Cooldown timers/ HUDs?

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Sukurachi
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Cooldown timers/ HUDs?

Unread post by Sukurachi »

I'm NOT a min/maxer.
I'm not a raider for whom the absolute maximum DPS is a required thing.
I don't calculate anything...
If the mob dies, I'm doing good.
If I die, I'm not doing good.

So, that said:

I love the graphics in WoW, it's cartoonish, sure, but it's also beautiful. And the Legion zones are gorgeous.
Encounters with mobs also hold a certain visual appeal.

Except I never get to actually SEE the encounters because I'm too busy watching my action bar to make sure I don't miss Dire Beast or Bestial Wrath coming off cooldown.

I don't know what add-on to look for to help with this.
It would be nice to have something that flashes in the middle of my screen when those two spells are off cooldown, something that tells me that my auto-attack crits have triggered a "free" Dire Beast, or that enough Dire Beasts have been called that my Bestial Wrath is available now.

I've tried a few add-ons, but most are simply too arcane for me to understand (the game makes me feel smart and wily, the add-ons make me feel like a complete dunce).

I don't want to see my pet's abilities come off cooldown when they just automatically use them anyways.
I don't want to see abilities that I barely use or that are very situational come off cooldown either.

I just need a minimum of information, mostly regarding Dire Beast, and Bestial Wrath.

Could someone please suggest an add-on that won't make me feel like an idiot, that could help with this?

I've tried:

SPTimers
SexyCooldown
Doom Cooldown Pulse
Ice HUD

I can't make heads or tails out of a couple of those, and the others don't seem to work "as advertised" (for example one of them doesn't allow me to drag abilities off its cooldown bar, which it clearly says in the "help" file you can do).

A bit of palindromic wisdom:
"Step on no pets!"
Casual player.. don't raid, don't PvP. Suffer from extreme altitis
I love pets - combat or non.
<That Kind of Orc> guild on The Scryers, small, casual LGBT and friends guild, join us Horde-side.

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Shinryu Masaki
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Re: Cooldown timers/ HUDs?

Unread post by Shinryu Masaki »

WeakAuras is probably the most used and popular one.
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Xella
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Re: Cooldown timers/ HUDs?

Unread post by Xella »

Definitely going to second WeakAuras. It can be a little daunting the first couple times you create your own aura and my brain still does melt when I'm trying to do more advanced stuff with it, but for what you're looking for it's fantastic because you can customize it to look the way you want. You control exactly what you're seeing and when, so if there's something you want to track (is your pet attacking the Eye on Il'gynoth?) create an aura for it. Decide that you don't actually need to track that (Kill Command has /petattack macroed to it already and you always hit that first after a target swap regardless of cooldown anyway)? Just delete or deactivate the aura.

There are a lot of WA tutorials out there, but for stuff like DB being off CD, you can use the "From Template" option and it takes like, three seconds. Then you just gotta customize it to your heart's content :B
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These are both the auras I currently use, and some of the ones I used to use. I mostly play the same way you do (if it's dead I'm doing fine, if I'm dead I'm not) except that I gotta get a little more finicky with it when I'm actually raiding, but I use MOST aura types, and those I don't use (Progress Texture, Text, and Model) I've used in the past... and they're just different visual modes anyway.

Bestial Wrath: Pops up when BW is off CD, goes away when BW is on CD. I created this one for the Highmaul/BRF tier set bonus (17?) where Kill Command had a chance to reset BW's CD and I needed a way to track it. Like most of my "texture" auras, this one animates in much the same way the default Blizzard auras do.

Heroism: Pops up when Heroism, Bloodlust, Ancient Hysteria, Time Warp, or Drums of Battle(?) are up and my DPS potion is NOT on cooldown. Mostly for raiding, because I don't pay much attention to heroism and sometimes miss the audio cue, and my in-combat potion often gets used at a bad time as a result.

Beast Cleave: I stole part of this from a guildmate because I was having trouble finding a good way to track it that would catch my eye. She just replicates her action bars higher up on the screen with the icons and I mean I guess if that works for her, but it usually doesn't for me. Shows the icon for Beast Cleave when it's active, along with a number-timer for its duration. I added a second aura that rotates around it when there's less than two seconds left, since that's the ideal time to refresh it if you're gonna.

Pet Exists: If my pet is dead or if I don't have one out, this icon shows up. This is also the only WA I have that will show up out of combat, though it's hidden if I'm in a rested area or mounted. I had a mirror aura for WoD SV/MM that would show up if I HAD a pet with the Lone Wolf talent, but since pets aren't even an OPTION with that since 7.0, it's a bit outdated.

Il'gynoth: If my pet is attacking the Eye of Il'gynoth it plays the Fel Reaver noise and also pops this aura up. I spent a lot of time getting it to work properly but then realized I didn't actually need it cos I don't mind having /petattack on my Kill Command (except in very specific circumstances) so it's sitting unused atm, but not deleted because it may come in handy for something else down the line. Also an excuse to use the nicer of my two custom sporebat auras, lol :P

Black Arrow/Chimaera Shot: I don't use these anymore because Legion killed survival, but included them because they were super helpful for me back when, and they could be easily adapted for Kill Command. The big, full-opacity aura (ruthlessly stolen from warlocks) displayed when Black Arrow/Chimaera was off CD, but a smaller, more transparent one displayed in its spot when the ability was a certain period of time away from coming off CD. The transparent one let me know that I needed to stop spamming my focus and pool it a little bit so I could hit my ability as soon as it came off CD. I set the duration of the little one based on how long it would take me to steady/cobra/whatever shot my way to the necessary focus. There might be a way to do that automatically, but I just approximated it and re-checked every few months cos I didn't care about being super precise about it. I used an identical aura set up to track Serpent Sting; when SS on my target had x time til it fell off, the little transparent version would pop up, and when my target didn't have SS at all, the big one would be there instead.

Mend Pet: honestly this one should maybe get a bit bigger cos I miss it sometimes, but I found that with the CD on Mend Pet now I wasn't always keeping it up and it was getting to be a problem when doing Nightfallen dailies in the elite area, cos I kept trying to refresh it at like, 7-9 seconds and then not hitting the button again for another 7-9 seconds. This actually pops up when my pet is ≤85%, not 80% oops. I'm like, 99% sure there's no way to track Hati's health or I would have an identical aura for him. He takes way more damage than my main pet and not being able to track it is suck a pita, but whatevs.

Focus Bar: I still use this but since I also have the new blizzard hp/focus bar turned on it's a bit redundant. Including it cos it's the only aura I still have that groups (it's six auras in one!) and progress bars. The tickmarks for where certain focus ability thresholds were were SUPER handy when I eventually gave up and swapped to MM at the end of HFC, but I set them up manually (inching it over pixel by pixel and then trying to screencap when my focus bar hit it to see what the focus number actually was, then adjusting accordingly) which was a HUGE pain and haven't re-done it for Legion. If I was a smarter person I might know a way to do it with less effort, but I haven't bothered yet, lol.

I also have "invisible" auras for Binding Shot (I /say Binding Shot activated! when I use it), interrupts (another /say aura when I successfully counter shot something), and Dire Beast (to add an audio cue back to hitting the button), and have a WIP one to announce brez, but that one's been tricky to test because of the cooldown and the need for a dead person, lol.

Visually, the sky is pretty much the limit. WA comes with its own set of aura textures, plus the Blizzard visuals and the stuff from PowerAuras (its addon predecessor). You can use custom ones as well; there's some finagling with image size (image dimensions have to be a power of 2, e.g 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc.) but it looks like .png images display fine in-game now so you don't even have to do weird .tga shenanigans. There doesn't really seem to be a consolidated place for people's custom aura textures that I've seen, but you can find some by searching curse and googling (and my own are here).
Current main: Xella-Skywall | Art Stuffs | Brains.
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Sukurachi
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Re: Cooldown timers/ HUDs?

Unread post by Sukurachi »

thank-you so much for all that.

from your first image I was actually able to glean just enough information to do what I needed.
it took me a bit to figure out how to hide it all while not in battle, or to reverse it so that it only showed when it was OFF cooldown, but it now all works perfectly!

So perfect, thanks a million!!

:hug:

A bit of palindromic wisdom:
"Step on no pets!"
Casual player.. don't raid, don't PvP. Suffer from extreme altitis
I love pets - combat or non.
<That Kind of Orc> guild on The Scryers, small, casual LGBT and friends guild, join us Horde-side.

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