Blizzard is working on a built-in cooldown manager in World of Warcraft patch 11.1.5

World of Warcraft Patch 11.1.5 hit the PTR this week, allowing us a quick peek into the next patch and its features, including the new Cooldown Manager. The Cooldown Manager is a new UI element intended to highlight key rotational abilities when they are available to use, and show when less frequently used utility abilities — think bloodlust — are up and ready.

This element is a work in progress, and Blizzard are asking for players to test it out and give feedback on what they think is good or bad about it. Anyone with an active account can jump into the test realm and give it a try.

The Cooldown Manager comprises of four frames: 

• Essential Cooldowns – these should be your core rotational abilities and have a major impact on your effectiveness in your current role.
• Utility Cooldowns – these are typically class based abilities, and are likely to be situationally important.
• Tracked Bars – used to display the duration of an ability or spell effect that may have an impact on your rotation.
• Tracked Buffs – displaces key buffs such as a class stance, or role-based buff that doesn’t have a set duration but it is important to know if it’s active for other class abilities to be effective.

On PTR at present, the feature is turned off by default, you access it by using the Game Menu (Esc), selecting Options, and then selecting Advanced Options in the Gameplay subsection.

Currently the only option is to turn the feature on, but blue posts within the feedback thread indicate that they plan to add additional customization features in the future, such as suppressing or adding other abilities.

Once you turn it on, it will default to appearing in the center of the screen below your character, this is a pretty common location for other cooldown tracking addons.

If you want to move the frame, you will need to enter the HUD Edit Mode via the main menu. Once again, by default editing this component is inactive — select the frame group at the bottom of the list of Combat frames. This unlocks all four frames and you can move them to your preferred location. You can also change the visibility of any of the frames on a frame-by-frame basis, your options are:

• Always Visible — frame is always visible
• In Combat — frame is only visible while in combat
• Hidden — frame is always hidden

The abilities that appear in the frames are dynamic based on your class, spec and talents chosen. If you change specialization or talent load ut for different content, the abilities that appear in the frames will update to match. Blizzard are currently collecting feedback on which abilities should be displayed in each frame. Not all abilities are included as yet, and there is conflicting feedback on whether certain abilities should be tracked or not.

I was somewhat surprised that Sunfire and Moonfire were not tracked for Moonkin, but Wrath and Starfire are displayed allowing them to highlight the Eclipse state. Because it only shows what’s available to cast and whether a damage/healing/defensive effect that will potentially change your rotation, it doesn’t currently do any DOT/HOT tracking, as these effects are on your target. I noticed it did inherit the range checking used by the action bars, and will show charges where applicable.