Vuhdo HoT Display for Holy Paladins

This is the first time I’ve ever set out to write something instructional here. If you aren’t a Holy paladin, and you aren’t interested in using Vuhdo, you probably won’t be very interested in this. Or perhaps you’re curious. Well, Vuhdo is an addon for healing much like Healbot or Grid. It’s my addon of choice as a resto druid because I love its user friendly configuration and HoT display options. Until today though, I realized that as a holy paladin I wasn’t using it to its fullest potential.

A paladin doesn’t need quite as many HoTs set up as a resto druid does, though. We’re primarily interested in our Sacred Shield, Beacon of Light, and Flash of Light HoTs for tracking. Vuhdo has a built-in option for this in the “Buffs” menu. It lets you know when Beacon of Light or Sacred Shield drop off a specified target. This has worked fine for me up until now, for 5-mans; when I realized that “when it drops off” just wasn’t cutting it. I needed to know when it was going to drop off so I could pre-empt it, and also be able to switch targets mid-fight. I set out to configure Vuhdo to show me. It’s actually quite easy to do once you know where to go.

First off, here is the Vuhdo menu that seems most intuitive for tracking Beacon and SS.

"Buffs" panel, with Config selected.

If you look at it, you can set up a colour for each buff. I go with orange for Beacon, yellow for SS. To the right, you can see how that looks on an actual health bar. The problem with this, as I mentioned above, is that the bars will only light up once the buff has dropped off. Not always such a good thing. It also can’t switch targets mid-fight – so while you may have dropped your beacon on another target because of fight mechanics, this bar will show orange to say “Hey, player X doesn’t have Beacon!” But by default, Vuhdo won’t show you who DOES have Beacon. Because of this, after configuring my HoTs I’ve actually turned it off so that it won’t try to tell me to put Beacon on someone who shouldn’t have it. It makes the tank swapping fights easier to do. But first you need to have this info displaying, and that’s where the next menu comes in.

Vuhdo's configuration menu, at the "Panels" tab.

Instead of going into the Buffs menu, along the bottom tabs, click on “Panels.” Then along the right hand-side, look for “HoT Icons.” This is the menu you will see. Make sure that “Own Hots” is checked off at the upper left hand corner there. Below that, you see what looks like a bewildering jumble of circles, but it’s actually pretty easy to understand when you start to mess around with them. In this example you can see that I have the far left red indicator checked off. At the bottom of the screen, you can see how the HoTs I have selected will display with that option. It puts them off the health bar, in a space to the left. That could work for you if you like that – I don’t prefer it, because it means my eyes have to move away from the health bar itself.

In the center of the menu, you can see the “HoT Order” box there. Each arrow points to a place where you can select the HoT you’d like displayed; from in-most to outer. (In my example above, the orange square is Beacon of Light, Yellow is Sacred Shield, and teal is the FoL HoT. I ordered them that way because I always want Beacon  (often on a solitary target) on the left. When you click the drop-down menu, this is what you’ll see:

You must choose, but choose wisely.

Yes, you can have it display your Gift of the Naaru if you’re a draenei like me (and why wouldn’t you be?!) You can also have it show the Sacred Shield, FoL, and Beacon of other paladins by selecting  the “Others” check boxes to the right. I didn’t bother with this because I was the only paladin in our raid tonight, which is pretty rare. Still, it’s potentially useful to avoid overwriting the shields and beacons of others. In this image you can see I have selected a location for my HoTs different from the first one. I want them inside the health bar, and in the upper half so that they don’t obscure the bar entirely. I’ve also opted to line them up along the left; that way when health is dropping I can see it easily without any boxes in the way, but this is a personal choice, and you’ll see it in action a bit later. Next, you’re going to set up your own colours, in case you hate teal.

Pretty colours.

Along the bottom tabs, click “Colors” right next to “Panels” and then go to “HoTs” along the right hand side. This is what you’ll see, more or less, except I’ve already set up my colours. To change the colour of a HoT, just click on the coloured bar along the left and you’ll get a colour selection menu. Here you can see the colours I’ve defined. The options along the right deal with the text of the icons themselves, and how they act as they tick down. Here the default options are shown, I haven’t changed any of this. You can opt to select “Full Duration” next to any HoT to show it ticking down the entire time it’s running, which could be handy if you need to know as much as possible. I might try this out for Beacon so I’ll always know approximately when the refresh is coming, but it might be information overload.

In raid.

Here’s what the above configuration looks like in an actual raid. You can see the orange button indicating that Vinius is my Beacon of Light target, and Beacon of Light is active on him at this time. Immediately below him is Wallofbricks, the main-tank. He has Sacred Shield on him, and you can see that my Flash of Light HoT is ticking down – it has only 6 seconds remaining. As it ticks the box will fade and then disappear entirely, unless I refresh it first. By default, the Beacon and SS indicators will also begin to show similar timers that can be configured, but that’s getting into more “Vuhdo” things and less “Vuhdo paladin” things.

I suppose it’s generally a “duh” but these simple configurations definitely helped with my healing tonight. I didn’t have any downtime on Beacon or SS, was better able to ensure my tank had the FoL heal, and I am a doofus for not doing this sooner. I know there are great addons for tracking these things, but where possible I like to work with the addons I’m already using and clearly Vuhdo knew how to do it, even if I hadn’t yet done it myself. So don’t be like me if you use Vuhdo, configure these things properly, you’ll be grateful later!

Hopefully that was easy to understand, if you have any questions I’ll be happy to answer them in comments if I know the answer, no guarantees!

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Even the patience of the Draenei has its limits

Vidyala has had ridiculously awesome luck with loot drops since beginning Northrend instances. It’s as if the Loot Gods look and say, “Lo, and it shall be healing plate,” and it is. I’ll admit something to you all here. This is what I envisioned when I rolled a holy Paladin. So many times I’d seen spellpower plate dropping and thought, “That stuff drops so often, and there’s no one here to take it. If only I had a holy paladin, she would be so well-dressed.” Yes, the motivating factor behind my alt-project, avarice, of course. It’s even working; she’s starting to be so well-dressed! I even had a fancy chestpiece drop, that I don’t wear but I was tempted. Losing 10% of my XP gain is bad, but the chestpiece itself has better stats than my heirloom.

Of the slots in which I am not wearing heirlooms, Vid has:

Head: Unbreakable Healing Amplifiers (an iLevel 200 I can wear at level 72, with a meta socket…thank you, Engineering!)
Neck: Mark of the Spider (BoE zone drop in Azjol-Nerub)
Back: Cloak of Azure Lights (OK, this one was a quest reward… the cloak from Jedoga in Old Kingdom dropped but I lost the roll to a warlock).
Wrist: Glowworm Cavern Bindings (BoE zone drop in Old Kingdom, mail, but it replaced wrists I had from a quest in Nagrand)
Off-hand: Tharon’ja’s Aegis (Tharon’ja in Drak’tharon Keep)
Hands: Aura Focused Gauntlets (Krik’thir the Gatewatcher in Azjol-Nerub)
Waist: Crawler-Emblem Belt (Elder Nadox, Old Kingdom)
Feet: Greaves of the Blue Flight (Ormorok the Tree Shaper, Nexus)

Basically, if Loot For A Paladin can drop, it has dropped, including BoE stuff that my group members were kind enough to let me have (even in one case of mail). I have absolutely nothing to complain about. I’m also a bit obsessive so I’m planning gear for 80.

For anyone else who might be gearing up a healing paladin sometime soon, here are the resources I’ve found. I welcome the addition of any I may have missed, in the comments! Some of them are unfortunately a bit outdated (e.g. Banana Shoulders, it’s a great guide but it was written before the current tier of emblems, and before the ICC and ToC instances).

Paladincraft.net’s Holy Paladin Gearing

Elitist Jerks Holy Paladin Thread

Banana Shoulders Pre-Raid Holy Paladin Gear List

Wowhead Forum topic someone else wrote about gearing their alt holy spec

Since I’ve hit Northrend with Vid, a funny thing is happening with my pugs. I’m awash in the sheer volume of them. It used to be easy to write an entry, “Oh, I went to this hour-long instance, I’ll write about that.” Now I’ve done Nexus something like six times.

One time was with a paladin tank who had apparently fallen from the sky, into Nexus, with little notion of how to use any of his tools and bad gear to match. He was incredibly hard to heal and I think still learning to tank – or had just queued as a tank for the fast queue times. He was slow. And I’m not of the “gogogo” school, I’d never pull for the tank, or be rude, but this guy was ponderously…just inching his way…through the instance. We could still be there, that’s all I’m saying.

I got dropped into Azjol-Nerub with a tank who was actually from my own server, and I remembered again what Veneretio said about how the dungeon tool is ruining your chances for raid tanking. I don’t know about that in this guy’s case, but I am surprised at the people who don’t seem interested in making connections even when they COULD. I mean, he seemed like a competent tank, I whispered him but he didn’t answer me (I’ll usually ask, “Hey, mind if I add you to my friends’ list?” This tank didn’t want to be my friend, which is fine, but really – how many people would pass up the opportunity to meet a decent enough healer, who isn’t a jerk and seems friendly? Before LFD, my friends list (on my old server) was crowded with tanks I’d met in pugs. I actually once logged over from one healer to another after running a pug with a tank, and he whispered me, “Hey, would you like to come heal xyz,” and I had to laugh because I’d just been running with him. He didn’t know they were both my characters, he’d just noted me as a healer on separate occasions. But nowadays, I guess people figure why bother to make friends on your server? Your next dungeon run is an instant queue away, and there’s a revolving merry-go-round of people willing to fill each role.

I know it’s ironic, coming from me, considering the name and focus of this blog so far, but I find this immensely disheartening. I said from the very beginning that my reason for pugging was that I enjoy the social and teamwork aspect of the game. I didn’t want to silently quest to 80 on yet another character, all by my lonesome. And for me, the experiment with Vidyala has been a smashing success, not the least of which is because a few people with stray characters have come to visit on Moonrunner. I’ve met great people, expanded my social circle – I’ve even met people on my server who happen to read here for some reason or other, which is really cool. But I’ve yet to meet more than a passing acquaintance through a pug. I used to meet people that way all the time.

Anyway, my failpug story for this entry comes to you from Azjol-Nerub, an instance so simple it’s hard to imagine that anyone could mess it up. Yet somehow, this DK tank did. We zoned in and pulled the first trash pack; everything was looking fine, we had no problems, and then the action ground to a halt. We looked back at the tank – he was just standing there. “Did he disconnect?” someone wondered. We did the WoW-equivalent of waving a hand in front of his face. We waited a few minutes, people grumbling. We tried to kick him (still had to wait 12 minutes before being able to kick him). We’d just started thinking about dropping group when miraculously, he moved! Without a word of apology or explanation, he ran in to aggro the next patrol (in Azjol-Nerub, one of the three-packs before the first boss).

The problem is, he was terrible. Aggro? He’d never heard of it. I know that the skirmisher has no aggro table, so that’s not his fault, but it wasn’t the only loose mob. I was web-wrapped and nobody freed me. I lost two DPSers on the first pull…and then we all started to panic as the next pack came towards us (I wasn’t able to get off a rez in time)… the tank had gone AFK. Again.

He came back and said, “Why is everyone dead!” I replied, “That’s what happens when you AFK in the middle of a pull,” while the shadow priest chimed in, “Seriously? You don’t know that these packs are all tied together?” It’s not rocket surgery to figure out when a pug is going south fast with no hope of recovery. I told the tank, “I will rez you, but then I’m out of here, this isn’t worth my time, sorry guys.” That’s what 59-odd levels of pugging have taught me – some pugs aren’t worth saving, it’s best to just put it down. I  have no guilt.

Somewhere in there I had my first Violet Hold run (uneventful). I’m starting to run into people whose 80 friends are running normals with them. It made healing the VH tank sort of a joke. I could have been retribution for that run I think, easily. When I’m not running pugs I’ve been doing a few other things – going back to do now-grey Hellfire quests for the Honor Hold rep. Do you know the quest where you have to assist the Draenei anchorite with an exorcism? He gives you the prayer beads that the dog stole and buried (I think Rades may have mentioned this…)

Anyway, I was doing that quest the other day, and you can target either the anchorite or the “released darkness” (floating skulls). I kept having to retarget the NPC to use the beads on him. Of course NPCs all do that oddly jarring “generic response” thing when you click them, which often leads to funny times:

Very angry human NPC in quest text! But you click him and he says, “Hey there!”

This Draenei was the opposite! I clicked on him the first time and he said, “You have other matters to attend to, yes?”

Sure, I’m helping you with the prayer bead thing. Look, see? I clicked him again.

“The Naaru frown upon such behaviour,” he admonished me.

But I’m just trying to help out! I target and click him again. He says, “Even the patience of the Draenei has its limits,” and then at another click, “I think I hear someone calling you…” This poor NPC just wants me to leave him alone so he can do his “Back, demon!” thing. I was really just being helpful.

It was the final one that broke me, though. In a tone of increasing irritation and despair, there in the midst of the exorcism, the Draenei demanded to know, “Who taught you to act like this?!” NPCs have it rough.

p.s. – I heard a little something about changes to the way that raids work. I’m sure you have too, unless you’re living under a rock. I’ll probably write about them sometime soon, maybe after the furor dies down a little. My unadulterated glee is having trouble expressing itself in 8000 words or less.

p.p.s. – The only funny search result that brought someone here this week was “Straight outta Gnomeregan.” The rest of them are variations of “I died in Blood Furnace,” “How do I get my corpse out of Blood Furnace,” and “Blood Furnace corpse run.” The answer? You came to the very, very wrong place, it took me at least twenty minutes.