I just wanted to celebrate the team starting the journey towards better gameplay UI with this new CD manager. There will always be a lot of criticism from this community because nothing is launched fully perfected. What I appreciate and was so impressed is that the team recognized the desperate need for better gameplay UI that was currently being filled by WeakAuras, etc., and decided to adapt it into the game.
Is it customizable enough? No. Is it perfect? No. But it’s a start, and a conscious decision to help players play what is a very difficult game to learn because it’s complex and there’s basically no good onboarding for how to actually use your abilities or track them.
I have friends who just started playing and are really struggling because they’re not spending hours on this game. They don’t want to watch YT videos on rotations and read guides to just play. Modern games don’t work like that - they teach you what you need to know in the game.
This new CD manager is a great step in the right direction. It’s a step, but it’s a good one for where it will eventually lead. I hope it helps casual and mid casual players play better and ultimately enjoy the game more.
If you’re hardcore and think your WA is better… well, it is. For now. Give it time. In the meantime, stop pooping on progress and encourage the team to push it further.
It’s literally the opposite of progress. They REMOVED existing features on the (superior) personal resource display and replaced it with a barely customizable, stationary, far inferior copy of WeakAuras THAT DOESN’T EVEN INCLUDE ALL THE BUFFS THE RESOURCE DISPLAY HAD.
Free addon that authors are not being paid is better than in game tool they’ve had years to work on that we pay box price and a sub for. It should be better.
That’s tech in a nutshell. AAA developers launch remasters in sub-par resolution (often claiming it can’t be done) only for an unpaid modder to fix it within 20 minutes.
And in response, instead of being humbled and learning from that example, they lobby to change copyright law to punish modders, let’s players and reviewers.
People love to talk about democracy and free markets until the people, democracy and market produce a superior product than you, then it’s like the scene from Gangs of New York when Bill the Butcher throws the axe into the back of the new sheriff they just elected because he was effectively defeated by democracy.
I see all these companies pulling a Bill the Butcher. The people are making superior products and it is enraging them.
I just started customizing my own WAs so I’m probably never going to touch the new options.
The main thing with WA is adding sound cues to stuff. You can add 500 icons each with a duration and a bar on them but that doesn’t mean you’re gonna be able to actually use them as a cue in content, especially as a healer.
The speed the game is going, sound cues are basically mandatory. Only role that can get away without them is tank. Everyone else doesn’t have the eye focus time, our eyes have to be glued to HP bars and the dookie on the floor and for DPS, interrupt stuff.
Buffs displayed on the personal resource bar were snapped to the bar and moved with the bar, it was a much easier and better way to track them
There were buffs displayed on the resource bar that aren’t present on the cooldown manager, for example: on my Arcane Mage, it tracked Aether Attunement, which is one of the most important procs to track. On the cooldown manager, it’s not present.
They can do whatever they want with the cooldown manager if some people like it, but why remove already existing features on the resource bar, which many people prefer?
Ah, the personal resource bar moving around was annoying for me as sometimes it would become hidden or not be in a reliable spot always to view important information so this was actually a negative thing for me
Ah that sucks about arcane mage procs, sounds fricked up that they wouldn’t include that
i wonder why they decided to remove the personal resource bar, i hope they improve the cooldown manager or bring back the personal resource display for stuff like this
im glad they’re trying to improve the UI but some of the decisions they make on removing things and w/e seem really cooked lol
Devil’s Advocate:
The PTR discussion for this feature explicitly said “This first version of the Cooldown Manager is a designer-curated list of abilities; which abilities are shown and the order in which they appear is not customizable.”
New features and customization tools would be coming in future patches.
The sad part is that this “designer-curated list” is another example of how little these designers know the classes they’re creating and what things might be important to keep track of.
