List of Addons
And their descriptions and why they are useful for healers. Pick and choose your poisons!
I use Curse.com to find and manage my addons. It’s very useful when I have many different addons that I find on different sites. Their Curse Client makes it easy for me to update everything when I remember – or even when I turn my computer on.
Warning!: Addons are meant to help healers, not distract them! If you find yourself watching your addon more than your surroundings, you need to rethink your addons. A healer is only as useful as the time he remains on his feet.
Healbot – A primarily click based addon. This shows you everyone in your party or raid, their health bar, and whether there are incoming heals on that player. The benefit of this addons is the fact that you can map different mouse clicks to your heals. That way left click can be flash of light, right click can be holy light and your camera control isn’t affected outside of the addon. This also allows you to heal people without selecting them, so you can always keep the tank selected, and throw a helpful rejuvenation on someone who’s standing in some fire. It’s highly customizable for size, notifications, and button configurations. The issue that I have with it, is that I’m a button pusher, and not a clicking healer. I like to select the person I’m healing, so I’ve stopped using Healbot over the course of my healing career. The only thing I do miss from Healbot, is it notifies which dead party members are getting a rez after they stood in fire during an attempt. That way, people get rezzed quicker and you can move on to the next attempt.
Grid – An addon that shows your whole raid in one small area, laid out in a grid pattern. Grid is perfect for healers who like to click and select their target they’re going to heal. It can be any size the healer prefers. It can be placed where ever is most convenient for you. This addon is also highly customizable in terms of look and feel. All the colors can be changed, all the notifications can be redone, and even the player’s name can be re-sized. Grid is great because it fits within your UI if you like to highly customize it, and it fits just as well in the normal regular WoW UI. My favorite thing about Grid is adding new notifications. One example is Kelthuzad’s Frost Blast spell. This spell encases one of your party members in a block of ice. I set up Grid so it would place a large notification on those player’s who were Frost Blasted. This helped me find the player if they weren’t directly in view on my screen. I could throw a quick large heal on them, and they would survive though the damage that dealt equal to 104% of the player’s health over four seconds. This is just one example of the many things you can do with Grid to support your healing.
Quartz – A cast bar addon that shows your actual cast, and not the perceived cast that WoW defaults with. It’s very useful if you’re playing with a handful of lag, or all of a sudden find yourself in a lag spike storm. It’s not just an addon that I suggest for healers, but also other casters. It also shows you an area (in red) where if you move or cancel the cast, the cast would have finished server-side, and will still cast. This can give you an advantage on getting a head start in moving out of the fire, while still finishing your spell. Another great thing Quartz does is compress buffs and show them in a neat stack anywhere on your screen. I use this by showing the buffs of my current target near my cast bar, so I can tell if I need to re apply Earth Shield or Beacon of Light.
RankWatch – This addon tells you (or a party member) when a downranked spell is cast. You can change the alerts from anywhere to in raid, /yell, to just whispering the player or telling you in private. Because when you train, the spells in your offspec do not get updated, it’s quite often that you find yourself using downranked spells if you’ve spent the 1000 gold for your character. Some people do take offense to RankWatch (if they just leveled, or are using a downranked spell on purpose) so there is a way to turn it off. It has saved me and my party members many times. I highly recommend it, at least until Cataclysm comes out.
Recount – This addon mainly tracks damage and dps output. I also recommend it for healers to either keep an eye on the top dps and make sure they don’t drop like stones, or you can swap the output to be healing done or overhealing done. I usually place this addon off to the side of my screen so I am not watching it during the entire fight. It also has a range of graphs you can open up and see interesting statistics. For example, you can see which spell you cast the most, which spell did the most healing over all, and which spell caused you to overheal the most. Using this type of data, you can adjust your game play to become more mana efficient, and overall a better healer. It’s also useful for you damage dealing alts.
For Fun Addons: These addons are great to replace in flight movies or use while on break during raids. Don’t use them during a boss fight!
Bejeweled – Love bejeweled? Now you can play it in WoW! This great addon shows up on your screen when you jump on a flight path, or are running back to your corpse. It’s totally resizable so you can put it somewhere where it wont interrupt your gameplay. This addon also lists the scores of your fellow guildmates and friends so you can be as competitive as you like. It will also announce in guild chat when you’ve broken someone’s high score, or received an achievement. If you have it turned on while you’re in combat (it installs with a setting to make it disappear as soon as you enter combat) it will still display notifications, so your guildies will know if you’re slacking on a boss fight!
Peggle – Listed as one of the 200 reasons to get a PC to play games by PC Gamer, Peggle is one of the more addicting games on the internet. And now it comes in addon form! Now you can take the complete ridiculousness of Peggle inside of WoW. This addon, made by the PopCap Guild who made the Bejeweled app, as many of the same features. It announces in guild when you’ve beaten someone else’s high score. You can even duel someone else who has the addon to see who’s the master Peggler! A must have addon if you hate waiting on those long flights around Azeroth with nothing to do.
More addons to come!
