CDMAuras

CDMAuras adds alerts on top of the default Cooldown Manager (CDM) — borders, glows, cooldown countdowns, buff timers, and custom icons — all driven by per-spell conditions you configure in-game.

If you ever used a WeakAuras UI package that conditionally glowed a spell one color when a buff was up, a different color when stacks hit a threshold, or displayed a custom text overlay with dynamic information — you know exactly what this fills. Midnight's Cooldown Manager is a great built-in tracker, but that layer of reactive, condition-driven visual feedback wasn't there. CDMAuras brings it back, built directly on top of the CDM rather than around it, so you can get back to the feedback setup we've grown to love.

Compatibility: CDMAuras is designed to work alongside other addons that extend or skin the default CDM without replacing it. All development and testing was done with EllesmereUI Cooldown Manager active.

Features

Alert types

Conditions

Every alert is gated by one or more conditions. All alerts show only when their conditions are satisfied.

Conditions can be used as Any (OR) or All (AND) logic. Buff-sourced spells automatically lock in a "Has Buff" condition that cannot be removed.

Special conditions:

• Maximum 1 Power or Buff Duration condition per alert
• Stacks conditions have no limit — but are treated as satisfied when any threshold is met (Border alerts only)

More features are planned, including:

• Sharing with Import/Export
• More customization options for Cooldown and Buff Text alerts
• Conditions support for custom icons
• Standalone custom text alerts with full condition control
• Customizable default values for new alerts and preset color palettes

Usage

Right-click any spell in the Cooldown Settings to open the context menu (/cdm). CDMAuras adds its own section:

• New Alert — open the Alert Editor to create a new alert for that spell, or paste another alert onto it.
• Cooldown Text / Buff Missing Text — toggle a text alert for that spell/buff
• Change Icon — override the icon shown on the CDM button via spell ID lookup.

Existing alerts appear under a Borders or Glows section. Click an entry to edit it; use the gear (edit) or × (delete), copy buttons that appear on hover.

Alert Editor

The editor opens as a panel beside the CDM settings window.

Alert tab — configure name, shape, color, frame level, and alert-type-specific settings (glow style and parameters, border texture, mask, etc.). A live preview is shown at the bottom.

Conditions tab — add, edit, and remove conditions. Each condition type exposes relevant fields (operator, threshold, spell/buff/power target). The Any / All toggle controls how multiple conditions are combined.

Slash Commands

/cdma reset    Recreate all alerts without a UI reload (can be used in combat)
/cdma help     Show command reference in chat
/ca [reset or help] shorthand for /cdma

How it works — the CDMAuras Engine

The Cooldown Manager introduced in Midnight ships with strict restrictions that make it effectively read-only for third-party addons. There is no supported API to attach alerts to CDM buttons, poll their state, or know when a spell goes on or off cooldown through the CDM itself.

CDMAuras runs on a purpose-built event engine that works entirely within the Midnight secret restrictions constraints.

Zero addon-side polling. A single shared eventFrame handles all Blizzard events (UNIT_AURA, UNIT_SPELLCAST_SUCCEEDED, UNIT_POWER_UPDATE, etc.) and fans them out through an internal message bus. Alert objects subscribe only to the specific messages they need — no alert ever registers a Blizzard event directly, and nothing runs on a tick unless a cooldown text is actively counting down.

CDM hook layer. Rather than scanning frames on a timer, the engine uses hooksecurefunc on CDM viewer methods to receive live cooldown and aura state changes at exactly the moment the CDM itself processes them — no polling, no lag.

Aura instance ID tracking. Buff state is tracked via auraInstanceID rather than spell name or ID. When the CDM registers a buff frame the engine caches an auraInstanceID → cooldownID mapping so incoming UNIT_AURA updates route directly to the correct alert in O(1) — no iteration over all active buffs on every aura event.

Opt-in cooldown tracking. Only spells that have at least one active alert registered are tracked. A spellID → cooldownID reverse map means the per-cast handler does a single table lookup — cost scales with the number of tracked spells, not the size of the CDM.

Requirements

• World of Warcraft: Retail (Midnight)
• The built-in Cooldown Manager must be enabled in Edit Mode

Installation

CurseForge

Download and install via CurseForge. All libraries are embedded in packaged releases.

Manual

1. Download the latest release zip.
2. Extract the CDMAuras folder into World of Warcraft/_retail_/Interface/AddOns/.
3. Reload or log in.

Feedback & Bugs

Please report issues on Github.

Author

jingley The engine, alert runtime, and core backend systems were logiced myself. The options menus, Alert Editor UI, and documentation were built with heavy assistance from GitHub Copilot.