Feedback: Cooldown Manager in 11.1.5

#1 - March 7, 2025, 12:49 a.m.

In the 11.1.5 PTR, there’s a new User Interface feature called the Cooldown Manager. The Cooldown Manager’s purpose is to help inform you of the state of your important class and spec cooldowns in a consolidated space on your UI.

The Cooldown Manager is a new display that can be enabled by opening the Options Menu, navigating to Advanced Options, and checking the box labeled “Enable Cooldown Manager”. There’s also a search bar at the top of the Options menu! Once enabled, you can make further adjustments to the size, position, opacity, and other options in Edit Mode, just the same as you would adjust any other User Interface element.

The Cooldown Manager has four parts to it that can all be adjusted and shown or hidden separately based on your preferences.

Essential Cooldowns

Essential Cooldowns are where any ability you currently have access to that has a cooldown is displayed. These are where your core rotational and big impact abilities are found, such as Crusader Strike, Judgment, and Avenging Wrath.

Essential Cooldowns show whether an ability can be used, the remaining duration of any effects is applies, and its cooldown once its effects are no longer active. Highlights that appear on abilities in action bars also appear on Essential Cooldowns, so you have all the information you need to play your spec in the Cooldown Manager, in the form you’re used to seeing it.

Utility Cooldowns

Utility Cooldowns is for buttons that are situationally useful, such as interrupts, mobility, or crowd control. You’ll find spells like Counterspell, Blink, and Ice Block here.

Tracked Bars

Tracked Bars appear for effects where it’s important for you to be able to see their exact duration. For instance, spells that change your rotation like Combustion, effects that are important to maintain like Shield Block, or effects where it’s helpful to know exactly when they will end, like Eclipse.

Tracked Buffs

Icons appear in the Tracked Buffs section for effects where it’s important for you to know that you have the effect, but its duration isn’t especially significant. Buff icons like Nether Precision for Arcane Mage, Backdraft for Destruction Warlock, or Maelstrom Weapon for Enhancement Shamans show up here.

Tracked buffs show icons, durations, and stacks of the effect. Tracked Buffs do not appear for effects that are fully indicated by ability highlights in the Essential Cooldown section.

Feedback

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. While you can adjust the size, opacity, location, and other properties of each section of the Cooldown Manager in Edit Mode, you cannot control what abilities show up or the order in which they are shown.

The most useful feedback we’re looking for are your thoughts on abilities or buffs that you feel are missing, extra icons or bars that do not feel important to you, and obviously any bugs you encounter.

Feedback about how you play is also extremely valuable to improving it in future patches. We have plans to add new features and customization tools. Are there important aspects of playing your spec that you cannot do with only the Cooldown Manager? What information do you need to track, and how do you currently track it?

Thank you very much for your testing and feedback!

#24 - March 7, 2025, 7:58 p.m.

Thank you for writing these thorough posts so quickly! We do have plans to allow you to hide or rearrange elements on the new Cooldown Manager in a future patch, however the specifics of how that works are yet to be determined. We are reading and noting all your feedback about feature requests, but can’t speak to much at this time that’s outside the scope of this PTR.

Because elements in the tool can’t be customized, we wanted to share a little philosophy behind what we’ve chosen to include and whether to make something an icon or bar. We want the Cooldown Manager to have all the information you need to play your rotation for a spec - you can just turn it on for a spec you’ve never played and you’re good to go.

But it doesn’t show everything - it aims to clarify and filter information to help you play with intention. There are a lot of buffs and such that WoW specs gain that don’t affect their choices, like short stat buffs or maintenance buffs that tend to stay up through the course of normal play. If a proc causes an ability icon to light up, we generally don’t show an icon for it because the highlight already communicates it’s present. Not showing those makes the information you do care about easier to see.

In particular we’re careful about what shows as bars, because they’re fairly “loud.” For something to be a bar, it needs to be something where knowing when it will end affects your decision making somehow.

One of the reasons feedback about which abilities are shown (or not shown) and where they’re categorized is so valuable is that it helps us find important information we might not be showing or remove extraneous information so you can focus on what matters most. For feedback on bars in particular, it’s helpful to understand your gameplay around when those effects will end.

#30 - March 7, 2025, 8:44 p.m.

This is a great list, thank you! Here are some of the updates we’ll make to the Blood setup:

• Add Essentials elements for Reaper’s Mark and Soul Reaper.
• Add a Tracked Bar for Death and Decay and a Tracked Buff for Coagulating Blood so you can see how strong your next Death Strike will be.
• Add a Heart Strike Essential element while you’re San’layn so you can see Vampiric Strike procs.
• Look into showing Dancing Rune Weapon’s remaining duration on its Essential element.
• Consistency pass for how defensives are shown for all tank specs.

I did want to ask about your Essence of the Blood Queen gameplay. How do you currently track Essence of the Blood Queen, and in what situations do you look at its state to make rotational decisions?

This is amazing, thank you so much for doing such thorough investigations. No changes to share on monks right now, but I’ve shared your notes.

We’ll add Iridescence, good call. The Snapfire issue is a good catch too - thank you. We’ll look into it.

Will look into this, thank you.

Another good catch - we’ll look into it.

We’ll change this.

We’re carefully reading all posts, not just the ones quoted. Thank you to everyone who is giving a close look at the tool for the specs you play - we’re looking forward to more.

#57 - March 10, 2025, 10:14 p.m.

Thanks for the feedback - keep it coming.

There’ve been some suggestions about Essential elements that could potentially be removed. In many cases those Essentials are there to show when you get an icon glow or a spell replacement. The idea is that players used to using Action Bars are used to seeing those effects on their action bar abilities, and we want them to continue to see that information in the manner they’re used to instead of switching to using Tracked Buff elements for them.

Overall, we feel that having additional Essential elements is less distracting than extra bars or buffs, since they aren’t appearing or disappearing and information about them always shows up in the same place. That said, we’ll look into whether we can hide some Essentials if you don’t have talents that make showing them relevant.

We’ll look into the Rebuke glow - may be a bug. What you’re seeing next to Light’s Justice in Edit Mode isn’t Hammer of Justice. Might be another bug.

Lots of good notes and suggestions here.

• We’ll add combat resurrection abilities like Rebirth to Utilities so you can see their cooldowns.
• Incapacitating Roar will be fixed.
• Combining Eclipses and CA / Incarn into one bar is an interesting idea. We looked into it but there are some technical limitations. We’ll keep it our list for future improvements.
• We’re looking into what icons appear for effects like Clearcasting and Owlkin Frenzy.

Awesome post - I’ve passed on your feedback for review.

Will look into adding stacks for Colossal Might. You can see the durations for Sweeping Strikes, Die By the Sword, and Bereserker Rage on their ability icons. The tool doesn’t show debuff information so can’t show information about Rend or Colossus Smash.

Giving them all their own bar would be a lot of bars, but we’ll look into showing the bar when an ancestor is present for any reason.

Thanks so much for this - passing it on. We’ll update the Cooldown Manager in response to class changes in the future so that it continues to show relevant information.

Love this breakdown, thank you. I’ve passed it on to the relevant folks.