Thank you for the extremely comprehensive response, and for the changes to Blood! I’m gratified to know that more iterations are coming in future patches. In the meantime, I am happily looking forward to ditching some addons and using Cooldown Manager to replace them.
As for Essence of the Blood Queen, when I play San’layn I have to track it with a third-party addon, because it can’t be tracked in the default UI unless you hunt for it in the sea of buffs in the upper right corner of the screen. I rely on this addon inside Dancing Rune Weapon windows (since that’s the easiest time to refresh Essence), to recognize if I’ve made a rotational mistake and let Essence drop, or when I’m judging when to pull the next pack or use Dancing Rune Weapon to preserve my Essence uptime.
But the main reason I want to track Essence is because it’s not a conventional maintenance buff. I don’t need to track Icy Talons (for example) because it’s a small power gain, stays active through normal play, and can be easily regained if lost. Essence is almost the exact opposite: the full seven stacks are a massive power gain, you have to change your rotation to keep it running (especially during Dancing Rune Weapon), and it is nearly impossible to fully regain it outside of the Dancing Rune Weapon window. New players need to understand that Essence of the Blood Queen should stay active, and more experienced players need to confirm that it’s active at all times (just like Bone Shield, which is on Tracked Bars).
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I need to be able to track rend, see stacks of demolish I have built up, and the top bar has 11 items on it for arms colossus which is a lot. I also can’t see the duration of colossus smash/warbreaker, sweeping strikes, die by the sword, beserker rage, etc. Pretty good start though, I can see this replacing WeakAuras one day but not in this state.
I have a big problem with this. You are continuing to replace gameplay with interface. There are problems with the game that lead to this. Why we need to track 5+ cooldowns and several buffs on top of that, while at the same time having to react very quickly to what’s happening on the battlefield.
We can already track all this with addons. This is not a good thing. Interface elements like this are massively intrusive. These new ones don’t even look good. Don’t make the game look like a 90s “my first windows game” that just consists of bars and numbers.
tldr: I wanna play a game, not an interface. I can already do all this with addons, do better than the addons.
I agree in that there is probably a happy medium between vanilla frostbolt spam and what is currently required, but I think even the happy medium would benefit from this tracker and actually the happy medium would make the Cooldown Manager more feasible.
Feedback for MM Hunter Cooldown manager experience:
- abilities not properly grouped (f.e. Aspect of the Turtle is far from all other defensives)
- Aspect of the cheetah: only the first 3sec are shown as “active ability state”. The follow-up 30% speed is not, but should be due to aspect of the fox implications
- Streamline missing - this is the biggest one so far. Streamline is the most important buff in the MM rotation. At the same time, Bulletstorm is shown in the buffs frame, and it’s much less important
Elemental Shaman
Essential Cooldowns
The following don’t even have a cooldown but are shown (so they should get removed):
- Lightning Bolt
- Chain Lightning
- Earth Shock
- Earth Quake
- Elemental Blast
- Frost Shock
While Flame Shock indeed has a Cooldown, I’d wager at the current Elemental Shaman implementation/mechanics state this ability is not that important to be an essential Cooldown. We’re not managing it. We keep one active. That’s it. So this one could also go.
This would cut the bar in half.
Tracked Bars
- Call of the Ancestor shows the duration of Ancestors. Except randomly spawned ones. Or resummoned ones. Also each spawn should probably have their own bar tbh.
these abilities are there so they can light up, not for the cooldown tracking per se
as a purely PVP player, will this also work with teammates or enemy targets? One of the biggest barriers to entry for new PVPers is knowing what cooldowns their teammates have or what the enemy target is doing so they can make a good decision on if they need to trade a CD or not. I know this is the first iteration, but if there was a cooldown tracker for this, it would help in PVP so much. really looking forward to this in game and it is a step in the right direction for WoW overall
There are no official APIs for tracking cooldowns other than yours, so officially this is not even “in game” at the moment, and was never supposed to be tracked in the first place. OmniCD and OmniBar do this by approximation by parsing the combat log and they are inaccurate for abilities with CDR.
So it’s very safe to say, this is never ever coming to the default UI. Only your CDs.
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You only get one release. This is something a ton of devs don’t understand. If you release a new feature, it better be finished.
Releasing this “tool” without the option to customize it is akin to the (beta) release of DayZ or No Man’s Sky. If you “release” something in an unfinished version, people are gonna hate it, go away from it and never look back, but keep using their old tools that work the way they want.
It’s an absolutely insane decision to put an unfinished version of this “personal cooldown manager” into the game.
I understand, it’s much easier to send your players to give you a list of what and what shouldn’t be in the cooldown manager after writing a short version that simply uses spell IDs or similar, compared to actually putting in work into this tool, but just like your UI revamp was great (except for the new buttons, I’m really sorry, I hate how they look), a large majority of players still uses entire UI overhaul addons, not because they’re better, hell they usually hide extra action buttons by default, but because they’re used to it and the first version that Blizzard had released was awful.
If you release this “cooldown manager” even if it does track all the important abilities, what if you don’t care about one ability that gets tracked? What if you do care about something that doesn’t get tracked?
This tool desperately needs to be customizable and releasing it without that option is a terrible decision. You might just as well not release it at all, because if you delay it, you’ll at least not get a ton of negative feedback for the entire thing not being customizable and pointless because it’s meant to replace WeakAuras, but is far too limited to do so.
Agreed with the replies saying more customization needs to be added/allowed before the feature releases. I am ecstatic at the idea of this being implemented and would love playing more alts without feeling compelled to set up WAs to make it easier, but I also would rather wait longer for it if it means it’s customizable once it hits live.
For slayer fury I think tracking stacks of Marked for Execution on the target is a must - this is easily the one thing that jumps out the most to me after hitting a training dummy for a minute or two. I think general debuff tracking on the target would be a good add, maybe as its own section, but also maybe not. Unsure on that one.
I think being able to move specific buff durations like, say, Enraged Regeneration and Berserker Rage from the utility section to the buff tracking section would be good. It’s fine being just in the utility section, but I like knowing when a defensive will run out, and I don’t necessarily want to increase the scale of the entire utility tracker just to look at one or two things. I can see this adding a lot of complexity, so it’s more of a wish list item for me I think.
Frost Mage feedback for cooldown manager:
Icy Veins is not on the tracked bars, like Combustion is. I have a weakaura currently that tracks Icy Veins specifically as a bar duration as I want to see it visually this way. I’d like to see this as a tracked bar personally.
When FoF or Freezing Rain are active, this glows Ice Lance and Blizzard like on the current action bars, but there’s nothing in cooldown manager to indicate the duration of these buffs. So IL and Blizzard appearing on the essential cooldowns bar don’t really achieve anything additional to the existing action bars as it’s replicating the same functionality. If anything, the duration of the buffs should show somewhere. Similarly with Brain Freeze, no indication of what the duration is; just the Flurry glow like on the action bar.
I also don’t particularly like that Frostfire Bolt appears as an essential cooldown when it’s a filler spell. I get why it’s there, cause of Frostfire Empowerment, but there’s already a tracked buff for this, and the button glow already appears on the action bar. This is falling in the same bucket as IL to me.
General feedback:
- Tracked bar is currently horizontal only. Have the option to make it vertical. I can’t see this option in Edit Mode.
- There are a bunch of spells that are tracking that I don’t really ever track, but I can understand why they’re listed (Cone of Cold, Ice Nova, Frost Nova, Remove Curse). Players should be able to have the ability to toggle certain spells on and off, or choose what you want.
- I’d argue to let players choose what appears on what bar, as development changes on specs can fundamentally change what should or should not appear, and having the devs have to also update cooldown manager each patch release worries me that things will be missed. E.g. Frostfire’s Frost/Fire Mastery were important to track in S1, while Excess Frost/Fire were not, now it’s reversed for S2. Cooldown manager trackers the Excess buffs but not the Mastery buffs (currently, rightfully so for S2) but if the spec changes again in the future these will need to be updated.
- Potentially look at profiles. Like currently cooldown manager could be the default profile and then let players set up extra profiles that are custom to the things they want to track.
Edit: One vital part of Frost is tracking Winter’s Chill and it doesn’t seem cooldown manager can handle this cause it’s an enemy debuff. Similarly for Spellslinger, tracking how many splinters are out at any one time to know when a Splinterstorm is coming would be useful - although it doesn’t matter as much in S2 compared to S1, it’s something to consider if in the future the Hero spec gets adjusted again where we need to actively monitor splinter stacks again.
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Edit 1: Added paladin note about Crusader/Avenging Wrath.
First off, thanks for this, its a great start. I am an outdoor/delve player and a mild Weak Aura user (around 20-30 total) and it will replace several I can tell. That being said, I broke my feedback into categories.
General
- Do these icons need mouse over tooltips enabled? I find myself trying to mouse over the icons on the new bars, but i can see that being annoying to some. Maybe something to opt into? I spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out the Overwhelming Power tracked buff for Feral, where an optional tooltip would have instantly clarified it.
- Utility bar feels too noisy (just like default UI buff section, too much info crammed in one place). I don’t understand the order logic either, it has defensives, movement, utilities all jumbled together. IMHO these would be better served by breaking them out in categories, for example: movement, defensive, utility like interrupts/stuns/snares, etc
- Doesn’t track debuffs on target, which is critical for a lot of specs.
- When a buff has both a duration AND stacks, I think displaying it as a tracked bar is far more readable than tracked buff icon. For example, BM hunter Frenzy on a bar is much clearer than Feral Druid Tiger’s Tenacity that has both timer and stack counts cramped on a single icon. Would also help with consistency across classes. At least the option to choose would help greatly.
- Doesn’t seem to track battle rez like Rebirth and Intercession
- Doesn’t seem to track Bloodlust effect duration, even when cast by me.
- Unable to test, but I assume it doesn’t track external buffs like Power Infusion or Aug Evoker buffs. FWIW
80 BM Hunter Packleader
- It tracks Howl of the Pack Leader, but once the beast is spawned, it doesn’t track Hogstrider/Wyvern’s Cry duration or stacks.
- Doesn’t track Hunter Pet Family abilities: Fortitude of the Bear, Primal Rage, Master’s Call
80 WW monk Shado-pan
- Doesnt track the following: Touch of karma CD or duration, Flurry Strikes stacks, Emperor’s Capacity stacks, Quaking Palm CD (this is a racial so idk if necessary, but i track it personally)
- Doesn’t track Dance of Chi-Ji or Blackout Kick! (i know these are procs, which are usually handled with spell alerts. Blackout Kick! has an alert but apparently Dance doesnt. Given how core these two procs are to rotational flow, I feel this omission needs to be figured out either with spell alerts or with this new manager)
80 Ret Paladin Templar
- I’m not sure it needs to track Crusading Strikes or Shake the Heavens, I never track those personally. Would love to be able to turn these two off without disabling the entire section.
- Divine Hammer duration isn’t tracked.
- Debuffs that would be helpful to track on target: Judgment, Execution Sentence, Final Reckoning
- Edit: With Radiant Glory, neither Avenging Wrath or Crusade is tracked that I can tell.
- Edit: Without Radiant Glory, Avenging Wrath/Crusade are tracked as an icon. I think the actual buffs (duration and stacks) should be tracked as a bar, and overall CD should be tracked on the icon.
80 Feral/80 Affliction & Destro Warlock
- Desperately needs target debuff tracking for bleeds and dots
For the future
- I think adding options for spell alerts would be a good addition to this feature. Procs, CDs, buffs, debuffs should all live under the same umbrella of options IMHO
- I desperately want the ability to both choose what shows up on the bars, as well as their order and position.
- I want to be able to choose icons shown. For example WW Monk Pressure Points (from Xuen’s Battlegear) I prefer to see Rising Son Kick icon. For BM Hunter Beast cleave, I want to see Beast Cleave icon instead of Multi Shot. For Feral Druid Predatory Swiftness, I prefer to see Regrowth icon since thats how i use it 95% of the time.
- Need to add trinkets or other on use effects from gear, both CD and buff duration
- On the Tracked Bars, I would like the ability to choose if i just want a timer counting down, I dont always want a bar, especially for short timers.
- I will strongly echo everyone’s cries for more control of this feature. Its a GREAT start, sure. I will say it makes total sense to take a “low code” approach. I cant imagine anyone reasonably believes this would ever be a 1 to 1 WeakAura replacement, with options to add custom code/scripts. I believe your philosophy of not having it track things like like short stat/maintenance buffs is smart, its easy to clutter this up out of the box (OOB). That all being said, optional customization is still sorely needed.
- There are some things I want to track that probably don’t need to be enabled by default, but are important to various players. Examples: BM hunter mend pet on a bar (not just an icon), WW Monk Lighter than Air and Vivacious Vivification.
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