Addon Tip: Tell Me When

by Tachyon on Thu. 18. September 2008, 01:32

Filed under: Addons

Manging your cooldowns properly is the bread and butter of the mage class - offensive and defensive tactics rely heavily on certain abilities being available or not.
Sometimes, the common buff/cooldown UI or addons don't suffice, and a custom tailored solution is preferred. For this, I can recommend the TellMeWhen addon.



TellMeWhen allows you to setup icon racks to display any of your buffs, debuffs, cooldowns and reactive abilities the way you want. The icons bars can be scaled and placed anywhere on the screen.

In my case, I set up two racks. The first rack shows some of my mage's most vital abilities (Trinket, Water Elemental, Icy Veins, Frostnova, Ice Block, Coldsnap, mana gem) when they are not on cooldown, and the second rack shows temporary buffs (Trinket, Icy Veins) and procs (from Band of the Eternal Sage and Ashtongue Talisman of Insight).

The first (1) of the screenshot above shows both racks in 'unlocked' mode, showing which spells/buffs/procs I configured for monitoring. During combat, it will look like on the second screenshot (2), here the Icon of the Silver Crescent is on cooldown and its buff is active, same counts for Icy Veins, and Coldsnap is also on cooldown and thus not yet available.

Attach this to your unit frame, and you see all the vital information you need at first glance. Tip for setting the addon up: On-use items usually have a similarly but differenty named buff, for example the item Icon of the Silver Crescent gives a buff called Blessing of the Silver Crescent, so if you want to observe the cooldown, take the item's name, and for observing the buff, take the buff's name.
If you're unsure how the buff is called, make it proc and check its name in your normal buff bar.

Hope you find this addon as useful as I do