I’ve come to the point in my healing career when I want to see when a tank has popped a cooldown, or if another healer has used some sort of cooldown (such as pain suppression) on the tank. It’s time for yet another grid plugin.
Tank Cooldowns
Download GridStatusTankCooldown.
The name is a little misleading, because it’s not tank cooldowns but really abilities used by every class on themselves or on others to save their lives.
Now, you could enter in all this junk manually as buffs using the standard Grid interface. Knock yourself out.
Configuration
As you can see, the addon only checks by default some of the most often-used tank cooldowns. It leaves cooldowns such as mage’s ice block unchecked.1 The only thing I found lacking was that warrior’s “last stand” was not checked by default. Or maybe it was shield wall. Whatever, you need to check both of those, seriously.
Look, there are the priest buffs. Pain Suppression and Guardian Spirit. This is important stuff. We very much care when one of these suckers is used on the tank.
If you feel so inclined, you can set priorities for the buffs, so if multiple cooldowns are popped at the same time, you can control which displays.
As usual, I was lazy, and left the defaults as-is. So far, so good.2
Display as Box
Fooled you! Showing as a box is not a viable option, because they would all appear as the same color. You want to know which cooldown was applied, not just that there is one present.
Display as Icon
To do this you’ll need an icon indicator plugin, such as GridIndicatorCornerIcons, GridIndicatorSideIcons, or GridIndicatorIconBar. Don’t use the center icon. The center icon is sacred.
Make sure to check the box for Tanking Cooldowns on the center/side/whatever icon.
And the result:
I fully acknowledge that this is FAIL. The icon is too small to figure out what the hell it is.3 And even if it weren’t, I wouldn’t know the difference, because I don’t know what the hell all these things look like. I don’t think I even know what my own pain suppression looks like. Moving on…
Display as Text
To do this, you’ll need a text indicator plugin, such as GridIndicatorSideText or GridIndicatorCornerText.
Before you set it up though, there are a few things to consider.
Text Length: The length of text shown is based on the length of text that you use for your names in your raid frames. I only show the first 4 letters. If you show 10 letters, you may get long cooldown names that don’t fit in the box.
Caster Name versus Spell Name: By default, Tanking Cooldowns shows caster name if you use text. Yuck, useless.4 If you are using a text indicator to show you which cooldown was cast, make sure to change the dropdown from caster name to spell name.
Now we’re ready to configure with ye olde check box on side/corner text.
And I do like the results!
Tank pops shield wall. Although I only have 4 letters showing, I know it is shield wall and not shield block, because I have filtered out shield block.
Last stand! We are in trouble, yo.
Everyone's poppin cooldowns, so we're srsly screwed. Hell, I'm already dead here.
- Because, really, who cares if the mage is using a cooldown? Who cares if the mage dies? ↩
- I’ve taken this plugin for a spin on a few raids now. Good times. ↩
- Again, don’t even THINK about using the center icon. ↩
- In theory, you could use an icon indicator to tell you WHAT the spell is, and then a separate text indicator in another area of your frame to tell you who cast it. I think that knowing who cast what isn’t that important, but if you run 25′s you may disagree. ↩
/cry
Why do you hate mages so much?
I actually do use the sacred center icon for the tank-only cooldowns:
I’m really glad you’ve shared this post because it’s really useful information for any healer to have. <3
- Shield Wall/Last Stand
- Survival Instincts
- Divine Protection (and I have Forbearance on the center icon, but at a lower priority than most things)
- Icebound Fortitude/Unbreakable Armor
I use the top middle indicator for Hand of Sacrifice, the left side indicator for Guardian Spirit and the bottom side indicator for Pain Suppression.
I love my little setup and have relied on it since the Ulduar days. My healers were baffled that I knew who screwed up tank rotations on Plasma Blast!
Oh interesting! Do you display raid debuffs in grid, and if so where? My grid is so full with hot tracking that I have very few places left to put cooldown monitors.
I’d suggest not casting HoTs, but it looks like you made that mistake at character creation…
Don’t mind me: I need to bash the other healing classes so I can feel better about myself during early 4.x and learning a 90% new spell set and healing model. I’m *not* looking forward to feeling like a pre-Beacon Paladin healing MgT all over again!
Sigh, I seem to always have “stuff” I need to be tracking on my target. If it isn’t hots, it’s shields/WS and mending stacks/duration. But I find tracking “proactive stuff” on the target far easier than reactive healing where I track less and panic more.
Now you know why paladins stack INT and Haste. Cast big because the damage is taken and they’ll die soon. Stack INT so you can cast big all the time. Cast fast because the damage is taken and they’ll die soon. Stack Haste so you can cast ASAP.
I wouldn’t say I panic, but on progression fights I don’t blink and click-heal like a coked-up ferret.
I’ll have to roll up a druid or priest some day…
I’m excited to know about the healing style of the elusive coked-up ferret.
Where can you fit all these things? O.O I checked out your Grid layout post and it doesn’t seem to include all the latest addons you wrote about… and there’s not enough corners!
I’ve been thinking about updating that, but I figured I’d wait until post 4.0 since there will likely be significant changes to grid and plugins. I use a lot of plugins to add extra boxes – cornerplus, sideplus… I pretty much have boxes EVERYWHERE. Shortening the text to 4 characters helps considerably.
Ugh, I hate it when the full name doesn’t fit. I need to know who those people are! (And I’m not being helped by the fact that a few people in my guild decided that hey, having the same damn name is fun! So we get Valli and Val (Valkyzer), Sy and Sye and Sigil and Stryphe and I feel like stabbing them with a fork be more creative dammit!)
). I haven’t tried it yet and I’m afraid it’s going to make Grid explode in tiny little pieces…
Back on topic: have you tried GridSideIcons (or something like that)? It’s supposed to add 2 extra icons to the sides of your regular middle one (yeah, I know, it’s sacred, but it’s where my Earth Shield and Weakened Soul are
I use both gridsideicons and gridcornericons. They are in the same “spots” as corner or side indicators (just your basic boxes, not icons), so you’d have to use indicators OR icons, but not both.
I… think that’s what I want. To have the regular indicators (4 of them, one each corner), the center icon, and 2 extra icons on the sides. I’ll test it out tomorrow.
That Grid setup is hardcore, I don’t think I’d remember so many things o.o What do you mean by POM stacks? (I’m a priest noob, but I need to get her Grid set up too… Priests are more complex than I thought :/)
I have an addon I forgot the name of which uses different colored indicators – i.e. I put POM on a tank, he gets a green square in the corner; POM jumps to me, I get an orange square in the corner.. and so on until the color is red and it’s the last jump.
The different colors should be under the plugin gridstatusmending and you can color based on stacks. ”Stacks” just means there are 5 charges left before it expires.
http://murlocparliament.com/2010/06/23/grid-for-priests-tracking-mending-frisbee-using-numbers/
Here, I did a quick sketch of my grid box.
http://murlocparliament.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/priestgridbox.jpg