How to use WoW’s Cooldown Manager — and will it be good enough to replace WeakAuras in Midnight?

The Cooldown Manager is an in-game tool to help players track their ability cooldowns, buffs, and debuffs, replicating functionality that has usually been provided by addons such as WeakAuras and TellMeWhen. This is a lightweight feature that is easily customizable, allowing players to drag almost any of their combat abilities into the Cooldown Manager panel so that they can be tracked.

So let’s make sense of this Cooldown Manager, and determine if it’s enough to allow players to properly track their rotations and other abilities in combat.

Enabling the Cooldown Manager and customizing it in Edit Mode

To set up the Cooldown Manager, start by going to the Options menu (from your main menu, that you can access with the Esc key), then Gameplay Enhancements on the left. From there, Navigate to Cooldown Manager and check the Enable Cooldown Manager box.

Below it, you’ll see two buttons: one is simply a shortcut to your regular Edit Mode, which allows you to move any interface frame (and you might already be accustomed to using it). Once the Cooldown Manager has been enabled from the options menu, it’ll be available here in Edit Mode as well.

This will allow you to individually move each of the four UI elements that comprise the Cooldown Manager:

• Essential Cooldowns: think of these as your main rotational abiilties
• Utility Cooldowns: buttons that you might press every once in a while but aren’t part of your moment-to-moment gameplay
• Tracked Bars: displays the duration of things like spell auras and summoned pets
• Tracked Buffs: displays buffs and debuffs you might need to track at all time

Drag those four elements to the positions you want, customize them to your liking (orientation, icon size, etc), and then we’ll move on to actually selecting what should be displayed on each of those panes.

The Advanced Cooldown Settings window lets you pick which abilities to track

Now it’s time to click that Advanced Cooldown Settings button back in the Gameplay Enhancements -> Cooldown Manager section of the Options menu. This is the place to select which abilities you’ll be tracking.

Once the Cooldown Settings window is open, on the left side of your screen, you’ll see several icons, for each of your combat abilities. They’re separated in three areas: at the top, Essential Cooldowns, where you should leave your rotational abilities, the ones you need to keep track of at all times. Below it are the Utility Cooldowns, which you should leave for things you need to pay attention to at certain moments, but not always, whether it’s long coolodowns, defensives, or utility abilities. And finally, Not Displayed is simply where you leave everything you’re don’t want to track.

It’s a simple matter of dragging icons to the top two categories if you want to track them, or back down to Not Displayed if you don’t. Do notice that there are two tabs — check the icons to the right of the Cooldown Settings pane: a clock/stopwatch icon for Essential Cooldowns and Utility Cooldowns, and a lightning bolt icon for Tracked Buffs and Tracked Bars. So click on each tab to configure all your abilities.

Finally, do keep in mind that with Midnight a new functionality is being added to allow you to easily share “builds,” like you can do with talents and transmog. You can already see that in the beta, if you have access.

How good is the Cooldown Manager?

Is it perfect? In my opinion, no. It’s missing some functionality that I consider to be essential.

For combat buffs and debuffs, I’m extremely used to having the icons only pop up when it’s almost time to refresh them. For a dot-heavy spec, that kind of functionality is invaluable. Yet this version of the cooldown manager doesn’t allow us to customize timing or position of the buttons that pop up.

I can’t change the order or properties of my ability icons based on combat conditionals. With WeakAuras, I could make an icon pop all the way to the left and make it glow if I had a proc that made it an important cast that I had to press immediately. With the built-in Cooldown Manager, we simply don’t have those options.

I’m a big believer that the default option of the Cooldown Manager — and any of these built-in UI features — should be extremely easy and user friendly. Cooldown Manager checks that box, but it also needs an “Advanced Options” version with a much higher degree of customization. This tool covers the basics very well, working as an entry-level tool to aid players. But for those of us who want more customization power, there’s a distinct lack of advanced features that used to be covered by addons, which we’ll sorely miss.

All in all, this is a “mostly decent” tool that gets the basic job done, but players who have grown used to more powerful addons will certainly suffer for a while and might have a hard time adapting.