Amira's Addon Spotlight
As part of a new segment we decided to bring you a weekly Addon Spotlight aimed at highlighting the uses and features of Addons you might not have used or heard about before. This week we're going to spotlight addons that are really useful for healers. All of these addons are available on Curse.com and can be downloaded via the Curse Client.
I've been healing in World of Warcraft for about four years, primarily as a holy priest. During that time I've tried out tons of different addons in order to help me become a better healer, Today I thought I'd showcase what I feel are the three most useful addons for healers.
Every serious healer absolutely needs some kind of unit frames and from Healbot to X-Perl, there are many different options to choose. However, I have personally had the best time healing with grid.
Grid
Created by Maia and maintained by Pastamancer and Phanx, grid is an addon that creates customizable unit frames. I find it to be the best option for healers because it...
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Is simple and easy to setup.
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Takes up very little screen real estate.
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Can be setup to show only the most important information.
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Can save profiles for different characters,
Overall, Grid is a standard, customizable unit frame that does all of the things good unit frames should. It's easily moved around your UI and everything from its bar colors to its size can be changed from a menu. However, I find that Grid's most useful element for healers is its ability to show tiny “status indicators” on health bars.
Status indicators are a kind of visual display of a status effect you can
set to appear on your health bars. For example, as a holy priest,
I've set my grid to display a bright green rectangle around any unit
that I've cast renew on. This is very useful for a fight with major
AoE healing, so I can keep track of who has a renew and who doesn't
when I'm HoTing the raid in between my circle of healing and prayer
of mending cooldowns. You can set most healing spells to show up with
an indicator of your choice in this way. You can download Grid here! Healers
also need to be able to cleanse afflictions like disease, magic,
curses, and poison very quickly, so the natural next choice for a
must have addon for healers is good old Decursive. Decursive Created
by Quu and rewritten by Archarodim, Decursive helps healers by... Displaying
curable afflictions, tailored to your class' ability. Working
as intended right from the box. Taking
up very little screen real estate. Showing
only the most important information. Basically,
Decursive comes in the form of tiny, movable squares on your UI.
These squares light up in colors (which you can customize) when a
raid or party member becomes afflicted with an ailment you are able
to dispel. To dispel the ailment, all you have to do is click on
the square to cure the affliction.
Decursive
is a very simple, yet affective addon that I'd definitely recommend
to all healers. You can download decursive here! Last but not least, I think another great addon for
healers is MikScrollingBattleText. It's not just for number happy
DPS, I swear! MikScrollingBattleText Created
by Miklord, MSBT is useful for healers because it... Shows
when important cooldowns are up. Can
be placed in a central location on your screen. Shows
the amount you heal for as well as critical heals. Highly
customizable. MSBT
is generally known as an addon mostly useful for DPS because of how
it shows when abilities on cooldown are available for use, but
healers usually have plenty of cooldowns to manage themselves! MSBT
tells me when things like prayer of mending and circle of healing are
ready to be used in a simple and easy way. You
can very easily set up MSBT to show the abilities that are important
to you, in a way that you'll quickly notice. You can change the type
of font your events use and you can have the ability's icon show up
next to its name as it's scrolling. You can download MSBT here! There
are countless addons that healers will find useful, but I think that
these are probably the three most useful addons for healers.
Comments
What would have been nice is to have healing specific addons highlighted instead of generic addons talked about with a potential healing twist.
Archarodim didn't create the original Decursive; Quu did. Archarodim rewrote Decursive in BC or something like that after Quu stopped playing.
Your introduction says ".. aimed at highlighting the uses and features of Addons you might not have used or heard about before.", but Grid, Decursive and MSBT are _hardly_ unheard of.
Also, you're calling these addons "essential" for healers, but seriously; MSBT is NOT essential. Neither is Decursive, since you can get the same functionality by configuring Grid properly.
And Grid is something all raiders should consider, although I agree that a Grid-like addon is useful for healers.
So that's 3 mistakes;
1. You didn't heed the article declaration, talking about addons that people already know
2. You wrongly credited at least 2 of the addons
3. You wrote an article for "essential healing" addons and included not a single addon that is essential to healing, just generic addons.
I know it's easy to dish out criticism, but you have to face the facts here. Plan your article better next time, _before_ you start writing it.
There are a few other things... Decursive has nothing to do with healing - it's all about clearing debuffs. Sure, getting rid of a curse that limits healing is necessary, but... Mages decurse. Also, any raid frame (even Grid) will show when someone has a debuff that can be removed. Maybe because I'm a mage, but... I always thought of Decursive as more of a utility addon than a healer addon.
And you have your facts wrong about the "creators" of Grid and Decursive. Are you aware of who the actual creators are, or did you just pull the current author names from the download pages?
Throughout the article, I mentioned that these are just my personal thoughts. These are the addons me and my other healer friends use a lot when we heal, even if they may be popular or generic and useful to other types of players.
What healing specific addons do you guys use?
So far so good! :D
As for healing specific, how about SmartRes2 -- self plug, I know, but you wanted lesser known addons.
A volunteer Curse Moderator!
I did play WoW on Llane in Knights of the Storm, Alliance (Myrroddin, Jelia, BadAsh, Vanhoeffen) but now play Rift: Planes of Telaria on Keenblade, Myth, Defiant (Lorandii)
SmartRes is good as well. :D
I will definitely look into SmartRes, thanks a lot guys :D Great conversation!
I realize I'm gonna get flamed at a lot for this post but ... I'm wondering, why go for Grid+Clique+Decursive and not Healbot ?
Would also like to ask if for the next addon spotlight we could have a link to the previous one(s).
I'm doing everything form HealBot : follow de-buff, buff (those I can managed), and I use it also to de-curse people.
The bigger difficulty with HealBot is to configure it to limit the place it used on screen, otherwise by default, it take too much place on screen.
I used also BarTender. My healbot add-on is configured to used less than a quarter of my screen, and around it, I put 2 bar (with bartender) where I put cool down icons, or cast that I don't want to affect on my mouse with heal bot (like power infuse eg).
In this way, I can follow all raid life, de-buff, and heal everybody into the raid who need it, knowing very quickly which cool down is up or not. I don't use de-cursive at all.
We also need to keep in mind that with healing add-on, you need to reserved space for raid add-on, like DBM or Raid watch2 (I select this one personally).
At the end, all add-on mentioned before are good, but you need to keep in mind that it is better to select and add-on which is well maintained. It is very difficult once you have made your choice to change add-on, so, select one with good maintainer is very important.