World of Warcraft’s started swiping good ideas from one of its most popular user-made UI addons, and it’s honestly about time

A surprising amount of my time playing World of Warcraft isn’t plundering its dungeons, trying my loot luck (it’s bad) in the raid finder, or collecting transmogs. No, it’s spent fiddling about to get the perfect WeakAura ready so I can treat my Outlaw Rogue like a fighting game character doing combos, rather than an MMO character with cooldowns to manage.

In case you’re unfamiliar, WeakAuras is an incredibly popular World of Warcraft UI addon that is, typically, used to help players create their own custom UI elements. I actually wrote about cobbling one together after The War Within came out, because my Hero Talent of choice wasn’t spiking my dopamine receptors right.

Well, WoW’s just straight-up muscling in on WeakAuras’ long-standing turf, as discovered on the PTR (thanks to WoWHead for the following screenshots—I tried to hop in myself, mind, but the PTR servers weren’t online at the time of writing).

The new cooldown manager UI element allows players to track three things—essential cooldowns, utility cooldowns, and tracked buffs. Essential cooldowns are your short-term concerns—for example, as a Rogue, I’d likely have Adrenaline Rush on there. Utility cooldowns keep tabs on situational abilities and spells, such as defensives, mobility tools, and so on. Lastly, tracked buffs show the remaining duration of core abilities key to your rotation.

The main downside? These UI elements don’t appear to be customisable beyond how they appear on your screen. As in, you can’t select what abilities do or don’t go on there, only things such as the number of rows, orientation, padding, opacity, all that good stuff.

I don’t think this is about to replace WeakAuras, or anything. One of the main draws of the addon is its sheer flexibility—beyond just tinkering with your UI, WeakAuras is also used to automate, well, just about anything you want it to, really. If you can’t use its simplified interface, chances are someone online (who actually knows how to code) has solved the same problem you want to fix.

For example, I have one that tells me when it is or isn’t a good idea to use Roll the Bones, streamlining an entire if>then section of my chosen class into a “push button when UI tells me to”.

But I might actually make use of this new feature. See, rather than use a Weakaura to keep track of my cooldowns, I actually have a separate, square-shaped action bar that goes above my character portrait—one where I’ve just dragged copies of all my abilities. It’s a holdover from a technique I use in FF14, where addons are against the terms of service.

This cooldown manager seems like a solid replacement for my homebrew solution. Besides, it’s still in its infancy on the PTR—if Blizzard adds more functionality to this, it may very well lower the barrier of UI-fiddling entry for greener players. I, myself, will continue having a cool reticle appear with a loaded shotgun noise whenever my combo points are full. As a treat.