I’ve been using Vuh’do for a very long time now. Been happy with it, love it.
I have two default profiles that I had spent a lot of time customizing, a “Standard DPS”, and a “Druid HealZzz”.
The standard DPS was one I set up for, you guessed it, a default DPS player. I could load the profile on a new character, save it as a copy unique to that character, and then modify it a little if I wanted to have mouseover heals, cleanses, misdirects or trinket procs when using an ability without macros. That sort of thing.
The Druid HealZzz one was set up with all the bells and whistles for my Druid to heal. All the buttons on my mouse set to just the right spells, the colors and textures of the health bars just the way I liked ’em, all the icons and countdown timers and everything.
Been using those profiles for years.
Well, I took my baby Priest, loaded the Druid HealZzz profile, saved it and started customizing. I figured, best to start with the bars all done, and just adjust spells to buttons.
It worked nice for my first few runs yesterday. No problems.
One issue I noticed that I wanted to fix, though, was I wanted a visual indication of Weakened Soul on the bar of whoever had it.
When you cast Power Word: Shield, the target gets your bubble, and also gets the Weakened Soul effect preventing another bubble right away.
Normally, they’re both on the same timer. Bubble fades, time to recast (if you want).
I noticed more than once during the runs that when the tanks PW: Shield absorbed enough damage to fade early, I had no visual on the bars of the Weakened Soul countdown. In a few tight spots, that left me spamming PW: Shield for the few seconds I waited.
I wanted that Weakened Soul on my bars. I didn’t want to have to hunt for it on the default party UI, mixed in with all the other buffs. And I wanted a countdown timer on it.
Well, I rooted around and found that the HoT window showed my normal Power Word: Shield, and that there was something new I’d never had cause to notice before called “Bouquets”.
One of the Bouquets was named “PW: Shield and Weakened Soul”. That sounded promising, so I opened the editing configuration for it.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, clicked the “remove” tab, and the options in the bouquet vanished. Poof.
I was pretty sure that was a booboo, so I tried to recreate them. Then I tried reinstalling the addon. Then I tried loading a different profile.
Nope, what I did seemed to be a global change. And I was getting error messages from the addon trying to call to that bouquet.
Pretty, huh?. Pretty stupid of me, anyway.
So, I went into the options and reset the addon configuration to stock.
Which…. ALSO deleted all of my profiles. Every single last one.
/facepalm.
‘Kay, fine. Whatever. If I’m going to make a mistake, why the hell not sink the Titanic, give me something to be proud of. At a certain point, if you screw up BIG enough, you can turn it into something positive.
You know, something so incredibly stupid that at least when you tell the story in a bar someday, people will laugh and buy you a beer. You don’t get that if you, say, ran over a nail and flattened your tire driving through a construction site as a shortcut.
You might get the free beer if you try to cut the tree roots out from under your natural gas regulator coming into the house with a Sawzall, and cut right through the gas main coming TO the regulator, causing a major gas leak that floods the area, resulting in the city fire department and police department all rushing to the area, along with the public works and gas company first responders, and an entire crew to repair the leak… all on a Sunday. On 4th of July weekend.
At least the house didn’t explode.
So, as long as I’d just wiped every custom setting I’d ever created in Vuh’do, let’s start with the easy one; configuring the Priest.
What I found out, in having to look at all these options again for the first time in years, is that all of these updates to the addon I keep downloading CHANGED shit.
I know, right?
Not only do things look better than before, but there are two new features that seem simple, but that I never had enabled before, or even knew had been added.
The first one, is that yes, the bouquets that are added allow you to have one visual icon that changes condition states.
There are many of them pre-programmed, you just put one in one of the HoT icon slots.
The one I wanted to use, PW:Shield & Weakened Soul, when modified to add ‘show Shield condition’ and ‘Countdown Timer’, does the following; it lets you have PW: Shield icon displayed as the 1st priority. If the Shield is still up, the blue square icon shows you the shield is active, the timer on how long it has left if it doesn’t absorb all the damage and fade first, AND a white circle around it that starts to vanish as the Shield absorbs damage.
Then, if the Shield vanishes early, the blue square icon disappears, to be replaced by an orange diamond with a timer, telling you EXACTLY how long Weakened Soul still has to tick down before you can recast your Shield.
These bouquets, which all of you regular Vuh’do users probably already know all about, let you tie multiple effects and stuff together, chain the alerts in a priority. If this is active, then it’s showing. If it goes away, the next one on the list that is active shows instead. And so on.
Hey, that’s some awesomeness.
Now, the second thing that I found out is that there is now an option to turn on Target, and Target of Target, for your health bars. All fully customizable.
That’s pretty sweet, but there is more.
You also have the option of configuring your mouse buttons for HOSTILE casting mode. You’ce got two buttons settings you can configure; what to cast when mousing over a friendly party or raid member, and what to cast when mousing over the target bar of an enemy.
You can set offensive spells on mouse buttons, and cast them while mousing over the bad guys displayed right on the target frames.
Now, I know this is all old hat to people who spend lots of time customizing bars and stuff, but I’ve always gone for a minimalist approach. I keep my viewing area clear as much as possible.
But what this is giving me is so much fun as a caster, that I’m squeeing in the instances.
I mean, check this out.
I can see at a glance where everyones health is at, I’ve got my blue square with a white circle on the tank for my Shield, I can see who EVERYONE in the party is targeting, AND I can see who the mobs they are on are targeting! All sper clear, easy to read at a glance, nothing extra cluttering it up. Bold, solid colors.
In this example, everyone is on the boss, and the boss is on the tank. No hankypanky.
In this example, you can see what it looks like as the Bubble begins to absorb damage. You can also see the corner of the blue square poking out. And of course, you can see the time remaining on the Renew.
We take a step back now, and you can see that while I’m healing, I’m also able to use mouseover on the bar to cast Penance on the boss without my mouse having to move OVER the boss, or away from the health bars. I like that. Fast response time if I need to drop a heal, yo. For those that don’t use it, the bar showing my Penance spell ticks is an addon called Quartz. I couldn’t play without it.
In this example, you can see that the DPS are not on the same target as the tank… and it looks like the Warlock pulled aggro with AoE on at least three different mobs, and has aggro on all of them. You can tell because all three are at different health levels. I have instant notification BEFORE his health starts dropping that he’s pulled aggro. How interesting that it looks like he’s the only one without a Renew on at the moment, hmmm?
Yes, being able to see immediately who the players are targeting, and whether or not they are pulling aggro off the tank intentionally, is a lot of fun.
You can do that with the normal party frames, but I don’t look at them all that much, I’m looking at the area around me in game, at the bad guys, at the bad on the floor I need to get out of. With this, and being able to cast damage spells directly on mouseover of the target bar, I can Heal using Atonement so freaking easy, and still be poised to keep Shield up or drop a Renew or Flash Heal in a tight spot. This has made 5 person instances so clear cut that it’s amazing the difference I feel.
The other thing I think is funny, is that it’s made it so easy for me to see when other people are screwing off or being dicks.
The last run I had of the night, I had a tank and rogue that I did Gnomeregan with that wanted to queue with me again. We got Scarlet Monastery Graveyard, and two new players, a Paladin and a Warrior, both guilded together and queued as DPS.
Within seconds of attacking, I saw something amazing.
The other Warrior and Paladin may have queued as DPS, but the Warrior was charging off into groups nowhere near the rest of us… and the Paladin was following along and doing nothing but healing him. I could easily tell from the grayed out bars that they were out of my cast range most of the time. I didn’t even have to look for them.
The tank and Rogue and I who had all queued together were three manning the instance towards the boss while they farmed the outer edges on their own.
The Paladin never stopped targeting the Warrior and casting heals. The Warrior didn’t rejoin us until we were down the stairs into the crypt… and kept pulling aggro in tank mode, and charging extra groups.
I stopped healing those two, of course, and told them that if they wanted to tank and heal, then reach down, find some guts, and queue as tank and healer. I stopped healing them and focused on the two folks who were doing what we came there to do.
It’s just an example of how nice it was to be able to see, instantly, that those two weren’t on the same plan as the rest of us, but off in their own little world. No wondering, no doubts or confusion. I could see exactly what they were doing, while still staying right on top of my game. I could have been dancing out of the bad while DPSing and healing, AND spy on those idiots, all at the same time.
Oh, and as a funny side note… I stopped healing the two at all, since hey, the Paladin was so eager to be a healer, and the Warrior bit off more than he could handle, the Paladin ran out of mana, and they both died. I did not rez. We finished the instance and wanted to requeue… but the others refused to drop group. They also refused to say a word, I believe under the mistaken assumption that if they didn’t say anything, I couldn’t put them on ignore.
Wrong answer, turkeybreath. We weren’t able to kick them once the instance was complete, so we did have to drop our group without being able to requeue, but I have the satisfaction of knowing that’s two more idiots I won’t be seeing again, ever.
It’s hilarious to me that, after all this time, my own profile settings and laziness prevented me from seeing the cool new features that are in Vuh’do. I had to screw up in a major way to get the awesome.
I can’t wait to dig into them even deeper!
