Audio cues for when cooldowns are up?

You know how with certain resources, when they get maxed out they make a sound effect? For example, machinist's battery gauge.

I find this enormously helpful, it keeps me focused on the actual game world instead of my UI.

However, despite playing MMOs for decades now, I've just never built any sort of consistent ability to muscle memory when a cooldown should be up, at least not well enough that I'd be satisfied with it. I find myself flicking my eyes down to my hotbars a little too frequently, and I think there's at least one better way.

What if we could tie sound effects (you know, <se.1> <se.2> etc) to certain abilities coming off of cooldown?

Now, technically you kind of can do this right now if you make a macro such as:

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/ac "No Mercy" <wait.60>
/echo <se.6>

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However, for whatever reason, macros can't be queued like other abilities, meaning this would feel very bad and be inefficient, and using a different cooldown would overwrite this one as any other macro used cancels out the previous.

So I made a little mock-up of what I might like to see. Obviously not perfect or even thematically accurate, just an example. To me, you'd right click (or its equivalent) on an ability with a cooldown and this would be an option in the context menu:

https://i.imgur.com/AcDEINd.png

Some new specially made sound effects would probably work best over the basic ones we already have, but if you gotta work with what you've got, I think they're fine.

While initially I thought just having a sound effect on the ability being ready would be fine, the more I thought about it, I think "on use" could also provide some niche usage. As I'm currently doing a lot of PotD, there's a certain cadence to ability usage, especially against specific bosses like floor 180's DPS push. Being able to hear that I didn't forget to hit anything in my panic would be a nice extra, without, I think, providing much extra info at all. For example, I'd know I'd need to hear x, y and z sound effects, but maybe in my panic I notice I only heard y and z. I see this happen even with people who run this content a lot like AngelusDemonus (watching his Machinist run where he forgot to use turret during this very push!)

Anyway, that's basically it. Just a bit of QoL/accessibility, and for me personally it'd help me focus more on the actual game and less on my hotbars.

I like that idea. I love games with great audio cues. They're insanely efficient if done right. I like the audio cues that are already in the game such as the job gauge audio cue or even the small sound effect that plays when someone applies a buff on you, when playing with an Astro it can be a neat little reminder to dump some resources (depending on the job) when you hear that noise.
With all that said however I doubt they'll implement your proposition anytime soon if at all considering it took them more than 10 years to implement something as simple as a damage type indicator. Also now that we're moving towards the 2 minute meta features like these are becoming obsolete.

+1 to this

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Originally Posted by Alltair

Also now that we're moving towards the 2 minute meta features like these are becoming obsolete.

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I would argue that actually makes them more critical. Previously, if you let some of your shorter CDs drift, you potentially lost usage, but alignment with other CDs wasn't as important. But now basically everything is on the 2m meta. And for shorter CDs, it's critically important that you use them the instant they are up, because drift now isn't just potentially lose usages, but also shifting them outside of the 2m buffs. Doesn't take many single-GCD slips to push a CD outside of the 2m window (which is only ~6-8 GCDs wide to start with), and you've got 4x as many opportunities to slip with a 30s CD than a 120s one.

FFXIV is quite visually busy, even if you have the visual effects of party members turned off. Audio cues are extremely lacking in this game, and having the ability to configure specific alerts like this would be extremely helpful. To the OP, I'd also add a further option to the "play when skill is ready" selection to play the sound a specific amount of time before the skill is ready (ex. playing the sound 1s early, or 2.5s early, so you have time to react without losing cooldown uptime). Frankly, given how often this game demands we identify mechanics entirely from visual effects such as boss pose or in-3d-space icons, it's rather inexcusable that the only available form of cooldown tracking is looking away from the 3d space and down to our hotbars on the regular. I'd also rather prefer having more than just a handful of sound options, especially if those are the same sound options as macros have available. Not only does it mean others in the group can screw with your audio cueing via macros and chat, but most of the chat sound effects are shockingly poor for use as "thing is now available" type sounds. Those types of alert sounds should be short, striking, very easily distinguished from each other, and otherwise entirely unique in the game and easily distinguished from the slew of other game sound effects.