Cooldown manager will improve in WoW patch 12.1, inching closer to WeakAuras

Blizzard is continuing to refine and add to the cooldown manager’s functionality in World of Warcraft when patch 12.1, the Curse of Ula’tek, goes live on August 11, 2026. These include some changes to the cooldown managers user interface that allows you to expand your tracking capabilities, more interactive capabilities between the cooldown manager and the ping system, and some API tweaks designed to support existing add-ons.

Changes to the cooldown manager you should know about

Once patch 12.1 is live, players can use the cooldown manager to track trinkets, potions, racial abilities and durations. The cooldown settings menu gives a quick breakdown between your essential and utility cooldowns to display, as well as showing you which items and abilities will not be shown.

Overall buff and debuff icons on raid frames can have different sizes and border scales but perhaps more importantly, healers can prioritize which buffs they want to visually show on certain raid frames and hide the ones they don’t, allowing parties to streamline relevant information.

The cooldown manager will have a new category called “Short” sounds that can be configured in the Combat Audio Assist accessibility feature of the settings menu.

Where the ping system works with the cooldown manager

The cross-section of the ping system and cooldown manager gives players the ability to do the following as of patch 12.1:

• Ping action bar and spells on the cooldown manager
• Ping trinkets, potions, and healthstones on the cooldown manager
• Ping certain players resources such as health or mana, which then appear as a chat bubble

New APIs have been added that allow certain addons to display filtered sets of auras (aka buffs and debuffs) with more customizable options but without exposing certain combat information that could be used for combat automation. If you have any addons that display aura/buff and debuffs, they’ll need to be updated to support these APIs.