WoW: My "grid" setup for healing.

Ok, so I promised some folks that I post some images of my healing setup and instructions on how I configured it, so here it is.

Before I get started, this is the list of grid-related addons I use:

Grid - The base addon.
GridDynamicLayout - Sorts raid members into dynamic groups. I'll explain more later.
GridIndicatorText3 - Adds a 3rd row of text to each grid box.
GridStatusHots - Adds indicators for HoTs showing the remaining duration.
GridStatusLifebloom - A textual indicator for lifebloom showing number of stacks and remaining duration.
GridStatusMissingBuffs - Shows raid members who are missing particular buffs.

Now, that said, here's an example of how my grid layout looks in a typical NAXX25 run:

IMAGE(http://i135.photobucket.com/albums/q133/serengeti000/grid1.jpg)

This is using the dynamic layout addon to sort the members of the raid into columns. In this example you can see that column 1 is made up of the current tanks, columns 2 & 3 are healers, 4 & 5 are ranged DPS and 6 is melee DPS. The dynamic layout addon watches each raid members status, including stances, talents, etc and dynamically sorts them into the appropriate groups. If someone changes stances (ie. shifting from cat form into bear form), it will move them to the appropriate column(s) as appropriate.

Now let's talk about what each item in the grid means.

Take a look at Krindle's box. The number on the bottom line shows that at current, Krindle is down 3.9k health. I don't show the max health because, well, I don't really care.

The number in the middle of Krindle's box (3-4.0) shows that Krindle has 3 lifeblooms active on him with 4.0 seconds until they expire. I only show my own lifeblooms, as it would be too much information to try to keep track of everyone's.

Now take a look at Knightly's box. The green box in the top left corner shows that he has a regrowth HoT currently active. As regrowth winds down, it begins to turn darker shades of green until it disappears altogether once it's run out.

Baylie, Eppy, Dein, Jut and Zero all have a grey box in the bottom right corner. This indicates that each has an active Wild Growth HoT on them. The boxes for WG start out pure white, and get dimmer as they expire, so in this case, they're about to run out.

Zero also has a pink box in the bottom left corner. This indicates that he has an active rejuvenation HoT on him.

I use the top right corner for 2 different things. When in combat, it shows people who have an abolish poison spell active on them, as in this example:
IMAGE(http://i135.photobucket.com/albums/q133/serengeti000/grid4.jpg)

when out of combat, however, it shows people who are missing a mark of the wild or gift of the wild buff, as I am in this example:
IMAGE(http://i135.photobucket.com/albums/q133/serengeti000/grid2.jpg)

There are a couple of status notifications not visible in the examples. The border of a persons box will turn green if that person is poisoned, or pink if they are cursed.

It probably sounds complex, but in reality it's very easy.

Now to be honest, I'm a bit lazy. I was planning on writing out all the instructions on how to setup Grid to work properly, but there's already a very good write-up available if you're interested.

What I decided to do instead was to share my grid configuration file, so if you're a resto druid, you can copy it and go. If you're a different class, well, you can always use my config as a starting point and modify it as needed. In order to use my file, first make sure that you have downloaded and installed all the addons above. Once that's done, download my grid.lua and place it in your World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\YourAccountName\SavedVariables folder. Start up WoW, join a raid, and it should all be ready to go.

There's really so much more detail I could go into, but this should give you a start if you're looking to get into grid.

Any questions I can answer?

This is great, thanks Baylie. I'm going dual-spec healing on my paladin with 3.1 so I was planning on find a nice Grid overview! Any pally healers, do you guys have a similar setup?

That looks like it takes up a big chunk of the screen. Do you have it off to the side, or smack in the middle? Can you toggle it on and off with an easy key combo?

Thanks for the real-world example of grid in action. I am intrigued. You actually make it sound pretty straight forward, where before I had thought switching to grid from healbot would be a nightmare. Like Leap said, it does appear to be eating up a lot of real estate. I'd love to see a screenshot of how it fits in with the rest of your ui.

If someone changes stances (ie. shifting from cat form into bear form), it will move them to the appropriate column(s) as appropriate.

This is a very cool feature, even if it is or is not beneficial, it's very cool.

I hate to say this.. I use the basic raid setup with bartender4 on my bars. I do use a lot of hotkeys and all the 5 buttons on my mouse. I have a swiftmend/regrowth script on my middle button, NS on my far right button, and remove curse on the far left one... so if my mouse goes down all my quick heals go bye bye. I also have my 5 basic healing spells + abolish poison to my number keys. I don't know if I will switch to grid as it looks huge and I don't have much real estate as it is left. But it looks very useful.

Here's what my full screen looks like with it running. Note that you can scale everything about it, so it can take up as much or as little of your screen as you like.

Apologies for the large image

IMAGE(http://i135.photobucket.com/albums/q133/serengeti000/WoWScrnShot_032909_181642-1.jpg)

Wait, there is a quest for Naxx??

LeapingGnome wrote:

This is great, thanks Baylie. I'm going dual-spec healing on my paladin with 3.1 so I was planning on find a nice Grid overview! Any pally healers, do you guys have a similar setup?

That looks like it takes up a big chunk of the screen. Do you have it off to the side, or smack in the middle? Can you toggle it on and off with an easy key combo?

Now that I've seen Gird in "action" here, I know I don't need it. For pally healing, anything I need to know is already displayed just as friendly in the raid windows I've configured in X-Perl.

However, if were running HoT's, I would absolutely snag and run this mod post-haste. That's some awesome stuff right there.

LeapingGnome wrote:

Wait, there is a quest for Naxx??

From level 60. You needed to kill a bunch of trash from each wing, and that unlocked the T3 quests.

LeapingGnome wrote:

Wait, there is a quest for Naxx??

It's a quest made for the old Naxx40 that you had to do before you could turn in any of the T3 tokens.

Edit:Bah, posted the same minute.

Yeah, Eppy picked it up in EPL and shared it with the raid last weekend

And then I joined the raid and you guys held out on me. I see how it is.

Farscry, can you post what you have for pally healing, or a screenshot?

After reading your explainer of Grid, Serengeti, I realize that I don't know bupkus about healing. If I had a hat, it would be off to ya.

Quick question: What addon are you using for your character and target panels? (The stuff in the top left corner, I mean.)

LeapingGnome wrote:

And then I joined the raid and you guys held out on me. I see how it is.

Yup, it was all part of our plan to make sure you didn't get the 70s quest reward, you got us

Enix wrote:

Quick question: What addon are you using for your character and target panels? (The stuff in the top left corner, I mean.)

That would be ag_unitframes.

LeapingGnome wrote:

And then I joined the raid and you guys held out on me. I see how it is.

Farscry, can you post what you have for pally healing, or a screenshot?

I'll take a few screenies on Sunday and find good ones with action going on. I'll post 'em in this thread and talk a bit about how it works for me.

One thing I need to get around to finally doing is reconfiguring DBM so it stops putting warning bars right on top of all my raid healing windows!

LeapingGnome wrote:

This is great, thanks Baylie. I'm going dual-spec healing on my paladin with 3.1 so I was planning on find a nice Grid overview! Any pally healers, do you guys have a similar setup?

That looks like it takes up a big chunk of the screen. Do you have it off to the side, or smack in the middle? Can you toggle it on and off with an easy key combo?

Leap- I don't use grid, but I grew up on healbot. I tried to run grid but just didn't like it. Healbot has what I need for information... damage to player, beacon on player, shield on player... lets me play the heroic whack-a-mole that healing is.

I use healbot with a slight bit of x-perl modification tossed in on both my healers (pally and priest). Tried grid some, but found that its functionality is similar, and that I felt healbot made better space utilization on my monitor.

Pigpen wrote:

I use healbot with a slight bit of x-perl modification tossed in on both my healers (pally and priest). Tried grid some, but found that its functionality is similar, and that I felt healbot made better space utilization on my monitor.

I tried healbot among other untiframes and while they were good, they just didn't have enough HoT info for me. I can see how they would work fine for other healing classes, but as a Druid, Grid just provides the most data in a nice compact space for me.

Well, not that compact, but that's my own design. The default grid boxes are a lot smaller than my config

As a tank, I don't need much from my UnitFrames.
Aggro - If it's me and the other tank, YAY! if it's a healer, I need to taunt. If it's DPS, they need to use their aggro dump and slow down.
Target of Target - goes along with Aggro, generally.
Mana - do I need to pause between trash chainpulls for my healers?

I hate how huge the XPerl raid frames are, especially in BGs and 25-mans.
I tried Pitbull, and really love it for 5-mans and soloing/questing. I never have the time to devote to really getting its raidframes set up to my liking, so I default back to XPerl. /sigh

I like Grid, and run it too. I've actually started using it instead of XPerl Raidframes, though it's lacking the mana display and I don't completely understand all the indicators it defualts with.

When I'm healing with my druid(63), I love having everyone in a very small space. I hate losing real estate to information I don't really need 90% of the time. I think I'll spend some time with Grid and try to replace XPerl for Raid and Party altogether. Then I just need me, my target, my ToT, and focus+focustarget.

Baylie, thank you! I am sure I'll ask you to join me in vent to set this up. Computers are not my forte.

Healbot has actually improved on the hot monitoring a lot. It shows the regrowth icon in addition to a countdown when it will expire. Same thing for the rejuv and lifebloom.

It also keeps track of earth shield left and some other set and forget abilities. I was very happy when I downloaded the new one.

On the healing front, I know healers like to see incoming heals from other healers - IIRC, Healbot doesn't natively talk to Grid - or rather, it does not implement the library that Grid takes advantage of. You can install the lib alongside your healbot install and make all the Grid-using healers very happy that they can see your incoming heals AND you can see theirs.

I don't know what Grid uses to display incoming heals, but I can already see them coming from anyone. There doesn't appear to be anything special healbot users need to do to let Grid users see their heals... No idea about the reverse.

Maybe Healbot added the lib in a later version - libHealComm, perhaps? I forget the name. I do recall intercommunication being a issue not too long ago.

I know I see incoming heals, and at the moment I don't have healbot or grid installed. Maybe more unit frame mods are including it by default (I'm using pitbull at the moment)?

I used to use grid alongside agUnitFrames (the latter for me, target, target's target, focus; the former for everything else), and I'm thinking of switching back to that kind of a format, maybe still using pitbull instead of agUnitFrames, as I like the way it's configured better. Grid is confusing at first, but extremely powerful in terms of condensing a lot of information down to a small space.

I'm also thinking of trying out something I saw on some of Ciderhelm's videos, where he keeps his own frame out of the way, puts his target's frame where I would normally have my frame, and makes his target's target the same size as self and target usually are. It makes sense, as a tank's target's target should be himself the majority of the time, and if it's not you probably want to know real quickly...

Sorry for polluting a healing thread with some tanky stuff, but wanted to report the bit about incoming heals and then I got carried away.

Edit: should note I don't have anything like Click (Clique?) installed either at the moment, or any healy mods at all that I recall. Probably will figure something out after I buy dual-spec for my shammy.

You know, now that I think about it, I see incoming heals on both Grid and my ag_UnitFrames lately... I wonder if it's built into the Blizzard default UI now?

Here's a video guide to Grid found via WoWInsider.
http://inevitableraid.com/?p=1480

A quick question with the Grid addons, Do they go in separate folders in the UI folder or do i transfer the files into the Grid folder itself?

HantaXP wrote:

A quick question with the Grid addons, Do they go in separate folders in the UI folder or do i transfer the files into the Grid folder itself?

I have the addons in separate folders (not inside the base Grid one).

Interface
>Addons
>>Grid
>>GridStatusHots
>>GridStatusLayoutPlus

Thanks

How do i download the Grid.Lua

Anonders wrote:

How do i download the Grid.Lua

Right-clik and select "Save target as..."