Penance Priest

Right after I wrote the other two posts on information management, I picked up the delicious Illustration of the Dragon Soul. I knew I needed some way to keep an eye on it, and using the main display of raid buffs was just not gonna cut it. Finding its icon in all that chaos is not my idea of a user-friendly interface.

What I’m using now is an addon called NeedToKnow. It was designed for tracking the time left on buffs and debuffs, which is exactly what’s needed here. In fact, it also tracks the count of stackable buffs, like rogue poisons, so it fits Dragon Soul just perfectly.

Below is a screenshot of NeedToKnow in action. The top bar shows Dragon Soul’s stack count (10) and time remaining (9s, but the “s” is a bit hard to see under the white spark). The bottom bar is for Renewed Hope, taken off the 3.1 PTR, which if you hadn’t heard yet, will be doing some of the heavy lifting that Grace used to do:

Renewed Hope now also give you a 100% chance to reduce all damage taken by 3% for 20 sec to all friendly party and raid targets when you Power Word: Shield a friendly target.

This is a raid-wide buff, so I’ll be tracking it using NeedToKnow. In practice, I doubt it will be something to be concerned about, as it will likely be up 100% of the time without trying.

One other buff I’d like to track this way is Heroism. Because Power Infusion doesn’t stack with Heroism (well, at least the haste component doesn’t), I want to know when Heroism is about to end. As soon as it does I’ll be able to pop PI on my friendly caster and be assured they’ll get the full benefits. Here again, hunting for the Heroism icon in the chaotic and ever-shifting list of raid buffs is the wrong way to do this; having a bright timer bar in a fixed position on your screen is the right way.

Oops! I hacked your code

So, yeah. NeedToKnow is great. The only problem is that this wunder-trinket has a reaaalllly loooonnnggg naammme. And the way NeedToKnow is coded puts the stack count to the right of the buff’s name. Without the hack, the purple bar would say “Illustration of the Dragon Soul [10]”. This would be fine except for the fact that I don’t want my bar to be wide enough to show all that text. And once you shrink the bar, the stack count gets hidden behind ellipses.

The minor hack job I did was to move the display of the stack count to the left of the buff name, as you see in the screenshot above. If you want to do this yourself, you can edit the LUA directly. About 25 lines from the end is a line that says “if (count > 1) then”. The line that immediately follows is where the bar’s text gets set up when a stack size needs to be displayed. I’ve changed mine to read

text:SetText(count.." - "..bar.auraName);

Um, please don’t ask me for programming help! If you’re not sure of what you’re doing, make backup copies, and go slowly, or just skip this bit. You’ll still love NeedToKnow.

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