Curse

Welcome to another World of Warcraft add-on spotlight! In this issue we are covering KillFeed, by lifetapt. 

The Addon

Are you a battleground fan? Do your feel your kills are not enough glorified? Want to know who was the bastard that killed you? Miss those realtime kill alerts from your favorite shooter, LoL or even GuildWars?

Then we know the solution: you should try KillFeed, by lifetapt. 

This addon does everything you would expect from an FPS kill count: when someone dies in an arena or battleground, a kill notification will appear, allowing you to quickly determine who was killed by who and with what spell or ability. In addition to the attacker and victim's names, both of their class icons are displayed as well as the icon of the ability responsible for the kill. 

Beyond Battlegrounds

But is KillFeed only usable in battlegrounds? Not at all! While originally intended for PvP, the addon can be used both for PvE and PvP situations. For that purpose, the addon can be configured to display notifications for players who die from NPCs or environmental damage, or even for killing blows against NPCs. Know who made that last shot at the raid boss!

The only limitation of KillFeed is that it has a "range limit": as it relies on the combat log for identifying kill blows, it can only display deaths that the log registers. Thankfully, the combat log has a range enough to cover entire battlegrounds, and of 200 yards in dungeons and the open world. This should prove to be more than enough on every situation.

Interview

We also had the opportunity to have a chat with the add-on's author, lifetapt:

Which is your favorite battleground?

Warsong Gulch and Eye of the Storm have always been my favorites. Provided the matchup is reasonably balanced, WSG and EotS can be really great at producing tense-but-fun matches with plenty of opportunity for teamwork, even in random pugs.

Have you ever came across any specially funny kill feed?

 A while back I was healing BGs on my level 62 Disc priest. At that level Power Word:Shield's scaling is completely broken, absorbing almost 9k when your health pool is 5-6k. Caught in a kidney shot and nearly dead save for my bubble, the two low-health rogues who wouldn't leave me alone managed to break the shield and kill me... only to kill themselves thanks to Reflective Shield. They both landed big crits at  the same time, and all three of us to dropped dead in a heap. I was confused as hell at first, but after looking at KillFeed I was laughing for a few minutes straight afterwards!

Which FPS game were you playing when you first had the idea for KillFeed?

Guild Wars 2, actually. I was playing in the Beta Weekend and after it was over, I ported both its kill feed and the Death Breakdown feature that shows what abilities you were damaged by when you die (which is mostly finished but I have yet to release).

How long did it take to finish the first working version?

I had it functionally working after a single night, since it's not a particularly complex addon. Took a few more days to polish it up, fix a few bugs and add a config UI.

How was the experience of working with the World of Warcraft UI?

 I've been playing with the WoW mod API since late TBC, and I really enjoy working with both the API and the Lua language. In fact, I truly feel that the ability to mod the UI has played a huge part in why I continue to come back to WoW after all these years, because it's just flat out fun to tinker with. It seems that very few new MMOs are providing an addon API, which I find to be a shame, because modding really adds on (sorry) to the longevity of a game for me.

What stage of development process did you enjoy most?

Probably the point at which I stopped testing on Stormwind Rats and started killing stuff in real battlegrounds, simply because it was fun to see actual data start showing up in the feed. This included things I hadn't initially accounted for like mages killing themselves with Cauterize.

Poor mages… What are you current plans for KillFeed?

I'd definitely like to add more ways to change the appearance. Additionally, I may add more strategically pertinent information to kill lines, such as where an ally died (Stables, Blood Elf Tower, Horde Flag Room, etc) or the number of attackers involved.

Besides your own creations, which mods do you find dependable for your PvP duties?

 I play BGs almost exclusively, so BattlegroundTargets is fantastic for getting a quick at-a-glance look at what we're up against. LoseControl is awesome, I still use it even after Blizzard added a similar feature in 5.2. ElvUI's raid frames strike a perfect balance between having plenty of useful information for healing while being very easy to set up and visually appealing. And OmniCC, because the cooldown "pie" widget in the default UI is terrible and hard for me to see!

We come to the end of the interview. Any shout-outs?

Thanks for taking the time to spotlight my little addon!

No, thank you for answering our questions and developing KillFeed!