Healing School with Atherial

Healer Mods
An interesting situation arose whilst playin the other night which I'd like to address. Taelana approached me to try out a Healer mod which was designed to help keep the healers in a group/raid from "double-healin" players, thereby wasting precious mana and possibly losin lives in-game.

If anyone has used a particular addon/mod for healers or have been in a group that used one which was particularly useful/helpful, I would appreciate knowing about it to test for myself and possibly other healers that will be in our Guild. Pretty much anything that can make a healer's job easier makes the groups job easier.

Healer Assist 1.1
This addon offers the healers of a group/raid a new window which displays all those who are performing the healin duties, the spell they are casting and their target for the spell. Now, the spells bein cast an' the target of said spells only show *as the spell is bein cast* which means if a healer has no spell goin, nothin shows fer them.

PROS:
Allows healers to see who has a heal on the go fer a particular meat-shield so ye can swap out to another victim... erm, target.

CONS:
I dunno fer sure, but may not abort a spell if one is already bein performed on the same target as another healer. If not, this is still a potential problem meanin the healers need to read quick who their target is and any other healers' targets are in the list.

This mod was tested by both meself and Taelana to guage its effectiveness an' efficiency. We didna exhaust ourselves but perhaps later on we may very well do more thorough runs wit it. What we did find out was that for this particular addon to work "properly" (from what we could tell) each healer needs to have the same mod installed for the correct info to be shared/displayed.

I'll update this as time goes on and more options are explored.

-Foddermike

UPDATE

Alright, I like the look/feel of Healers Assist v1.1 addon. Not too obtrusive, just adds a window listing all the healers and displays their target once a spell is cast. The one drawback I've found through testing it is that when two healers have the same target, if one is already casting and the other starts it allows both spells to go off, and in my opinion that is a waste of mana.

I have started looking into the area of mod'ing the addon to first check the other healers listed for a target same as yours, and if one is found, to cancel your spell. I don't know how long it will take to get this to work, but if/when I get it, I will make this available for all healers in the Guild. I see this as being a very valuable tool for going through raids/instances where multiple healers are involved.

-Foddermike

UPDATE

Alrighty, version 2.0 of WoW is on everyone's systems and the new addons/mods are out/coming out. THe Healer's Assist addon I mentioned has the same features as before, except from what I can tell you can no longer click in the new window to select your targets. To me this is a setback as it was easy to tell who needed healing and to get to them right away. Unless this function returns, I don't see this being very useful in full raid groups as your screen will be cluttered with too many windows open and you'll never see that mob heading your way.

Unless you can select those characters listed in the "Emergency" section of the Healer's Assist window, it's just one more thing to clutter yer screen up.

I'll keep this updated.

-Foddermike

Well, since me last posting in here, I have done a li'l searching and found that using the UI mod "X-Perl" will cover pretty much everything ye need in regards to tracking party/raid members health and buffliness. It has a great many features which provide all the info a person could need, and then some! The raid windows are still bein worked on by meself (haven't fully figured them all out, but I'm getting there) and I'll update that as soon as I get it working good.

Just a short update this time. I'll be a mite more wordier next one *winks*

-Foddermike

Well, t'is been a while since me last posting. Since that time I've gone through and tried out various mods fer healin, and almost always come back to the same ting: keep yer eye on the life totals and watch yer mana, ye can't get much better than that.

As fer mods used to aid in healin, I can't say I'm using any of them anymore. HEalerAssist doesn't do anything more that alert the healer to another's current state of health, which X-Perl Unit Frames does already, and nicely I might add.

Instead, In the coming while (can't say how long it might take me, days or weeks or otherwise) I'll be looking into putting up some Healer specific macros, ones that will allow for instant or near-instant casting of spells, using of items, and so forth. There are a great many things you can do with the macro feature so why not use it? Hey, if you can do with a macro instead of a mod, why not? it's already built in and won't eat up yer available memory. I have a list of commands to read through so give me some time and let's see what I can come up with.

Blessins O' Lathander!

Greetins an' Salutations me flock! Well, t'is been another while since me last update, but since that time I have been looking into various methods of improvin the effectiveness of healin for our runs. While me efforts have not been entirely exhaustive, I have looked at a few things and come up with some info for those of us that bear the mantle of HEALER:

X-PERL UNIT FRAMES
Many in our congrega... erm, Guild, use X-Perl Unit Frames as their interface mod of choice, to which I also subscribe. There are others, like Titan Panel and Ace too (I believe) but for this section I'll talk about X-Perl.

X-Perl has a vast many options which can be enabled/disabled to aid the healer in keeping a close eye on not only the state of the raid's health but also tracking buffs, debuffs, who is in range of spells and so on.

PARTY WINDOW: During a raid, this can be set to automatically disapear giving back a lot of space on-screen for those that feel the need to run other add-ons.

RAID BARS: Through some testing, I've found that having these turn on, with the above mentioned party windows off, replaces the need for add-ons such as "Grid" or "HealBot" where the raid group is displayed as a spread. This not only keeps mem/CPU usage low but displays as much info as needed (buffs, debuffs, etc) from X-Perl.

HEALER MODE: Some like this option, I myself haven't tried it but from the description all it does is reverse the way the health bars are displayed; increasing for damage instead of dropping for loss of health. this one falls under perrsonal preference for use, as I like to see the loss to indicate the severity of one's situation as opposed to a growing damage bar.

FADING: I'll have to check in-game, but this option will fade out a raid member's window when they are outside the range of the reference spell. This is a must I feel as it is an instant indicator as to if you can actually cast your heal on your target without having to cast and then find out they're out of range. Personal preference allows you to set how much fade happens, from almost nothing to completely gone from the screen.

FAT HEALTH BARS: After scaling down my UI interface to open up the viewing area, I found I had to turn this option on so I could better read the health bars of me raiders. Not a bad thing anyhow as this is yer focus so standing out is a gooder.

** BONUS **
A side bonus from using X-Perl Unit Frames in a raid with the raid bars turned on, when the battle's over and the dead need to be raised, you can see if someone is already targeting a corpse an' casting; this helps rez'ers bring everyone back as quickly as possible and returned to a fighting state sooner.

Now, this listing isn't complete, I'll have to make some amendments to it once I get back in-game and take some notes, but otherwise it's a good start for those using X-Perl Unit Frames. For those of you using other UI mods like Titan Panel or others, perhaps I"ll look into tryin them out and seein what options they have for setting, then put up a "guide" for them.

Until next time, keep yer stick on the ice, an if the women don' find ye handsome they should at least find ye handy

Sincerely,

no one cares!







just kidding, lets get this topic started. I am interested in the opinions this thead can generate.