This is what we do when we have a heroism rotation. We did this on our first few Kaz'rogal and Gorefiend kills, but rarely do it anymore.

It certainly works if you are dead, and you count as out of combat then. I don't know if you need to be in the instance in order to be able to swap people around, I'd expect it works from a player outside the raid with proper raid rights. This can easily be tested, too.

Hm you know, this thread has gotten me thinking a bit of what we can do with the current WoW API. Cryect built a proof of concept GPSLib which lets you actually trace player position relative to each other inside an instance, even though the coordination system there is somewhat dumbed down or turned off by Blizzard. I've looked quickly into the code and am not really sure if it actually only works by having the players continually ping the minimap or not. The pinging seems to be needed to calibrate the coordination system of the minimap inside the instance. If I read the code correctly, it's only required to ping once for each player, but I'm really not sure how it all works and what exactly the trick is he is using there, as I'm not really understanding how the minimap's answer look like inside instances. If and only if it really is useable with only pinging once then the following should actually be possible to implement. Otherwise it isn't as it would require each player to more or less regularly ping the minimap which certainly kill any raider's nerves.

So let's assume we can get player positions, at least relative to each other. Then we should be able to build a sort of Command Center addon which should seriously fix the deficencies that Furio described. What I imagine is a "tactical combat map", a bit like what you get when you are in AV, for example. We can just have a background image, showing the floor of the place of the current bossfight, assuming we know which boss we're at, which does work by parsing mouse-over/Bigwigs data. So the raidmanager sees the room and we put pins on that map according to the position of the players. We can now track player movements on the map. Cool.

Now what Cryeks' GPSlib is not able to do, is get boss mob positions. But we know which players are melee and we do know the heading of the players, so ranged attacks using a channeled spell which does auto heading will give us a line, and having two players with intersecting lines (it doesn't need to be that accurate) will give us the mob's position. So we also have sometimes boss positions. If the boss is running around that won't be possible until a melee or at least two ranged channeled spells hit him, but that's not so important as we're not going to do a realtime representation, but a tactical overview of the fight.

Now this would allow a raid manager to actually be outside the instance but still be able to assess the situation somewhat, even though he can only see "pins" moving. The data from the player's and enemie's health will be available, as well as Bossmod timers, so that could actually be useful.

What's even more, that raid manager in group 6 could actually not only display all this information, but also condense it into some less data (less updates, omit certain things) and rebroadcast it into a custom channel where random people joining that channel with the viewer-addon can view the raid in progress. Tada: Raid-TV! Granted, this all would be quite less spectacular than seeing it as you'll only be able to see icons moving around, but it's more than nothing.

There is a huge IF to all this, and it basically all depends how GPSlib works and how accurate its data is. But if this is actually doable, it would be a nice little project over the hollidays, especially if Sunwell doesn't make it in time for PTR.

Anetheron - Rotate the shamans for bloodlust in melee group
Kaz'rogal - same

RoS phase 1 - Swap ppl who tank in a "tank group" with a shaman that drops agi+stoneskin
RoS phase 3 - Swap enhancement shaman in the group of the MT just after he taunts, for WF+Str, switch him back once the debuff is gone

Gurtogg - One of the best swap you can do in bt: Phase 1 put enh shaman in the tanks group, he serves as a threat multiplier, gives out higher raid dps and more healing via SPs. Switch him back in melee group on phase 2. Rince and repeat.

Illidan phase 2 - Give the bloodlust from your enh shaman to your warlocks / mages / SP. Melee's dps uptime is not high enough.

Our enh shaman is the person that gets moved around the most, we often use him as a threat amplifier in the tanks group after recovery on a bad situation. SP's don't get moved much, we have 2 and thats plenty; all the healers are in a sp group except for the shaman that is with the 4 warlocks. He's 4/5 t6 and has most of the best gear in the game, along with alchemist stone. Frankly, since the buff they got, I've never seen him run out of mana.

To the people asking about the mod - someone has reposted it on curse - it is simply called RaidRestore.
You can search for it there.

Something that occurred to me today, but the possibilities of automatic group switching and Prayer/Circle of Healing would be a damn good reason to disallow addons to access that during combat.



I'm still working out within our raid group how to rotate heroisms/shadow priests. I still want a little bit of shadow priest time, but with our Ret Paladin it's clearly not a full time thing I need anymore. I'm also trying to figure out the Heroism thing. Assuming both groups are DPS groups (S Priest + Mages/Locks vs Rogues/DPS Warriors/Ret Paladin) which 4-man group would benefit the most from Heroism from the Reso shaman? What is the expected DPS increase over the length of the heroism that each DPS class would get?

The notion of a raid leader with a setup like mine combined with the mentioned mods is fascinating. A desktop to do actual raiding in, and a laptop to log an alt in. On one screen, the raid - on the other screen, RAIDAR or whatever somebody actually called a tactical map based on GPSLib. Being able to quickly track raid members for things like cores on Vashj or Thaladred positioning is definitely useful, and coupling that with the ability to rapidly shift between raid configurations could have some extremely powerful uses.

Although, sadly, I would mostly be interested for the sake of having a second screen with RAIDAR on it. Geeky delight!

I have looked a bit more into this; the normal PlayerGetMapPosition call returns 0 in instances, however Cryekt obviously discovered that Minimap:GetPingLocation does return information about one's own player position in the instance. I tested it a bit last night and found that it does give a coordinate system that can be used. It does only give one's own position but that just means you need an addon installed for every player in order to get everyone's coordinates. Also one needs to calibrate the coordination system, but otherwise, what I outlined above should really be possible. Until the hollidays I won't find much time to play around with that more, but I'm interested in doing some further research in this area.

The moment something like the use of RAIDAR (rep++ for the name) becomes widespread blizzard will make it inpossible. I seriously doubt their standpoint on the abbility to get coordinates inside an instance changed since the patch they made it inpossible (1.2 or 1.3).

Back then they dissabled it because it was being used to show your own position in Atlas. Used for simply finding your way arround an instance. We are now thinking of automated direction arrows for fights like gruul where you can show the safest spot to run to. That's most certainly not something Blizzard will allow.

That said, I do think we need to get somesort of abbility to replay raid movement. Combatlogs will only tell so much. Sometimes wipe reasons can't be recapped from simply the events that happened. Sometimes you really wish you had the abbility to check everyones position and movement.
I was wiping on Anetheron last night (yeh gogo laugh) and I wish we sometimes had the abbility to replay the raid movement and checked if the positiong was correct for carrion swarm and how the infernal was picked up.

If that is the sole reason, then they can just add a random offset to the value returned. I'm interested in the relative position between players, not so much in the absoulte position on a map. On the other hand, they probably realize that it will always be possible to get positional information as long as we do have the possibility to check ranges in some way. If I know my spell with range 10 yard reaches player X but my spell with range 5 yards does not and I collect all such information for each other then I can set up a differential equation system of some sort and find the positions with sufficient good accuracy. The more data the better. We have lots of hacks that do this right now and whose results are displayed in BossMods who warn you about people clumping up.

Also with current Addons and Informational Sites I'm not sure if they still want to uphold their stance. We'll see. At the moment in any case, Minimap:GetPingLocation does give coordinates relative to the last map ping, which seems to be the point (0,0) if nobody ever pinged.

That is more or less what I want to do. Imagine a combination of a positional "playback" together with WWS like data. Why is this rogue doing less damage than the rest? Ah he needs to move a lot because he runs after this mob. Why did these three guys die just now ? Ah they were standing together, must have been some AOE or splash damage.

We will rotate heroisms (on the odd case where groups aren't preset for it, or we have more than 2 shaman) and occasionally Mana Tides, though the increased regen in 2.3 has negated the need for that.

Giving 25 people an A wouldn't work in our raids...we already have issues moving people around just with 6-8 people (officers and strategists), though we are pretty good about consolidating groups, and since our GM has something similar (if not the same) to Raid Restore, fixing groups up for the next attempt or next boss is not a problem at all.

RAIDAR sounds like a mod with great potential, though I'd agree that it might push things into pre-BC Decursive range as far as abilities and what Blizzard intends us to be able to do. I wish I had the time to work on something like that, since it fits my skills quite nicely with all the math computation involved. I know our officer corp would love to have something like that, and the customization available through various plugins would be enormous.