WoW: Forever Beta Enables Cooldown Manager for Five Classes

Blizzard has switched on the Cooldown Manager inside the WoW: Forever Beta, letting testers try the ability-tracking overlay that already ships in live World of Warcraft. The Cooldown Manager from Retail is now available for testing in the WoW: Forever Beta, Wowhead reported after Blizzard posted its weekly development notes on September 24. The tool is not yet finished: it currently works for only five of the game’s classes, and it still can’t tell one spell rank from another.

Beta testers immediately compared Blizzard’s bare rollout with the third-party addon that had already been doing the job for weeks:

Off by default, live for five classes

The feature has to be switched on manually. The Cooldown Manager in World of Warcraft: Forever is intended to enhance gameplay by pulling critical information from the buff bar or action bar and placing it in a fully customizable location, and by default it is disabled, requiring players to enable it in Options under the Gameplay Enhancement settings. Blizzard has limited the initial test group: Druid, Mage, Priest, Warrior, and Warlock are available for testing the Cooldown Manager, with additional classes becoming testable in future updates.

The rollout comes with gaps Blizzard has already flagged. The Cooldown Manager does not yet support spell ranks, a limitation Blizzard says will be resolved in a future Beta update. Blizzard also told PCGamesN what it wants back from the test pool: developers are asking players for “spells that you wish were tracked by default.”

An Addon Already Filled the Gap

Before Blizzard’s version worked at all, an independent developer had already built a stand-in. A CurseForge listing for an addon called Forever Cooldown Manager, made by a developer credited as Thunderz96, puts cooldowns and buffs on screen as clean rows of icons on the WoW: Forever beta where Blizzard’s own Cooldown Manager was still empty, since Blizzard lists the built-in tool as a work in progress with no spells to show for most classes. The addon reportedly does not depend on Blizzard’s system and instead reads a player’s spellbook and their own auras directly.

The listing had racked up modest but steady traction on CurseForge ahead of Blizzard’s own feature going live for testing. It is a small but telling sign of how the WoW: Forever beta’s addon scene has been patching around missing native systems rather than waiting for Blizzard to finish them.

Part of the First Big Post-Launch Build

The Cooldown Manager change landed inside a wider September 24 build that Warcraft Tavern described as the beta’s first major update since it opened. This is the first major update since the Beta went live one week ago today, the outlet reported, adding that Blizzard also put out the first episode of the official WoW Forever Podcast earlier the same day.

Read also: WoW: Forever Beta Taken Offline for First New Build Since Sept. 17 Launch

The same build carried a broader class-tuning pass alongside the UI work. Reporting from wowforevertools.com noted the update renames Mangle to Primal Bite, turns Primal Fury back into Blood Frenzy, drops Improved Holy Strike from the Holy Paladin tree while cutting Holy Strike’s cooldown to 10 seconds, raises Wrath’s damage by about 50%, and pushes Slam’s cooldown up to 18 seconds. The Gnome racial Eureka! was also reworked so that it becomes a flat 10% discount applied uniformly across every class, after players and Blizzard both flagged it as overtuned in its earlier form.

What Still Doesn’t Work

Blizzard’s own list of known issues, cited by Icy Veins, confirms the tool is a partial build rather than a finished feature. Players on the official forums have separately reported the panel failing to display saved layouts after closing the edit screen, a complaint that predates this week’s class-list expansion but underlines how early the system still is.

Blizzard has given no date for when Hunter, Paladin, Shaman, Rogue, Warlock companions and other remaining classes will get access to the tracker, or when spell-rank support will arrive. For now, five classes and a handful of feedback threads are all the beta has to work with.

Reported from

• Wowhead
• PCGamesN
• Icy Veins
• CurseForge