Reflections From The Pond

Posts Tagged ‘addons’

Imagine a world where you’d be deprived of three of your five sensory inputs, a world where you could not smell, you could not feel and you could not taste anything. Imagine how you would be confined to experience the world you live in by sight and by hearing alone, and how you would interpret that world.

Now, welcome to the World of Warcraft.

In WoW, you don’t ever touch anything, you don’t get any tactile input whatsoever. The rain or sunshine on your face as you ride through the great big wilderness, the magic bolts incinerating your innards or the melee swings ripping open your body, the pain in your knuckles as you scrape them against a boar when levelling fist fighting and or the warm smoothness of your lover’s skin under your fingertips when you engage in a bit of roleplaying in a secluded spot, these are things you only feel in your mind.

In WoW, you never smell anything, you don’t ever get any olfactory stimulation. The blood and sweat of your fellow raiders, the musty odour of your horse or perhaps the not-so-faint oily aroma of your mechanostrider, the sweet smells of the herbs as you gather them, the dry dustiness of the old inns and houses around the world, you can only imagine these smells.

In WoW, you never taste anything. Perhaps you are better off actually not knowing what Pungent Seal Whey or Bitter Plasma or Spider Kabob taste like, but wouldn’t you like to taste that Black Coffee or Delicious Chocolate Cake?

In WoW, you experience the world around you through vision/audio. You interpret the world through your eyes and ears and you react accordingly. But in a hectic environment, with a lot of information flooding through your eyes and ears, you will find it difficult to experience and interpret everything, and to react upon it. The more information, the more difficult the interpretation and the slower the reaction.

In real life, in the afk world, you would not need a flashing warning across your eyes and a loud sound to alert you to the fact that you were standing in a fire. Your burning feet would scream in enough pain for you to not even have to think and make a conscious decision about stepping out of it, your brain would have bypassed that and reflexively thrown you out of it. If you happened to be dressed in sturdy leathers or possibly chain mail, impregnated with enough dirt and blood and other body substances to form a rather functional fireproofing, perhaps your feet would not be the first to react but your nose, sniffing at that horrid smell of something burning.

In the afk world you don’t need to get a skull over your head to show that you are infected with some nastiness that takes out a sizeable chunk of your health every second and will spawn a gooey ooze that will follow you around and pulse more nastiness around itself until it meets another ooze and falls in love with it and the two little oozes becomes one. Ok, bad example for a RL comparison but I guess you get my point?

But in WoW, when you are staring intensly at your screen on that ugly mofo Gormok the Impaler and you also need to keep a close watch on the health of the other 24 raiders in there with you, chances are it will take you a second or three before the information that it is YOU that’s in the fire has filtered down through the layers in your brain, and then you may need an extra second or two to react and by then it is too late and you will be dead.

In WoW, when you are gathered up in a chummy group with most of your fellow raiders, humping hugging the leg of the rotted slimy abomination in Icecream Citadel, seeing the small yellowy flakes around you that indicates infection is nigh impossible in all the fireworks and slime spewing going on, and chances are you will spawn the baby ooze in the middle of your raid bringing the wrath of your healers down upon your head.

Enter the BossMods.

A BossMod is an addon that highlights certain things in a fight to help you see it and act upon it. They can also provide you with timers for those bosses that have various timed phases, such as Kel’Thuzad laving his phase shifted state and physically entering his room after three minutes and 48 seconds.

There are a few varieties of BossMods, BigWigs, Deadly Boss Mods or Deus Vox Encounters to name a few, and most come pre-packed with a lot of nifty features enabled, most of which you don’t really need. The BossMod is there to make it easier for you to fish up those vital snippets of information out of the massive information flood coming your way in a raid, remember? They are not there to make you drown in even more information.

So what you want to do is set your chosen BossMod up to show you things where you find them easy to see. For some reason, BossMods often come configured to be as obnoxiously in the way as possibe, showing their pretty bars of various formats spot on in the middle of your screen. I don’t know about you but I generally want to see what is going on and not have it obscured with a bar showing me that a new ooze will spawn in 6 -5-4-etc seconds, so I have moved all such things to the sides or the top/bottom of my screen.

The next thing you want to do is check all fights and chose the information you think is relevant for you. I am lucky in that my guild goes for an exploratory “blind raiding” run first, spending an evening in the new raid wing without having read up on the tactics, with all BossMods disabled, just exploring and gathering information and trying things out, so when the next raid rolls around and it’s time to kick it up a notch, I generally know what I want to keep extra track of or where I need extra help to not screw up.

For example, in my BigWigs I show the Unstable Ooze Explosion because that is something I am not likely to see myself as my focus is generally on the people bunched up around Rotface’s legs. I don’t show warnings for Mutated Infections since I see them anyway on my Healbot and even though we are not blind raiding anymore on this one we still have someone call out who’s infected just to help people react. I use the Flash’n Shake though to alert myself to the infection if I have it, shaving that extra second of reaction time off. I don’t show warnings for Slime Spray because as I generally have the boss targetted I see his cast bar and, being so close to him, I see his animation too and can react to it without problems. I don’t show warnings for Ooze Merges because I don’t care about that. I show the Boss Death simply because I like the triumphant sound it plays when the boss keels over.

Another example, on Festergut I don’t show warnings for the spores because so far I have had no problem getting one, and I don’t show the Inhale Blight warnings because I see it clearly enough myself and there is not really anything I can do to prepare for the extra damage. I do show the Pungent Blight warning because I want to be prepared to heal my designated targets up to full asap when that happens, which takes some pre-planning and clever distributing of Riptides. I don’t show the Vile Gas because it should not be a problem if people spread out as we are supposed to. I use the Proximity Display just so I can avoid being too close to someone and vomit on them should I be in a ranged group healing. I have the Berserk timer enabled so I can see how close we are cutting it and I have the Boss Death chime of triumph enabled for the same reason as above – I like the sound.

These are the settings that work for me, resto shaman generally on raid healing. If you are anything else, tank, tank healer, melee, ranged dps, you probably think something else is vastly more important and should set your BossMods up accordingly.

There are a few problems associated with BossMods though

One is what Larísa at the Pink Pigtail Inn describes in a post recently, discussing another post over at Tobold’s MMORPG Blog, that are we really playing the game if we allow BossMods and other addons to show us what to do? How can we complain that the game is too easy if we always use the training wheels of BossMods? Well, I decided a long time ago that addons let me have more fun and help me play my game better, but I definitely want them customized to my liking and to help me with what I want and what I need and nothing else.

Another problem is that even if you tailor your BossMod to show those and only those timers and warnings and messages that you yourself find indispensable, a BossMod happy raid leader or raid assistant may still flood your screen and your eyes and ears with raid warnings and countdowns in chat, putting a huge dent in your pretty customized layout.

Thirdly, you learn the encounters as if the BossMod paraphernalia were an integrated part of them. You train yourself to react upon the BossMod instead of the fight, which risk leaving you flailing helplessly if the BossMod plays trick on you.

Example: I was dragged into a late night Naxx Undying run with my priest Jools a few weeks ago. We started with killing Sapphiron and Kel-Thuzad, steamrolled through the Abomination Wing, Patchwerk went down in notime, and then we faced Grobbulus. And there we failed.

For some reason – perhaps because none of us had run Naxx in a long time – no one had an updated BossMod and the players targetted with Mutating Injection did not get a skull on their heads. They did not notice that they were infected and thus they dropped huge poison clouds in the middle of the room. Perhaps it was something else as well, because some players’ screens lit up with a lot of error messages so they could not see where they were going. The other healer was trapped out of range and I got confused trying to circumvent the spreading clouds so I failed to pop a pair of wings on the player going dooown.

We were all trained to trigger a run to the side when we had a skull on our head and not when we had an infection. So we relied on the safety net of our BossMods and it failed. Not a big deal, it was late at night and we were tired and/or inebriated, and we had had a good laugh together during the previous boss kills, but our reliance on addons did cost us that Undying title that time.

BossMods, like any other addons, can be turned on and off at your pleasure. If you feel you no longer need a certain warning, or you can do better without it, turn it off. Maybe you can still play as good as before, maybe you want to turn it back on.

So, use the BossMod as training wheels for as long as you need, but don’t be afraid to take them off sometimes and see if you can balance on your own. If not, no big deal, just make sure you keep the BossMod updated :-)

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My computer, my beloved laptop, although getting on in years (it’s soon three years old!) and although it has been to the shop twice, has never had any problems dealing with the graphic settings of WoW.

When the special shadow effects were introduced some time ago I got seasick from them and turned them down to the barest minimum where you could still see shaped shadows and not just formless blobs.

I’ve ran all of 25-man Naxxramas (AoE heaven, remember?) without any problems at all, and although I mostly raided 10-mans after that up till just a few weeks ago I never ever had any problems with lag or disconnects during raids apart from the very rare power cut or similar total loss of net access. Never!

Now, enter patch 3.2.2.

The release of this patch coincided with me moving my shaman to another server and starting running 25-mans with her.

On these 25-man raids with her I have been disconnected from the game once or twice per raid night.

It may not sound much but it is one time (or two!) too many, especially since it seems to happen in every fekking raid!

If I am “lucky”, it happens during the startup phase, only making me miss portals to Theramore for Onyxia or the generously provided Fish Feast.

If I am not so lucky, it happens during an encounter. And in case you haven’t noticed or maybe it has slipped your mind, the encounters nowadays are pretty damn unforgiving of people standing still.

Standing still, you know, like someone who has just lost all her control over her toon by disconnecting but said toon is still in the game, still in the raid, and she is NOT MOVING when Kologarn looks at her nastily, and she is NOT MOVING when the blue sparkly roaches start trailing to Thorim and she is NOT MOVING when the lava around Sartharion and his three hench drakes starts churning.

And if the disconnect didn’t do enough damage, either collateral by me and my uncontrolled toon drawing hurt to my fellow raiders, or incidental by me not throwing my heals where I was supposed to, when I do manage to log back in the dc always, always, ALWAYS screws with my healing addons.

I lose all the raid frames, and even if I manage to do a /reload ui while back online, the reloading screen takes forever and ever to load through and all that time I am NOT MOVING.

And even if I do get through that prolonged hell of waiting and having to listen on Vent to what is happening and I actually do get the raid frames back, sometimes they are not sorted, sometimes they are not clickable, and sometimes the amount of health they show are frozen and unchanging!

The clickability comes back once either I or the boss is dead, but the randomness of the sorting linger on.

(Incidentally, this is why I had a brief session of  Earth Shielding the druid tree instead of the druid bear last night, because my main tank setting was lost and the spot in my raid frames grid where the bear used to be was now taken by the tree – same orange color and their names are similar enough for me not to react immediately (hey! It’s not like I read all the names on the raid frames!))

Turning down all graphic settings to the absolute minimum does not seem to help at all, I was playing with that last night and I still got dc’d.

Sometimes I wonder if it is server-related – I find Dalaran on Stormrage way more laggy than I find Dalaran on Aerie Peak – but maybe that is just a matter of me being in Stormrage Dalaran during peak hours more often than on Aerie Peak where I am mostly out in the bush or the old world.

Sometimes I wonder if it is raid-related – I raid 25-mans on Stormrage and 10-mans on Aerie Peak, but then again I have done the odd 25-mans on Aerie Peak too after the patch and although my fps was very low at times I never got dc’d.

Sometimes I wonder if it is computer-related – my computer is not the most modern and fastest one, and is generally slow when tabbing in and out of WoW, but why have I not encountered these horrbible dc’s before patch 3.2.2 then? I seem to have had more dc’s after 3.2.2 than in my entire WoW history before that.

No, I firmly believe patch 3.2.2 is the root of all this evil – it is the patch from hell!

Well I’m sitting by my game rig
But the frame rate’s way too low
And it lags with every spell cast that I try out

And I’m standing still while running
In the raiding fireworks
Scared beyond belief to get the login screen

And this perverted fear of dc’s
Chokes the smile on my face
And common sense is ringing out the bells

This is a technological breakdown
Oh yes, this is the patch from hell

And all my addons got resetted
And there’s nothing I can do
It’s all just bits of pixels not controlled by me

Oh look out world, take a good look what comes down here
I must learn this lesson fast and learn it well

This ain’t no fresh exciting new content
Oh no, this is the patch
Said this is the patch
This is the patch from hell!

(And fear not, I am not going to sing out. Well, not loudly at least. Well, maybe loudly but in the shower only where no one can hear me.)

One sure way to rub your nose in how many addons you rely on in your daily WoW is to transfer to another server.

Because, you know, all your addons and user interface and macros and even Blizzards’s own in-game options will reset their settings when you transfer and you will end up with a blank slate of helpful addons and options not being helpful at all.

And somehow they are all inter-related. I could not customise my HealBot until I had fixed my macros I use therein, I could not dress my shaman in her various ItemRacked gear outfits until I had  set all stats displayed in RatingBuster. And I had totally forgot how to tweak the displays of the plethora of BigWigs warnings so I ended up with them all in the middle of my screen obscuring important things going on.

Thanks to a pro reminder of a fellow transferee (you know who you are – thanks!) I had been clever and screenshotted all my macros and settings for some of my addons, so it was not such an ardous task to fix it all as it might have been. But still, it took a good many hours to pimp ‘em all to my satisfaction.

Got some aha-experiences as well when I worked my way through the addons. HealBot, for example, comes not blank but with a pre-set suggestion of shaman heals and spells. Did you know shamans have a spell called Cure Toxins? I didn’t. Can’t remember ever using that spell, especially since Cleanse Spirit does the same thing for the same cost and with the added benefit of removing a curse as well.

And even though you test and tweak and check them you still need to do a live SAT to weed out all the little bugs and things that ar not quite right.

For example, I thank the gods of Providence that my very first run with the raid guild I’ve applied to (and been accepted into!) was 25 man Vault of Archavon and not 25 man Iron Council on hardmode. I know the VoA fight a little – enough to be really really determined NOT to die in a fire (thus proving that I am a noob instead of just suspecting it) and with my instant self-heal spells handily macroed in to save my be-tailed behind in case of an emergency.

I did manage to not die in a fire, I managed to not die at all actually, and after having calmed down a bit from the initial panic (what? now? no, I am not reeeeeeeady!) I slowly woke up to the fact that my Chain Heals did not, in fact, splatter their pretty whitish-green lazor beams all over my fellow raiders.

And I rapidly found out that this was because I had, in fact, not bound the Chain Heal to its usual left mouse button hot-key. Residing there was now the eminent Healing Wave, a spell that is not bad at all but perhaps not the best choice for raid healing :P

Anyways, I got it worked out eventually and got a whole bunch of new ideas for how to Improve Stuff as well! I see many hours of macro playing looming ahead! :-)

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*singing* HealBotting across the Universe, on the Starship Enterprise, under Captain Kirk *stops singing*.

Hmm, well, not really, but I just love that song :D

Now, back to business! I use HealBot (or HealBot Continued which seems to be its current real name) when I heal in WoW. I’ve tried to use some other healy addon with even more custom options , like Grid, but since I was so used to the HealBot it felt like an unsurmountable hassle to figure out how Grid works and set it up to my liking.

I’ve heard rumours that it is a memory hog, but I’ve never noticed that, so I’ve stuck with HealBot, and in fact use it on all my chars, not only the healery ones, for a range of functions.

So how does it work?

Well, start by downloading it from Curse or some place of your liking, and install it. There is a manual of sorts on the download page and there is a whole forum dedicated to it, but this post is about how I have customised it to fit my way of playing. Anyone interested in it should not take my words as gospel but rather play around with it yourself to see what works for you :-)

If it doesn’t open automatically in-game type /hb to start it up.

You’ll see a frame looking something like this:

You use HealBot like any other raidframe, by clicking on the named healthbar to perform a variety of functions or spells. HealBot comes loaded with a default setting, but where’s the fun using that? Customising time!

Left-click on the small yellow H icon on the minimap

or write /hb o.

This opens up the first tab of the HealBot configuration, the General tab:

Disable HealBot turns the HealBot frame off. Turn it back on with /hb.

Show minimap button -- what it sounds like.

Lock position -- once you’ve found the ultimate place for the frame lock it in place so you don’t accidentally drag it around your screen. Not too fun to misclick on the anchor point instead of a bar and toss the entire thing out under your other action bars.

Anchor -- the HealBot frame grows from this point, and you left-click in the chosen corner to drag the frame around.

I usually chose Top Left as my anchor because then the groups will be sorted nicely with 1 on the top left and increasing to the right and down. It also means that you will have to move the HealBot frame around to fit it in depending on the size of the raid, since after a 40-man AV the tiny frame with your name only in it will be sitting almost in the middle of your screen and not neatly down in the corner.

Close automatically -- this closes the frame when no one needs a heal or a decurse of some kind and pops it open again when someone does. I have my heal frame enabled at all times because the popping up and down of it can be rather annoying. You can’t make it so only the bars of people needing heals will open up, it’s either all or nothing, so I prefer having it open all the time.

Play sound on open chimes so you won’t miss that HealBot is now ready to be used. Not very useful to me so I’ve turned it off.

Hide options button -- checking this saves some space in the frame since the “Options” at the bottom of it will be hidden. Better to instead use:

Right click opens options -- right click anywhere on the frame apart from a heal bar to open the configuration menu (options panel).

Hide party frames -- I check this since I don’t need the usual five party members’ frames visible when I have HealBot enabled, but I don’t check Include player and target since I find it reassuring to see my own frame all the time and I often have a mob or boss targetted to see who it is targetting in turn and which spells and abilities it is using.

Enable libQuickHealth is for the more advanced people using some sort of mob health thingie. I have not had the time or inclination yet to figure out if this would be useful for me, so I have not checked it, same with the Use CPU Profiler.

In the chat option, the only message I have enabled is the resurrection one -- Notify for ressurection only. It is slightly annoying when you ress people only to find out a second or two before your 10 second ressurection spell is finished that someone else was ressing your target too. HealBot shows dead people’s name in black letters which turn to green when someone is casting a ress spell on them, so you can check that before you try to ress someone as well to avoid double-ressing.

I don’t use messages for healing (as you can see I have checked No messages) but you can select any recipents of your choice if you want to broadcast whom you are healing and for how much (estimated).

The original ressurrection message has been good enough for me so far (Casting #s on #n), but you can make fanciful messages of your own if you please. #s is the spell you are casting, #n is the target for the spell and #h is the estimated amount this target will be healed for.

 

Now, the next tab is the Spells tab.

The top drop-down menu lets you choose if you want to use enabled bars at all times or if you want to disable them when out of combat. You can have different spell settings and key-bindings on the enabled and disabled bars.

I always use enabled bars because frankly I have enough spells to keep track of as it is, and adding another set of depending on whether I am in or out of combat would do my head in.

As you can see you can bind spells to five mouse buttons, and you have to check for yourself which button on your mouse corresponds to what.

For each mouse button, you can have up to four different keybindings, the simple click or a click when holding down a modifier key, shift, ctrl or alt. I use ctrl as my push-to-talk key for our Ventrilo, so I have cleared all ctrl-clicks from my HealBot.

You type in the spell or macro you want to use for each click-combo. (More on my macros later.)

Save unique spells for each spec is a nifty feature that will let you select different spells for the clicks if you are dual specced. I have not yet tried it with any of my girls since I don’t have anyone with two healery specs, so I cannot say for sure how good it works.

Use enabled settings when target is in combat is a small variety of the top drop-down menu, but since I don’t use disabled bars I have it unchecked, and the next one, Always use enabled settings, is checked to be doubly sure. (Well, enabled settings is not quite the same thing as enabled bars, but close enough :-)

Avoid accidental PvP flagging is checked so if I can’t heal anyone engaging in PvP unless I am flagged myself.

Having an addon choose which spells to use when in combat is a strict no-no and would be boring as hell, but out of combat it really doesn’t matter, does it? Checking SmartCast when out of combat and checking which kind of spells you want to use for this enables the addon to pick whichever spell is appropriate for your target. This is probably the only times nowadays my priest actually uses Lesser Heal or Heal when she’s SmartCasting out of combat to top her off.

The SmartCast spells are cast in the following order; ressurrection spell, decurses, buffs and finally heals.

I am a lazy one so I have enabled all types of spells :D

Be aware though that for the SmartCast of buffs to work you need to set which buffs to look out for, which you do on the Buffs tab, and likewise which spell(s) to use for decurses, which you do on the Curse tab.

 

Next tab up is the Healing.

Here you can choose from a number of different options in which heal bars to include.

I generally have Self, My Targets, Group, Raid, Pets and Target Bar checked. Raid includes yourself and the group you are in, if any. If you check Self and/or Group, those health bars will be pulled out and displayed as separate groups before all the other raid groups, like this:

See how the groups sort themselves nicely in the options order?

The Pets include all sorts of combat pets, hunters’, warlocks’, priests’ Shadowfiends and any MC’d minions of theirs. Very handy in the Inspector Razouvious fight, for example.

Main Tanks are picked up from ORA2 or whatever raid addon you are using.

My Targets is a list you make yourself by Ctrl-Alt-Right Click on the health bar of whomever you would like to add to this group, up to 10 members.  To remove someone from your My Targets-group, Ctrl-Alt-Right Click on them once again.

Target Bar is showing the player or NPC you have targetted at the moment, and they don’t need to be grouped with you. Handy for escort quests and such things. If you want your target to show up as a group of its own on HealBot, select which options you would like to include. I usually have them all unchecked.

Checking Restrict Target Bar to predefined settings is supposed to make you able to add people to your My Targets-group by right-clicking them, but it is not working for me atm, so I have it unchecked.

Alert Level is the threshold (percent of max health) below which the health bars will highlight to call for attention, like in this example where the level is set to 80%:

I have normally this level set to 100 %, so my health bars are always highlighted. This is because you cannot easily distinguish between the fading done for people above 80 % health and the fading done for people out of range in Healbot, so to not risk trying to heal people out of range, or failing to run towards them if needed, I prefer to clearly see who is in range for my heals:

The range check frequency is simply how often HealBot checks who’s in range, and as usual, the more often the spiffier computer you need.

Since I don’t use disabled bars I’ve not bothered about Disable bar when range > 100 yards, with my settings above it does not matter if it checked or not.

In the nextx pane, Show extra bars is for any raid members not already selected in the top pane, and it can be filtered accordingly. I rarely meddle with this since I most often raid 10-mans (except when bg’ing which is too chaotic anyway for me to bother trying to sort things neatly) which are pretty easy to keep track of and thus I keep it on All Classes sorted by Groups.

 

Next tab, the Cure tab!

At the top, I’ve checked the Monitor to remove debuffs and also in combat. I can remove debuffs and I use Healbot for this as well, so I only have one addon for the whole keeping people good and well and happy-business. So, debuffs needs to be removed, and especially in combat since some are rather nasty and might even interfere with my ability to heal.

It’s a screenshot from my shaman’s HealBot, thus I’ve chosen Cleanse Spirit for debuff removing and I am monitoring it on the raid, which also includes myself and my group. This is the spell that SmartCast will use when de-debuffing, but you have to set the decurse spells and key-bindings yourself in the Spells tab for when in combat.

I’ve chosen to ignore debuffs by class, ie magic effects won’t show up on my shaman’s healbot since she can’t dispell magic effects on friendly target, and debuffs which are not harmful or which has a short duration is also ignored. I hate being slowed so I’m keeping an eye out for such debuffs even though they are not directly harmful.

In the next section, the custom debuffs allows you to watch for debuffs that you can’t dispell but need to react fast to. HealBot comes witha few debuffs loaded, but you can always write in a new one and save it when you encounter it. Kel’Thuzad’s Frost Blasts and Ignius Slag Pots are examples of debuffs that requires fast reactions to heal.

I have colour-coded the different debuffs so I can easily see who’s affected directly on their health bars, when the bright leaf-green turns to any of the darkish colours indicated, violet for diseases, blur for magic effects, green for poisons, brownish-yellow for curses and reddish purple for the custom debuffs.

I’ve unchecked Display warning on debuff since I see it directly with my colour-coding, but I have checked Play sound on debuff, although it is usually too noisy to hear it through the raid din.

 

Next, the pimp options are found on Skin 1 and Skin 2.

On these two tabs, there are several options for textures, widhts, fonts and font sizes etc, and you have to fiddle around with them to find something that works for you. Remember that you can save different skins for different situations, you can use considerably larger bars and fonts on a 5-man dungeon run or a 10-man raid than a 25-man raid or even a 40-man AV raid.

You can’t change the colour of the health bars when unaffected by debuffs and not lacking any buffs, or the colours of the rage/mana/energy/runic power bar, but otherwise it is pretty customisable. 

There are a few different skins to choose from an you can make as many of your own as you want, just tweak the settings on Skin 1 and Skin 2 and save them under another name.

The Background is the color of the frame or (lack of frame) around the HealBot health bars.

If you check Show headers, all your target options from the Healing tab will be sorted into neat groups with headers, which in my opinion makes it much easier to see the whole picture. Just check out the difference between this AV raid with headers:

 

 and the same AV raid without headers:

Speaks for itself, eh?

I want to monitor for aggro and I use the Flash bar which blinks on above the health bar of the player in question to alert me if someone has pulled aggro and might need a quick heal. This monitoring covers both aggro towards the triggerhappy mage with a string of crits that actually passed the tank in threat and the random aggro-redirect of certain boss spells which are flung haphazardly out on the raid.

I don’t use fluid bars because the wildly fluctuating of the health is a bit nauseating at times.

I use Show HoT icons but not Debuff icons since I see the manner of the debuff by the colour-coding anyways, and the health bars are a bit crowded at times. For that very same reason I put the HoT icons on the bars and not off them, and to the left because that let’s me see the first part of the player’s name to easier identify them. Icon count is for charged buffs, like Earth Shield or Lifebloom, and duration is for normal HoTs, like Riptide or Renew.

On the next tab, Skin 2, there are more options for the appearance of the health bars

I have set the opacity for out of range and disabled to the same value, because like I said before it is very hard to differentiate between them even with largely different values.

I also make the Mana bar size rather large since I like to keep track of my fellow raiders mana and if they might benefit from an Innervate or Mana Tide totem.

The bottom pane has some more informative options. I try to keep the bars rather small, so I only use Show name on bar and not Show class on bar, but to make up for that I use Color text by class and use a rather fat font to be able to see the colour. If you have good enough eyesight, a good enough and large screen resolution, you can check the Double text lines to squeeze in two lines of text on each health bar. I don’t, so I settled for the above settings.

I don’t use Color bar by class since it screw up my debuff colour coding.

I also don’t show health on bars since that is a rather large number with lots of digits and needs a large health bar to be visible. I do like to be able to see something else besides greenih bars, you know, things like the boss and the splendid fireworks going on around him and even some of the lovely scenery of their hideouts.

 

The next to last tab, the Tips tab, deals with the tooltips.

All these options sets what is shown on the tooltip when you mouseover a health bar. I usually don’t pay too much attention to this, it is basically information about the target and which key-bindings you have available.

 

The last tab is the Buffs tab.

I always check Monitor for missing buffs and also in combat.

This is my shaman’s Buff tab, and she has it easy and needs only keep track of her own buffs, the Water Shield and Earthliving Weapon, but you can set this to check raid wide for missing buffs.

Out of combat, player’s who miss a buff will have a white health bar (or blue, in my case) and it won’t turn green until all buffs you monitor for are in place. You change the un-buffed color by right-clicking on the bar and drag the sliders around til it suits you.

 

Now, this is the basics on how HealBot works and how I have set it up. The trickiest part is to assign spells, macros and abilities to the various keybindings and to find a way to work with them fluently, especially if you, like me, use this addon for many different chars with different spells at their disposal.

This turned out to be a pretty long post in itself so I will cover my actual key bindings and when I use them on my various chars in another post. Til then, have fun fiddling around!

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The topic of the week in the blogs I read seems to be addons, or maybe more specifically healing and addons, with a lot of recent posts about this and a lot of opinions and discussions and flaming back and forth in the comments.

I pulled some interesting topics from some of the blogs discussing this because my views on these specific matters were quite different and I felt a rant coming on.

“If you are incapable of playing this game without addons, then you are allowing those addons to play the game for you.”

I can play this game without any addon at all, and I have done so many times when one or more of them have gone fubared and I cba to try to find which one and fix it. Error messages all over the screen ftl.

For many situations or classes this is perfectly viable and I usually don’t even notice that all addons are disabled. For other situations and other classes, this is not so.

Healing is one of these not-so situations.

I can heal a 5-man group without any addons at all by clicking on their party frame and press the appropriate keybound spell for the heal I want to use.

Does it take longer? Yes. Will I miss who has that misty-green poison dot ticking down? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Will I waste a lot of time on misclicks on targets? Definitely yes. Will this result in a wipe? Maybe, maybe not. Do I like it? No.

Could I heal a 10-man raid without any addons? Same answers as above, only even more slow and strenous. Could I heal a 25-man? Same again, and with even more emphasis on slow-to the point-of-or-past-too-late and strenous-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown.

So, I am capable of playing this game without addons, but (in this particualr case) I don’t like it.

Why don’t I like it then? Well, there are two reasons, actually:

1. I hate to lose people on my shift, and I’d be a lot slower without my addons, using only the default UI, and thus I would end up losing a lot more people.

2. My addons actually make me experience the game MORE, not less, and accordingly to not use my addons would make me miss out on a lot of the gameplay.

Let me elaborate.

The addons I use for healing are Healbot and Visual Heal. Despite its name, Healbot is NOT a bot used for healing.

Healbot is a customisable addon that presents information about the people in my party or raid. It shows me the healthbars, the mana bars, who has aggro, and who is out of range for me. It can be set to show a lot of different buffs and debuffs on the player, and it presents this in an easily accessible manner that makes me feel comfortable I won’t miss anything crucial.

However, what it can’t do, is heal the player for me.

(Ok, out of combat there actually is a one-click kinda thingy called Smartcast. If I want to heal someone out of combat and has SmartCast enabled, Healbot will automatically choose the spell most suited to heal the player to full. But hey, who gives a shit about what happens out of combat, eh?)

The frames of all players are bunched together where I put them, within easy reach for me, the healing spells I use are bound to different key/mousekey combinations, and I feel confident I can pull most of my party or raid through whatever we encounter.

But, and this is important, in combat, it is I who choose whom to heal, it is I who choose which spell to use, not my addon.

Although I have been playing computer and console games for a major part of my life, I am not a twitch gamer and I do react a little slow sometimes. Anything which makes me able to toss out my heals more easily, or able to see and target who has some nasty debuff before he/she kicks the bucket is a great benefit to me.

I mean, its still ME doing the healing, isn’t it?

I even have time to watch how the fight is going this way instead of suddenly wondering why is noone needing a heal anymore? just to realise that Oh, the boss is dead.

Sure, I could practice manual targeting and healing with the deafult UI to improve my performance there, but it would never be as fast and easy as it is with my Healbot, I would be too focused on targetting and healing and lose out on a lot of the actual fight.

So, in my opinion, this kind of addon is NOT playing the game for me, it is helping me have more fun.

Call it crutches if you want but if I risk falling on my face when walking I am very happy for a pair of crutches, thank you.

Another interesting topic was

“Good healers use addons to heal. But great healers don’t have to rely on them.”

Now this could be a quagmire to tread. What makes a healer good? What makes her great?

The truth is, that I don’t understand this statement at all.

I don’t consider myself a good healer, maybe I would dare to aspire to “adequate” or maybe “good enough”, but definitely not “good”. I usually get the job done but sometimes I botch things up and people keel over around me.

Anyone able to pull a group through or carry their part in a raid, with or without addons, is good enough. And that is, well, er, good enough. In my opinion.

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