Bit of feedback for Enhancement Shaman’s cooldown managers:
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Flame Shock’s manager doesn’t seem to track its duration or presence on the target, only its cooldown. This feels a bit unintuitive.
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Crash LIghtning’s buff should probably be a bar, or at least show its duration on the spell tracker, similarly to Assassination Rogue’s Envenom buff.
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Not sure if this is possible, but having the Maelstrom Weapon buff glow when at max stacks would be a fantastic replacement for the previous glow on all spells. It’d make the spec much more accessible without having to rely on spell alerts to manage its stack count.
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It would be really nice to have Primordial Wave’s spell manager show the duration of Splintered Elements after the initial cast, if talented.
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After the buff, Legacy of the Frost Witch should be a bar too, since Totemic’s burst currently relies on having the buff up for both Primordial Storm and the Doom Winds/Sundering window.
Some feedback from a little bit of play.
First i agree with others asking for a way to re-arrange the abilities. Logically a layout that makes sense to 1 person won’t for another.
feedback on Prot Pal specifically.
No tracking of the hero talents buffs for shake the heavens or a holy weapon/bulwark being active.
Shield of the righteous not appering on the ability bar. This is especially weird as a nice thing i noticed is how abilities that cost holy power light up when you have enough to be cast. The primary ability that works for with Prot is Shield of the Rigtheous. I understand it has a buff timer but having it on the bar to change colour when it can and can’t be cast will be something many prot players may miss. I personally don’t track it in my weak aura pack but that is because i have a big holy power bar to tell me when i can cast SoTR, which this currently does not.
When talented into Sentinel it does not appear on the cool down tracker only Avenging Wrath.
Avenging Wrath while active has a coloured overlay for the duration which i don’t think is clear enough to denote it being active. I think it needs the proc glow effect.
I understand the logic of Blessing of Protection, Divine Shield & Spellwarding being in the utility bar but considering how important divine shield with final stand talented can be as a rotational defensive in content i am not 100% sold on it and the others (BoP, SpellBop) being mixed in with the utilities.
I am also not a huge fan of the main rotational defensives (ardent defender, blessing of kings) being lumped in with the core abilites. For tanks i would like to see an additional bar for defensives… though this may be mitigated to an extent by the option to at least re-order these spells/abilities.
The buff bars like for SoTR and consecration are nice though i do wish you could have them always grow up or down instead of offsetting from the centre. It’s a little thing but when you’re trying to get used to where to look for a buff having it jump a little up or down in the heat of battle would not be my choice.
Overall love that this is in the game and the direction it’s heading. Keep up the great work!
I know this is probably completely out of the scope of what you’re doing here with this current feature right now, but I’d like to maybe put it into your minds for the future at the very least.
Along with Weakaura/TellMeWhen style functionality that you’re addressing with this base game feature, many players make extensive use of addons which allow them to customize their enemy nameplates, friendly nameplates, and Personal Resource Display.
Addons such as Plater allow players to blacklist or whitelist buffs and debuffs directly over the mob model’s nameplate health bars to give the player immediate information in the heat of combat per specific mob. A personal favorite of mine is using a function of Plater that shows a “pandemic glow” effect when your DoT is close to expiring, which makes it much more noticeable that you need to refresh your DoTs before they fall off.
Along with a potential nameplate update (one day I hope), I’d wish to see the in-game Personal Resource Display (the health bar and small amount of buffs that show under the player character) fleshed out and updated in the same way. I find that this can be a very nice place to put information right in front of you.
I certainly wish for more customization, but I understand these things take time, and the team is maybe not exactly there yet. Most of my personal feedback and requests are of the mindset that there are many buff effects in the game that can feel a bit superfluous or suffocating to interface with. I said in a few posts up that the actual Buffs Frame on the UI editor can just feel like an absolute soup of buffs which can be claustrophobic and altogether a bit of a useless place to look when actually playing the game.
Addons are unfortunately the only avenue for a WoW player to filter out the information that’s actually important to them, but I’d like to see that philosophy change, and I’m glad strides are being made to work on this issue.
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some quick feedback for MM hunter (sentinel)
- the Lunar Storm debuff is something that is very relevant to be tracked: the optimal play is to hold your Rapid Fire if you have <7 seconds left on your debuff, and having to look at it on the top right of the screen is a bit of an annoyance.
- Precise Shots show up as Spell Alert around our character(see Combat>Spell Alert Opacity), but we have no info about its duration. This is relevant when you are moving from one pack to another and want to know how long do you have before losing your buff.
- Similarly, Lock and Load shows up as a Spell Alert, but we have no information about its duration.
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- IMHO, Spell Alerts and the Cooldown Manager should be part of the same feature, instead of this awkward somewhat arbitrary split between them.
- Bloodlust/Timewarp/Fury of the Aspects/drums-type effects are so important that IMO they should be a tracked bar. Yes, you can feel the extra haste, and you can see a bigger character, but IMHO these effects are still not enough to highlight how important these buffs are, and having their duration highlighted in the tracked bars section would be important since some classes change their rotations during these effects.
- Tracking trinket and special item cooldowns would be nice as well, since they are usually important enough for dps
I know that this was said before but it bears repeating: Health and Resource bars deserve to be more customizable so that we can move and size them independently. I am fine with my health bar being on the side or attached to my character model, but my focus bar needs to be centered and close to my important buttons (my “Essential Cooldowns”), as well as having the focus number clearly visible would help me decide whether to Steady Shot again or if I’ll have enough focus for an Aimed Shot in the next gcd.
Finally, IMHO the Tracked Bars section should be customizable to be vertical bars, though idk how that would look for a spec with more tracked bars.
Please keep iterating on this feature, it’s great. I legit would prefer to use it than to have to hunt down weak auras for every single class that I play when leveling alts!
Feedback primarily related to the Augmentation Evoker.
Bar: Essential Cooldowns
Blistering Scales needs to be added here. For me, it’s one of the abilities I struggle the most to keep active on the tank. Having it on the bar could help with that. An additional feature that would be amazing is if it showed a charge counter for the ability on the bar. However, this might end up making it look too cluttered.
Prescience: If possible, split the charges into two individual icons and add a timer on each icon showing the remaining duration of the buff. This would help better control the ability, especially in M+ scenarios where you often want to keep the buff only on the DPS. I don’t think it would clutter the bar too much, as Augmentation doesn’t have many abilities listed here.
Another option could be to add Prescience to the “Tracked Bar”, with one bar per target affected by Prescience.
Bar: Tracked Buffs
Nourishing Sands: Add this ability to this bar. It would help better track the ideal moments to use Emerald Blossom.
Bar: Tracked Bars
Ebon Might: Due to the duration updates from Sands of Time, the bar always resets even if the ability’s duration is about to expire. It would be better if this bar behaved similarly to the default Ebon Might tracker we already have on the character (below the mana bar).
Unrelated but additional request: Could we get a different icon for Mass Desintegrate/Mass Eruption? This would help track when the ability is available and, especially for Devastation, avoid accidentally canceling a Mass Desintegrate.
If the selection of the specific abilities to be tracked on the cooldown manager are slated to come later than 11.1.5, then I’d like it if lightning bolt and chain lightning were removed from the cooldown tracker. I don’t need to see those as they’re never off CD and tempest already lights up when I have the maelstrom stacks for it. Also frost shock displays hailstorm stacks most of the time, but if I get a ice strike proc and use it, frost shock stops displaying the stacks. Not crazy important but it’s a little annoying and would mean that I don’t need to have a separate buff tracker for the hailstorm stacks
Purely based on what is described, i think theres really very little point to this if youre not going to go all in with it. IMO, as is, the only audience that would use this would primarily be people who dont use WeakAuras, so this is just a nice bonus for them, or people who do use them, but play at a level where they dont really need to/dont utilize it properly.
if you really want this to replace WeakAuras, then it needs to be the same or better than it. if option 1 allows us to fully customize every aspect of out UI in terms of buffs/CD/procs, etc, and option 2 limits us to only customizing the position and scale of the same things, option 1 is clearly the one we’re going to use.
I know not everyone feels this way, but for me, reordering the abilities/buffs shown in the weakaura/CD manager is VERY important. certain abilities NEED to be in a correlating position on the WA and my bars. for example, I do use 1-4 on my keyboard for core rotational abilities (i know not every1 does, but i do). ill use my DH for the example. my current WA shows (in this order) Chaos Strike (resource available) > Blade Dance (resource available/CD) > Felblade (CD) > Eyebeam (Resoure available/CD/Furious Gaze duration). it shows all the other stuff i need, but those are what im using for this example. those 4 WA positions line up with my 1-4 on my keyboard. if i moved eyebeam to the first slot, but it was on key 4, my brain cant wrap its head around that, and my rotation will constantly get messed up.
I KNOW theres gonna be flame here, but thats how my brain works, and i know im not alone on that.
It kind of feels like they’re trying to create a replacement for WeakAuras, without understanding exactly how everyone uses them. Showing buffs and CDs is just part of using WAs. the visual display is a VERY large part, and only customizing size and position isnt going to cut it.
the TLDR is: if you’re trying to create a customization option to replace weakauras, it NEEDs to be the same or better.
2 Likes
I tested this again after this weeks update, still from a Moonkin perspective & pretending no add-ons exist. I see the additions made & that’s cool.
This time I placed the Utility CD bar underneath my action bar that I have my utility/consumables on (for visual cues) to check for differences.
- I noticed that defensive & movement abilities had an ‘active sweep’ indicator on the CD manager, nice.
- This had me wanting to overlay it on my utility action bar, but the sizing options between action bars & CD manager differ too much to square it up properly
I tried the same with the Essential CD bar, but the way I have macros/keybinds setup, it’s not as functional. Once additional customization options are available I’ll look again. I did find an issue when I selected Wild Mushroom instead of Sunseeker.
- The stack counter text for Wild Mushroom is really small, even when I set the bar size to 70% which made it huge compared to my action bars (set to 50%)
- It doesn’t help the icon is fairly ‘busy’ graphically, has a recharge text timer, & a recharge sweep indicator
- Full stacks & desaturating at zero stacks is visually obvious, but would it be possible to modify the icons for abilities with stacks/recharges?
- To a lesser degree it’s the same with the Starlord Bar stack counter text size
- Example, by no means the only way, I created a WA on live that shows when Starlord is active. At 1 stack it has a white border & white CD text, both change to yellow at 2 stacks, & then green for 3. Works for me, but everyone is different.
Bring on the customizations 
Assassination rogue: I would like to see bleeds/debuffs tracked as a bar, as that is one of the most important thing for us to track. Much more important than tracking self buffs or whatever it is doing right now. Garotte, Rupture, and Crimson Tempest especially, but Shiv, Kingsbane and Deathmark would also be nice.
As many have probably said.
It is critical to be able to have the option to reorder the elements. Specs change and the priority and importance of spells and proc change, thus being able to modify the ordering is critical.
Also is important the ability to hide certains elements.
Straying a bit from cooldowns, I feel the personal resource bar has been left to rot when it could get some simple changes to make it amazing:
add ressource value that we can display or not.
add the possibility to change to texture of the personal resource display
add the possibility to have the resource display in a fixed location.
Just saw some news on wowhead about the privew of the cooldown manager and I feel it’s a redundant design in current wow.
What you did is just put some icons of buffs and cooldowns on your screen. But, why don’t re-design your action bar system and buff system to drag and drop any single skill from spell book, and buff icons to any position on your screen?
Also, this design cannot take over WeakAuras because of lack of complexity to your icons. Here is some example:
I play balance druid, eclipse is one of my key mechanism. I can use a single WA icon to track:
- If I’m in solor, lunar eclipse, or I’m currently in celestial or incarn (this is both eclipses).
- I can track my cooldown, and additionally I am able to track the “save up to 15 seconds” cooldown from the “control of the dream” talent.
- I can track how many stacks do I have for CA/Incarn.
- When I’m not in a eclipse, I can display two numbers to indicate how many casts of wrath/starfire to enter corresponding eclipse.
- I can display % numbers for damage amp in both eclipses. This also help me track the “Harmony of the Heavens” talent effect.
- Optionally I can add a sound effect to notify me when CA/Incarn gain a charge/ready.
Another example is the moonfire icon. I can display:
- How long does it remains on my current target.
- How many targets have my moonfire debuff (the number of moonfires on all nameplates currently on my screen).
- Notify me the moonfire is below 30% duration with a sound/voice and highlight it with a glow effect.
For feral druid there is also an example I can show:
- Track feral bites.
- Display a text of “HOLD” to tell me don’t press this button when I have < 50 energy.
- Display a text of “FREE” to tell me the “Apex Predator’s Craving” is triggered and I can simply press this button without thinking.
- The icon change to “Ravage” when it triggers.
Your current design simply duplicates action buttons and buffs without clickable. It doesn’t display enough useful information. Also looks flattened but in fact I look at some icons at most of time so I expect it be bigger, or brighter than less-important things.
Please take a look and carefully review your design. It’s a good start but I hope you can make good use of your productivity. If current status is what you will finally deliver, I would wish you stop now and spend your time on re-design and overhaul on druid talents.
Thanks
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The cooldown manager could use some extra features that I like from WeakAuras and OmniCD as both a PvPer and PvEr.
The first being a customizable party cooldown tracker. This helps prevent overlapping defensives and utility.
The second being auditory sound effects or voice callouts on said defensives or utility. It’s a prominent WeakAura feature and hearing sound queues or some announcer naming the utility or defensive that is traded is quite helpful in all areas of the game, especially in PvP.
The last one for PvP are enemy cooldown tracker as WoW is game of massive knowledge skill checks with many many offensive, defensive, and utility cooldowns and can be quite busywork to track everything going on all at once.
With little communication in game modes such as Battleground Blitz, Solo Shuffle, and even the casual game modes it is quite helpful to be able to see and process the information. In fact, playing without WeakAuras is a disadvantage in PvP as it is a competitive environment and having more information than your opponent puts you a step ahead, which is why some AWC teams are already talking about not sharing their WeakAuras to the general public since they will be competing for money.
Overall, I like the direction this feature is going. I don’t think the goal should be to replace WeakAuras, but to provide not-so-savvy-add-on-users to track essential auras for combat – which this does just fine. Or to have people, like me, who fidget with add-ons too much, have Blizzard do the work.
I think a lot of folks who play WoW just want a “plug and play” approach, and having the developers provide a curated list of auras is nice. For those who like customization, don’t worry you have WeakAuras. And maybe through a few iterations, you’ll have the option to customize this. I’m just excited for this because I’m curious to see if I can finally play a class efficiently without setting up auras in my personal WA packages.
A question for the team: I noticed that my personal resource display is no longer tracking the duration of my active abilities. Is this intentional or a bug?
I was looking to use both – only having the “Tracked Buffs” to show essential combat buffs, and having the PRD enabled to show only the duration of my active abilities. I think having the “Essential Cooldowns” & “Utility Cooldowns” visible makes my UI too noisy, so having the buffs on the PRD (like it always has) would’ve given me a UI solution that is not as redundant. The PRD use to display my ability durations in an elegant way.
Some feedback after trying this on a Sub Rogue:
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Danse Macabre would be nice to see in “Tracked Buffs”. Seeing how many stacks you were able to reach during your big burn phase is a nice way to gauge if you’re doing optimal DPS.
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An option to disable the “proc” / “glowing action bar ability” tracking in the “Essential Cooldowns”. In the case of rogue, my action bar ability already glows when “Coup de Grace” is available. Plus, “Tracked Buffs” already tracks stacks of “Escalating Blade”, so I can easily see when I have four stacks. I can imagine the same case exists for other classes
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“Tracked Bars” should be renamed to something else as its purpose is not clear. Maybe “Important Effects”? It would be nice if there was a toggle to not display them as bars, but as the traditional square auras.
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This would be a great tool for those that play casually & that are finally looking to step up their gameplay. For this reason, there should be an option to toggle tool tips so that they can read what their essential buffs are and what they do.
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I love how “Tracked Buffs” icons grow based on how its anchored/snapped to in Edit Mode. It helps keep the buff bar seem integrated with my action bars (see screen shot above). It would be great if this were to be applied for the other components of the Cooldown Manager. i.e. If I anchor “Utility Cooldowns” to the center, icons should overflow into the bottom row & be centered. If I anchor to the right, icons should overflow into the bottom row & should be shifted right. If I anchor to the top left, icons should overflow into the top row & should be shifted left. etc.
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In the Cooldown Manager, have a sub-toggle for the 4 components of the Cooldown Manager. If I choose to never use one component, as it stands, I have to mark its visibility as “Hidden” and it will continue to show up in my Edit Mode. I’ll be nice to choose which component to enable. Also, each component toggle should have a description that summarizes the purpose of the component
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Think about how this plays along side PRD. IMO, with this released the PRD should be updated with native options to
- Hide all buffs – I can see people just wanting the health bar and power bar and just using the cooldown manager for buffs
- Hide special resources – I can see people just wanting to track just the buffs with the PRD, as it provides a minimal way of showing essential ability & utility durations compared to the Cooldown Manager. In its current state, the most minimal the PRD can be (through native options) is buffs + the special resources. We already track the special resources on the player frame, its redundant for some people.
Also, in live, why does PRD not track Flagellation & Shadow Blades, but Cooldown Manager considers it an essential. Is there a difference in the philosophy between the two?
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Its bound to happen – after a class update, there will be essential buffs or abilities that are not being tracked. I hope this feature has a way for the dev team to easily apply hotfixes for what is being tracked. Hopefully there’s a elegant & fast feedback loop and some mechanism in place to apply live updates to this thing (without us having to wait for a client side release).
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When the ability to filter the auras displayed in the Cooldown Manager releases, please don’t abandon the idea of Blizzard providing a curated list of default Auras that suffice for proper class play.
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With this released, there should be an option to hide “Action Bar 1”. I can see people wanting to completely hide their action bars that house their abilities, and just to have the Cool Down Manager displayed.
Hello!
Important:
- Tracking for racial abilities and equipped on use trinkets is missing.
- Tracking personal resources near cooldowns is essential. The personal resource display often becomes covered when adjusting the camera. Please consider providing the ability to detach the personal resource display from under your character so that it doesn’t move around.
- While it would be ideal to be able to control the order and visibility of each ability, it is good that they are ordered similarly across classes. It is important that my defensive abilities are always in the same spot when I switch characters.
- Outlaw rogue: Adrenaline Rush and Blade Fury tracked bars show 1000+ seconds left on those buffs while stealthed w/ “Underhanded Upper Hand” talented. This is not intuitive as the talent simply says “Adrenaline Rush does not lose duration while stealthed”.
A way to track DoT/debuff time remaining on current target is essential and missing. For me, this is a make or break issue with the feature. Time remaining on the debuff will alter your rotation. To name a few:
- Feral Druid: Rip/Rake/Thrash.
- Shadow Priest: SW:P/Vamp Touch/Devouring Plague.
- Ret Paladin: Expurgation.
Nice to have:
- Would like to be able to control opacity based on combat state. For example, 50% opacity when out of combat and 100% in combat. I like the UI to fade (not disappear) into the background when I’m out of combat. It would be good if action bars could do this too.
Looks great so far!
For context, I’m using the class WeakAura packs from Luxthos to track CDs, my resources, procs and important debuffs on my main target.
People are explaining a lot of information, but from a casual player stand point the feedback is short and sweet.
Just make weakaures in wow! Everything it has just in wow. It’s simple.
Yall can put blizzards little twist on it, but just making a simple and equal to weakaures is what I am looking for.
If it is not like weakaures, then it won’t be used unless you block “weakaures” the addon from working.
Keep up the good work.
Could we get the option to show the exact number of seconds left underneath the icon of each effect players and enemies have on them as well? It would be good to have this for the cooldown left underneath our ability icons as well. Just a request.
The functionality you have here is grate, but in the end to remove the most of my weakauras I have to be able to add multiple of those bars, adjust which abilities are displayed in them, adjust if they should be visible when on cooldown, or when usable, or as always.
Also you should be able to track certain debuffs or buffs and make them visible in the center of the UI. I think doing this would remove a massive amount of weakauras.
The next thing in the base game UI that needs to be adjusted is enemy nameplates. The current ones are almost unusable.
Hello again team, I’ve returned to provide more feedback.
MW Monk:
- I see that Vivacious Vivification was added to the bars. Good stuff.
- Really strongly suggest adding Chi-ji/Yu’lon Duration somewhere or this will 100% be dead on arrival for MW monks. The healing rotation completely changes during these windows so it is imperative to know when it is out and it is a bit harder to see the bird or dragon during clustered fights.
- Jadefire Stomp really should be on the cooldown bar.
- I see Teachings of the Monastery stacks are now tracked, but Sheilun’s Gift stacks are still not.
Disc Priest:
- Mindbender/Shadowfiend duration similarly to Chi-ji/Yu’lon is important to know for disc ramps because of how many other buffs are tied to them it is super important to know when the window is ending.
- Harsh Discipline is another thing that is noteworthy as you tend to always want to make sure you have it up for Penance casts.
Thank you for being receptive of our feedback.
Augmentation Evoker:
I think the duration of Prescience that is on a target should be trackable somehow. It is important to be able to see the remaining duration on a target where sometimes you may or may not be able to fit in Ebon might before it expires or if you need to refresh soon on a specific person.
Though there is the problem of having multiple bars per person since you can normally have up to 3, and maybe 4 if you go time skip… But currently, there is no good way to track this duration properly in the game. Maybe there can be some compromise somewhere
Golden Opportunity I think should be under tracked buffs. Since it doubles the duration of your next Prescience, you might want to avoid using it on certain players.
The bar for Ebon might is great though.
Evoker
Another spell I think could be useful to track the duration for is Spatial Paradox. but I think this is mostly important to the player I am buffing since they would want to 1: know they have it. 2: know the duration of the buff.
I am once again requesting a tracking bar/interface for Enhancement Shaman Maelstrom Weapon, perhaps a combo bar or a bar similar to holy power.