I use lots of mods that fit the general theme: predict a future event and display the remaining time with a bar, and I am sure you do, too. For example: bossmods (dbm, bigwigs), bg timers (capping), classtimers (scorchio), buff timers, debuff times (dotimer), swingtimers (quartz), and many more. But I am not satisfied with them. Why? Let me explain...

The bars are either filling or depleting, and for the sake of simple arguments, lets assume they are filling. Their length is typically the same, no matter the whole time to complete. This leads to displays like the following:
Which one is going to finish first? You will not know without reading the label or watching the speed of the movement, which defies the whole idea of a bar as a representation of time... Also, if the bars sort themselves, so that the top ones finish faster, then the bars reshuffle occasionally, which is distacting.

Moreover, the timers are often scattered and harder to compare, since they come from different mobs. (Will I have to refresh scorch before Malygos heads into Vortex? The answer takes more than a single look)


A simple design sketch

The basic idea of this design is a timeline from left to right, future events are to the right. As time progresses, the bars move tho the left, while retaining their length (Think of Guitar Hero ) This layout would emphathize the relationships of the cooldowns/events/buffs to each other, in order to help the player plan her next actions. Personal Events on the top, Boss events to the bottom and events that are to far away are indicated to the right.
A basic addon could provide the functionality, with modules for different types of events (buffs, swing timer, pvp, bosses, dk runes, dps rotations ... )


Can't we do better?
Since bar mods have a big impact on wow visual style and player performance, I think we should look for new ideas here. I outlined one above and I am certain you will have some as well. /discuss

Really good idea.

I agree with your assessment, although I think part of the problem is that such an addon would need to be everything to everyone in order to work properly. As you outlined above, it would need to contain cooldown timers, dot timers, opponent ability cooldowns, boss timers, etc etc. It would be a pretty hefty mod.

A question about the representation that you have there - you mention that the length of the bar would remain fixed as it moves from Right to Left (Future to Now). What does the length of the bar represent in that case?

I'm assuming the length of the bar represents how long the actual buff/debuff/phase is, and the whole bar will move along the timeline.

Either that or every bar has the same length and they just go down the timeline, so you can glance and see if anything is coming up soon.

Such a mod would only be useful as long as the number of pieces of information displayed are relatively small.

You certainly wouldn't want to dump half the items that ElkBuffBars displays for me into the timeline, as many of them are things you may glance at once every blue moon only.

Such a mod should also be very, very easily customizable. It should be even easier than opening a config menu to add and remove what is being tracked, so you can do so mid-raid, between pulls, without wasting time or distracting yourself much from tanking or other activities.

I'd think having a box at the left side where you can type in the name of something to start tracking, and a drop down on the right where you can select tracked items to be removed, would keep it simple, and then have more advanced configuration options that you won't use on the fly all the time tucked away as per normal mod configuration.

This is an excellent, original idea. Wish there was a way to tag posts as important/very worth reading.

I just want to point out that cooldown abilities/items becoming available would be points on the timeline, not bars. They don't stop becoming available after that. Things being unavailable and on cooldown would be shown as bars, however.

Modularity would help with this. Also, some things are much harder to implement than others. Cooldown timers and buff/dot timers are really easy to implement in a single, small addon (I did it in TellMeWhen). Opponent and boss timers I imagine would be heftier because they involve figuring out information that's not provided by the API.

Ok so there are really 2 representations of time in your illustration, that makes sense.

The addon doesn't necessarily need to be "everything to everyone". It can be more like Fubar with an API so people can create plug-ins to add timers for whatever. There just needs to be a basic framework that people can plug into. I think this a great idea. I wouldn't want to include the timers for all my buffs for example, but I'd like to have a central spot for some specific spell cooldowns, boss abilities, debuffs, and specific buffs. As long as its highly configurable and has a good presentation, I could see a mod like this easily becoming a standard.

In regards to customization...
Would it be to contradictory to the concept to move the different types of bars vertically for customization purposes while still keeping them in alignment with the time-line? It might be slightly more difficult, depending on placement, to see them in comparison to the time-line, hence the reason for customizing to what the player really wants or feels comfortable with.

Now if this does get to be a standard / required mod, which is very very likely, then the creators of DBM and Big Wigs will most likely get a beta modules, if not stable modules, released in a very quick manner. That, or why not try and figure it out ourselves?

The OP inadvertently raises an issue with the concept itself: If you design a linear scale for time, at a zoom level high enough to distinguish things that are happening in the next 10 seconds, stuff that's multiple minutes away won't fit on the screen, which is why it has that "Enrage 8:37, Death 8:00" display in the blue arrow. This requires more reading than the mod should, and undermines the purpose of creating an intuitive graphical display of time.

To get around this problem, and to design a way to visually discern both the shortest and longest time scales of interest, the solution is obvious: use a logarithmic (or probably better, pseudo-logarithmic) time scale. For example, display from Now to +30s just like shown in the OP (let's say it's 300 pixels wide), but then compress +30s to +120s to fit within the next 300 pixels (a 3:1 time compression), and +120s to +300s in the 300 pixels after that (6:1 compression) and +300s to +600s in another 300 pixels (10:1 compression). This gives us a full view of 10 minutes of time within a 1200 pixel screen.

Another option would be to have 2 time scales, the 0-60s version above the 1-10min version, and move them at different speeds. They could both be linear, or have the short timeline linear and the long timeline [pseudo-]logarithmic

Of course, there will have to be customization within the plugins for what events to display at different time scales. I may or may not like to be reminded of a 10-minute cooldown that's still 3+ minutes away.

Perhaps in the spirit of keeping the horizontal realestate small, you could put the 0-30s portion of a logarithmic timescale above a graphical line, and the 31s+ portion below like this:
It keeps the whole set of information close together, but clarifies the immediate things from those more distal along the timeline.

Sorren's Easy Rotations


Older hunter mod similar in concept, kinda 'bare' but has everything basically there. bars are created as shots are preformed etc.

The old Ace debuff timer, DotDotDot, also did this. I don't think it's being maintained anymore, though.

It did something similar, not quite exactly the same. And no, I'm not maintaining it anymore (see infoblock for why); if anyone wanted to pick it up, you'd have my blessing. Anything outside of a configurable "window" of time showed as a full bar, and anything below that window operated as a linear width:time bar, maintaining the idea that any DoT with a shorter bar ended sooner.

I've been really wanting my timer bars to all have the same scale of width:duration for a while. Maybe an alternative would be something like 100% width means 30s or more, and anything with over 30s duration shows a jagged ending edge rather than a straight ending edge like bars with 30s or less remaining? (I just picked 30s off the top of my head, but it would probably vary by class or whether it's buffs/debuffs/cooldowns/etc)

This is what I liked about ShockAndAwe and kept for Squawk. The ability to look at the bars and determine which one was going to end first based purely on their width, because they all* deplete at the same rate. Personally, I think a full bar instead of a jagged-edged one for an over-duration bar is a good idea, too, and will likely end up being how I treat those types of cooldowns/debuffs in future revisions.

wow, forteXorcist is a pretty cool addon (which I had never heard of), although it does seem resource intensive.

It also has spell/dot timer bars with a fixed maximum like DotDotDot did. Definitely going to try it out some.

Forte actually works pretty well for everything I'm seeing, just on initial tests. Hell- it could serve even better than SAA on some things perhaps, if one got used to it.

I'm really impressed. I'd say the only thing it needs is some more custom settings for a Shaman- like the MW bar changing color when its at a full 5 stacks. Wow.

I tried the ForteXorcist cooldown bar, and it's truly awesome. My only gripe is that it won't show buffs that proc off other abilities, such as Abomination's Might or Greatness. If it would map those the same way it does buffs from my own spells, that would make it pretty much perfect.

The way I would visualize this is not as something similar to Fubar (as the modularity aspect, where people write different stuff for it), but as similar to the style of the Actual Fubar (bar).


For instance, this would be positioned where the reputation/XP bar is on the default UI (or could be positioned). You could have 2 bars, one for times up to 1 minute, including debuff drop offs. The second bar would be customizable as to the time, and would not include debuff drop offs, but it would include other major events such as: Boss Abilities, Cooldowns (greater than 20/30s), and other stuff that does not need close watch, but still might be helpful in the long run.

Ideally, it would appear similar to the Forte deal, but personally, I do not like the color/width of the bar that they use, something thinner would be more preferable. Also, the time would need to be more visible for each icon.

I really like the idea of a DDR/Guitar Hero type display--vertical rather than horizontal. Pseudo-3D feel where far-off events are faded or smaller or rotated to seem deeper into the screen. (I also really like the idea of the logarithmic time scale.) http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/ima..._screen002.jpg The bottom line is "now" and higher on screen = farther into future.

What are the categories of stuff you want to track? I'm thinking of 3 off the top of my head: (1) abilities that should be used/refreshed ASAP, either when they expire or the cooldown expires; (2) conditional abilities with cooldowns, but that won't necessarily be used immediately when available, like innervate; (3) event milestones, like phase transitions or enrage timers.

I'm going to take one step back in generalisation to "predict a future event and display the remaining time." With all the shortcomings that current mainstream bar mods suffer (to the point that they offer at best only limited utility in my personal experience), perhaps alternate display methods should be considered as well, either as different solutions or a source of fresh ideas.

One of the biggest problems I have with bar mods is, as macbeet mentioned, that they get shuffled around: I apply Rake and by the time I need to refresh it, its associated bar may well be in a different location. Thus leaving me to waste time tracking it down among the list. Another major problem is the relative complexity of a list of timer bars. Tracking such a list while wailing away at a test dummy is hardly taxing. But in a boss fight where a dozen other things require more of one's attention, reading through the laundry list of constantly shifting and rearranging bars becomes more challenging.

I've tried a variety of timer mods but the best thing I've found so far is actually just Power Auras. Given that the timer feature is in a static location, I know exactly where to look to find out how much longer I have until Rake needs to be refreshed. Given the image overlays I can see without skipping a beat which dots and buffs are up. If a picture is worth a thousand words, that's a lot of reading time saved for more important matters like paying attention to what's going on around you. For instance:


...tells me I have one second left on Rake, but clearcasting is up so next up is Shred. 14s on Savage Roar, 9s on mangle and 11s on Rip.

But as useful as I've found Power Auras to be as a timer mod, it's still lacking a bit. While the visual overlays are one of its strengths, it unfortunately makes the timers difficult to see if you're in a fight with a lot of bright ambient light (e.g. standing in the power sparks for Malygos). At the very least some of Power Auras' strengths should be considered for bar mods:
* An option to have certain buffs/debuffs show up in fixed locations along the list, or even allow for a timer to be pulled out of a list and set in a specific location.
* An option to customise bar coloring options by name as well as the more common buff/debuff type (thus enabling a little more at-a-glace utility).