buffs. Just like with fingers of frost or flurry or clearcasting, I might want to create a symilar one my fire mastery or my nether precision etc instead of tracking a buff whuch is a bit more difficult to visualize than some colour shape in the centre of the screen. I know this might be a bot of a long shot but it would be amazing.

Lastly it would be cool if like some addons, we could track on the nameplate of the enemy certain buff/debuffs. Thinking of shatter for frost mage for instance. There are addons that change the face of the character with the buff in big of an important effect, buff or debuff. It would be sick to have that.

1 Like
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Thank you for writing these thorough posts so quickly! We do have plans to allow you to hide or rearrange elements on the new Cooldown Manager in a future patch, however the specifics of how that works are yet to be determined. We are reading and noting all your feedback about feature requests, but can’t speak to much at this time that’s outside the scope of this PTR.

Because elements in the tool can’t be customized, we wanted to share a little philosophy behind what we’ve chosen to include and whether to make something an icon or bar. We want the Cooldown Manager to have all the information you need to play your rotation for a spec - you can just turn it on for a spec you’ve never played and you’re good to go.

But it doesn’t show everything - it aims to clarify and filter information to help you play with intention. There are a lot of buffs and such that WoW specs gain that don’t affect their choices, like short stat buffs or maintenance buffs that tend to stay up through the course of normal play. If a proc causes an ability icon to light up, we generally don’t show an icon for it because the highlight already communicates it’s present. Not showing those makes the information you do care about easier to see.

In particular we’re careful about what shows as bars, because they’re fairly “loud.” For something to be a bar, it needs to be something where knowing when it will end affects your decision making somehow.

One of the reasons feedback about which abilities are shown (or not shown) and where they’re categorized is so valuable is that it helps us find important information we might not be showing or remove extraneous information so you can focus on what matters most. For feedback on bars in particular, it’s helpful to understand your gameplay around when those effects will end.

2 Likes
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Thanks but I would love to stick with my current weakauras. The main reason is they are highly customizable and they look neat and clean as they are designed for specific UI that I am using. Giving people a cooldown manager by default is a good step but please do not “break” the current weakaura’s for those who want to use them. Give everyone a choice.

1 Like
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Feedback about some classes/specs I play

Arcane Mage:

  • Having Arcane Missiles, Arcane Explosion and Arcane Barrage on the manager when all they do is show if they’re affected by Clearcasting or Intuition seems unnecessary. There are already visual cues for these buffs at the center of the screen, and it just overloads the cooldown manager.

Evoker:

Preservation:

  • I think there is room to consider that the buffs from Lifespark and Stasis might be worth tracking to see how long the player has before those are wasted.
  • Hover is tracked as a bar but only for presrvation. I am not sure if it’s an ability that’s worth tracking that much.

Chronowarden

  • I think the temporal burst buff should be tracked as empower spells priority goes up when it is active, for both Preservation and Augmentation.

Retribution Paladin:

  • Seems a bit buggy, but Crusading Strikes first appeared as a tracked bar, then an essential cooldown, I don’t think it fits either.
  • For Templar, Light’s Deliverance is not always tracked, I think it should be.
  • For Herald of the Sun, I don’t think Blessing of An’she is worth tracking, at the very least not as a bar.
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Any chances you can pack it up into an addon or expose it on live server under some hidden setting? Would be able to test it out a lot more on live servers.

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Thanks for this. A couple notes on your post:

  • We chose to include spells that get icon glows as Essentials to support players who may be used to looking for information about those procs on their action bars, since we wanted them to continue to be able to get information the way they’re used to.
  • We also duplicate information that’s currently shown by spell alert visual graphic cues since some players disable them and it takes some experience to learn what they mean.
  • Your Evoker feedback has been passed along.
  • We’re looking into how to show Crusading Strikes status. We’d like to let players know when they’re going to get an extra Holy Power but the current bar is a bit loud.

Unfortunately, no. The tool relies on code that only exists in the 11.1.5 PTR.

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I started playing around with the Cooldown Manager on the PTR, and I must say for a first draft it’s looking pretty good.

  1. Resource display and CD manager

There should be a way to integrate the resource display “bar” within/around the CD manager.

The resource display has the issue that it moves a lot around depending on the orientation of your camera, so it can easily get hidden by the CD manager (if you do put most of your CDs in the bottom centre of your screen), or other parts of your UI.

So a way to maybe “lock” the resource display, to be able to track our unique resources (Holy Power, Shards, Combo points, etc.), along with our CDs, would be great.

Or the CD manager could include directly a resource tracker, so an extra Holy Power/Shards/Combo points display.
Or a way to move the current resource display below our character portrait?

  1. DoT management (Affliction Warlock)

I play Affliction Warlock, like someone else who posted earlier, and I agree, for DoT specs we need a tracker of our DoTs in the CD manager. At least for our “maintenance” DoTs, the ones we’re supposed to have on 100% of the time.

A. Tracking core maintenance DoTs

I need to be able to track my Agony, Corruption/Wither (maybe hidden if Absolute Corruption is talented?) and Unstable Affliction without having to “look up” to unit frames.

B. Shadow Bolt/Drain Soul & Malefic Rapture tracking

We also have Shadow Bolt/Drain Soul and Malefic Rapture constantly displayed in the CD manager, I guess it’s because we have a proc for each that makes them shine in our action bars, but I really feel like we don’t need them.

They feel really out of place when we don’t have a Nightfall/Tormented Crescendo. I keep wondering why they’re there, I don’t have that feeling about anything else that’s currently tracked.

C. Soul Rot

The CD manager should track the duration of Soul Rot, since it already tracks its CD. While it’s up it could track its duration, the “lit up” version of the icon.

Right now it does track a duration, the “Dark Harvest” buff if talented into it, it’s just a bit confusing.

Dark Harvest should probably be tracked as a “proc” like Tormented Crescendo and Nightfall.

And Soul Rot should be “lit up” while it lasts on your target.

D. Vile Taint/Phantom Singularity

Same thing than for Soul Rot, the CD manager already tracks their CDs, having them lit up with their remaining duration while they are active would be great too.

E. Summon Darkglare

Same thing than for our other CDs, the icon could be “lit up” while Darkglare is active, it’s a nice thing to know.

  1. Enemy unit frames

I know that’s not the subject yet, I hope you will work on enemy unit frames in the future. It’s simply impossible to play a DoT spec like affliction with the base unit frames.

Baseline unit frames don’t have enough space to track all the debuffs that Affliction warlocks can apply, let alone enough space to track all the important debuffs that Affliction would want to be able to track.

It can track up to 7 DoTs/Debuffs at a time. As Affliction warlock I can easily apply 10+.

Also we should really be able to to display the timer for the duration of our DoTs and debuffs on the enemy nameplates. Just the “sweeping” animation on the icon is not enough, it’s too complicated to guess the remaining duration just based on that.

2 Likes
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Resurrect arcane mages, cant test cooldown monitor when we are dead

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Would it be possible to see the key bind associated with each cooldown shown in this Cooldown Manager as well?
I think for someone who plays multiple specs or classes this would be a game changer.

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Can you please add spellblock for protection warrior as a major cooldown ?

i’d like to see a debuff tracker, to keep an eye of my dots on my target (looking at the enemy unitframe all the time is not really good)

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Hello.

Here is my feedback after playing a bit with the new Cooldown Manager.

General Feedback first :

  • It’s very well made, and very pleasant to use. The inspiration from usual class WeakAuras is clear and it’s for the best. Kudos on the core op the feature, it’s very good and very missing from the game (especially for specs relying a lot on spell cooldown for their rotation)
  • As already mentioned, I can’t see it being much used without ways to customize it. It doesn’t need to have crazy customization, just let us choose what abilities and buffs we want to track and the order they appear on. Most people have their abilities ordered on their WeakAuras depending on their keybindings. Having the first spell appearing on the tracker being keybound to “2” while the second one is bound to “1” leads to a lot of confusion when playing. I know it’s coming later, but I felt it was still important feedback
  • Direction growth of icons can only be left or right (or up or down if set up vertically) and is lacking a “centered” option (which will be used by most people)
  • Some important buffs are tracked through the Tracked Bar module. It would be nice if these buffs would default back to the Tracked Buffs module when the player choose to always hide the Tracked Bar module
  • It seems that the intent is to desaturate the icon during cooldown. One feedback and one bug report :
    — Bug report : some icons are desaturated as soon the CD start (Stormstrike for instance). Some other icons remains colored until another ability is used (Crashing storm, Frost shock, Fracture…)
    — Feedback : I would recommand reducing the alpha of the icon instead of desaturating it. Keeping the colors make identifying the ability easier (all the more important as we can’t choose the layout) and reducing the alpha is easier to spot on peripheral vision so it’s easier to know what is on the CD and what isn’t without directly looking at the CD manager
  • “Combo abilities” do not reset properly. See Tempest or Voltaic Blaze for Shaman for instance. Once the combo ability has been used the icon does not default back to the normal icon (ie : after consuming Tempest, the Lightning icon still displays Tempest) until the ability is used again
  • The CD Manager is lacking a resource module for combo point, holy power, rage… I know these can be tracked with the personal resource display but since it is basicaly a personal nameplate attached to the feets of our characters, it moves with our character depending on the camera zoom. It looks like the CD Manager is intended to replace what the personal resources display used to do (since it used to display our buffs and it had an option that never worked to track important CD) so let’s do the final step
  • Finally I understand that abilities with no cooldown are displayed if they have an icon glow proc attached to them. I would rather have them not displayed and have the proc buff be displayed (for instance for enhancement shaman : not displaying Lightning Bolt but displaying the Tempest buff). I understand Blizzard’s choice here (having continuity over all parts of the UI) and I know it’s a personnal preference that should be solved with the help of addons but I still wanted to make the feedback

Enhancement Shaman Feedbacks :

  • Playing as Totemic with the CD Manager feels very nice as all the abilities are displayed in a logical layout. On the other hand, playing as Stormbringer is really difficult as the layout makes no sense : Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning are displayed on the far left while Elemental Blast is displayed on the middle right. Those three spells are Maëlstrom spender and should be displayed new to each other (EB then LB then CL). Frost shock and FLame Shock behave in a very similar way : both are short cooldown filler range spell with procs and should be displayed next to each other
  • Frost shock is displayed both as a utility spell and an essential spell (provided you took either Ice strike or Hailstorm). Either take it off of the Utility Cooldowns module when displayed in the Essential Cooldowns module, or make it displayed in the Essential Cooldowns at all time (I would wager for the second option, people who don’t want to use Frost shock usually skip the talent entirely)
  • Purge is displayed in the Utility CD module even though it doesn’t have a CD
  • Earth Elemental is not tracked at all (not sure if intended or not as the spell is very very situational)
  • Whirling Elements (Totemic Capstone) buffs are not displayed in the Tracked Buff module. They really should as they can impact your decision making)
  • Currently Arc Discharge is displayed as a glow on both Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning icon. I think it should be changed to tracking the buff in the Tracked Buff display and no glow on the abilities icons. Arc Discharge should be spent with high Maëlstrom stacks to make the most of it and the glow will, in most cases, trick a new player in spending the buff instantly for a free low impact LB/CL. And since the consumption of Arc Discharge should be delayed, the most important information needed in combat is the buff duration. Should I spend my Maëlstrom on LB or EB ? It depends on when Arc Discharge is going to expire

That’s all. I want to stress out that I have never made any extended beta feedback/bug report. This new feature got me so hyped that I chose to spend a ton of time on PTR and I can’t emphesized enough how good I think it will be. Kudos to Blizzard. The only thing lacking will be modern nameplate and the game will be fully playable without a single addon I believe.