Cooldown Master

A timeline-style lane cooldown tracker for World of Warcraft. Its signature display is a horizontal (or vertical) lane where each tracked spell's icon travels toward the "ready" end at a speed proportional to its own cooldown, so your abilities visually fan out by urgency — the one view Blizzard's built-in Cooldown Manager does not provide.

Around that it gives you three display surfaces you can mix freely — the traveling lanes, depleting bar frames, and ready-notification boxes that a cooldown pops into the moment it comes up. Every cooldown can be routed to any combination of the three, per category or per individual spell.

Supports Midnight (retail 12.0+), Classic Era, Burning Crusade Classic, and Mists of Pandaria Classic, and registers a LibDataBroker launcher + minimap button so panel addons like Titan Panel, Bazooka, and ChocolateBar pick it up automatically.

Cooldown Master carries forward the idea behind CooldownTimeline2 (CDTL2) by cliffclive / Vreenak. After Midnight changed how cooldowns work, I rebuilt the concept from the ground up for 12.0 with the original author's blessing — full credit for the original timeline-cooldown idea goes to him.

Midnight 12.0 and the secret-value API

The interesting part for other addon authors. Under Midnight, every cooldown number is a secret value in combat: C_Spell.GetSpellCooldown's start/duration, the DurationObject's GetRemainingDuration/GetTotalDuration, and even curve evaluation all return taint-protected secrets that error the moment you read or compare them in Lua (issecretvalue() is the detector). The only combat-readable signals are C_Spell.GetSpellCooldown(id).isActive / .isOnGCD (plain booleans) and maxCharges.

Cooldown Master works around this with a hybrid approach:

• Exact swipe + countdown text come from feeding the opaque DurationObject straight into a native Cooldown widget via Cooldown:SetCooldownFromDurationObject — Blizzard's widget consumes the secret internally, so the timer is exact even though the addon can never read the number.
• Icon position on the lane is self-extrapolated from each spell's true duration, learned out of combat (where numbers read normally) and persisted across sessions via SavedVariables, plus an in-combat wall-clock observation layer for anything not yet learned.
• Spell discovery uses the C_CooldownViewer category sets, and on/off is driven entirely off the readable isActive/isOnGCD booleans.

(Earlier versions of this README described a curve-evaluation engine that "sidesteps the taint." That turned out to be a dead end — curve results stay secret too; see docs/EXPERIMENTS.md.)

Features

Displays

• Timeline lanes (up to 3), horizontal or vertical, with linear, shared-timeline, logarithmic, or split spacing; smooth 60 Hz icon motion.
• Bar frames (up to 3) — horizontal status bars that deplete as the cooldown runs, with an optional icon, spell name, and live countdown. A conventional cooldown-bar list, sitting alongside the lanes rather than replacing them.
• Ready-notification boxes (up to 3) with per-spell "important" highlight, pinning, sounds, a post-combat linger, and a per-box icon cap.
• Icon stacking — grouped rows, spread-apart, offset fan, or emergent overlap — so clustered cooldowns stay readable.
• Secondary tracking (Classic) — per-lane GCD and swing-timer indicators, as a lane fill plus a sliding bar.

Text

• Icon labels — a line of tag-built text on each lane or ready-box icon ([cd.name], [cd.type], and [cd.time] on Classic), anchored above, on, or below the icon.
• Status line — one line of live text per lane, bar frame, or ready box, built from global tags: [cd.next], [cd.count], [player.class], [player.name], [target.name], [target.class], plus [player.hp.pct] and [player.power.pct] on Classic.
• Click-to-insert tag picker, context-aware — the per-cooldown tags are offered on icon labels, the global tags on status lines. Templates with only static tags resolve once instead of every frame.

Retail note: UnitHealth and UnitPower return secret values under Midnight's secret-value model (even out of combat), so health and power tags are offered on the Classic flavors only. [cd.time] is Classic-only for the same reason — on retail the icon's native countdown draws it instead.

Tracking

• Custom cooldowns — define your own tracked cooldown from a fixed duration plus a trigger (a spell you cast, or a buff you gain). Runs on a purely local timer, so it works for anything the cooldown API doesn't expose. Aura triggers have a Detect button that captures the next buff you gain, so you never have to go hunting for an aura ID.
• Per-category filters (spells, utility, buff bars, buffs, potions, trinkets, offensives, pet spells, custom) with per-spell overrides for visibility, lane, bar, ready box, important, and pinned — plus Set All buttons to bulk-apply a category's routing to every cooldown in it at once. Every category is tracked by default except offensives, which is opt-in.
• Consumables and trinkets — potions/flasks are auto-discovered from your bags and equipped on-use trinkets (slots 13/14) are tracked.
• Pet spells — your pet's abilities (Spell Lock, Axe Toss, Gnaw, Freeze and the rest) are discovered from the pet spellbook and tracked like any other cooldown.
• Offensives — your damage-over-time effects on your current target, timed by aura duration instead of by a cooldown, so a dot travels the lane and pops a ready box when it falls off and wants recasting. Discovered as you apply them; refreshes re-anchor. Tracking follows your target, so swapping targets clears the lane. On retail this is cast-driven — a target's auras are secret in combat, so identity comes from UNIT_SPELLCAST_SUCCEEDED rather than from reading the target. A per-spell Remove (X) button clears a dot that got learned off a shared target dummy.
• Shared-cooldown dedupe — abilities tracked under multiple spell IDs collapse to a single lane icon and a single ready pop.

Appearance and setup

• Test Mode — preview your layout with sample cooldowns: pick the type, the count (1-20), the duration range they span, and whether they loop. Settings apply live, and the samples route through your real Filters config, so what you see is what you'll get in combat.
• Full media control — every bar, background, border, and font is fed by LibSharedMedia, so your own SharedMedia packs work throughout. Ships with a few original CDM textures (Gradient, Glass, Soft Edge).
• Appearance — per-lane icon borders, icon zoom, unusable-icon tint/desaturate, cooldown-swipe tint, and configurable fonts/colors for countdowns, lane markers, icon labels, status lines, and frame name tags.
• Masque — optional icon skinning. CooldownMaster registers three groups you can skin or disable independently in Masque's own options: Lane Icons, Ready Icons, and Bar Icons. Skinning is opt-in per group, so nothing changes until you pick a skin. While a group is skinned, its skin owns the icon border and crop, so CooldownMaster's own icon border and zoom step aside for it.
• Scale — one slider resizes every lane, bar, and ready box together (0.5x-2x) while keeping each frame anchored where it is; a second scales the options window itself.
• Class colors — a per-class color table, flavor-aware (13 classes on retail, 11 on MoP, 9 on Era/TBC), feeding the lane fill and bar fill "use class color" toggles.
• Profiles — per-spec auto-switch, import/export to a copy-paste string, and standard AceDB profile management.
• What's New popup — a short digest after an update, with a quiet chat-link mode or off entirely.

Planned

• Classic offensive (dot) tracking — Offensives is retail-only today.

Getting it running locally

The repo doesn't ship the Ace3 / LibSharedMedia / LibDataBroker libraries themselves — they're pulled in by the BigWigs packager via .pkgmeta.

You have two options:

Option A — Run the packager (recommended)

If you've got the packager installed:

./release.sh

This produces .release/CooldownMaster/ with all libraries fetched into Libs/. Copy that folder into your World of Warcraft/_retail_/Interface/AddOns/.

Option B — Reuse libraries from CooldownTimeline2

If you have a copy of CDTL2 already, copy its entire Libs/ folder into this addon's Libs/ folder, then add LibDataBroker-1.1/ and LibDBIcon-1.0/ from CurseForge. Same library names, same load order, no version conflicts.

After either option, drop the CooldownMaster/ folder into your AddOns directory and /reload.

Slash commands

Command	Action
/cm	Open / close the options panel
/cm lock	Lock all frames
/cm unlock	Unlock all frames for repositioning
/cm test	Toggle test mode (configure it in Global > Test Mode)
/cm whatsnew	Show the What's New popup
/cm reset	Reset all settings (requires /reload)
/cm version	Print version + flavor

/cdmaster and /cooldownmaster are the long forms of /cm — each works with every subcommand above (e.g. /cdmaster lock). A set of diagnostic subcommands exists for troubleshooting the engine: debug, api, spells, haste, tracking, anchor, seedtest, curvetest, items, buffs, petprobe, and the offensives probes (off, offprobe, offreset, auraprobe, auraapi).

Panel addon integration

The addon registers a LibDataBroker-1.1 launcher and a LibDBIcon-1.0 minimap button. Titan Panel, Bazooka, and ChocolateBar all pick up the launcher automatically — just enable "Cooldown Master" in your panel addon's plugin list.

Click	Action
Left	Open options panel
Right	Lock / unlock frames
Middle	Toggle test mode

License

See LICENSE.