Addon/UI Changes Feedback Thread

In Development Midnight Beta Test
1

I did not see a feedback thread for the addon/UI changes currently.

The main feedback/concern I wanted to provide was that currently, there is no way in the base UI to track external cooldowns/timers. If I am tanking and I get barkskin I would typically create a weak aura to track that, or maybe a separate weak aura to track lust timer as a dps, or PI, etc etc.

I do feel this is important information that makes the game harder without having access to tracking, especially since the buffs bar can get kind of crazy.

Other examples would be tier set bonuses.

Either incorporating that into the base game or allowing weak auras to still work for that reason would be pretty beneficial.

Wanted to add a list of things that people may want to track that I could think of:

  1. External Buffs from other players
  2. Trinkets
  3. Potions/Flask
  4. Tier set bonus procs/buffs
47 Likes
2

I didn’t see a thread specifically for the UI changes either.

This is some feedback notes from the perspective of using the built in tools without any addons as a replacement for class weakauras, ElvUI, etc. and the pain points or lacking info that results.

Cooldown Manager issues and Pain Points:
Much of this I posted in the combat approachability thread, but is important to later points so I’m going to leave it in here as well.

Bad class/toolkit interaction:

  • Improved Whirlwind (Fury Warrior): The Stacks matter most while the duration is almost entirely irrelevant. Especially as a tracked bar where not showing the icon hides the stack number as well. This would be much more useful if the bar displayed how many cleaving abilities you still have rather than how long you had to do them, and the icon showed the stacks as the major element rather than the duration.
  • Ignore Pain (Protection Warrior): Stacks are used to show a percent of the maximum size, but are a much smaller number that is not present if it is shown as a bar without an icon, and given it is shown as stacks, lacks a “%” unit and may be unclear to new players what it represents. Ideally, given how running out cuts the buff short, this info would be preserved and given more emphasis. Additionally it may be personal preference of the player to see the plain number value of health the shield will block rather than a percentage.
  • Ironfur (Guardian Druid): The tiny stack number is extremely well camouflaged into the black and gray icon colors and has no way of showing the duration of earlier stacks and when they will begin to expire. I imagine this issue will also exist on any other buff that does not renew itself.
  • Bone Shield (Blood Death Knight): The number of stacks in bone shield is a very important figure, but the duration is also important since it is disastrous if the buff is accidentally allowed to expire. Similar to Ignore Pain, right now the stacks and duration are given much different emphasis, especially as a tracked bar which may not show stacks. Since the number of stacks are also shown on the Marrowrend icon, this spreads out or duplicates information in a way that may be unclear to new players, especially if they expect the number on marrow rend to mean they can press it 12 times like it would for Death Grip or D&D in the same toolkit, not that they have 12 stacks of the buff it gives.
  • Blood Shield (Blood Death Knight): The duration of blood shield in combat is an almost useless stat to know in comparison to how large the shield currently is, which is not displayed at all by the cooldown manager. This is especially painful as the Player Frame, and Personal Resource Display do not show the size of shields overlapping the health bar either, meaning there is no way without addons or mousing over the buff to know how large the absorb is. I imagine this issue exists for all other instances of absorb shields as well.
  • Consecration (Protection Paladin): This one looks like development in progress, but it is unclear that the tooltipless buff “protection paladin” in the cooldown manager changes itself to show the consecrate buff including the extra time from Sanctuary, while the Consecrate bar shows the duration of the last placed consecrate. Also if the buff version is moved to tracked bars, it shows as empty until you leave consecrate then counts down the 4 seconds given by Sanctuary. regardless, it doesn’t feel like a great way to communicate to the player that they accidentally left the faded edge of their consecrate hidden under mobs and other abilities, and have 4 seconds to reenter or lose the buff.
  • Non-Class Ability Tracking: The cooldown manager currently lacks an ability to track non-class related things such as racial abilities, potions, trinkets, or externals like pain suppression, power infusion or bloodlust that would be important parts of making decisions about your own class related defensive or offensive cooldowns.

Issues in Functionality:

  • Tracked Bars Dimensions: Currently there is no way to manipulate the bars dimensions to make them wider, shorter, more densely packed, etc.
  • Personal Resource Display Customization: Currently there is no way to manipulate the size or dimensions of the personal resource display, or to curate what is shown such as hiding the health bar while keeping the resource bar.
  • UI Object Growth Behavior: Edit mode tools are extremely unclear when an object is parented to another one, and causes issues such as the Tracked Bars pane growing from the center depending on how many buffs are being tracked. this means that if the player wants to place it above or below a different part of the UI they will need to have a different UI profile or change it themselves every time they switch spec or character, due to different buff numbers causing the pane to overlap or drift off of the element the player wants it anchored/parented to. Additionally, if you only have a single tracked buff, a second placeholder “Example Buff Name” bar is added which offsets the placement of the single tracked bar you have upwards.
  • Cooldown Manager lacks center align: if you have more buttons tracked than the number of columns there are options to wrap to the left or to the right, but no option for centering the new lower line, meaning the bars will be off-balance if the number of icons is not divisible by the length of each row.
  • Sound Alert lacking triggers: given the drop-downs with only one options I can guess this feature is incomplete but it is worth mentioning the sound alerts lack “when” options for buff expiration (or near expiration, given how bad it is for a new BDK to accidentally let their bone shield charges expire), and reaching the maximum number of stacks/charges.
  • Sound Alert Unclear Terminology: One of the when options being “pandemic” is descriptive to someone aware of what that means, but is entirely impenetrable to a new player who doesn’t. “On Cooldown” is also somewhat unclear, does this trigger when an ability is used? how much do “available” and “charge gained” overlap? does “charge gained” operate as “stack gained” for buffs?
  • Cooldown Settings Panel Navigation: The cooldown settings panel can be expected to be opened a lot when a player sets up their UI, especially when it auto-closes when opening the related talent panel. currently it requires a fairly high number of button presses to access it by going to the gameplay enhancements tab of the settings or by opening edit mode and clicking on it directly.
  • Player Frame, Target Frame, and Cast Bar minimum size: these panes, and probably more all have a minimum size of 100%, requiring an addon to shrink them if the player feels they are too large. these panes also lack dimensional scaling to do things like make them longer without also being taller.
  • No display of absorbs: it is worth mentioning again that there is no method of displaying absorbs on the health bar of the player frame or personal resource display. I use addons to show these in TWW, so I do not know if they are also not shown on enemy nameplates which would also be vital information to know

UX Suggestions:
These aren’t necessarily issues, or pain points but are things that would make the system feel a lot more workable to me as a user.

  • Tracked Bars and the Personal Resource Display feel like an insufficient replacement to the “data bars” functionality provided by addons for many of the reasons above. They show primarily remaining duration when duration is often the least useful information to know about a buff. additionally, with the personal resource display now a part of the UI rather than being free-floating, it feels odd to have those bars under a seperate system, and with seperate art style, than the Tracked Bars of the Cooldown Manager. In my opinion, a unified system of just bars that can display secret values for resources, buff duration, or specific values like absorb amount or number of stacks divided by max stacks would be more useful to me as a user while keeping all combat calculation secret, and would also likely be easier to maintain than two seperate systems, especially if the current tracked bar system needs bespoke options for buffs that are more than just a duration.
  • Options for desaturation/transparency would enhance customization. Current options are for 100% opacity or being hidden when in or out of combat, but it may be preferential to have bars fade partially out of combat so they can still be read for things like cooldowns without also fully blocking vision.
  • Mouseover unhide allows hidden conditions to not create problems. if hidden it may be user preference that bars unhide or untransparency themselves when moused over, to check on info quickly between combat without resorting to always on bars.
  • Options to color buff bars would aid readability and accessibility. Right now all Tracked bars are the same color. Allowing players to set the color of the bars (Ignore Pain yellow, Shield Block blue, etc.) would make them easier/faster to discern, as well as helping visually impaired players.
  • The number and categorization of panels is a bit restrictive. Currently, all bars must be in a block together, and the cooldown manager strictly divides buffs vs abilities, having only two panels for each. however a user might prefer that bars for their always on buffs are not in the same place as the duration of their major defensives. similarly the number of bone shield stacks is shown on the Marrowrend icon which is in abilities and duplicates the information if also shown in buffs. In short it makes sense as a default, but there are many situations in which a player might want to mix buffs and abilities together on a bar, or have more panels than currently given.

Finally, it was not worth its own post to note that the new dismount button for skyriding disallows its use when not landed, but should probably be tied to whether you checked “auto-dismount in flight” in the settings given they overlap in purpose, and a cancelaura macro already allows this behavior if you only use a specific mount.

EDIT: Additional issues with nameplates and frames:

Playing a bit more I have encountered a few more pain points.

  • Personal Resource Display Numbers: There is no way I can find to add numbers to the personal resource display, limiting it’s usefulness for things like knowing how much rage I have at any given time.
  • Nameplate Names cut off: being a tank I immediately turned on every option for additional information on the nameplates, but this has the effect of severely curtailing the name of the mob. For example in the introduction “Voidfront Pummeler” and “Voidfront Defiler” both only shows “Void…” when not targeted, which is better than the elite “Gloomstress” only showing “Glo…” untargeted, and “Gloo…” when targeted. Considering the usual naming scheme of enemies has the second word as the unique identifier this doesn’t feel great for readability and being able to tell enemies apart. Ideally options to either shorten as “V. Pummeler” or, personally preferred, change the font size, move the name to a different line than the health info, or widen the bar without scaling up in all dimensions would allow much better target understanding.
  • Target Frames names cut off: The target frame frequently cannot hold the full name of the NPC targeted (aforementioned Voidfront Pummeler manages to make it all the way to “Voidfront Pum…”). Similarly there are no options to make the font size smaller, widen the bar without scaling in all directions, or to hide the portrait and use an ElvUI style health rectangle. Combined with the Nameplate issue, this means the only way I can learn the actual full name of an NPC is through their mouseover tooltip, which is not a very good UX experience. It’s one thing to say “if you want to push high keys or raid mythic you should get some addons” and another to say “if you want to read the names of questing mobs you should get some addons”. Target frames haven’t been adjusted for this release to my knowledge, but the new focus on curtailing addon functions means prior issues that addons solved may not be solved anymore.
47 Likes
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What i miss in the standard interface.

This is some feedback from the perspective of using the built in tools without any addons. This is a healer’s review. I am play in one of the 20 world guilds. I play mostly on a standard interface with not many addons. I’d like to see feedback from knowledgeable people or Blizzard on what will still be available through addons and what won’t. And what are Blizzard’s plans, which improvements will be added and which will not.

ACTION BARS :

  1. Mouseover action bars. Untransparency bar when moused over.( I use addon for it)
  2. Option to turn off action bar animations. ( I dont like this animations and use weakaura to turn them off)
  3. Styles/Skins. (I use Masque addon for it)

CAST BAR:

  1. Spell icon. (I use Quartz addon for it)
  2. Cast time numbers inside the bar. (I use Quartz addon for it)

COOLDOWN MANAGER:

  1. Option to add spells by self. Some spells/buffs doesnt exist in the tool.
  2. Non-Class Ability Tracking. Trinkets/Racials/Potions/Enchants cooldowns and buffs duration.
  3. Option to create multiple buff/spell bars. If i want one buff big and other not. Or i want to split spells/buffs in 2/3 columns or blocks.
  4. Option to desaturate/glow/sound alert.
  5. Option to turn off animation/duration on spell bar. I dont want to see PI/Apotheosis duration or Hymn cast time on the spell bar. I have buffs bar for it.
  6. Dynamic groups. Buffs lock their positions this is looks bad.
  7. Option to choose number of icons for each bar. Center align.

RAID FRAMES:

  1. Option to track defensive cooldowns on frames.
  2. Styles/Skins

NAMEPLATES:

  1. Different settings for friendly/enemy nameplates.
  2. Option to turn on “Show only names”. I only use Plater because if you use the “Show names only” script, it affects both friendly nameplates and enemy nameplates, but with Plater I can only show names for friendly nameplates and standard nameplates for enemies.

I’ll update this post if I find anything else.

38 Likes
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My feedback is more limited given the time I’ve played, the content I’ve done in Alpha, but it boils down to this for the UI:

The housing system and the flexibility therein is the single best thing I’ve seen in WoW since launch. No joke, it’s better than I could have hoped for, outside a few small things I hope to see changed.

Replacing WeakAuras with the cooldown manager and buff tracker in the current state of those tools is quite possibly the worst change I’ve seen to date. The cooldown manager, while better than the abomination that is currently in retail, still lacks all customization in layout.

This can change though. The same principles of flexibility that apply to the housing system should and must be applied to the UI elements intended to replace combat addons. Primarily, I want the ability to place cooldown trackers wherever I want them, independent of other UI elements, not only in a single bar. As a first step, giving me “blanking” spaces so I can arrange things in the cooldown tracker as a grid would be better that what we have right now.

I also think we need the ability to split off individual cooldowns and change the sizes of those cooldowns independent of the rest of the icons. My UI elements today isolate my most important CDs, place in areas of the UI where I can watch mechanics while tracking those things, and then shuffle off the less important cooldowns to another, less prominent location. The cooldown manager needs to have this same capability - not just in two bars as it is today, but ideally, in as many bars as we want to configure (or, at least four cooldown bars we can manipulate).

Edit: Let me add this, too. I’m an average (very average) CE mythic raider. I’m also approaching 50 years old. Not being able to customize the UI in this manner is an accessibility issue - my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be, my reflexes aren’t as good as they used to be. I can do it today by optimizing my UI. Please, think of the accessibility functionality you’re killing off - the deaf, the hard of hearing, the physically challenged, age considerations - and drive hard to fix these problems before you alienate those of us with accessibility needs.

I also want to see sound alerts added to things INCLUDING the cooldown manager - let me play a sound when a cooldown comes off CD please.

49 Likes
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I second this - more than anything else the ability to read friend player names past the abhorrently bad default font (it’s 2025, and that font is hard to read on larger screens/1440p) - is the one thing I think I’ll miss from Plater.

12 Likes
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I was going to make a similar post, and you covered much of what I intended to say but some additions:

  1. The sound effects in the cooldown manager must be much louder, it is extremely easy to miss at current volumes even when directly listening for them.

  2. For procs, there is conditional display (good), but each icon has a fixed location. It would be good if procs could display at a location dynamically based on how many procs you currently have. As an example, lets say we have proc 1, proc 2 and proc 3. When proc 3 procs it is always in the proc3 slot, even if proc1 and proc2 aren’t up at the time. What im asking for is proc3 being in the proc1 slot, until you get a second proc, and it would then be bumped up to proc2 as an example. I pray this makes sense, maybe someone can reword this for me.

  3. Blocklist/Allowlist is just mandatory. It is such a big deal that, even if everything else was fixed-- if this isn’t added then the ui will be poor. This goes for nameplates, raid frames, unit frames, buffs panel and debuffs panel, probably in that order. As a Feral Druid, I do not want to track Tear for example. This is critically important for dot specs especially, since identifying targets that need a dot applied gets exponentially harder the more icons you need to filter through.

  4. I’ve noted that nameplates tend to be very wobbly, that is, they move around a lot.

  5. For the cooldown manager, I would like if there was a conditional display based on talents selected. Or at least a way to set a maximum number of icons that can be in a single group at the same time. For example, I would like to set this number to 8, and if I happen to have 9 icons, I want to bump Skull Bash down to the Utility Cooldowns section. Currently the workaround is to just change the profile every time you switch, but thats a bit annoying.

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Playing Assassination Rogue and not being able to track the duration of my dots as part of the cd manager window is really bad. Why would i be concerned with tracking the cd of for example Rupture which has no cd? This is basic functionality of a weakaura that is being removed. I can not add specific buffs I want to track besides the few options deemed worthy by you all. For example I can see which heads/tails coins I have flipped while playing fatebound but not the lucky coin buff you get from 7 flips. For the resource bar I can not separate my energy from health. I just want a bar with combo points and energy but not my hp. I would love to be able to put combo points above the energy. Basically all around the limitations of customization throughout all the blizz ui options is hard to adjust to. I feel like we are taking a huge step back here.

32 Likes
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We’re missing any and all options to affect how stacking works to suit our needs, and on top of that, nameplate stacking is broken. Like, fundamentally broken. On a set of three target dummies, the middle nameplate jumps around, completely off center from the actual target.

Also, please let us post links to images :slight_smile:

imgur<.com>/a/new-nameplate-stacking-4ewHeYg

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Hi, I’d like to hopefully provide a perspective that hasn’t been posted yet. I play every aspect of the game to a moderately high level, but lately my focus has been on Raid leading, Rated PvP and M+.

I know the new Blizzard damage meter hasn't been implemented yet, but I would like to vocalize that the **Advanced Death Log** portion of Details! has been an *invaluable tool* for diagnosing deaths/wipes while Raid leading, PvPing, or pushing keys. Not only does this feature show timestamps of damage taken / healing recieved / defensives used / cc etc with timestamps, but it also allows us to see the tooltips for the various abilities involved and show what defensive were still off CD and available to a player.  This tool is MUCH faster and more useful than trying to dig through warcraft logs between every pull, to the point where I can see how we lost players before the wipe even occurs to try to solve any problems mid pull.  Anytime a death occurs while I'm running M+ with my friends, this is the first place we look to figure out what we need to do better. When I'm pushing arena rating, we're almost always looking at this whether we win or lose to figure out what we abilities we need to pay more attention to or even for the fun of seeing how hard we just hit an opposing player when we chunk their HP.  I would hate to return to a world where this tool didn't exist and we have to guess what happened, argue about it or play a blame game.

Another incredibly useful tool for Raid Leading, tanking and PvP is an addon I use that simply posts in a private chat only I can see, when a player uses a taunt and on what mob, a dispel, a purge, or an interrupt. Losing this as well as the ability to track taunt Diminishing Returns on nameplates will make sorting out tanking mishaps a nightmare of searching logs on my second monitor instead of doing another boss pull. Outside of normal taunt swaps, every now and then a non tank player will accidentally taunt a boss without noticing, and being able to show them that it wasn’t a tank threat issue but their own mistaken button press in a timely fashion has stopped a lot of player frustration and blame games. The interrupts and dispels are much more helpful to PvP situation, and allow me to see if an enemy is spamming purge, or what my teammates have interrupted and when, which is critical to my decision making and coordination with my teammates.

This might sound weird, but I do not use a CD hud type set up like several class tailored weakaura packs or the new CD manager provide. I do not like having what looks like a second action bar on my screen, so I make very simple WAs that are just a number tracking durations or stacks I can put on or near my own action bar. For instance, I have a somewhat see-through red number under my rend button that shows the duration of Rend left on my current target and a purple number under my execute that shows the number of stacks of Marked For Execution on my target. Surely as many others in this thread have suggested, we will get the ability to move the CD manager icons around independently, but the ability to remove the second icon and keep only the number would be a simple and very appreciated customization option. Preferably with the ability to change the color, size, decimal accuracy and opacity like WAs.

Honestly I am still so worried about you guys implementing these combat addon removal changes so soon without easing them in as you iterate the in-house replacements, I am trying not to doom about it, but it is incredibly difficult. So many of my friends and guildies have said they might take next expansion off or quit the game entirely due to this. TWW has been an extremely solid expac and Housing is going to be one of the best features ever added to WoW, I really want to see the game I love so much flourish with housing without such a downside. I agree addons that completely organize mythic raid positioning or solve puzzles for you are a step too far, but all of these losses to visibility, clarity, and customization seem a steep price to pay. I urge you to please step down from the arms race, just give players more time to handle complex mechanics so we don’t feel required to install those types of addons/WAs and you’ll see the vast majority of players stop using them. The bleeding edge players will find slightly more annoying to use overlay or 2nd monitor solutions to all of these nerfs to our toolkits, and the average player will still pay the price.

Hope everything goes well with continued testing and development, sorry for the last paragraph but I feel obligated to express this at least once.

24 Likes
10

I have used the built-in UI almost exclusively (no elvui, no plater, no cell, very few weakauras) since I started playing again in Dragonflight. I am very pleased with the additions and changes so far, but there are a few things missing even for me, and that will frustrate my friends accustomed to more customization. (Splitting this into a few posts for each major component of the UI)

Nameplates

The new nameplates are great, although stacking behavior is clearly a work in progress. Love the variety of options for styles; I prefer the “Block” style that keeps all text inside the bars. The options for debuff tracking and ‘simplify’ mode for minor units are huge improvements. Complaints and suggestions:

  • The white border/outline is too strong and creates visual clutter; I would like to turn it off or replace it with a square/non-rounded black border
  • Names don’t fit, which is confusing in dungeons with a lot of similarly named mobs (Windrunner this…, Windrunner that…) cutting off the second word; please add a ‘short names’ mode; options for text size/font would also help
  • Aggro display as a bright red ‘shadow’ above each plate is distracting and adds clutter; please consider implementing color-coding instead (health bars of enemies targeting you are red or green depending on aggro state and whether you are a tank spec); this keeps information inside the nameplate, which helps reduce size and optimize stacking
  • SharedCC debuffs should include Interrupts, and Cast Bar Target Name should show the name of the player who interrupted
  • Needs some kind of “execute threshold” display - another good opportunity for color-coding
  • I use an add-on that displays absorb shields overlayed on nameplates, please add this so we don’t need to look at a buff tooltip to know the remaining size of a shield
  • Please extend the Cooldown Manager’s buff filter pane to select which Personal Debuffs are shown on nameplates (and/or in the tracked buffs bar, once that’s implemented); many class debuffs are currently missing, and some that are tracked automatically are unnecessary, adding clutter
  • The “highlight” mode for important casts / casts targeting me is hard to see and adds more visual clutter (it’s like a white shadow that pokes out from the sides of the cast bar). I would prefer some sort of color-coding of the plate border or cast bar, but also see notes below on warning indicators. This needs to better differentiate between ‘important’ and ‘target me’ highlights.

One very important note: Ion has said in interviews that there will be no tracking of non-boss mob ability cooldowns in the new combat timers; the developers want players to respond to visual cues like mob animations. This is wrong and insufficient. Some mob ability cooldowns must be tracked, so that players can prepare to respond. For example:

  • Healers need to know the cooldowns of major group-wide damage events, like Shard of Halkia’s AOE so they can prepare ramps/cooldowns in response
  • Some ‘dodgeable’ attacks require instant reaction, meaning you pre-move or save a GCD for the cast; e.g. the mobs in Everbloom that would dash to a dps and spin on top of them; this would 1-shot in a high key, but could be avoided by moving at the exact right moment, or casting a knockback at the same time as the mob cast

Dungeon design might alleviate this by always having a delay and indicator for mob casts, like the lines for dashes Eco-Dome Aldani. But you do not want healers counting mob cooldowns in their heads to be a skill differentiator. Nameplates are the right place to have this info, as the cooldowns are specific to each mob, and it won’t clutter the boss timeline.

Please consider adding some mob ability cooldowns displayed as icons with swipes and duration numbers in the “mob buffs” to the left of nameplates

On a similar note - while I have mostly avoided immersion-breaking weakauras with airhorns and shotgun sounds - some of the few I have used in dungeons add visual and sound indicators for spells targeting me and avoidable attacks like frontal cones. It can be hard to notice a highlighted bar in the midst of 10+ nameplates, and you shouldn’t need to learn the names and icons of every dungeon ability (by dying to them, probably), and how to spot the important ones in a cluttered field. Distinct but unobtrusive sound alerts (I use a raindrop sound for casts targeting me) can jar players out of over-focusing on damage rotations.

Please consider adding a standard set of ‘Warning’ indicators tied to nameplates:

  • ‘Lethal’ attacks (the kind that must be interrupted, or require defensives and healer cds) should show the ‘Deadly’ icon from the dungeon journal
  • ‘Avoidable’ attacks (frontal cones, line dashes) should show a common indicator (I have used a weakaura that displayed a blue lightning bolt on mobs casting frontals, but something like a radar cone / pie slice to indicate a shockwave would make sense)
  • Casters targeting you should show a standard icon regardless of the cast (my weakaura had a yellow exclamation mark; I would prefer something like a red target reticle / cross-hairs)
  • It’s important for indicators to be high-contrast, easily distinguished from overlapping nameplates, to draw your attention to the right mobs, and use a common language to convey how players should respond, even if you don’t know exactly what the mob’s ability does
  • Each class of warning should also have an associated sound effect, like the cooldown sound alerts
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Personal Resource Display

I have relied on the personal resource display + action bars since returning to the game in Dragonflight. The PR’s buff display was notably complete for Evoker, making it enough to play well at a high level without a custom weakaura UI. This is now gone but replaced by the Cooldown Manager’s Tracked Buffs. More on that later; first a few points about the new PR display itself:

I am very glad to see this finally added to edit mode and able to position it on screen, preventing it from floating under UI elements; I used an add-on to achieve this in Live. But the options for the PR display are very bare bones:

  • No options to scale the width/height of the bars, add text for health remaining / health percent, or adjust opacity
  • No options to choose which bars are displayed, it’s all-or-nothing
  • No way to adjust the relative order of the bars
  • The edit mode square for positioning the bars does not include the area that will be covered by the Special Resources display

I would like to change the order of the bars and split them up to have my cast bar in between the power and special resource bars (I use an add-on to achieve this in Live). Please split the PR display into components for health, power, special resource, and ‘extra’ resource bars, that can all be positioned, scaled, and customized like separate Action Bars in a stack, allowing them to be pinned to each other and components like the Cast Bar. These should all have the same options as action bars or cooldown manager bars, adjusting size, opacity, visibility in/out of combat, plus number displays for resource values (or Ebon Might duration remaining, for Augmentation).

Additionally:

  • “Show Special Resources on Targets” should probably be an option in the new nameplates instead, allowing it to exist separately from the special resource “bar”
  • “Show Friendly Buffs” should be retired. I am surprised this still exists, now that the PR is no longer a floating nameplate and does not display any personal buffs above the health bar. I never enable this; it annoyingly displays long-duration buffs like Power Word: Fortitude that you don’t need to track in combat
  • The default position of the PR display in Edit Mode is weirdly placed directly above your character portrait; please move it to the center of the screen near the cast bar and cooldown bars
  • It would be nice to have some simplified display of personal buffs/debuffs attached to the PR health bar. Things like a green poison drop / red bleed drop when you have any such effects on your character, or a gray shield around the bar while you have a major defensive active. A lot of information that is communicated through buff icons on the Tracked Buffs or Party Frames / Character Portrait can be condensed into a simple yes/no state to help drive quick decision making, and this would be a good place to put that info, whereas other frames tend to expand the full list of unique buffs or debuffs which can be overwhelming
  • Edit to Add: The PR display’s bars also have some weird strata sorting. If overlapped on screen with the cooldown manager’s Tracked Buffs, the buff icons will sort on top of the mana bar, but under the health bar, making them partially covered. Not that you should do this, I have some messed-up edit layouts from trying to interleave the bars the way I like with my cast bar and buffs, but it goes to show the bars need to be rebuilt as proper, separate elements likes action bars

2nd edit: not allowed to add more than 3 replies in a row, so I’ll add my cooldown manager feedback here, since it’s part of the same combat state tracking:

Cooldown Manager / Buff Tracking

I have used the Personal Resource display’s built-in nameplate buffs as my primary combat buff tracker since I started playing again in Dragonflight. It was nearly complete for Evoker (missing only Iridescence for Devastation, which you could almost ignore); I used add-ons to modify the buffs displayed for other classes.

I am willing to accept the Cooldown Manager’s Tracked Buffs bar as a replacement, now that it has built-in options to select which buffs to display and doesn’t force us to use the horrendous “Tracked Bars” mode for some of them. But there are a few issues:

  • Not all class buffs are included; I’ll keep this feedback to class-specific threads, but it will be VERY important for the developers to maintain this properly for all classes especially when adding new effects from tier sets or class updates
  • Non-offensive buffs are excluded; I would like to see the display of my defensives’ duration in the same place; also applies to external defensives, PI, etc
  • I need an option to ‘collapse’ inactive buffs, not just ‘hide’ them, so that active buffs are grouped together in one place (should have options to collapse to left/top, right/bottom, or center of the bar). The bar looks silly when you add a lot of buffs to it and have one active at the far left and one at the far right with a huge empty space in between; I want to collapse it so I can look at one place to check my active procs
  • Trinket cooldown and buff tracking can be very important; we should be able to add at least 3-5 items from our bags to ‘equipment’ slots in the cooldown manager, causing it to display their cooldowns and stacks/durations of any buffs granted while equipped or active. (This should include health and power potions and warlock healthstones, so it can’t just be your equipped items, unless we get a custom checkbox to show the shared cooldown of potion types.)
  • The “Show Timer” option makes it hard to read stack counts of buffs

Re-posting my feedback about the rest of the cooldown manager, which hasn’t changed despite the nice new ability filters:

Tracked ‘Bars’ are Awful

  • They take up a lot of space on screen, stacking horizontally or vertically
  • Being separate from the Tracked ‘Buffs’ means you have to look at two places at once
  • Multiple bars progressing at different rates is confusing; a longer bar doesn’t mean a longer duration

I am very glad we can now move all buffs from Tracked Bars to the Tracked Buffs and disable the bars. I would never use more than one Bar with the current options. Please consider adding an ‘overlapped’ mode that combines all bars into one, decaying at the same rate, with icons moving along the bar similar to the combat timeline. This would take up less space and make overlapping buffs easier to understand which will expire first.

Cooldown Bars are Redundant

I understand the motivation for cooldown bars, but I think it’s misguided. The problem comes from players not looking at their action bars, because their bars are too cluttered and positioned way at the bottom of a large, modern screen, away from their character’s feet with a zoomed-out camera. The concept of an ‘essential’ bar with just your damage abilities, and a ‘utility’ bar with your other cds, is good. The cooldown bars are positioned in a better location by default for large screens. But I don’t need two displays of the same information on screen, and the cooldown bars are less useful than action bars, because they can’t be keybound, don’t display keybindings, and can’t include macros, items, or other non-class abilities. They also don’t show a highlight and swipe on the spell you are currently casting, which is not critical since you have a cast bar, but adds some small feedback when you press a button.

Cooldown bars do have some advantages over action bars:

  • Shows the duration of buffs from activated abilities, directly on the ability icon
  • Out-of-range display tints the entire icon red (action bars only tint the keybind text)

But I don’t see a reason these effects shouldn’t apply to action bars too. Except for these small differences, I can replicate the cooldown bars entirely with action bars in edit mode, so I don’t really use them.

While I might get used to the cooldown bars, the changes that would make me use them are basically replicating action bars. I use castsequence macros for abilities that I always use together, and don’t need to see the cooldowns separately; I want to see cooldowns for some items; I want to see my keybinds. These are features of action bars, and adding them to the cooldown bars would just turn them into extra action bars (which would be acceptable).

My biggest wish for now is parity between icons displayed on cooldown bars, action bars, and tracked buffs. Let us choose which components to use, and don’t make some information specific to certain components, when it can display equally on another.

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Combat Timeline

I haven’t gotten to test this much since dungeon boss abilities are not all included yet and there are not many groups for raid testing, but I wanted to leave this as a positive note:

One of the few weakauras I use at all times is called “Raid Ability Timeline” and does exactly this - packs all timers from DBM/BigWigs into a single, scrolling timeline. The new Combat Timeline copies this design perfectly, and I couldn’t be happier. There are nice options for orientation, size, opacity, and display of spell names and tooltips (names are always printed horizontally and therefore only show when the timeline is in Vertical mode, but that’s my preference anyways). I might ask for an option to adjust the length of names displayed, truncating or wrapping so they don’t overlap other UI elements, and move them to the right instead of the left of the timeline. Otherwise, it’s basically perfect for me.

The real test will be if dungeon, raid, and other encounters (world bosses, etc) reliably implement timers for all relevant events. An option for audio cues when certain types of events are 5 seconds away would also help a lot (see my notes on standardized warnings for nameplates; many of us rely on common calls from boss mods like “AoE incoming” to parse the ability timeline and convert X spell to Y reaction).

The combat timeline also comes with three boxes for ‘warnings’ (critical, medium, and ordinary) in edit mode. I believe these are the red text warnings that appear on screen for certain boss casts? Being able to reposition these is nice; I hope these will get standard icons and audio cues instead of just text. I mostly ignore the text warnings in boss fights as I find them distracting; who wants to read a bunch of text to figure out what’s happening? Just tell me how to respond (Press a defensive! Dodge! Break the shield!), don’t explain the boss’s ability to me in full sentences. I can read the journal before the fight for that.

While there is still skepticism of the stated goals for fight design and avoiding programmatic solutions, I can at least say I love the timeline UI itself, and reactions from friends have been positive.

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With the “removal” of WeakAuras, but more importantly, the removal for addons to track our own buffs and debuffs, a huge portion of my UI is dead.

I hate, I mean I really hate the “class WA pack” style UI, and this is also why I hate the cooldown manager. It adds extra clutter in my screen that just blocks the 3d world, and it makes me look in another place to see my cooldowns.

I can have all the information I need on my action bars, well not anymore… Please integrate buff and target debuff duration into the border of the actionbar button. Not being able to do this anymore and having to use the cooldown manager basically means I have to get used to a whole new user interface that is a massive downgrade in usability. These changes don’t solve fights for me, they shouldn’t be removed.

https://imgur.com/a/LQDgwo7

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I spent some time this weekend on the Alpha specifically playing around with the new UI and nameplate features. My goal was to try to replicate the current functionality of my retail UI as closely as possible using the available Blizzard UI tools. For reference, my retail UI is primarily built using ElvUI, Plater, and assorted WeakAuras. On average I would say I was able to replicate about 80% of my current functionality, but maybe only 40% of my current aesthetics. Below are my key pain points / suggestions for improvements:

UI Elements

  • Add an option to remove portraits from player and target frames. The floating heads (even if you change them to a class icon) are unnecessary visual clutter, and frankly, kind of ugly. Looking at popular UI builds, many players favour streamlined frames, and it would be good if this could be an option on the base UI.
  • Add the ability to scale individual elements of a UI group separately, such as being able to scale the font without having to scale the overall group. This functionality already exists for some things (e.g. buffs on nameplates) but not others. It can be frustrating when certain text is too small to be easily read, but cannot be scaled to a readable level without having the attached grouping scaled to take up a third of your screen.
  • The cooldown manager and buff tracker is a significant improvement over the current live version. However, it is currently missing several key buffs - I’m not sure this is because they’ve just not been implemented or because there is no intention to add them in future. If it’s the latter, I would suggest instead that all buffs/debuffs for a class/spec are added by default, or alternatively allow for a function where players can manually add buffs of their choosing. It would also be fantastic if players had the option to add including itemisation buffs, like tier set procs or trinket stacks. There are definitely a lot of trinkets out there that are almost unusable without a means to easily track their effects.
  • The tracker prioritises showing duration of a buff over other information that can be just as if not more important to understand, such as stack count. As an example, as a Protection Warrior one of my most important tracked buffs is Ignore Pain. The current buff tracker shows me the duration of my current Ignore Pain well, but while it shows the stack count/percentage of the buff’s max threshold, it’s in small, non-scaleable font and is hard to see. Understanding the actual value of my Ignore Pain and hence my effective health pool is more meaningful data to me than highlighting the duration. Likewise, being able to properly see the stack count would be a significant improvement. It would be good if the tracker could be customised to allow for different information to be highlighted depending on what is more important for a particular buff, rather than assuming duration is the only valuable metric.
  • Related to the above, the tracker only shows as bars, which is sometimes not the best way to display the pertinent information, and takes up more space than necessary if all I really need to see is something like a stack count. It would be great to have some alternate display options, such as a simple square or circle that fills up/down.

Nameplates and Frames

  • The nameplates by default attempt to display every debuff on an enemy target, including debuffs from other players. While this is relevant in some cases (e.g. the current CC on target function is a great addition), it’s a lot of visual noise and irrelevant to my personal gameplay. If one of the goals of recent changes is to reduce mental overhead for new players, it’s visually confusing and antithetical to this goal to include debuffs from other players. Additionally, many of the debuffs players apply to mobs are passive/non-interactive, and do not need to be actively tracked. At the very least there should be a toggle that allows me to show only my own debuffs on the target, though the most preferable solution would be to allow players an advanced whitelist/blacklist option. Allowing players to whitelist/blacklist reduces in-combat mental load and allows us to focus on what’s most important.
  • Absorbs and shield effects show very poorly on raid and player frames. A shield of 10% max health appears exactly the same visually (the thin white line) as a shield of 40% max health. This makes it difficult for a player (or their healer) to make accurate assessments at a glance. Raid frames in general lack the degree of customisation required, particularly for healers.
  • Allow for nameplate colouring for different mobs. One of the most useful things about my plates on retail as a tank is that they are differently coloured for mobs I currently have aggro on vs. mobs I don’t. While the proposed Blizzard UI does have a flash/highlight option, it’s nowhere near as clear as bars being entirely different colours, especially when one is pulling a large group. DPS players also regularly colour code for casters vs. other mobs. Even if full colour customisation is not possible, having preset modes such as default, tank, DPS, etc. would be an improvement.
  • Target cast bars and target of target frames are oddly placed and not editable. They take up way more space than they need to due to how they are anchored to the target frame, and cannot be scaled or moved independently. More broadly speaking, there is currently a lot of inconsistency as to what is customisable and what is simply moveable in edit mode. I’m hoping this is simply because this functionality hasn’t been implemented for all elements yet, but if not, I would suggest that being able to move and scale every element of the UI in edit mode should be the minimum goal.

In general, I would encourage design for choice wherever possible. Most of my pain points came from places where I felt I previously had a choice as to how to show information, and now I don’t. Different players can have vastly different UI needs, and ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions where the game decides what I should and shouldn’t want to see are not ideal. While I would also argue that functionality is the first priority, the value of aesthetic options should not be undersold. Players have been honing their UIs for over 20 years, and being able to design a UI in a way that is visually appealing is an important avenue for player expression in much the same way that character design and transmog choices are. If the Blizzard UI is unable to replicate the aesthetic options currently available to players through their existing add-ons, I’d strongly reiterate that cosmetic/‘skinning’ add-ons should be allowed to remain, even if functionality becomes exclusively Blizzard’s domain.

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This is supposedly coming (along with some other stuff) and is just not in the game yet

Huge Updates to Cooldown Manager Coming Soon! - Sound, External and Debuff Tracking - Wowhead News

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This is the version of the cooldown manager we have in Alpha. It’s still entirely inadequate for the reasons stated above; mostly, the lack of placement customization, the fact you’re locked into two bars and can’t place individual icons; audio cues aren’t there; and one more minor point that some might find silly: You can’t display the associated keybind to a cooldown, something we can do with WeakAuras.

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Alpha version is very clearly missing 2 of the features listed on that link. One regarding debuff management, and the other being the externals tracker.

Its also missing damage meter. I wish there was an out of raid test for their raid mods like they have for private auras.

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The improvements to Nameplates in Alpha 2 are in a good direction. The text shortening seems a little smoother with it’s chunking, though with all extra bits turned on there is still the hilarious result that there is not enough room on the bar to show all three periods in “…” at smaller nameplate sizes.

Having played some dungeons, I would like to add to the ask for customizing enemy and friendly nameplates separately, as a tank I want every bit of info enabled on the enemies, but for the friendlies I would prefer there was a way to maybe customize the “simplify nameplates” option to preserve their name, or otherwise enable some ability to see their name, maybe their relative level of health, and not much else. The hiding of the names is because of crowding is somewhat self-inflicted, but it feels bad to choose between info I need on enemies, and knowing who the friendly player is beyond the color of the bar showing their class, as well as the want to read the hard work the writing team took in coming up with NPC names.

I have also run into some weird behaviors with nameplate stacking, as the update post called “stickiness”, where the nameplates can end up in places they shouldn’t because there isn’t enough room for them above their NPC. I’m sure there’s behind the curtain logic reasons for this but a contributing factor seems to be the HUGE amount of horizontal space reserved for each bar. At size 2 for untargeted NPCs the bars seem to try to keep 50% their length from each other. it may feel like less space when the left and ride sides of the bars are loaded up with icons, and the player is trying to see the fire AoE they are standing in underneath them, but incredibly rough eyeballing has three columns of nameplates reserving nearly 40% of screenspace, I shudder to imagine a large pull and the resulting grid of healthbars covering the entire screen, entirely disconnected from the position of the NPCs they represent. Is there the possibility that the level of padding can be customizable? Different roles, and different players may have different tolerances or needs for how far the bars should be apart, and how much disconnect between the NPC and their bar can be tolerated. A ranged player may prefer plates spaced far apart that move little, while conversely as a tank Id prefer they be offset the minimum amount necessary, or even still be overlapping as long as I know every health bar and cast bar is at least partially visible.

Regarding stickiness, the issue of NPCs moving and their nameplates turning into a UI blender as they all zip around to adjust seems to have been addressed by making them move slowly, but this has resulted in some bad nameplate placements from certain camera movements, generally when nameplates at the same level sweep laterally over each other. I was also able to have nameplates entirely swap places with each other. This was done by putting the camera behind the dummies and then rotating it around the side slowly so that the nameplate stacking-motion is faster than the NPC motion in screenspace. It’s good to hear this is a known issue, but it should be emphasized this has potential to create bad experiences and negatively impact gameplay if the player feels they made a misplay because they were tricked, or simply lost track of which nameplate was for which enemy when they started playing musical chairs.

Images:
.imgur.com/a/FTB1N69
.imgur.com/a/StgjNFT

if the images are not accessible, the first shows the three Orgrimmar Raider target dummies with nameplate size 2 where the first and third nameplates are directly over their NPC, but the nameplate for the middle NPC is way off to the right, as if there was a 4th target dummy in the line, and the second image is simply the three dummies, except the nameplates for the far left and far right dummies have swapped places. seemingly unwilling to return to their spot due to the space being inhabited by the other already.

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Reposting the images for you:

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The latest version also can’t decide how to “shorten” as it keeps changing while adjusting its position.

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