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WOTLK Must Have Addons for Healers/Druids?
Hello 
As a hunter, my must-have raiding addons were fairly standard: ora2, omen, dbm, grid and a few hunter-specific ones like SimpleMD.
I have the feeling that I might need to add a few new ones for healing, especially for monitoring health, HoTs and poison/curse status of the raid and selected raid members.
I think the main contenders are:
1. Grid + some plugins like GridStatusHoT
2. xPerl
3. Healbot
4. Decursive
So my questions are:
a. Option 1 would be my first choice simply because I am used to it. Would that cover all my needs, or would I miss something important?
b. Do people use more than one of these or is there too much overlap?
c. Any other interesting/must-have addons? For example, I found something called lifebloomer, which claims to track the lifeblooms more efficiently...looks interesting.
Thanks in advance
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@ Tue, 11/11/2008 - 02:25
a. Going with Option 1 would cover all your needs. However if you do want more spesific with timers and numbers on your hots for players you prob want a plugin or an extra hot moniter modd for that. Grid shows hots, but not timers on them.
b. Grid, Healbot and Xperl have the same functions. They show the same info they just do it in diffrent ways. You don't shouldent need more then one.
In my opinon Grid is the best one but also the hardest one to setup i defently recomend this one, not all like grid tho so you should just go with witch modd that works best for you. Everywon have diffrent tasts.
c. Must have addons, hum. The must have addon for a healer is prob just a raid monitor modd like Grid/healbot. As long as you have that you can manage, then ofc there are alot of other modds that can help you out here and there with diffrant tasks, like PowerAuras or HoT moniter modds and sutch but i don't se those as must haves.
I'm sure your fellow druid friends can help you out with more class spesific modds.
Edit: Here on this movie you can se how i have my grid setup, it's abit fuzzy so you can't fully se it all but it'll give you a rough idea on grid at least. What you can tell out is, when a Red square aprear in the left bottom corner of a players "box" that meens he got aggro. When a green box apear in the upper left corner that meens that a heal is incoming on him, by me or any other healer. You can set up for what ever you like for all 4 corners, to show aggro, inc heals. afk, active hots and so on.
As i have it setup the boxes do not show numbers on how mutch health they'v lost untill they are under 60% in health, so mostly you just se the bars in the boxes move up and down. This can however be set to just how you want it, showing numbers all the times or not showing at all. Showing at 60% worked good for me.
One of the best settings is that the boxes of players fade out when they are out of range, making it easy and fast to spot who you can and can not heal.
http://vimeo.com/2205107
Ps. And yes, i took this opportunity to promote my movie again
A man is but the product of his thoughts.
What he thinks, he becomes.
@ Mon, 10/11/2008 - 15:57
One thing ive noticed with the new pit bull unit frames is that it shows how much your heal will heal your target for as you are casting it (doesnt count crits) but then again its not much use for HoTs
We are all puppets, I'm just the puppet who can see the strings..
"Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted." - John Lennon
@ Mon, 10/11/2008 - 16:05
That is not pitbull Alencia, that is a healing library included in several mods like pitbull / grid / oUF.
It works, as long as the caster has the same library so that they can communicate.
It's very usefull as you can see if you have an incoming heal on you.
Shynaski: "I'm very disapointed with paladins as well, mainly because of what DKs can do."
@ Mon, 10/11/2008 - 16:14
A healer needs tons of information to properly play. They key however is to filter the info so that you don't get too much crap info you have no use for that just clutters your screen, but not go too far so that you miss important things.
For raid frames I strongly recommend a complete XPerl. Grid is too unclear for my taste, it doesn't show debuffs in a specific way just says someone has a debuff which isn't enough for me. It's also very confusing, doesn't track how much HoTs ppl carry, or
Here's a screen of my UI which shows how XPerl raid frames will look on your screen. The raid frames is the stuff above my chatbox.
Xperl has alot of options to show which debuffs persons have, also shows boss specific skills like dark barrage and such very clearly. You can easy set it up to fade players out of range or who don't require heals, has options to show raid pets (not on my UI) etc. It's a very strongly recommended addon imo and not too hard to set-up. One raid should be enough to figure out all it has to offer and how you want the information shown.
Also WitchHunt is strongly recommended as it shows the spells boss are gonna cast and since you never have the bosses targetted you normal UI isn't enough.
Scrolling Combat Text to replace the regular blizzard crappy combat text
I also recommend ArcHUD to keep easy track of mana and health (something you tend to forget when ehaling: it's those circles around my char, you never really miss your own status then
But I realsie this isn't something everyone likes to use.
Something to track your HoTs is probably not a bad idea either, especially as a druid. Can't recommend anything though, I don't use such a mod.
@ Mon, 10/11/2008 - 16:41
I personally use Healbot for both my main healing tool and grids u can set it up to show icons for your hots and colour changes for debuffs that u can cure, this eliminates to the need of 2 sets of grids on your screen will try to show u my screen whn i get back home and uploade it
Live Long Die well
@ Tue, 11/11/2008 - 12:41
Edit: Here on this movie you can se how i have my grid setup, it's abit fuzzy so you can't fully se it all but it'll give you a rough idea on grid at least. What you can tell out is, when a Red square aprear in the left bottom corner of a players "box" that meens he got aggro. When a green box apear in the upper left corner that meens that a heal is incoming on him, by me or any other healer. You can set up for what ever you like for all 4 corners, to show aggro, inc heals. afk, active hots and so on.
As i have it setup the boxes do not show numbers on how mutch health they'v lost untill they are under 60% in health, so mostly you just se the bars in the boxes move up and down. This can however be set to just how you want it, showing numbers all the times or not showing at all. Showing at 60% worked good for me.
One of the best settings is that the boxes of players fade out when they are out of range, making it easy and fast to spot who you can and can not heal.
In my continuous war against Ompi and Grid
I need to say XPerl can do all that as well !!!!
- You can set health bars to fade (different lvl of fade) if people are out of range, if they do not need dispels, if their health doesn't pass a certain treshhold (for example fade is less then 20 % HP lost) or all of the above. You can connect the out-of-heal-range to a spell you have in you spellbook.
- Debuffs color the boxes making it very obvious what debuff is on players: blue is magic green is poison, etc
- The edges of the boxes can be set to give color coded info too: red edge means aggro, purple edge is PW Shield debuff,
- It's possible to show the actual buffs and debuff by icons on the health bars so you know what they are affected with, this number is limited to 4 though (not that much room after all)
- Incoming heals can also be set up but I would actually recommend not using it, it's a dangerous tool.
- Unlike Grid : the XPerl health bars can be split up and moved anywhere on the screen (where in grid they stick together)
Anyways Death to Grid !!! All hail XPerl
(/hug Ompi)
@ Tue, 11/11/2008 - 15:19
Tbh i've used both xperl full version and grid - they can both display and do pretty much the same ^^, (e.g. debuffs/curses/graying out for out of range/setting new aura's/only showing debuffs that you can cleanse or cure etc etc). The only thing i have found different is that Xperl updates damage taken a tiny bit quicker than Grid. I dont think that the Grid aditional addons for healing are particularly useful, because as standard Grid displays how much a person will be healed by and displays it in that person's frame.
It's all down to personal preference in the end. I use Xperl as my main display frames (except raid frames) (although i really like Agunit frames - but they dont have a full workable release out yet ./cry), then i use Grid for raid display. Before i used Grid i used the Xperl raid frames, but like Stell said it's how you sift the relevant information not how you got that information
Also, as a side note - i found Pitbull very config intensive (in a time consuming kind of way), compared to Xperl/agunitframes - but on the plus side pitbull is a very impressive interface.
@ Tue, 11/11/2008 - 16:04
In my continuous war against Ompi and Grid
- You can set health bars to fade (different lvl of fade) if people are out of range, if they do not need dispels, if their health doesn't pass a certain treshhold (for example fade is less then 20 % HP lost) or all of the above. You can connect the out-of-heal-range to a spell you have in you spellbook.
- Debuffs color the boxes making it very obvious what debuff is on players: blue is magic green is poison, etc
- The edges of the boxes can be set to give color coded info too: red edge means aggro, purple edge is PW Shield debuff,
- It's possible to show the actual buffs and debuff by icons on the health bars so you know what they are affected with, this number is limited to 4 though (not that much room after all)
- Incoming heals can also be set up but I would actually recommend not using it, it's a dangerous tool.
- Unlike Grid : the XPerl health bars can be split up and moved anywhere on the screen (where in grid they stick together)
Anyways Death to Grid !!! All hail XPerl
(/hug Ompi)
Haha, that's just what i said that from the start
. All 3 modds Grid, Xperl and healbot have the exakt same function and show the exakt same info. They just do it in diffrent ways, It's not about witch modd that's best here it's about what modd the player in question likes the most.
No point in linking up stuff that you think xperl can do witch grid can not. Cause it can
guessing it's the same for the other 2 modds aswell.
Obviously i think grid rules and all others raid frame modds should burn in hell!!
and you feel just the opposite, that shows that both modds are realy good tbh, so it's just down to each player to take the modd you like the most, what modd that works for you.
A man is but the product of his thoughts.
What he thinks, he becomes.
@ Tue, 11/11/2008 - 16:58
Thank you very much for all the info.
I think I will stick with grid for the time being (with apologies to Stellvia) not because I think it is necessarily better, but because I am already somewhat used to it. However, once the expansion madness is over, I do plan to test xperl as well.
I did try a HUD (yet again); this time one called UnderHood. It is very flexible, with a reasonable default setup and, of couse, it would take about 3 days to configure it the way I want. Not now. ;P
I will add a screenshot in a bit.
::42::