Cooldown Master

A timeline-style cooldown tracker for WoW. Your spells, items, potions, and trinkets glide along lanes toward a ready edge, with depleting bars and 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, in your own language, with deep customization there if you want it.

Three ways to watch a cooldown

Cooldown Master gives you three display surfaces, and you can mix them freely.

• Lanes — the signature view. Each icon travels toward a "ready" edge at a speed set by its own cooldown, so your abilities fan out by urgency and you read the whole rotation at a glance.
• Bars — classic depleting cooldown bars, with an icon, the spell name, and a live countdown.
• Ready boxes — an icon pops the instant a cooldown comes up, holds, and fades.

Out of the box you get one of each, all showing the same cooldowns, so you can see all three styles side by side and keep whichever you like. Every cooldown can be routed to any combination of the three, per category or per individual spell. Want your defensives on a lane, your big cooldowns on bars, and only your interrupt popping a ready box? That's a few clicks.

Now in five languages

Cooldown Master speaks English, French, Russian, Korean, and Simplified Chinese. Everything the addon draws — options, tooltips, ready boxes, the What's New popup — reads in your client's language, and falls back to English wherever a phrase hasn't been translated yet.

Simplified Chinese is complete. French, Russian and Korean are partial for now and fill in over time. Translations are bundled in the addon itself, so there's nothing extra to install and nothing to download — your client language decides, and switching languages switches the addon with it.

Want your language added, or spotted a translation that reads wrong? Come say so on the Discord or open a GitHub issue. You don't need a GitHub account or any tooling to help — a plain list of phrases is perfectly welcome.

How it works (and why it settles in after a few casts on Retail)

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. They're 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, 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 only.)

If a spell or buff is missing, or it's landed in the wrong category, let me know and we'll get it sorted. Most everything is dialed in, but there may still be a couple of loose ends.

At a glance

• Timeline lanes — up to 3, horizontal or vertical, with your abilities fanning out by how soon they're ready
• Bar frames — up to 3, depleting status bars with icon, name, and live countdown
• Ready-notification pop-ups — up to 3 boxes that pop an icon the moment a cooldown is up, hold it, and fade
• Five languages — English, French, Russian, Korean and Simplified Chinese, bundled and automatic
• Four lane modes — Linear, Timeline, Logarithmic, or Split (shape the time curve yourself with control points)
• Nine tracking categories — Spells, Utility, Buffs, Buff Bars, Potions, Trinkets, Offensives, Pet Spells, and your own Custom cooldowns
• Pet spells — your pet's real cooldowns, for Hunters, Warlocks, Death Knights, and anyone with a pet bar
• Offensives — watch the harmful effects you've put on your target and catch one before it falls off
• Custom cooldowns — track anything by giving it a duration and a trigger, even things the game won't tell you about
• Text tags — put the ability name on each icon, and a live status line on any frame, from a click-to-insert tag picker
• Highlights — make key spells stand out with a Border, Glow, Flash, or Border + Flash in a color you pick
• Spells, items, potions & trinkets — potions, flasks and elixirs auto-discovered from your bags, conjured mana gems and healthstones recognized by ID, on-use trinkets tracked automatically
• Masque support — skin the lane, ready, and bar icons independently in Masque's own options, or leave them stock
• Per-category filters — with per-spell overrides, and Set All buttons to route a whole category at once
• Deep customization — icon zoom, borders, fonts with live previews, textures, colors, stacking, scale sliders and 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 for Titan Panel, Bazooka, and ChocolateBar
• Works out of the box — tracks the same abilities as Blizzard's Cooldown Manager. Open it with the minimap button or /cm.
• Retail + Classic — Midnight (12.1), Classic Era, Burning Crusade Classic, and Mists of Pandaria 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, 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. When cooldowns bunch up, stacking keeps them readable: group them into rows, spread them along the lane, fan them out with an even offset, or let them overlap cleanly.

Bars, if that's more your speed. Not everyone wants a timeline. Bar frames give you the classic view: a tidy list of depleting status bars, each with its icon, the spell's name, and a live countdown, sorted by who's coming up next. Style the fill texture and color (or use your class color), pick which side the icon sits on, cap how many show at once, and flag your important spells to make them stand out. Bars run alongside the lanes rather than replacing them, so use one, the other, or both.

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, on the bars, and right on the lane. Pin the ones you never want to miss, give them their own 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, flasks and elixirs are auto-discovered from your bags, conjured mana gems and healthstones are recognized by ID, and your equipped on-use trinkets are tracked too. Filter by category (Spells, Utility, Buffs, Buff Bars, Potions, Trinkets, Offensives, Pet Spells, Custom) and override any individual spell's visibility, lane, bar, ready box, and highlight. Changed your mind about a whole category? Set All applies its routing to every cooldown in it at once.

Your pet's cooldowns too. Pet Spells is a full tracking category: Spell Lock, Axe Toss, Gnaw, Freeze and the rest are discovered from the pet spellbook and travel the lanes like any other cooldown. Your pet's basic attack and its command and stance buttons are left out, so only real cooldowns show. On by default for anyone with a pet bar.

A cooldown's buff, on Classic. Some abilities have a cooldown and give you a buff, and you want to watch both: Icy Veins, Arcane Power, and the like. Tick Buff on the spell's row under Filters > Spells and that buff appears as its own second icon, counting down the buff itself rather than the cooldown. Off by default, so nothing new shows up until you ask for it. (On retail, Blizzard's own category sets already surface tracked buffs.)

Catch an effect before it drops. Offensives tracks the harmful effects you put on your target — damage-over-time effects and debuffs like stuns alike — timed by how long the effect lasts rather than by a cooldown, so it travels the lane and pops a ready box the moment it wants recasting. It follows your current target, so swapping targets clears the lane. Each spell gets a Remove (X) button for clearing anything that got picked up off a shared target dummy. Offensives is off by default. Turn it on under Filters > Offensives.

It works on every flavor, but the two differ in how an effect gets identified:

• On Classic, effects are detected automatically as you apply them. An effect that leaves nothing readable on your target — a Paladin's Consecration is the clearest case — has its length learned by observation instead, from when the combat log says it ended, and the estimate only ever revises upward. So on a fresh install its ready box fires early for the first several casts and settles once the effect has run its full course uninterrupted. That's the learning working, not a fault.
• On retail, a target's debuff can't be identified during combat at all, so Cooldown Master learns which of your abilities applies which effect out of combat, from what lands just after you cast. Since 12.1 the game withholds that too, so an effect it hasn't already learned can't be picked up. /cm offlearn tells you plainly when your client is withholding it rather than leaving you guessing, and where the game still allows learning, it walks you through one ability at a time. Anything already learned keeps tracking normally.

Track anything with custom cooldowns. Some things the cooldown API just won't tell you about. Custom cooldowns let you build your own: give it a name, a duration, and a trigger (either a spell you cast or a buff you gain), and Cooldown Master runs the timer itself. Entering an aura ID by hand is miserable, so there's a Detect button: click it, gain the buff, and it fills in the ID, name, icon, and duration for you. Custom cooldowns flow through the same lanes, bars, and ready boxes as everything else, with the same routing and highlight options.

Text where you want it. Put a label on each lane icon (the ability name by default) built from tags like [cd.name] and [cd.type], anchored above, on, or below the icon. Add a status line to any lane or bar for a live readout: the next cooldown coming up, how many are on cooldown, your target's name, and more. Nobody wants to memorize tag syntax, so there's a click-to-insert picker that offers the right tags for wherever you are, and only ever the ones your flavor can actually draw. Both are off by default, and both get full font, size, outline, and color control.

See your layout before you commit. Test Mode fills your frames with sample cooldowns so you can position and style everything without waiting on a real fight. Choose what kind of samples to show, how many (1 to 20), the range of durations they span, and whether they loop. Settings apply live as you drag the sliders, and the samples obey your real filter routing, so what you see while setting up is what you'll get in combat.

Make it yours. One in-game Options window controls the whole look: icon zoom and borders, an unusable-icon tint or desaturate, cooldown-swipe tint, configurable fonts and colors for countdowns, lane markers, icon labels, status lines, and frame labels, plus LibSharedMedia textures throughout. Font pickers preview each font in the font itself, so you can see what you're choosing. Two scale sliders let you resize every cooldown frame together, keeping each one anchored where you put it, and resize the options window itself from half size to double. A few original Cooldown Master textures are included (Gradient, Glass, Soft Edge), and any SharedMedia pack you already have shows up in the pickers automatically. Or change nothing. The defaults stand on their own.

Masque, if you skin your icons. Cooldown Master registers three groups you can skin or disable independently in Masque's own options: Lane Icons, Ready Icons, and Bar Icons. It's opt-in per group, so nothing changes until you pick a skin. While a group is skinned, that skin owns the icon's border and crop, so Cooldown Master's own icon border and zoom step aside for it — turn the group off again and they come straight back.

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.

Slash commands

• /cm — open or close the options panel
• /cm lock — lock all frames
• /cm unlock — unlock all frames for repositioning
• /cm test — toggle test mode (set it up in Global > Test Mode)
• /cm offlearn — guided setup for Offensives on retail, one ability at a time
• /cm whatsnew — show the What's New popup
• /cm reset — reset all settings (requires /reload)
• /cm version — print version and flavor

/cdmaster and /cooldownmaster also work as long forms. There's a set of diagnostic subcommands too, for troubleshooting or filing a good bug report — /cm anchor arm 30 <spell> traces one spell's live cooldown state for 30 seconds on retail, and /cm bagscan, /cm itemcd, /cm masque, /cm petprobe and friends report exactly what the engine is seeing.

Good to know

• No other addons required. Cooldown Master is completely standalone, and all libraries are bundled.
• It complements Blizzard's Cooldown Manager rather than replacing it, adding the timeline view, bars, and ready alerts the built-in one doesn't have.
• Speaks your language — English, French, Russian, Korean and Simplified Chinese, bundled in the addon and picked automatically from your client. Anything not yet translated falls back to English rather than showing a blank.
• LibSharedMedia-aware — any fonts and textures you have installed show up in the pickers automatically.
• Masque-aware — optional, opt-in per group, and completely ignorable if you don't use it.
• Retail and Classic — Midnight (12.1), Classic Era, Burning Crusade Classic, and Mists of Pandaria Classic.
• A couple of things are flavor-specific. The per-lane GCD and swing-timer indicators are Classic-only, since on retail Blizzard's own Cooldown Manager already covers that ground. The health and resource status-line tags are Classic-only too, because Midnight protects those values from addons even out of combat. And Offensives identifies effects differently on each side, as described above.
• Safe by default — it only displays information; it never casts or automates anything.

What's next

• More tags for the label and status-line system.
• More languages, and fuller coverage in the ones already here. French, Russian and Korean have room to grow, and any language is welcome.
• More tracking indicator types (Classic) — the per-lane secondary tracking covers the GCD and your main-hand swing timer today; further indicator types are on the list.
• Conditional autohide — hide frames on resource level or stealth state, alongside the existing out-of-combat and group/instance visibility rules.

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!

Translations are contributed by players, and shared across my addons so a phrase translated once helps all of them:

Thank you all — this addon reaches a lot more people because of you.

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.