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In L2Disc – An overview of Discipline Priest raiding, I mentioned that I wanted an AddOn which can track my Prayer of Mending. Specifically, I want to know when I should be casting it so it’s bouncing around out in the field.
Some people don’t care, because they regularly re-cast it. I find this rather inefficient, although I do see how it can be annoying to have the mending “stuck” on some too-rarely-damaged pet.
Other people talk about having HealBot or Grid display a Prayer of Mending icon. This isn’t useful at all to me, because it doesn’t notify me when it’s absent – there’s just too much stuff going on for me to deal with scanning 25 raid positions for that icon. On top of that, could I even configure either of them to deal with multiple instances of Prayer of Mending bouncing around, cast by multiple Priests? Probably not. Besides, I really despise both of those AddOns and I won’t use them so I’m not going to stress over this.
So I need some other solution. This sounds like a common problem, and one which is interesting for a programmer to solve.. so there must be something out there, right? Well not really.
MendWatch ∞
The first reference I found was with MendWatch (curseforge). I even found a nice review of MendWatch.
However, like so many other good programming efforts, this one has been abandoned and has not had a fan update it.
Well one guy says he updated it, but that MendWatch update project was abandoned too. I saw a reference that it moved to WoW Ace. But since that project decided to completely redo portions of their website, breaking links.. I had to search by hand. I also had to use an external engine since their built-in one doesn’t turn up any results. Nice. Well here it is: MendWatch on WoW Ace. Abandoned.
Prayer of Mending Tracker ∞
Ok, so MendWatch seems to be out of the running. I saw some references to another AddOn with the completely uninspired yet totally appropriate name Prayer of Mending Tracker. But I can’t seem to get this to do what I want, which is to give a small icon of some kind and an audio alert when it’s time to re-cast. It seems that if I hide the GUI the sound is disabled.
Then there are some of the extreme solutions.
Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text ∞
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/mik-scrolling-battle-text
(Note that I had reviewed “Mik’s Scrolling Combat Text” and maybe the project has since been revised)
It’s supposed to allow quite a lot of customization. In trying it, I can definitely agree. However, this program is an example of what not to do when taking a complex idea and making it “user friendly”. It’s an absolute horror for me to figure out. I’m just not going to use it in its current state. A scripting language would have been easier for such a complex idea as the pattern matching it does. Yes I did fiddle around quite a lot, I could never get it to do what I wanted..
Power Auras Classic ∞
https://web.archive.org/web/20160630052655/http://wow.curseforge.com:80/addons/powerauras-classic/
This seemed like an interesting choice to me. An image or text and a sound can be triggered. At first I couldn’t figure out how to get it working, but I learned that there’s an unsquashed bug where new items do not become usable until a /console reloadui is done. Even then, and with a lot of fiddling, I wasn’t able to get this AddOn to do just what I want.
Others ∞
So am I left with MendWatch? I wanted to investigate Curse’s priest category some more.
- PoM Tracker has been abandoned.
-
vBroker_PoM, which uses tekkub‘s LibDataBroker and has been abandoned.
- This AddOn doesn’t seem to do anything. I have LDB and I use other LDB addons. This AddOn is shown as loaded by WoW before I log in, and using Option House after logging in. It does not appear in my list of AddOns and it does not appear in my list of LDB AddOns. I have no idea how to troubleshoot, and no I’m not going to disable other AddOns to re-test.
POM Assist
https://web.archive.org/web/20110705224016/http://wow.curseforge.com:80/addons/pom-assist/
Looks fantastic, but I can’t get the sound to work when the GUI is off.
/poma- Configure it to have sound.
/poma hide- Cast Prayer of Mending on myself.
- Wait for an expiry, no sound is heard.
/poma show-
The sound is heard.
Seriously? Sigh.
… back to Prayer of Mending Tracker. But wait, I found a bug!
/pom sound on/pom hide- Cast Prayer of Mending on myself.
- Wait for an expiry, no sound is heard.
/pom show-
The sound is heard.
Umm. Yeah.
So I have to contenders who seem to share the same code and/or bug. Whichever fixes the issue first gets used.
Goodmorning SpiralofHope, I’m the author of Prayer of Mending Tracker and have been out of the game for well over 1.5 years. I actually just reactivated my account this week because the new expansion has sparked some interest and I decided to see if my mod was even being used…no idea if PoM has been changed/nerfed/removed in Cata, or possibly some new interface changes or even a better mod that might make it useless now….I still haven’t had a chance to log in yet and play around, I just decided to make use of my lunch hour and find what I can. If this is still something you would find useful and have bug reports or extra features like the one you stated above let me know and I can fix it.
Hi elidion, welcome back to the game.
I’m pleased you’re getting back into programming. I’m much better at re-casting PoM, but it burns mana to not use as many charges as possible. So yes this addon could still be very useful.
I’ll check out your latest updates and give you feedback there:
http://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons
[edit] https://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/fileinfo.php?id=11925