VisualHeal - Official Thread

[xbeeps]

VisualHeal is a small and simple but powerful tool for all classes that visually shows your heals to others and heals incoming to you from others by means of two information-packed, yet intuitive bars.

See http://www.wowace.com/addons/visualheal/ for full description.

Please post your comments and questions in this thread. If you find an issue or have a suggestion for improvement, please post a ticket at http://www.wowace.com/addons/visualheal/tickets/

[Epophis]

This is a great addon! It really helps me gauge the efficiency of my heals.
Being at the top of the heal charts means nothing if you are also top of the over-heal charts.


One thing I'd like to see added sometime, is some visual indication for HoT's.

And one minor visual thing that I would enjoy is if the bar didn't immediately disappear when casting completes. It would be nice to see the results of the cast for a split second, perhaps with a overheal%, then maybe fade out. Just to give an extra second to look at the results.


I've gotta say it again. Great Addon!! I'm going to be recommending it to all the healers in my guild. Please keep up the great work.

[xbeeps]

Originally Posted by bmurray

One thing I'd like to see added sometime, is some visual indication for HoT's.

I know, everyone does. However, they are a pain to track, because the API provides so little functionality for it, so it involves quite alot of guess-work (which lead to inaccuracy). The gain, i believe, is very small. For uses where VisualHeal really matters (boss fights in raid encounters), the slow HoT's have very little significance on the rate of health change, compared to direct heals and damage from mobs. Please note that i'm not saying that these heals are not important, but during the cast time of a direct heal (1.5-3.5sec) the influence of HoT's are not likely to influence the basis for decision of whether or not to break the heal. Especially when you consider the fact that the HealBar *does* change every time a HoT ticks. The HealBar is instantly updated everytime a HoT ticks, so at any time it is only the remaining ticks between now and the heal time that needs to be accounted for. I believe the general fluctuations in health caused by damage and other healing effects (vampiric embrace, earth shield etc.) are much greater than this, and in my opinion it would be a waste of time and processing power to track HoT's just for such a small gain.

Originally Posted by bmurray

And one minor visual thing that I would enjoy is if the bar didn't immediately disappear when casting completes. It would be nice to see the results of the cast for a split second, perhaps with a overheal%, then maybe fade out. Just to give an extra second to look at the results.

I'll consider this. I was going to add an option for letting it stick to the screen, but it would also be nice to let it disappear after a short delay.

Originally Posted by bmurray

I've gotta say it again. Great Addon!! I'm going to be recommending it to all the healers in my guild. Please keep up the great work.

Thanks!

[Epophis]

The HealBar is instantly updated everytime a HoT ticks, so at any time it is only the remaining ticks between now and the heal time that needs to be accounted for. I believe the general fluctuations in health caused by damage and other healing effects (vampiric embrace, earth shield etc.) are much greater than this, and in my opinion it would be a waste of time and processing power to track HoT's just for such a small gain.

From the perspective of tracking HoT's, I totally agree. Seeing the health bar move in real time is perfect for visual queues of the HoT's that are already ticking.

I probably wasn't clear enough in my original post. I'm wanting to see a quick visual of post cast information to gauge how my heal worked.

As a druid, I've got 2 instant cast HoT's. Currently Visual heal doesn't do anything for instant cast heals. I think it would be great to optionally see the Visual heal bar pop up post cast, with projected HoT effect assuming the HoT is allowed to tick (and bloom as Lifebloom does) completely. (calculating lifebloom may be tricky because it can stack.)

It would really help me gauge what type of heal to use next, depending on how fast I'm noticing the tank is taking damage.

I hope this makes more sense. I'm not asking for HoT tracking as much as I'm asking for a post cast estimated results display, then a quick fade out. Very similar to my other suggestion of allowing the visual heal bar to stay there for a second after a regular channeled cast, to reflect upon ones abilities to minimize overhealing and mana conservation. =-)

I find it easy to talk about generally trying to avoid overhealing and at the same time know about when to use tactical situational overhealing. But, in the heat of battle it sure would be great to have an addon that displays instant results per cast, to drill it into my thick head.

cheers!


-- (edit) I understand this is probably asking you to add functionality that isn't exactly in line with the original intended purpose of the addon. (better informed decisions about canceling a long cast heal) If this request is something that you feel shouldn't be part of this addon, please let me know. I think it would make a great post for the ideas thread.

[scree2]

I'm glad you finally got this moved over to Wow Ace. Its in solid shape still.

I have been noticing a few minor issues lately, and it may or may not be caused by my click heal interface. Right now im using Grid/Clique combo and i've been noticing that occasionally my heals aren't queue'ing up the VisualHeal mod. That is it say, that when I begin a heal (and sometimes its a quick rapid mouse click), the visual heal bar isn't being displayed. Instead, only the normal cast bar shows up (instead of when both normally show up).

not quite sure how to narrow down that error but it seems as if the mod isn't detecting all instances of spells being cast.

[xbeeps]

@bmurray: It has already been requested earlier, and it is planned to add the ability to let the healbar stick to the screen after the heal for a defined amount of time (or indefinitly). I'm not entirely sure what exactly you're requesting in addition to this?

@Scree: I use Clique myself and i haven't had the issue you're describing. One thing to know about VisualHeal (and the embedded HealComm-2.0 library) is that it is *completely* independent of how you cast the heals. It does not know of Clique or any other addon that is used to cast spells. The reason is that everything is driven by events generated by the game engine (UNIT_SPELLCAST_XXX), and these are generated regardless of how the user triggers the heal. The only thing i can think of is tainting. I don't know much about that subject, but i do know that it can cause code to not be executed if some other addon messes up, and that is the only logical explanation i can think of, that could possibly prevent VisualHeal from receiving the events from the game engine.

[lapalapa]

any plans on making it compatibale with sharedmedia lib (for different bar skins?)
and border options would be awesome.

[Speeddymon]

Originally Posted by xbeeps

@bmurray: It has already been requested earlier, and it is planned to add the ability to let the healbar stick to the screen after the heal for a defined amount of time (or indefinitly). I'm not entirely sure what exactly you're requesting in addition to this?

@Scree: I use Clique myself and i haven't had the issue you're describing. One thing to know about VisualHeal (and the embedded HealComm-2.0 library) is that it is *completely* independent of how you cast the heals. It does not know of Clique or any other addon that is used to cast spells. The reason is that everything is driven by events generated by the game engine (UNIT_SPELLCAST_XXX), and these are generated regardless of how the user triggers the heal. The only thing i can think of is tainting. I don't know much about that subject, but i do know that it can cause code to not be executed if some other addon messes up, and that is the only logical explanation i can think of, that could possibly prevent VisualHeal from receiving the events from the game engine.

bmurray is asking basically for a bar to guess at how much healing will be done by a an instant cast HoT. Lifebloom is instant cast, and is a HoT, and he wants to be able to track it's progress, like with an instant heal. This would require a lot of guesswork, and I don't know of any addon that does it right now, however that isn't to say that it can't be done, but you have to watch for a lot of things, damage taken, and if the player does something or has something done to them which interrupts the effect. The easy part of watching for the interrupt is that you can (iirc) scan the buffs and as long as the lifebloom buff is there, then it is active, and they are being healed. Hope that helps clear that up..

Now, as for tainting, you should get an error if an addon is tainting code. Some other addon may be broken and causing it to not work, but I doubt there is taint.

scree: One way to find out if it is another addon, is to disable all of your addons except for visualheal, and see if you can reproduce it then. If not, then you know it is an addon, and you get the fun task of narrowing down which one it is. If you can reproduce it with nothing else loaded, then it is visualheal. I take a guess that there may be a bar mod involved, since you say you are clicking a button, instead of using a hotkey, so perhaps that bar mod is not properly hooking the original blizz actionbars, or worse, it isnt properly replicating them.

[Epophis]

Originally Posted by xbeeps

@bmurray: It has already been requested earlier, and it is planned to add the ability to let the healbar stick to the screen after the heal for a defined amount of time (or indefinitly). I'm not entirely sure what exactly you're requesting in addition to this?

Fantastic to hear that you will be adding the ability to let the healbar stick to the screen!

The addition that I'm wanting does have to do with HoT's. But it really has nothing to do with actively tracking the HoT at all.

For example:

If I cast an instant HoT that will do +100 health over 8 seconds, I'd like to see the Healbar show me a quick display of +800, using the same colors and display method as it does when I'm channeling a heal spell.

No active tracking of the HoT is needed. I just want a one time visual indication of how much that HoT is going to heal total if it actually completes all of it's ticks successfully. This display could disappear after about a second or so, just enough to mentally note it.

I hope that make more sense.
Thanks

[xbeeps]

@bmurray: I understand now what you want, but this is not something I'll add to the HealBar, at least not for now. First, i don't feel that this is very useful - the spell has been cast, there's nothing to do about it (you cannot abort it or gain anything from doing just that). Second, i don't think it is consistent with the current display, that shows the currently casting heal(s). I want the display to be simple and straightforward, so that it instantly provides crucial information without too much "parsing" done by the user - there's simply not enough time during large scale encounters. The first thing that i will add is the ability to keep the bar on screen for a given amount of time. When that is done, I'll have a renewed look at this request to see if some of the aspects of it are worth considering for implementation in some way.

The problem with tracking HoT's:

1) Different players have different gear -> HoT's with same ranks heals for different amounts
2) #1 means that the client must sent info about the size of the HoT to other clients, just as it is the case for normal direct heals.
3) One player can have HoT's on multiple targets, and multiple players can have multiple HoT's on one target. All this is easy to keep in a small database, that is updated by messages from other clients.
4) Any given client can determine the number of HoT's of a given type on any target, but it *cannot* determine who cast these. This means, that when a HoT's is prematurely dispelled, it is impossible to update the database, because the client does not know which of the HoT's from the multiple targets to remove from the database.

I know that HoT's are rarely dispelled (except maybe in PvP and certain boss-encounters (Garr)), but i hate to implement something that only works sometimes. If anyone know a reliable method to keep track of HoT's it would be a nice starting point, but right now i looks like a complicated error-prone mess.