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 12.1), Classic Era, Burning Crusade Classic, and Mists of Pandaria Classic from one code base, ships in seven languages, 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 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 — step, linear and identity curves all came back secret.)

Auras are stricter than cooldowns, and 12.1 tightened them again

A cooldown at least keeps two readable booleans. An aura on your target keeps almost nothing: in combat its spellId, name, icon, duration and sourceUnit are all secret, and every "ask by spell" API (GetUnitAuraBySpellID, GetAuraDataBySpellName) returns nil outright rather than a secret — so you cannot identify a debuff on your target in combat by any path. That is why Offensives is cast-driven: the spell ID from UNIT_SPELLCAST_SUCCEEDED stays plain, so identity comes from what you cast rather than from what you read.

As of 12.1 the UNIT_AURA payload itself arrives secret — isFullUpdate is a secret boolean and addedAuras a secret table. Two practical notes for anyone hitting this:

• A boolean test on a secret boolean throws (if updateInfo.isFullUpdate then is enough to error), because the single bit is the whole payload. A boolean test on a secret table or number does not throw — truthiness of a non-boolean leaks nothing. Check the value type before assuming which you have.
• tostring does not throw on a secret — it hands back a secret string, and string.format is what dies. Wrapping a read in tostring or a pcall around the producer protects nothing; test the returned value with issecretvalue().

Instance-id collections go the same way — removedAuraInstanceIDs measures as a secret table, and C_UnitAuras.GetUnitAuraInstanceIDs(unit, "HARMFUL|PLAYER") is dropped for the same reason. With no plain reconcile source left, the cast-driven path stands alone and a wall-clock expiry sweep does the job the reconcile loop used to.

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 and fills in its ID, name, icon and duration, 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 and elixirs are auto-discovered from your bags, conjured items (mana gems, healthstones) are recognized by ID on every flavor, and equipped on-use trinkets (slots 13/14) are tracked. Classic Era reports every consumable under one category with nothing to tell a potion from a sandwich, so there it lists them all — food and drink carry no cooldown and never draw anything, and can be hidden from the list.
• Buff tracking on Classic — a cooldown spell that also grants a self-buff (Icy Veins, Arcane Power) can show that buff as its own second icon, via a per-spell Buff checkbox under Filters > Spells. Opt-in; retail surfaces tracked buffs through Blizzard's own category sets instead.
• 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 — the harmful effects you put on your current target: damage-over-time effects, and debuffs like stuns. Timed by aura duration instead of by a cooldown, so each one travels the lane and pops a ready box when it drops. 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 dot is only ever learned once its source can be positively confirmed as you, so a groupmate's dots on a shared target stay off your lanes. As of 12.1 the added-aura stream itself arrives secret, so an effect Cooldown Master has not already learned cannot be picked up during a fight, and /cm offlearn says so and stands down rather than pretending. Anything already learned keeps tracking normally. A per-spell Remove (X) button drops one you no longer want tracked.
  • On the Classic flavors an effect that puts nothing readable on your target — a Paladin's Consecration is the clearest case — has its length learned by observation, from when the combat log reports it ending, 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. Measured on TBC: 3s, then 5s, then 8s and stable. That is the learning working, not a fault.
• 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). Font dropdowns draw each name in the font it names, and preview your current pick on the closed dropdown.
• 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.

Localization

Ships in English, French, Russian, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and German, all seven complete. Translations are bundled in Locales/, selected from GetLocale(), and fall back to English per-phrase, so a language renders as itself where it has a translation and as English where it does not.

Translators

French	Zox
Russian	Malevi4
Korean	labrie75
Simplified Chinese	Keriaovo
Traditional Chinese	BNS333
German	Stonetwist

Credit where it is actually due. These six translated my other addons. Cooldown Master shares a portion of its text with those, and inherited their work for free through the shared store. Everything beyond that was written in-house in each translator's established style and with their permission — so any mistake in it is mine, not theirs. The same note is on the addon's About tab, and corrections are very welcome: open an issue or say so in the Discord.

Locales/*.lua are generated — never hand-edit one. They are built from the EverythingLocales shared store, which CooldownMaster joined as a third addon alongside Everything Quests and EQ Objective Tracker. That store keys a translation on its English phrase rather than on any addon, so a phrase CDM shares with the other two arrives already translated — 45 did on the day CDM joined, before anyone typed anything. Editing a generated file here is overwritten on the next build, and that repo's drift check exists to catch exactly that.

Locales/enUS.lua is the manifest and creates ns.L. It must load after embeds.xml and before Core\Constants.lua in all four .toc files. ns.L carries an __index that returns the key, so a missing phrase degrades to English rather than erroring.

Run python docs/_verify_locale.py (exit 0) alongside luacheck . after any user-facing string change — it checks code keys against the manifest and every translation for orphans and string.format mismatches, without needing the store repo checked out.

⛔ Displayed does not mean translatable. A string that is also persisted to SavedVariables or used as a lookup key must stay bare English. AceDB rawsets scalar defaults straight into the saved profile, so a translated default is written to disk and outlives a client language change. Dropdowns take { value = <bare>, text = L["..."] }, and anything Blizzard already localizes should use the Blizzard global instead.

Planned

• More languages — the six translations are complete, and contributions are welcome, with no tooling or GitHub account needed to help. Corrections to the existing ones are just as 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.

Getting it running locally

Clone it straight into your AddOns folder and /reload — every embedded library is committed to the repo, so a fresh clone runs as-is:

git clone https://github.com/wheelbarrel00/CooldownMaster.git

Drop the CooldownMaster/ folder into World of Warcraft/_retail_/Interface/AddOns/ (or the _classic_era_, _anniversary_, or _classic_ equivalent — the same folder serves every flavor, and the right .toc loads itself).

At release time the BigWigs packager re-fetches each library fresh from its upstream via the externals block in .pkgmeta, so the committed copies are a convenience for local development, not the source of truth for what ships.

The options panel is hand-built rather than driven by an AceConfig options table, so AceGUI, AceConfig and AceDBOptions are deliberately not embedded — don't add them.

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, cdv, seedtest, curvetest, items, bagscan, itemcd <id>, buffs, petprobe, tagprobe, masque, and the offensives probes (off, offprobe, offlearn, offreset, auraprobe, auraapi).

anchor reports the cast-to-re-anchor pipeline, and anchor arm [seconds] [spell] traces one spell's live cooldown state — the quickest way to show what the engine is actually seeing when reporting a timing bug. off arm [seconds] does the same for the offensives binder, showing why each dot was learned or refused.

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.