This version of the Cooldown Manager is live today with the launch of Patch 11.2.5, though Blizzard is continuing to take feedback and improve on it over the course of the Midnight Alpha, so be sure to let them know what features you'd like to see.
Displaying Essential and Utility Cooldowns
The cooldown manager hasn't changed too much since the last set of improvements previewed by Blizzard, adopting a drag and drop interface to help players easily decide what abilities to show, hide, or emphasize.
Though aside from the sleek interface, the cooldown tracker is not much different from a non-interactable action bar, it's quite easy to use. This simplicity is paid for in a lack of customization, however,
Although text-to-speech and other audio alerts are not currently working on the Alpha, the support is there.
This introduces the conflict. The Cooldown Manager has support for additional features, such as the ability to create alerts when an ability is coming off cooldown, which an action bar cannot do. On the other hand, it doesn't support basic action bar functions like spacing abilities out or creating distinct layouts. It doesn't track trinkets, items, or spells like Whirlwind, which still incur the GCD sweep but do not themselves have cooldowns. You also can't key bind directly to the Cooldown Manager, which means that ability still needs to be on an action bar somewhere on your screen. Moreover, players cannot separate abilities onto separate bars: compared to the eight available action bars, the Cooldown Manager offers a single larger block of "essential" cooldowns and another smaller set of "utility" ones, but that's it.
Despite the sleek interface, the Cooldown Manager isn't able to replicate the distinct layouts or features of traditional action bars.
There is an advantage in ease of use, for players who are not yet familiar enough to take advantage of Edit Mode, but for everyone else, the Cooldown Manager exists in an odd state where it is neither a replacement for action bars, nor a complete supplement to them.
An Overabundance of Glows
One issue shared between traditional actions bars and the Cooldown Manager is an abundance of glows when certain abilities are buffed or come off cooldown. Designed to be a helpful reminder to emphasize important parts of the rotation, continual creep of which buttons and effects are considered important has resulted in an overbearing mishmash of conflicting priorities.
Which button am I supposed to press again?
With the advent of the one-button rotation and highlighted combat assistant, it also feels odd that the base UI tries to tell players which buttons to prioritize, especially when they aren't necessarily that high priority, resulting in some glows constantly repeating while others simply never fade away. Ideally, this is something that players would have the ability to customize themselves, enabling glows for important states they'd like to emphasize, while removing the more mundane reminders.
Tracking Buffs with Bars and Icons
Buff tracking is where the Cooldown Manager really comes into its own, giving players better visibility and control over important class and specialization specific buffs. Still clearly a work in progress, as the manager has not been updated to account for the wide-ranging class changes on the Midnight Alpha, but that is to be expected, just as more class changes are expected over the course of the test period.
Though buffs will also have audio alerts, what you can track is very limited.
Like cooldowns though, buff tracking suffers from the weakness of only tracking class/spec specific buffs, with no support for debuffs, trinkets, items, consumables, or other temporary effects that you might gain during a dungeon or raid encounter.
Buffs tracked by the Cooldown Manager also continue to appear in the normal buff bars, resulting in some redundancy.
External Cooldown and Debuff Tracking Coming Soon
In their previous preview, Blizzard did confirm that the ability to track debuffs and some of the bigger external defensive cooldowns was coming, which will be a welcome addition for many classes.
Preview courtesy of Blizzard.
Future Feasible Features
Clearly still a work in progress, the Cooldown Manager is a fantastic addition to the game and the question is not whether it will inherit more features, only a matter of when. Still, we would be remiss to not include a list of additional capabilities we'd like to see added over the course of the Midnight Alpha:
Separating tracked buffs and spells onto multiple bars, so that they can be grouped, stacked, or scaled separately.
The ability to add spaces and rows between tracked cooldowns.
Tracking on-GCD abilities that don't have cooldowns.
Numbers displayed to tenths of a second.
Tracking trinkets, items, consumables, and other specialized on-use effect cooldowns.
When/if sound queues are added, the ability to dictate which channels they output to.
Integration of, or more features for, the personal resource display - separating health from resources, showing resources as a bar, icon, or raw number.
The option to turn off default glows, or even add our own.
Tracking trinkets, items, consumables, and any encounter specific buff effects.
Optionally(?) filtering buffs from the normal bars when they are also displayed by the Cooldown Manager.
