Project Lore

This is the first of many features about addons I use in order to make Juggy the best shaman ever and Xenophontos a halfway decent warlock. Grid is an addon I used much more while I was resto and main healing, but it is still pretty useful even while I'm enhancement. An Ace addon, grid displays party and raid health bars in a compact form, and it gives loads of information using very little screen real estate. This means that at a glance, you can see how your raid is doing. By default, it displays each party member as a small square within a grid. I think that is where the name came from, but can we ever be sure? One of the great included features of grid are the inverted health bars, meaning it fills up a dim box with color as the player loses health, making it easier to spot who needs healing in a large raid. There is also a built in range check that can automatically dim all player's boxes who are out of range. This feature is invaluable, since trying to heal players who are out of range can waste a lot of time. It's also a great feature for battlegrounds, allowing you to become top healer and help your side win. Lastly, my favorite feature of Grid is its use of the incoming heal module, which shows a visual estimate of any incoming heals on any target in the raid from anyone using Grid (or any other ace addon that has the incoming heal feature). If all of the healers use this addon, you can avoid a lot of overhealing. There are also border colors, center icon, and other corner icons that are configurable to show tons of different statuses of each player in the raid. I do like to make a couple of tweaks to the defaults, though. I play on a relatively high resolution, and I find the default size of the squares too small. So, I scale it up in the options. As a shaman, I have two dispel options, poison and disease. The standard set up has all types of debuffs appear as a single mark in one corner of the player's box. I go in and change it so that magic debuffs and curses don't show up and poisons are in one corner while diseases are in another. That way I know which button to press or totem to drop in order to cure all of my party members. I also like to be able to see when Dorkins is going to run out of mana, so I've picked up GridManaBars. This takes a slice of the square and turns it into a mana bar. Imagine that! Most of the other options are fine for me on their default settings, but Grid is highly flexible, so play around and look at the documentation to find the settings that work best for you.

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