World of Warcraft recently shared some huge improvements it has planned for the Cooldown manager, including the addition of more advanced settings, trackers for debuffs and external defensives, more Edit Mode customizations, and even sound alerts. Though there is no timetable for these quality-of-life improvements, World of Warcraft fans can expect them to arrive in future updates.
The Cooldown Manager is a new optional UI feature added in World of Warcraft Patch 11.1.5. Using the Cooldown Manager, players can track essential cooldowns, buff durations, utility skills, and timers for certain abilities, such as Death and Decay, Starfall, and similar AoE attacks.
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However, World of Warcraft is far from done with the Cooldown Manager. Blizzard recently revealed some of its plans for this new UI feature based on fan feedback. One of the biggest ways it will do this is by expanding customization options with Advanced Cooldown Settings. Players will eventually be able to pick which spells and abilities to hide, change the order they appear in, customize mouseover tooltips and ability timer appearances, and control where abilities appear, and if they show up as bars or icons. They will even be able to search for keywords in the window, and have unlearned abilities appear as well.
Planned WoW Cooldown Manager Improvements
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Advanced Cooldown Settings
- Choose abilities to display or hide
- Change order of abilities
- Toggle mouseover tooltips and ability timers
- Customizable Essentials and Utility frames
- Buffs as bars or icons
- Show unlearned abilities
- Search function
- Debuff Tracking
- External Defensive Buff Tracking
- Sound Alerts
- Additional Edit Mode Customizations
Beyond that, debuffs and DoTs in World of Warcraft will eventually be looped into this feature. Fans will be able to use settings to indicate when DoTs are missing, in the pandemic window, or about to expire, letting them more easily juggle classes like Affliction Warlock. Additionally, tanks will have options to show defensive cooldowns that their allies use on them so they can better manage their own mitigation abilities.
Optional sound alerts for when abilities come off cooldown or when buffs for various World of Warcraft classes proc will also be added to this system in the future. Players will be able to customize specific audio cues on a case-by-case basis, giving them precise control over when and if these sound alerts happen.
There are even more ideas World of Warcraft is working on with the Cooldown Manager already, including greater control over resizing and repositioning the interface in Edit Mode – the UI customization suite introduced in WoW: Dragonflight. It is even considering the ability to have multiple configuration profiles that swap based on types of content. While none of these iterations have a concrete timetable at present, fans will hopefully see all of them manifest in some form in the future. Needless to say, it seems like World of Warcraft is committed to making the most out of the Cooldown Manager and other quality-of-life improvements.
- Released
- August 26, 2024
- Base Game
- World of Warcraft
- Developer(s)
- Blizzard
- Publisher(s)
- Blizzard
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