Monday, August 3, 2009

Healing Firsts: H-VoA (Troubles with Healbot)

In a small way, it's a little anti-climactic to take down bosses with alts. Yes, last night was the first night that I got in a PUG for Heroic VoA, and we cleared both bosses pretty easily. But it wasn't like I was jumping up and down now that I have the achievement. On the contrary, I felt a little embarrased... it's kind of like, "No, I swear! I've done this content already." lol.

There were a few issues on Emalon (4% on the first attempt, and then people focused on the boss and not the Overcharged add... bad raiders), but after 3 attempts, we beat him down. And no issues at all on Archavon. I was really hoping for any Shaman drop... simply because I was the only Shaman. But no, such luck. Oh well... there's always next week, right?

But the major issue I had was actually with Healbot. I know it has the settings to make it like the picture below. You know... mulitple columns and rows. Maybe instead of the 40-man picture (4 x 10), it would be more like 3 columns with 10 people in the first two and 5 people in the last one. That would make sense, right?

Yeah, well.. no. Mine is just one column. All 25 people in one column. I'm sure it's a setting that I have messed up or something. I just didn't have time to fix it. I got the invite, accepted the summons, and then Wow crashed. It does this enough that I know I have to completely restart the computer or else it will keep crashing. So, as soon as I got back online, I had to run in the instance: everybody was already waiting at the boss. A quick healing assignment (I was on raid healing), and we were off. I dragged Healbot around a bit so that it went from the top of my screen to the bottom. And I think I could heal most people. And those I couldn't, probably got hit with a chain heal anyway, right? And since none of the wipes were the healer's fault, it didn't matter if I couldn't see a few.

Regardless of the reason. I have to fix this. Furthermore, I really need to stop being lazy, enter in my MouseOverTarget macros, and then just use the x-perl interface that I have up anyway. Either way will work, but healing with one column... what a pain!

Oh... and there's just something about being the only one to have the power to drop Heroism and make 25 people instantly smile that they're casting, hitting, shooting 30% faster. It's a fun feeling.

1 comment:

Ess said...

If I recall correctly, the setting you want is under one of the "skins" tabs -- it will allow you to fiddle with stuff like like that, as well as the sizes/looks of the bars. When I was still using Healbot, I was somewhat lazy and kept the standard boxes settings the whole time and then *just* changed the number of columns depending on whether I was in a raid or BG. (I didn't use their preset "raid" settings.)

Healbot gave me a different problem, actually. It, for some reason, wouldn't load left-click spells sometimes. So, I'd click to heal and nothing would happen until I reloaded the addon. (Even then, sometimes that didn't work.) After enough frustration, I finally switched over to Grid + Clique.

Grid is a unit frame replacement (you could still use X-Perl instead) and Clique allows you to very quickly bind spells to mouse-clicks. It's super-easy to configure. If you're not ready to bother with MouseOverTarget macros, you could always give it a try. I have mine set up to work almost exactly like Healbot with just a few modifications. (I uploaded a few supplemental grid plugins, too, to show mana bars, etc -- I can get the names of them for you if you're interested.) The combination looks a little different than Healbot, but is functionally the same, and I have never had the spells I've assigned suddenly disappear. :)