I'm curious to see what others see as the future of Raiding Addons. As I see it we've begun to enter into the third generation of Raiding Addons which is best defined by the progression and complexity of Boss Addons (other raiding addons have gone through similar generations though not quite as well defined)

1st Generation - CTRA style Timer Mods that just provide a raid warning at set times based on triggers
2nd Generation - A step above where instead of just telling you a warning at a time players have Timer Bars (ex. original versions of BigWigs and Vendetta)
3rd Generation - In addition to Timer Bars, provide information on the fight and about the raid relevant to the Boss Fight (ex. IMBA and a few of recent additions to BigWigs and Vendetta)

By the Third Generation, I mean track mob counts say on Gothik, show the safe spot for Heigan, show who can heal on Loatheb or interrupt on Kel'Thuzad. This seems to be a defining factor that future boss addons will no longer just deliver timers but due to increasing complexity of fights will give real status information on the fight.



Though there is more to Raiding Addons than simply boss addons though much harder to define since they normally spring out of an idea and less inspiration to improve on something (though the progression from damage meters to threatmeters could be said to be one such step).

1st Generaton - Decursive & DamageMeters, Raid Bars
2nd and Beyond Generations - Sorting Raid Bars, and Threatmeters


Anyways I'm asking this because one I'm curious and two interested to see what other users want in their raiding addons.

Currently myself I've just finished development of Blackboard for IMBA, which is similar to Quill. Now I'm beginning to get ready to focus on an addon for tracking and recording player positions and some simple status information and allow playback of this recorded data on a map so the raid leader can see where players are dieing or what potentially went wrong. This is partially being developed out of my curiosity out of having an animation of actual player movements on four horsemen and the possibility it might be a practical and useful addon (besides I have most of the technology developed to allow tracking of player movement).

Well, the future of raiding addons will be defined heavily by how much the expansion changes impede on our coding options.

Our own guild built proprietary mods, healing mods, an rdx style mod that can build new boss mods on the fly - timers and all that. We built some sunder/demo mods and all sorts of really cool stuff. Tanka really went crazy in naxx (although our toolkit started on cthun) - we even have audio files built in and such. My point is I loved how addons were going... I just hope we can continue that freedom in BC... but I guess we'll see :o

Some of the elements you describe of third gen work with our server and client addons we have (our toolkit)... but some other stuff like "showing the safe spot", and "sharing void zone information"... we looked into, but would require a rework of WoW.exe afaik. Some of the ideas people want to do are simply going to be impossible.

I just hope they stop trying to emulate addon writers because they're never as competent. It should be good enough to basically assume CTRA is a required raiding mod, and not use their own worthless version.

Indeed, this is going to be one of the biggest factors in what will become standard in xpac. I'm no programmer but from the limitations they have mentioned so far, it seems we're already in for a significant change to how we raid, for example how "lazy" healers - err healers using decursive raid. ( i kid i kid...)

That is unless Blizzard goes buckwild and the Boss Encounters are absurdly different than the ones players are used to (and relatively coded towards) now.

From the perspective of what Cryect is talking about, 2.0 UI changes are fairly minimal, as they mainly relate to targetting and casting rather than information gathering and information display.

I'm interested in how you're tracking player movement, though. I can't think of any way to do it off the top of my head other than some kind of dead-reckoning based system. Also, given the inability for addons to affect the 3D world at all, how are you showing the Heigan safespots?

We'll see where the expansion leaves us.

As for marking safe spots - I'm not sure thats possible with addons.

I wanted a mod that shared xyz coordinates of void zones - and while it was essentially possible, displaying that information graphically appeared impossible. Maybe compass? Who knows.

There is definitely a limitation on mods - your imagination will be trumped by the restrictions in place... and hence thats why I think the expansion and ruleset will define things more than anything. Coders are already reaching the limit of what can be done. Maybe some novel ideas will pop up - but the fancy level has kinda hit a plateau.

Remember a lot of us started in EQ, started with NES... etc - we're probably in our mid 20's. There are thousands of competent code makers playing this game; if it can be thought up, its generally been put to code.

Probably some sort of minimap overlay would be my guess.

Edit- Stupid link. >_< The post below shows the same thing I believe.

http://static.curse-gaming.com/mscreens/11564.jpg

That used to be possible, but it got toasted when the old "Tracker" add-on was posted (this was an add-on that more or less gave every player the ability to track the location of players, mobs and nodes on the minimap, which sort of made hunter tracking skills redundant). So I'm curious too.

Ah. So it's not showing the safespots in a manner I'd call all that useful, to be honest. I *know* which zones I'm allowed to be in, as does anyone after their 2nd or 3rd attempt - 1234321234 isn't exactly hard, and understanding the behavior on the plague cloud transitions isn't hard either. It doesn't solve the problem of a player not knowing where on the floor the lines actually are, which seems to be the real problem.

If you could manipulate the on screen rendering, mods would have literally no limit. But I just don't think its possible. The GUI is truly a GUI - its an overlay. I don't think it can adjust either based on orientation (at least not in the grand sense people want above).

Yes. Common advice from the official UI forums (originally from Iriel around the StatRings time) was: put a piece of saran wrap over your monitor. Whatever you can write on it with markers is possible. If you can programatically draw something useful (like a HUD), it can be done with an addon. So anything 'drawn' onto the ground is basically not doable. Additionally, instances don't offer coordinates in the way thyat the outside world does.

With the advent of stacking hots, the risk of overhealing from wasted hots is higher than ever, especially on players that aren't taking constant damage A useful counter to this would be an improvement to health-bars that displayed an the expected health gained from any pending heal over time buffs (in addition to actual health).

Hots are a great way to heal non-tanks that occasional damage. But using hots on dps doesn't work well if three or four healers all have the same idea. Even worse, if a few people lay some hots down, then another healer uses a direct heal to top the player to full, leaving a bundle of wasted hots. Currently, healers can scan a targets buffs for hots to help with this decision, but this isn't really enough information.

If would be very useful if when I looked at a health bar, I could see that a player was currently at 60% health, but would be at 95% (or 110%) if his hots completed (and if he didn't take additional damage). If this was a dps player who took some splash damage and didn't need an immediate top off, I could ignore healing him and let his hots finish up.

There are a number of implementation challenges, such as handling swiftmends and dispells, as well as actually determining the effect of a hot as its cast (probably best solved by healers calculating the effect of their own spells and reporting them as they cast), but I'm sure the mod developers could handle these issues.

This is pretty obvious change with the the "Secure" UI changes: What I'm hoping for is a set of RaidFrames that dynamically highlight/fade people based on distance. Actually I'd love to have it now as I don't use the dynamic sorting frames currently. And as my guild pushing through AQ40 being out of range is the biggest problem I have as a healer. Additional visual cues that make playing wack-a-mole easy and more effective may make the transition from EM mods easier on those that use them.

Customizing what Buffs and Debuffs are displayed is a must. (I really only care about buffs I can cast and debuffs I can do something about.) This alone removes much need for Decursive or Whispercast.

Ability to create custom raid frames. I have one frame that is a list of all healers which only displays their mana bars. (Using Nurfed UI's RaidFrames) This helps me locate someone in need of an innervate quickly. Again distance highlight/fade is a must.

I'd also like to see some visual cue in the raid frames indicating people with aggro. In tank swaping fights right now I do this by watching "target's target", but it would make life easier if I only had to watch the raidframes and they had a cue to let me know who is getting hit. Obviously this might be any number of people, not just one person, so it can't be too annoying either.

Timers are 10x better than the old CTRA warnings.

Status messages like razorgore egg count, nef drakonid count, etc are also wonderful. Helps me know if I should start burning pots and cooldowns if something is close or to just wipe out and try again. Perhaps make this a static "fight status" frame. So I don't have to catch the 3 second warning (sorry I'm looking at health bars) and instead have a static info frame I can glance at when I get the chance. A lot of status information is already handled by timers, but this would be for the information that isn't timed, but is easily trackable, via mob health, yells, or whatever.

Okay, so this mostly ended up a wishlist. Not sure what direction UIs might head in, but most revolutionary changes will probably come as the result of new challenges fights present.

Irshish: PerfectRaid sounds like it'll help you with most of that, although not the custom raid frames. Playing a healer recently, I've used a combination of PRaid and OzRaid to heal from and it works for me. Grid (new project from the coder of Squishy/Detox) is looking really good, too - look at the mockups/beta on the WoWAce forums for more info on that.

I think the biggest advantage to the second gen mods is the ability to seperate out raidframes from bossmod functionality: I don't have to put up with some crap raidframes just to keep using BigWigs or LaVendetta's bossmods. I use the raidframes I like.

Ok, so now you've got me thinking: What would be a good way to implement this?

You'd want a graphical display in the form of bars, numbers, and/or percentages. What should it display? My first instinct would be a weighted average of the HoTs currently on that unit, with those ending sooner being weighted more heavily to display a 'predicted health.' A mod could go further and parse incoming damage and use that to either shorten the bar based on incoming DPS, or to determine time between attacks to better predict the unit's HP on the next attack (or next 2 attacks, etc).

There could also be displayed a timer that counts down to the 'expected life value' that could be either customizable or based on some kind of in-fight data.

I think that stacking HoTs will find a place in the raid mods of the future, does anyone else have an idea of how they'd like to see them handled?

I think a two bar setup, though one bar would be more elegent.

The top bar just for stacking hots should show current health and health after successive ticks(total for all stacked hots) in different colors
[----60%----] [5%][5%][5%][--25%--]
[---Green---] [Shades of Green-Yellow-Orange][Red]
Depending on how many stacks you want to show, 2, 3, 4, 5, ad naeusum

And then a second Bar which shows incoming Damage in the opposite way(on each tick cycle, every 3 seconds or so)
[----60%----][---40%---]
[--30%--][10%][10%][10%][---40%---]
[Green][Yellow-Orange][Red]

These could be combined in a single bar, lowering if the hots can't keep up with damage and slowly raising if they can, by just subtracting each total damage tick from each total HoT tick and adjusting accordingly.

I could see something like

<<<< Maintankname >>>>>>>

with the < being red and > being green. If the HOTs are predominating damage, make green alpha 100% and red 50%. If incoming damage predominates, reverse it.

Yeah its not that useful I agree. The only part I find useful in it personally myself is helping wtih timing your run inside the tunnel on the side. It was more something I did when I sitting around one night. Something a little more useful be say an old addon I made that tracks where Lethon is shooting shadow bolt volleys (this information is determined based on a combination of timing and watching when Lethon hits his current target).



Player Positioning can be determined through an "abuse" of minimap features in ways prolly not intended. Currently I've been using the minimap to allow players to place markers on the minimap that the entire raid can see and also place markers on the minimap on Sapphiron for where people get frozened.

To a degree you can, I can determine say what direction a player is facing but not their altitude they are looking. I was thinking about making a HUD that gives you directional arrows that shows which why your tank is facing etc. decided it wouldn't have much actual usefulness (just one of those things I was thinking up when I figured out how to determine relative player positions one night and was thinking of targeting reticles in games like MechWarrior).

There is a terrific addon (forget the name) that shows the direction of a target in relative/absolute terms to your own position, but it unfortunately did not work inside of instances where its usefulness would have really shined. I'd like to see something like that available - can't find the rogue you're trying to heal? No problem, the big arrow says he's ----> that way.

Edit- oh yah, its called TLoc or targetloc something like that.

Definately agree this is such a nice advantage. People can use the component for each part they like the best instead of one addon that contains everything. Though it was also nice being able to tell your raid just download this addon instead of saying well here's a list of different raid frames or decursers etc that you might like.

With the expansion I expect to see a nice variety from the grid style addons to other things that might not seem to be quite as obvious say what the RDX guys are calling Skein which draws lines between our traditional sorted list to the fixed list (for some reason to me this doesn't sound like a great idea but sounds like it will make pretty videos). And every player is going to find they have preferences for different styles and while there will be some packages like RDX that offer it all there will be also the seperate components for download.