Cooldown Master
A timeline-style cooldown tracker for WoW — your spells, items, potions, and trinkets glide along lanes toward a ready edge, with pop-up alerts the moment they come up. The visual companion to Blizzard's built-in Cooldown Manager. Install it and it just works: your cooldowns show up automatically, with deep customization there if you want it.
How it works (and why it settles in after a few casts)
Cooldown Master places each icon on the timeline by how long its cooldown is — so it needs to know each spell's real, talent- and haste-adjusted cooldown length. Under Midnight, Blizzard hides that number during combat, so the addon learns it. Out of combat it reads your true cooldowns directly and remembers them for good — saved to your character, so a spell is only ever learned once. In combat, where the number is hidden, it clocks each cooldown from start to finish to fill in anything it hasn't seen yet.
What that means for you: on a fresh install — or a new character, or after a spec change — give it a minute. For the first few casts some icons may sit in the wrong spot on the lane while it figures out their true timing. It sharpens with every cooldown you use, and once a spell is learned it stays learned across sessions. Important part: the countdown number and swipe on every icon are always exact — those come straight from Blizzard's own cooldown widgets. It's only the icon's position along the lane that settles in as it learns.
(On Classic, cooldown numbers are readable in combat, so there's no learning period there — this applies to Midnight/Retail.)
At a glance
- Timeline lanes — up to 3 lanes, horizontal or vertical, with your abilities fanning out by how soon they're ready
- Four lane modes — Linear, Shared-timeline, Logarithmic, or Split (shape the time curve yourself with control points)
- Ready-notification pop-ups — up to 3 boxes that pop an icon the moment a cooldown is up, hold it, and fade
- Lane icon highlights — make key spells stand out with a Border, Glow, Flash, or Border + Flash in a color you pick
- Spells, items, potions & trinkets — potions and flasks auto-discovered from your bags; on-use trinkets tracked automatically
- Per-category filters — spells, utility, buffs, debuffs, potions, trinkets, with per-spell overrides
- Deep customization — icon zoom, fonts, textures, colors, stacking, editable labels — or leave the defaults alone
- Per-spec profiles — auto-switch when you change spec, plus import/export to a copy-paste string
- Panel-addon ready — a LibDataBroker launcher and minimap button that Titan Panel, Bazooka, and ChocolateBar pick up automatically
- Works out of the box — tracks the same abilities as Blizzard's Cooldown Manager. Open it with the minimap button or
/cdmaster.
- Retail + Classic — Midnight (12.0), Classic Era, and Burning Crusade Classic
What it does
A cooldown timeline, not just a row of icons. Cooldown Master's signature display is a lane — horizontal or vertical — where each ability's icon travels toward the "ready" end at a speed set by its own cooldown. Long cooldowns sit at the back, imminent ones crowd the ready edge, and everything fans out by urgency so you can read your whole rotation at a glance. Pick Linear, Shared-timeline, or Logarithmic spacing, or use Split mode to place up to three control points and shape the time curve yourself. Icons glide at sub-pixel smoothness, so even slow cooldowns move cleanly instead of stepping pixel by pixel.
Alerts the moment something's ready. Up to three ready-notification boxes pop a spell or item icon the instant it comes off cooldown, hold it, then fade it out. Flag your key abilities as "important" to make them pop with a Border, Glow, Flash, or Border + Flash in a color you choose — on the ready boxes and right on the lane. Pin the ones you never want to miss, add a sound, and let them linger a beat after combat ends.
Tracks spells, items, potions, and trinkets. Cooldown Master reads the same category sets as Blizzard's built-in Cooldown Manager, so your tracked abilities show up automatically with nothing to set up. Potions and flasks are auto-discovered from your bags, and your equipped on-use trinkets are tracked too. Filter by category — spells, utility, buffs, debuffs, potions, trinkets — and override any individual spell's visibility, lane, ready box, and highlight.
Make it yours. One in-game Options window controls the whole look: icon zoom, an unusable-icon tint or desaturate, a configurable countdown font, cooldown-swipe tint, LibSharedMedia background and border textures, editable lane labels, and icon stacking (grouped rows or spread apart) so clustered cooldowns stay readable. Or change nothing — the defaults stand on their own.
Profiles that follow your spec. Per-spec profiles switch automatically when you change specialization, and you can import or export any profile as a copy-paste string to share a setup or carry it between characters. Standard AceDB profile management underneath.
Built for Midnight. Under Midnight, cooldown numbers are protected values that can't be read during combat. Cooldown Master feeds Blizzard's own widgets for exact swipe timers and countdown text, and extrapolates each icon's lane position from durations it learns out of combat — so your timers stay accurate even mid-fight.
Panel-addon integration. A LibDataBroker launcher and LibDBIcon minimap button that Titan Panel, Bazooka, and ChocolateBar pick up automatically — just enable "Cooldown Master" in your panel addon's plugin list.
| Click |
What happens |
| Left |
Open the options panel |
| Right |
Lock / unlock frames |
| Middle |
Toggle test mode |
Slash commands
/cdmaster — open or close the options panel/cdmaster lock — lock all frames/cdmaster unlock — unlock all frames for repositioning/cdmaster test — toggle test mode (fake cooldowns for layout)/cdmaster reset — reset all settings (requires /reload)/cdmaster version — print version and flavor
/cooldownmaster also works as the long form.
Good to know
- No other addons required. Cooldown Master is completely standalone — all libraries are bundled.
- It complements Blizzard's Cooldown Manager rather than replacing it — it adds the timeline view and ready alerts the built-in one doesn't have.
- LibSharedMedia-aware — any fonts and textures you have installed show up in the pickers automatically.
- Retail and Classic — Midnight (12.0), Classic Era, and Burning Crusade Classic.
- Safe by default — it only displays information; it never casts or automates anything.
Credits
Cooldown Master carries forward the idea behind CooldownTimeline2 (CDTL2) by cliffclive — the timeline-cooldown addon that inspired this one. When Midnight changed how cooldowns work and CDTL2 could no longer run under the new restrictions, I rebuilt the concept from the ground up for 12.0 and reached out to cliffclive before publishing anything. He kindly gave his blessing to carry the idea forward. Full credit for the original timeline-cooldown concept goes to him. Thank you, cliffclive!
Found a bug or have an idea?
Report it on the GitHub Issues page — include the error text if you can grab it (BugSack/BugGrabber makes that easy) and what you were doing when it happened.
Made with care for the Midnight expansion. Got a question or want to hear about updates? Join the Discord! If you like this one, check out my other addons — Everything Quests, Everything Delves, and Loot Pro. Released under the MIT License.
