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AddOn Spotlight: SexyCooldown

Mathew McCurley
Updated ·7 min read

AddOn Spotlight focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience -- the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your AddOns folder will never be the same! This week, we get real sexy.

Timers for spells is an imperative addon for many classes that rely on steady rotations of DoT management and keeping debuffs up on enemies. DPS can be greatly altered by the careful balance of spell effects lasting for certain periods of time on enemies. There are a lot of good timers out there for spells and abilities, but today I want to introduce you to my favorite. If this addon is old news to you, and you already know how powerful it can be, help out the less fortunate! If you're new to his wonderful piece of code, stay a while and listen, as I sing a love song to SexyCooldown.



SexyCooldown is an addon that just makes sense to me. I love the way the options are laid out, the simple cooldown bar management, and the versatility of the addon itself. This particular AddOn Spotlight will be broken up into a few segments -- first, we will look at SexyCooldown and I will sing its praises and show you its options, and second, I will go over some use cases for the variety of different applications that SexyCooldown can help you with. And, as this is non-widescreen smaller UI "make everything fit nicely" week, I will explain the virtues of SexyCooldown to DoT heavy classes that want a simple, single bar of DoT timers that could help you with your DPS rotation for that added edge.


What is SexyCooldown?

SexyCooldown is a DoT, ability, trinket, item, internal cooldown, and debuff timer that is not set up for any one class -- everyone can use SexyCooldown in their own way. The addon is set up in such a way that icons for spells cast or debuffs on a targeted enemy or focus travel down the bar as their seconds dwindle. Abilities that are in no danger of falling off or have a good long while before they are ready to be used again move slowly down the bar. Abilities that have shorter times until they drop move faster down the bar to alert you. The real strength of SexyCooldown is that you can do all of this on as many bars as you want, placed all over the screen wherever certain cooldowns are needed to be seen. Plus, the addon was created by Antiarc, so you know it's going to be suave.

Each SexyCooldown bar that you create is perfectly customizable for border, background, color and size through dragging the corner of the bar and scaling for whatever space you need. Right clicking on a bar will bring up the options for that bar, or you can access the options in the Blizzard Interface menu. Each bar is individually configurable to include the types of cooldowns and timers you wish to have shown on the bar through check boxes and a blacklist, which I will get to in a moment.

Raid Debuffs



One aspect of SexyCooldown I love is that you can have raid debuffs shown on a SexyCooldown bar as well as your own personal timers. This can be invaluable for classes such as rogues or druids, who can choose attacks based on different debuffs that are currently present on a raid boss. By configuring a SexyCooldown bar for your target's raid debuffs, a rogue could check to see if a Bleed effect is on the target so he could use Hunger for Blood, or check for major armor or spell debuffs. Knowing what is on the boss can be tricky at times, but an easily customized raid debuff bar could do wonders for your raid awareness and situational ability use to maximize DPS.

The Blacklist

Want to narrow down the bar's cooldowns even more? Shift-right click on a debuff or cooldown while it is on the bar adds it to that bar's blacklist, preventing the debuff or cooldown from showing up on that bar. For instance, as an elemental shaman, I want a bar solely to track how long Flame Shock has left on a target before I have to reapply the debuff in order to guarantee that my Lava Burst does extra damage. I set the options accordingly, and if debuffs other than the Flame Shock periodic damage appear on the bar, a simple shift-right click will remove those debuffs forever from the bar. To take an ability off of the specific bar's blacklist, just select it from the blacklist list in the options. Simple and straightforward.

Why is SexyCooldown great for smaller user interfaces? Simple! Having a simple, single bar of every combat cooldown or debuff you could need is invaluable to space savers. Even two bars doesn't take up as much space as a separate bar for every cooldown or DoT timer. With full scaling capability and border changing, Sexycooldown can also be manipulated to fit right in with any minimalist configuration you have.

Use Cases

Here is where the fun starts. This is by no means a comprehensive list of use cases for SexyCooldown, but it's a start for the budding adventurer who has not yet stepped into the world of cooldown and debuff timers. If you have any other ideas for cooldown bars, post them in the comments!

  • Death knights can easily track their tanking and DPS cooldowns with one SexyCooldown bar, and keep their diseases and fevers on a second bar closer to the enemy to make for easy reapplication.

  • My elemental shaman has a bar specifically for Flame Shock, as noted above, to make sure all of the potential damage from Lava Burst is happening on every cast.

  • Rogues can track all kind of cooldowns and buffs, including Tricks of the Trade on their focus or tricks put on them, in addition to raid debuffs and their own internal cooldowns on trinkets and abilities.

  • Tanks of all kinds can add their tanking cooldowns to bars easily viewable near the center of the screen so they know when they have those abilities available again.

  • Retribution paladins can add a bar to track Art of War procs, and see how much time is left on the buff in order to know when to use it.

  • Healers can track HoTs on their focus while moving away to deal with raid or group healing, all the while cognizant of the focus' healing.

These use cases are barely scratching the surface of an ultimately unlimited set of variables and uses for cooldowns and debuff bars. SexyCooldown makes all of this easily customizable and straightforward, with the extremely beneficial feature of multiple, asynchronous bars doing their own things wherever you decide to put them. I cannot recommend this addon enough. Go forth and experiment!

Download SexyCooldown at [Curse] or [WoWAce].

To see SexyCooldown in action (in a raid setting!) by its creator Antiarc, head over and see his Gotta Go 2! Go Harder! video. Watch his cooldown bars on the bottom center and be amazed.

Next week on AddOn Spotlight, I'd like to do something a little different. Let's do Community Choice. Send in your favorite addon that you would like to let other people know about and I will choose three to write up and give credit to those who sent in the choices. Then, we get to spread all of our addon joy all around the community! Like jam on toast, or butter on toast. Really, anything goes on toast. Send your addon suggestions for next week's Community Choice to mat@wow.com.

Addons are what we do on Addon Spotlight. Did you like that thing I wrote about