Monday (26 Apr) - Killing and Healing Stuff

Monday (26 Apr) - Killing and Healing Stuff

Wild is going to have some interesting decisions to make this week. At long last, the MM guild is starting up the Wed/Thurs ICC ten man again. The raid leader, Bd, posted the new schedule, with the raid kickoff at 6:45pm. Wild got an invite. Wild signed up for the FS 25 man ICC for Tuesday, which will be a fresh run. Sign ups are surprisingly light so far (20 signed up) so perhaps Wild will actually get an invite.

The conflict, though, is on Wednesday. Generally Wild is very much needed on Wednesdays for the ICC 25 progression run. Without Wild there are only three healers currently signed up. I decided to hedge my bets and signed up for both Wednesday raids as "Tentative." If Wild is not needed for the ICC 25, then I'll run the 10 man. If the 25 man has trouble filling and it looks like it might not happen, then Wild can also switch to the 10 man as it starts 45 minutes later than the 25 man. Of course, not committing to the 10 man might mean that it fills without Wild, but that would be ok. We'll see how it plays out.

It was an otherwise quiet weekend, with the exception of the For The Horde! raid, which has already been posted. The rest of this is a long, technical discussion of healing addon comparisons that I had to wade through to see if there were better healing tools I could be using. It had been awhile since I looked at the alternatives, plus with Philly now level 80 I wanted to make sure she had all the right healing tools as well.

Once upon a time Wild was the only level 80. He had a popular raid frame addon called CTRA and used a popular healer addon, the name of which I've long forgotten (and which no longer exists). In those early days addons came and went; authors got bored and stopped updating them, and new authors came out with new addons. Changing a raid frame or a healer addon was a big deal. Learning how it worked, figuring out the settings, and then testing the results could take weeks of fiddling - assuming the addon even worked like it was supposed to. Wild held on grimly to a favored addon even after it was abandoned by the author, until it was so broke he had no choice but to go through the process of finding and learning a new one.

Wild thought he had settled the issue of raid frames and healer addons. Wild has been using xperl for his raid frames AND for healing for many months. It works well enough and it's reliable. The author keeps it updated and fixes whatever minor bugs crop up, although it's strictly maintenance. There are no efforts to improve it or add new features. It's not broken, though, so why would Wild be looking at alternatives?

Wild's guild, trying to squeeze the best out of the raid, has been reviewing user interfaces and spell strategies and rotations for healers. One deficiency in Wild's addons has come out of that which Wild would like to correct and improve on, one that apparently xperl can't provide.

Druid healers have a lot of heal over time (HoT) spells, more than any other class of healer. Xperl can show Wild how many HoTs are on the target from all healers, and can show how many of Wild's own HoTs are on a target. What it can't do is tell Wild what specific HoT it is. That didn't use to be a problem. Wild has another addon called Dotimer that displays all of Wild's Hots on every target in a separate display from xperl. Back when Wild rarely had more than four or five raiders with his Hots on them, it was not a problem to glance at the Dotimer display to see who had what HoTs. In this new frenetic world of raiding, Wild's HoTs could be ticking on a dozen raiders at a time, and the Dotimer info becomes overwhelming and useless to Wild. I need a better way.

Doing some research, the two most popular addons which can do what I want are Healbot and Grid.

Grid is the swiss army knife of raid frames addons. It can do absolutely anything, I kid you not. It has more options and settings than the cockpit of a fighter jet. Which is part of it's problem. It's so complex even experts at getting it to do what they want have trouble explaining how they got there. Documentation is nil, and like most addons you just have to tinker with it until it sort of does what you want. What's even worse for me is that it relies heavily on color in it's crowded displays, and anything past a few very loud, primary colors simply won't work for my color deficient eyes. It's so powerful that I've attempted to use it twice, abandoning it both times, but I find myself thinking I'll try it a third time.

But first, I decided to give healbot a try. In addition to doing everything that xperl does, it does two additional things that I want. It can display what Hots are active on a target, which was the main thing I was looking for. It also does one more thing that is strictly cosmetic, but which I would really like to have. Healbot can hide the party interface, even when not in a raid. One of the most irritating things about xperl and many other UIs with raid frames is that when you are not in a raid, you are stuck with a set of party frames (for 5 mans) that looks completely different from your raid frames. With healbot both the look and feel of the UI is the same for both party and raid. I like that.

For the past three days I have been using Philly as my guinea pig to determine if healbot can do the job.

Asthetically, I hate the way it looks. From a screen space perspective, it is very inefficient and klutzy, wasting a lot of real estate. I got past a lot of that through interminable tinkering, but some things . . . well, here's one example. Healbot displays the icon of active Hots, just like I need it to. It will also show remaining time until it expires, also a good thing. There is even a setting where I can choose where in the raid frame box the icons will appear. Perfect! Except it's not even close to perfect. If the icons are placed inside the box, it hides the heal bar, which is the most important thing I'm looking at. When selecting a location outside of the box, healbot reserves a whole gob of space, making the box a lot larger than I want it be. The best location, with the least waste, is outside and below the box. That would work for me, except that the placement is off center, with half the icon inside the box covering up the mana bar. Not a showstopper, but it leaves half of the space below the box unused but reserved. Again, cluttered, hard to decipher, and wasteful of screen space.

Another issue that may really start to drive me nuts is that healbot does not support profiles. Profiles are used to save a configuration, which can be used not only by the original toon, but other toons as well. Assuming I use healbot, I would have to set it up manually for each of my healer toons, and if I change something, I'll have to go to each toon and make each change. If there is some problem or update and I have to re-install, I might have to re-set up everything again from scratch. Even worse, I can't set up separate configurations for say, pvp healing vs raid healing. I'd have to manually set it up each time. Profiles can save me from a lot of that effort, but healbot doesn't have it.

I do like things about healbot. Not needing a separate party frame is a big plus. It also has a click healing feature. Wild is a mouseover healer, not a click healer, but in testing with Philly it was pretty convenient (in pvp primarily) to be able to left-click a raider to Shield him, and right-click to cast a Penance spell on him. Nifty and quick. It does show healing and mana bars in a usable way. Not as flexible as xperl with that, but acceptable.

Bottom line is that to use healbot I would have to give up more screen space than what xperl uses now, and I would have to train my eyes to recognize small icons that crowd and clutter up the heal bar. I'm just not sure if I want to go through all this, but I'm going to push Philly into some battlegrounds to see if I can learn to like it. I really want to be able to see those HoTs.

Addendum: Philly tried out Healbot, and was left pretty frustrated with it. Part of it is just learning something new. However, I did find one other irritating issue. Healbot frames are intended to be clicked on to cast heals. However, when Philly (or Wild for that matter) are in DPS spec (shadow or moonkin, respectively) I want to be able to click on them for targeting purposes. But I can't, because clicking them casts heals. I can turn that off, but that means remembering to do that every time I switch specs. I haven't totally given up on healbot, but . . .

Wild did get into a VoA 25 raid Monday night. Monday being the last night before the reset, it took awhile to find enough raiders that hadn't already done VoA this week. While we were waiting to get the raid filled I got a whisper from my nephew. I hadn't seen him in game in a very long time, and didn't think he played anymore. He still plays regularly, though, but mostly on the alliance side. We got caught up on family news and then he signed off. He lives back east so our time zones don't match up too well.

Our first target in VoA, of course, was Toravon. Toravon drops the T10 trousers and gloves. Wild has the trousers, so the only reasons to do VoA was for the gloves and the badges. We began the fight, and it was immediately apparent that our makeshift raid was a pretty ragged bunch. Toravon does a lot of raid damage, spawns adds that have to be killed quickly, and continues to increase his level of damage the longer he is alive. If the DPS is strong, he's not a hard boss to kill. Our DPS wavered, and Wild found himself throwing out the heals as fast as he could. We had five healers, three of us druids. The other druids had gear equal to or better than Wild's. One of the druids died three quarters of the way into the fight, and more raiders started dying as Toravon's damage ratcheted up.

We lost a third of the raid, and came close to losing him, but a last push by the remaining DPS brought him down. The loot was plate and mail, so no gloves for Wild. However, Wild broke the 5k mark in healing, finishing first with 5236 hps. A priest came in second with about 4900 hps. Of course a lot of things had to go right to put up a number like that, but it was still a nice confidence builder for Wild after all the issues with the many Putricide fights.