Monday, August 24, 2009

Twig Heals 101: HealBot (setup 2)

The second half of the healbot setup is all about the look and feel of the addon. Familiarize yourself with the following screens and don't be afraid to play with them during your next raid. Healing addons can only be effective if you make sure they're displaying ALL the information you need in a manner in which you can understand.

Healbot 3.2.0.0 Healing tab:

The healing bars tab controls which health bars appear on your screen. There are options to display targets not in your raid, pets, tanks, even vehicles if you wish. My setup leaves main tanks unchecked, as I prefer to have their health bar appear with the other members of their group instead of at the top of my healbot UI. That allows me to easily see when my wildgrowth spell can best be used on the melee group. Play around with these settings to decide which health bars you do and do not want to appear on your healbot UI.

Also of note in this tab are the alert level and range check settings.
Alert level: This setting tells healbot to alert you when a target goes below a certain percentage of their hp.
Range check frequency: This setting tells healbot how often to check the range of all targets in your raid. The lower the setting the faster you'll know if someone in your raid has moved out of healing range.
Disable bar when range over 100 yards: This will remove the health bar of any target over 100 yards away from your healbot UI.

Healbot 3.2.0.0 Cure tab:

This section of healbot allows you to monitor dispellable debuffs on members of your raid and to set which spells you will use to remove the debuff. You should definitely have your abolish poison and remove curse spells mapped to your mouse in the spells tab if you want to utilize this screen properly.

Healbot 3.2.0.0 Skin 1 tab:

Skin 1 tab directly affects the appearance of the headers and font of your healbot UI as well as aggro and current HoTs a target has. I highly recommend having your HoTs appear on the health bars with a duration counter so you can know exactly when a target's heals are going to run out. I also recommend enabling the monitor aggro function as it allows you to see instantly when a raid member has pulled aggro from a tank as well as when they have picked up an add.

Healbot 3.2.0.0 Skin 2 tab:

The Skin 2 tab directly affects the look of the health bars on your healbot UI. You can adjust height, width, number of groups per column, opacity, mana bar size, etc... in this tab. Play around with these settings to get healbot to look and feel the way you want it to.

Healbot 3.2.0.0 Tips tab:

The tips tab controls the tooltips that are displayed by healbot. Set these to your preference.

Healbot 3.2.0.0 Buffs tab:

The buffs tab allows you to monitor which members of your raids are missing your buffs as well as notifies you when the buffs are about to expire. My setup only monitors Gift of the Wild because I rarely apply thorns to anyone other than the tanks in my raids and they account for so little damage it's not worth the mana it costs to reapply them mid fight.
And there you have part two of the healbot setup. I've tried to keep my descriptions and explanations short and sweet, and I hope your own setup will be just that... short and sweet.

Coming up next we step out of the setup screens and take a look at healbot in action. Both healbot users and Grid & Clique users will find useful tips in my next post. So stay tuned.

2 comments:

  1. I use healbot too, and I find the buff tab useful, as I always know who has GoTW and who needs a spot buff. I also use it for de-cursing and de-poisoning like you. All and all it's probably my favorite WoW mod.

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  2. I started off healing without an Add-On in places like Deadmines and Ragefire Chasm and thought to myself "wouldn't it be easier to hover over a character and click?" so I looked into add-ons and BOOM! Healbot! It's perfect!! Works straight 'out-of-the-box', I can keep on top of curses no problem and the SmartCast feature is very, very nifty. Also, thank you ever so much for putting a guide up to setting up this wonderful AddOn, it all makes sense when written in plain English. (Durr). Love, Zhiv/Resto Druid/CoA.

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