What it Does
Once enabled, external buffs are duplicated on a separate frame for better visibility, which is nice to emphasize important abilities, but limited in function and scope. It's certainly nice to know when things like Pain Suppression are active, but it only tells you when the ability is active on you - there's still no way to know whether a particular 4-minute cooldown is available or on cooldown because it was used on someone else, so a major coordination issue remains unsolved.
Only tracks single target buffs like Life Cocoon, but not group effects like Rallying Cry.
Does not allow filtering, rearranging, or even previewing what abilities will be shown.
No cooldown information, to know whether an ability is available or if it was used on someone else.
Like the Cooldown Manager, buffs are duplicated, displayed on both the normal and external defensive frames.
Like a lot of Blizzard's addon replacements, the work-in-progress is a nice enough proof of concept, but still lacking in a lot of ways.
What it Could Do
The External Defensive Tracker isn't actually part of the Cooldown Manager, though integrating the two may actually solve several of its issues, since the manager already has an interface for delineating which buffs are shown and in what order. This could also open further customization, such as showing some of the buffs as bars, others as icons, and further fine tuning. Why limit players to a single frame for buffs and another for external defensives, when they could decide which buffs appear in what positions on their screen?
Players have been asking for better ways to filter their buffs since before the Midnight addon changes were ever announced, either hiding unimportant ones or splitting them out into separate groups. While this is something the developers have expressed interest in improving, the Cooldown Manager already seems to have a basic framework for this functionality just waiting to be expanded.
The Cooldown Manager already supports basic filtering, as well as separating spells into two groups, though more would be even better.
Blizzard has already given us a preview of some future options, such as displaying bars instead of just icons, though for now the simple tracker can be found in the Gameplay Enhancements settings. This checkbox is kind of redundant though, since it adds the option to the Edit Mode, which also needs to be checked before the frame can be adjusted.
Enable the tracker in the settings to add it to Edit Mode, then toggle it again to customize the frame.
