Introducing BobsToolbox: WoW AddOn for Priest

I am a Software Engineer and I play World of Warcraft (WoW) so the logical conclusion would be for me to create an addon! I will explain what an addon is just in case you’re not sure. An addon is a plug-in to WoW that allows you to modify certain aspects of the game. Most addons are for modifying the players GUI. It allows the game to be tailored specifically for your type or class of player.

[edit date=”06/19/09”]

My addon (BobsToolbox) is tailored specifically for priest but is being edited to support for druids. I am really liking leveling my druid.

[/edit]

Let me introduce you to BobsToolbox with a screenshot of how it looks.

Oh well let me outline some things for you… The default state of BobsToolbox will not obstruct your view of the World of Warcraft. After all isn’t that why we are here to see the content of the game?

That’s a lot of information within your center viewing area. With the help of another couple (approx. 58) other addons my WoW experience is so much better. Playing WoW with addons allows for better feedback during all different areas of WoW like fights, quest, raids, battlegrounds, etc. allowing you to perform your class feature more efficiently. Lets take a looks at the two specific tools in BobsToolbox. They are the Target Tool that consist of the player, target, vehicle/pet, and target of target information. This tool allows for monitoring of all the major health and mana information for al the important units. The Click Heal tool allows for the monitoring of all your raid or party members. You can monitor each units health and if the unit has a disease or magic debuff that you can remove. You can also monitor all the HOTs (heal over time), shields and other important buffs.

BobsToolbox using the LibHealComm and LibResComm libraries that allow it to capture other player’s heals and resurrections. BobsToolbox will display all other healer’s incoming heals on the targeted unit’s health bar. You will also be notified in the chat window about who is resurrecting who. I will be adding this to the unit health bar in a future release.

 

Target Tool:

Lets take a closer look at the target tool. Now you couldn’t see the player’s health or mana bars in the original screenshot due to an option turned on that says “Hide bars @ 100%”. This allows the player’s health and mana bars to disappear when they are full. There is no need to have that information on the screen when it’s irrelevant. If you choose you can turn that feature off and the players bars will always be displayed. If you target any unit then the player’s bars will be shown with your target’s bars. Here is a screenshot of the player’s bars when not at 100%.

The bars are not at 100% so they appear on the screen letting you know that your health and/or mana needs to be monitored and/or refilled. You can see the player’s health is on the left with a green color and the mana bar on the right with a blue color. The mana bar will change color depending on the class. A rogue for instance will have a tan colored bar since rogues use energy and not mana. Now let’s target another unit and see what the target’s bars look like.

You can see the target’s health bar, mana bar, name, level, class, guild information, buffs, debuffs and missing buffs from the player. The targets health is the green bar on the far left and the target’s mana bar is on the far right. The target’s name, level, class, and guild information is in the center below the player’s character. The class text will be colored based on the class. The player’s name will also be colored green for friendly and red for hostile. The target’s guild information will always be displayed in a tan color. The target’s buffs are listed on the left of the target’s name. The target’s debuffs are listed on the right of the target’s name. The target’s missing buffs from you are shown above the health bars on the left. This indicated that you need to buff the target with your special buffs.

If you notice that this target doesn’t have your buffs but the target’s missing buffs icons are not shown in the upper left above the health bars. It’s because the unit is not friendly with you. I know that I stated earlier that the target’s name would be red if they were hostile but you have to remember that I was in Dalaran when I took the screenshots so everyone is friendly. :)

Ignore the Click Heal tool for a moment and lets focus on the vehicle / pet bars. You will notice here that the vehicle / pet bars are always shown even if they are at 100%. Below is a picture when the vehicle has taken some damage.

And in case you were wondering what happened next… Yep I died.

 

Click Heal Tool:

The Click Heal tool will allow you to monitor your whole raid or party. The Click Heal tool will display each member with a health bar that will show current health, incoming heals, debuffs, and certain buffs. Lets take a look it the tool in action in a battle ground.

As you can see the raid members are all display in the Click Heal tool area. This area can be configure for group sort or row sort. Group sort will sort the health bars by groups of 5. The rows sort will sort the unit by rows of the configured value. Below is a picture of the Click Heal tool configure with row sort. I like this view if I decide to show the heal bars when running as a shadow priest.

When running shadow I don’t need the bars as close to my character. Honestly I don’t pay that much attention to them when I’m running as shadow. Ok so the Click Heal tool monitors the raid but what else? Let’s say your in a raid and you have the tank targeted but some DPS that’s standing in the “death cloud” needs a heal. You don’t want to lose focus on the tank but you need to pop off a heal. No problem just click the units name and boom you just cast the specified heal on that DPS unit that couldn’t figure out that they are supposed to move out of the death cloud. We should have just let him die but we are holy so. The Click Heal tool can be configured to heal base on left, middle, right, button 4 and button 5 of the mouse. You also can configure all the combinations of alt, ctrl, and shift clicks. Yes that is 20 different combinations of spells you can configure for each unit. All the raid buttons share the same configuration so if left click is your “flash heal” then a left click on any button will cast the “flash heal” spell. The next feature of Click Heal to cover is the range check and disease/magic monitoring.

 

Lets take a look at the picture above. All units that are out of range of your spells will be dimmed out. You can see that Draast is now in range due to the fact that his health bar is no longer dim. We can also see that he is in trouble. His bar is blue so that tells us that he has a magic debuff that can be remove by the player. We have the “dispel magic” spell configured for Ctrl-Button 4. Lets cleanse him before he dies!

Ok he’s no longer has the debuff. Ok so it he wasn’t about to die but you just helped a fellow raid member out of a debuff that you probable would have never know about. It’s so easy to see when your raid member could benefit from you remove a debuff since their health bar will turn blue for magic and purple for a disease.

See what I get for helping. Actually I died because I have no PVP gear on so I’m holy spec with my healing gear on. It wouldn’t be the fact that I completely suck at PVP. Just wanted to make sure that was clear. Lets take a look at the monitoring of certain buffs on the units health bar. You can see on the first column and 4th button that the unit has a Prayer of Mending. This Prayer of Mending will bounce around the raid bars each time it gets triggered. It’s actually really fun to watch. You can also see that the top right unit bar has a renew buff. Each bar will monitor the following buffs: Renew, Prayer of Mending, Power Word: Shield, Soulstone Resurrection and Abolish Disease.

You probable have already noticed the exclamation beside each players name. This allows you to monitor when the unit is missing a valuable buff that you can provide. Each color means something special. A black exclamation means you are out of range and can’t buff the unit. This is obvious on most bars due to the fact that they have already been dimmed to the range check. Others like the bottom of the middle column is in range of a heal but not in range to be buffed. The red exclamation means that the unit is missing the Fortitude buff that give the unit more health. The blue exclamation means the unit is missing the spirit buff. The purple exclamation means the unit is missing the shadow protection buff.

Now let’s take a look at on of the most important parts! Incoming heals and their amounts. The first bar show the state of a player that is in need of heals. We can see by the number on the right that they are 8600 HP low. You know that its 8600 and not 8.6 due to the fact that the ‘.’ exist. Anything lower that 1000 will not have a ‘.’ character in the number. The second bar shows the incoming heal by the light colored bar beside the current health bar. You will also notice that the number now shows what the missing HP will be after the heal. The next bar is showing that the current incoming heal will over heal by 290 HP. This is a nice very low over heal. This is a nicely timed heal with minimal over heal. The next bar shows a very bad heal. One of the worst kind except on certain raid fights. The next heal will be a completely wasted over heal. You know this because the units health is full and you can’t see the incoming heal bar.