Hi, in Legion Remix I have been playing with no addons enabled (except Details) to get used to the default UI. For perspective history, I have played WoW since 2005 at various levels (CE raiding, mid level m+ pushing, and casual play) and never used total UI replacements (e.g. ElvUI) but have piecemeal replaced parts of the UI with addons including a typical modern Weakauras cooldown tracking suite that I usually make myself for each spec.
Wins
- Intuitive, easy to use. Once I actually access the settings (more on that later), it is very clear what will and will not happen any time I change anything in the Cooldown Manager (CDM) UI
- Includes 90% of what I need. I won’t be going into nice-to-haves in this post, but the CDM does allow me to almost entirely replace any sort of buff tracking or cooldown tracking and play at a competent level.
- Good default setups. So far I have played Ret and Prot Paladin and what I need is generally right there out of the box and I have only had to add or remove a couple of things.
- Pending Alpha features - I would like to have things like sound alerts and debuff tracking, but won’t be going into that here as it is already on alpha and I just can’t play with it yet.
Highest Priority Issue - Missing Cooldowns/Buffs
Some categories of things simply cannot be tracked here. This causes me to use awkward workarounds like placing an action bar near the rest of my cooldowns, or needing to look at my enormous suite of buffs. Of the 90% above, this is the other 10% that stops this from being fully usable to play the game.
- Usable Items - Trinkets and potions etc
- Racial abilities
- Spells granted by items or effects - for example the Remix Artifact active spells
These are the missing items that actively prevent me from having my bars completely secluded away. I know Bar 1 always exists for Skyriding and other vehicle interactions so it does have to remain somewhere visible, however I really do not want clickable buttons to be required near my cooldown tracking to see.
Secondary Priority Issue - Buffs Overriding Cooldown Tracking
Retribution has a talent called Judgement of Justice that provides a 5 second movement speed buff when using Judgement. It is entirely possible to have the cooldown of Judgement be less than this duration, or even within a second or two of the buff ending. The current behavior has a yellow “swipe” replace the typical dark swipe when tracking a buff duration instead of cooldown. In the case of Judgement with this talent, the buff duration completely eclipsed the actual cooldown, leaving the CDM unusable for tracking Judgement with this talent.
This is a one off example but I have also seen it with many other abilities with the “Remix Time” active that recovers cooldowns very rapidly. Each time it happens is an edge case, but it is one that stops the CDM from doing its job.
I feel like this system needs a holistic solution to this problem rather than addressing every individual case in perpetuity. Any time it happens, it brings me back to the above extremely undesirable situation where I feel like it is just better to have an action bar in the middle of my screen rather than using the CDM.
Lower Priorty Issue - Resource Tracking
(Edit: Being told this is already fixed in Alpha, disregard)
The Personal Resource Display has a whole ton of issues I won’t go into detail about here that make it impossible to use reliably. In short it has a fundamental issue of being “in the world” in terms of the frame and also affected by camera movement, or enemy nameplate movement if using the enemy display variety.
The CDM does have those WeakAura staples of showing range and whether I have enough resources to use an ability, however I cannot track my resources outside of whether I have enough or not for a spell. This isn’t super important because I just have my character frame next to my cooldown manager at the moment, but that does come with a lot of other information I really don’t need anywhere near my cooldowns like my name, level, character portrait, or maybe health. If I could track resources in a better way on the CDM (or just move the PRD into its own edit mode frame) then I could have my character frame be in a more aesthetic location instead of sitting right next to all of my cooldowns.
Conclusion
Thank you for reading and I hope one day I can again play WoW with the pure default UI and feel like it is enough to play the game. Big leaps have been made since Dragonflight and I hope this continues.