Home
(Cached)
Healing AddOn for World of Warcraft
VuhDo Documentation Wiki »
Setup Walkthrough
As such it may be a little overwhelming if you're opening up vuhdo for the very first time. In this case I highly recommend to follow this guide first:
Afterwards, if you have questions about specific options and where to find them, you can come back to this guide and use it as a reference. I will try to make it as complete as I can. If you have suggestions/comments/want to see further information included, please drop a line at plusheal vuhdo support forums.
The guide was created using version 2.11, so things my look slightly different if you have a newer version, but overall things should be similar. See the vuhdo release notes for any changes.
When you first install the add on, it might look a little strange but really it is just trying to show off some of its powerful features.
You can see the vuhdo buff bar is overlapping my unit frame, and there are 4 panels auto loaded that are also overlapping each other. All you need to do is click-drag them to a better location.
At this point you will need to start configuring vuhdo to fit your needs, not the default. Open the option panel by left clicking the minimap icon - it looks like a Draenei.
The option pane does have a different look and feel than most WoW add-ons, but you'll get used to it quickly.
If you want to keep things simple and don't feel like configuring things yourself, you can use the Tools → Panel Wizard menu to change how the main panel is organized, and which of the secondary panels is showing. I'm not going to look at that in this walk through because I'm assuming you want to be a power user and tweak everything to exactly what you want.
This is where you will be setting lots of little features that effect all panels.
You'll probably want to start customizing the settings on this very first pane. Operation mode is by default neutral. This allows for health bar coloring by class, solid color or gradient (green to red usually) depending on health remaining. Additional operation modes in essence fade out (or color a different color) most of the bars except a few that are showing the lowest HP, allowing to isolate more effectively those in most need of healing.
The bars can be selected based on a few similar criteria: most HP lost, least HP left, or health % left. You can set both the irrelevancy limit above which the bars are faded out as well as max number of players that are to be considered relevant at any given time.
Filter allows you to filter out various units out of the main raid panel if you're showing them in separate panels like main tanks or private tanks panels, to avoid redundancy. Your target bar is not filtered by default and is shown together with your focus and private tanks in private tanks panel. If you want to filter it out, check off target. Same applies for focus.
Hide panels and lock panels are pretty self explanatory from the mouseover explanations provided in the options section.
Note that if the whole options window is too small for you to read, there is now an a toggle in the upper right portion of the window that allows options scaling.
The scanners button is very important. In most cases you can probably leave it as the default, but for performance issues it is important to know about these options. Range is very useful, for making it obvious when a player is out of range for a heal. Pick one of your spells with your typical spell range (probably 40yrds) and put that. Then when players are out of range their frames will be faded and you know you can't heal them. Also depending on your performance you can adjust how often vuhdo checks if the players are in range. I've never had a problem with the default 250ms.
Global Scanners option covers update frequency and range for HoTs, cyclic updated bouquets, custom debuff timers etc.
I left this tab as set up by default, but it lets you adjust aggro display by text on the frames. For me it is enough to see that a mage has pulled aggro (>> and << in red around their name) and then I pop a shield on them, and either a renew or flash heal depending how much damage they took before the tank could reclaim the aggro.
Tank mode is a built in feature for those who use vuhdo for tanking. It allows to ignore aggro from caster mobs that randomly target raid members. When you're tanking, you don't want to be seeing raid members getting aggro from this and wasting time trying to taunt the mob off of them when they can't be tanked. As a healer though, you want the tank mode off, as you still want to see who is going to get hit in the face by a spell and need a heal.
Due to more flexible customization requests, indicators were introduced. They allow modification of almost every aspect of the raidframes. The set of instructions on how each indicator is to behave is called a bouquet and is explained in the greater detailed in the bouquet section.
One indicator that also displays bouquets and isn't listed in this section is under Hot Icon slots so keep that in mind when you're deciding how to display your information.
For a quick setup, what you should pay attention to here is Health Bar coloring. Choose among the various Health Bar bouquets on the drop down menu next to it as desired. These include Health bar (generic), Health bar (generic, solid), Health bar (generic, class colored) and Health bar (generic, gradient). The last 3 are in essence just like Health Bar (generic) but with the option of solid, gradient or class colored already selected for you instead of having to click on edit, % health flag and choose the coloring yourself.
This is your default health bar coloring for all panels.
However, you can have different health bar coloring in different panels. For example I keep my Main Tanks panel class colored and my main raid panel solid (green) color. To do this, there is another health bar color selection under Panels->Bars->Custom Setting->Custom Health Bar Bouquet. It will override the General->Indicator->Health Bar one for whatever panel you have currently selected. If you want to have same coloring on all the panels, make sure that Panels->Bars one is on off/empty or the same color as General->Indicators. If health bar isn't colored the way you selected under Indicators, again check that it doesn't conflict with Panels->Bars one.
Make sure you check Mana bar indicator. The default bouquet is mana bar display but you can change it to all power display, threat, specific HoT or debuff display etc.
Finally, check your display for outer border is to your taste as by default it is Multi+Aggro and shows different colors as you mouseover, target a target or gain aggro.
For a more advanced use of Indicators, check the Bouquets section of the guide.
This has some interesting options that don't really fit under any other categories. Mouse over each option to get an explanation of what it does and if it sounds like something you would like. I use it to hide default blizz party display and show the global cooldown directly on the hp bar I'm currently mousing over. This is great when I'm doing PoM/CoH/Renew spam. I don't even need to flick my eyes to the castbars in these situations.
You can turn on and change the message that is posted to raid/party chat when rezing someone. You need to put "vuhdo" as the placeholder for the name of the toon you are rezzing.
Clique support can also be find here should you want to stick with it instead of built in click heal support.
Reaction on key press is built into vuhdo by default. Should you choose to go back to reaction on key release, it's under Mouse Up.
This section is pretty self explanatory. Incoming heals are very useful to see as a healer, so unless you have serious performance issues you should have those turned on. You can choose which type of heals you want monitored and how to display them.
Life text shows incoming heals/overheals with numbers. By default, this is on. Event horizon sliders affect the window of time the addon uses to check for incoming heals. 3 secs works for most situations.
This section is relatively new and is an extremely useful aid in AoE healing. There are two display methods that allow you to decide how to cast heal.
One will show how clustered raid members are to each other hence allowing you to choose where to cast your heal so that it hits maximum amount of raid members. Nothing worse when you cast your aoe heal just to realize that the person you cast it on is far off and it healed nobody else but him.
Second display shows you exactly who your aoe heal will hit if you cast it on current mouseover.
Neither of displays is actually configured here but their base numbers and the way they operate are.
Things to watch for here are range and health level sliders. Range will change depending on your talents or glyphs. For example I set it to 18 yards for CoH as that's what it is with two points in Holy Reach. Health level sliders adjusts when you want to see clustering. I like to almost always show it but it can be distracting for some and you may choose to watch for it only when there is serious raid damage going on.
Source/destination offers options depending on the mechanics of your aoe spell. You need to adjust this to your type of aoe heal. For example CoH is cast on any target (not myself only) and it affects entire raid.
Counter affects the first type of display I mentioned. It is by default shown under Panels->Hot Icons->choose Cluster from the dropdown menu for placement of any of the hots. It will show how many players are clustered to each other by number and color. The threshold definition for what you consider fair or good clustering is changed here. If you don't want to show this as a hot and instead want to show it in one of the other indicators, you can do that by making a custom bouquet. The example of clustering bouquet to mimic this function is shown in Bouquets section.
The second type of aoe heals display where you monitor who exactly gets the aoe heal can be selected for any of the indicators (used to be outer border by default) by choosing the bouquet Cluster Mouse Hover.
Bouquets were made in response to user requests for more flexibility in the way in which various hots, cooldowns and statuses are shown. They give access to almost all the things you can change within vuhdo like health bar foreground color, background color, frame color (frame outside and inside), mouseover opacity, hot positions, hot bars etc. as shown below:
Most of these indicators can be found under General → Indicators. Bars within the hp bar and square/icon positions around the frame can be found under Panels → Hots and Panels → Hot Bars.
For each of those elements now you can specify how they're going to behave.
There is a number of bouquet presets included as defaults that regulates the basic operation of the raidframes:
Aggro Indicator
Background: ClassColor
Background: Solid
Border: Multi
Border: Multi+Aggro
Border: Simple
Cluster: Mouse Mover
Health Bar: (generic)
Health Bar: (generic, class colored)
Health Bar: (generic, solid)
Health Bar: (generic, gradient)
Manabars: All Powers
Manabars: Mana Only
Mouseover: Multi
Mouseover: Single
Swiftmendable
Tank Cooldowns
Threat: Marks
Threat: Status Bar
Bouquet itself is an arrangement of various flags, each flag separately customized and ordered by priority. Some of these bouquets are self-explanatory.
Border: Simple is set in the indicator position for the outer frame. It has only one flag customized by default to be black. In essence it’s a simple black frame around the hp bar.
Border: Multi on the other hand has 3 flags included. First one is color for frame if the player is targeted (by default white. You can change color and width of any of these flags). Next one is color if the player is moused over which by default is yellow. Last flag is default black frame color. What this means is that all hp bars have a simple black border around them unless moused over (yellow) or targeted (white) if you have this bouquet set in the frame indicator position.
Border: Multi+Aggro simply has the aggro flag added to the above three, and placed as first in priority with red color so that red frame takes priority over all the above conditions (target, mouseover, default black).
Possible flags that you can use are listed below:
Color: Emergency
Color: Overheal Highlight
Flag: AFK
Flag: Aggro
Flag: Always Class Color
Flag: Always Solid
Flag: Charmed
Flag: Cluster>#players
Flag: Cluster, Mouseover
Flag: Dead
Flag: Debuff Curse
Flag: Debuff Disease
Flag: Debuff Magic
Flag: Debuff Poison
Flag: Debuff bar color
Flag: Debuff, Dispellable
Flag: Disconnected
Flag: Distance < yards
Flag: Health < %
Flag: Health > %
Flag: Mana < %
Flag: Mouseover Group
Flag: Mouseover Single
Flag: Other Player's Hots
Flag: Player Target
Flag: Raid Target Color
Flag: Range, in
Flag: Range, out of
Flag: Swiftmend position
Flag: Threat > %
Flag: Threat, High
Flag: Threat, Overnuke
Statusbar: Health%
Statusbar: Inc. Heals %
Statusbar: Mana %
Statusbar: Threat %
Statusbar: non-Mana %
Most of these you will recognize as previous or currently available options, just presented differently. For example,
Statusbar: Mana% used to be available as a checkbox to turn the mana bar on or not, with a width adjustment slider. Now you can place this mana bar above or below the frame or within the frame etc. and color it however you like, as well as adjust the width.
In addition to these preset flags, you can type in the flag box any hot, buff or debuff by name.
Keep in mind that for the most part, setting up various options on other tabs within options pane will create/alter some of these bouquets for you so you do not have to panic if you don’t pick this up right away. For example, I show my player names by class color under Panels→Text.
It in response automatically ads a flag (Flag: Always Class Color) in a bouquet that controls hp display (Health Bar: (generic)) which is by default on the bar foreground color indicator and applies it to text and not to background, and places it in priority at the bottom, just above the health %:
Lets now say you want a bouquet for healer cooldowns on the target. Start by typing in a new bouquet name under General → Bouquets.
Some of the important healer cooldowns include Divine/Hand of sacrifice, Pain Suppression and Guardian Spirit. Enter each into debuff/hot/buff name box and adjust properties for each. You can order them by importance (ie. if more than one are present on the target, DS will show up first in this arrangement (red →), color them however you like (blue →), or show them as icons (if you’re putting them in hot icon positions) or simple colored squares (green →). You can also show only your cooldowns or those coming form other healers or both (yellow →). You can then choose to show this bouquet wherever you like. I like using hot bars for these, but you can use any of the indicator slots listed at the start.
Properties of each flag will differ somewhat but will reflect the options that were there prior to version 2.0. For example,
Flag: health<% will allow you to set the percentage above which you consider health to be significant and therefore displayed in whatever color you pick.
Statusbar: Non mana % will allow you to pick solid color for display of runic/energy/rage, color them by class, color them by amount remaining etc. You still have to pick individual colors for each of the powers under Colors tab if you choose solid colors.
Other things like Debuff: Curse you will not be able to change from bouquet menu since this option is already under Colors tab.
Another common bouquet is clustering bouquet normally found under Panels->Hot Icons->Clusters. This is a built in option, but should you wish to display it somewhere else you can create your own bouquet like this:
The bouquet uses Flag: Cluster>#players flags and sets first one to green and number of players to 5 (you can change this to whatever you like. For example 6 if you have a glyph of CoH). Second one is set to yellow and number of players to 3. You can of course set as many colors and number cutoffs as you like. This will in essence place the little star icon display for clustering into frame borders instead (or whatever other indicator you choose) and notify you of how clustered the raid members are, and which targets are best to hit with aoe heals.
This is the tab that is most important, because once you set these, changing them will be very hard on your muscle memory. (I set greater heal to my left click and now hardly use it and wish I could change it to Flash heal, but changing my muscle memory will make me a fail healer for a while if I try that.)
The choice between using "Mouse" or "Keys" - or I guess both, will be totally personal and based on what you prefer. I like to click the frame with a mouse button and a modifier key held down, to cast my spells ("mouse") my husband prefers to mouse over the frame and hit a key that has been keybound to a spell ("keys").
Vuhdo comes with all your classes spells pre-assigned for using the mouse-click method. I personally recommend going through and clicking through all the options deleting everything that has been pre-assigned, and then go back and assign each of your spells as you see fit. (If you are migrating from healbot or grid/clique, you will probably assign them the same as you did there.)
You can assign any spell or item that is targetable. I have levitate mapped so I can quickly levitate the players that have trouble making the jump over to Thaddius. You can also assign your Heavy Frostweave Bandages (now if I could just remember to use them when I'm OOM) I've never done it but I may assign "Baby Spice" as I have lots of fun with that while waiting for raids to start. You can also assign personal macro's to any of these slots. (A note about macro's if you have any that are named the same as the spell Vuhdo will use the macro not the spell so it could cause problems if you are not expecting that.)
Don't forget to put in special key words too
You'll want to put in those key words even if you plan on using the "keys" for mouse over action instead of click action.
To use mouseover with keybinding macros you will assign each slot to a spell (can't be a macro) and then go into the WoW Key Binding interface and set up the key bindings for each of the 16 Vuhdo slots.
In short, if you type in the spell in any of the key slots here, it will make a mini mouseover macro for you that you can then bind to a specific key through the key binding interface (make sure you scroll to the very bottom to see vuhdo bindings).
If however, like me, you like your macros to do very specific things, you like modifiers and spell combos etc., you will want to make the macros yourself and not rely on the addon to do it for you.
The macros you make yourself in the default macro blizz menu, you either bind to the mouse buttons or drag to the action bars and use as any regular mouseover macros.
However if you feel like you don't want to spend the time and all you want is a simple "cast on mouseover" heal macro, this is the section for you.
This pane contains some spell options that don't fit on either of the other pages. One feature that Disc/Holy priest (and any other class really) will LOVE is the ability for Vuhdo to save two sets of Spell bindings and then automatically switch depending on which spec is your current spec. (I'll show this in action later in this walkthrough).
You can also choose to save your hot setup with this profile. That way, you can track different sets of hots with different specs (eg. Pain Suppression instead of GS)
Another feature that I like is that it can auto-trigger any trinket or spell (that doesn't trigger the global cooldown) to be used every time it is off cool down. If you are like me and ALWAYS forget to use your "On use" trinkets, this is a GREAT feature. I also use it for "Inner Focus" It may not be the most efficient use of that talent/spell but if I didn't do this I never remembered to use it and that is a much less efficient use of the talent point.
You can also set it so that you will "keep your stance". I thought this would be useful for when I'm in Shadow form, to keep me from casting a heal and going out of form, but I found that it wouldn't let me cast my Power Word: Shield either, so I didn't like that.
Here, you can set vuhdo to auto target whoever you are healing at the same time ("target"). It comes in handy for me in pvp when I'm frantically mousing over toons in wintergrasp, trying to heal them.
This section is the same as the one under Mouse but this applies to hostile targets. I assume you have chosen to show player target or target of target in one of your raidframes. Clicking on these bars will follow this mouse assignment.
Keep in mind this is a frequent source of conflict with healing spells assignment. If you just enter the spell names into a key assignment (eg. left click) for friendly targets (under mouse) and for hostile targets (under hostile) you're fine. However, if either one of these positions contains a macro instead of just a spell name, then you have to make a macro for a hostile spell that includes both the heal and the hostile action like this:
Otherwise, you may experience issues with your healing spells not firing on certain targets, particularly focus. This is a common source of trouble as people forget that at some point they've made macros for their common spells and they've named them the same as the spell. Vuhdo will always search for macro names first and pick them if you have any over the actual spell. So your old and dusty macro for renew, that you may not remember you actually have will get picked over the spell. When you're entering a spell name into the box, watch carefully in the right bottom corner what is says (eg. spell, macro, command).
Here you can set a number of spells to smartcast while out of combat when clicking on the player bar. Some of these may be on by default so if you ever wonder why all of a sudden you're cleansing or buffing without intent to do so, check this section.
On the other hand, smartcast buffing paired with showing missing buffs by color can be a very powerful tool for all your buffing needs.
Battle Rez (druid only) alone can be set to smart cast in combat when clicking on the dead player's bar.
Set the modifier keys you would like this to work with here (eg. smartcast only when shift pressed as well) so that you still have the functionality but do not have to use it if you simply want to target someone or heal.
This is the tab for managing the buffs your class has available. I'm only familiar with how this works for Priest and Druids.
As you can see the default set up is for all your buffs to be displayed in a column. You can choose in this pane which of your buffs you want to have shown. I don't use this for Fear Ward or my Shadow Fiend so I've unchecked those. But if you did use it for fear ward you can use the "menu" click to assign it to a particular player (yourself or the tank probably).
Checking the boxes where it says missing will color your health bar with whatever color you set for a missing buff. The top missing color shown will be the one at the very top in your Buffs->Config settings (in this case fort, which I have set to white). You can use buttons up and down to change this priority coloring and click on the missing color picker to change the color.
On this pane you can adjust how exactly the buff watch is displayed. I prefer it horizontal and shrunk down a little bit. I also moved it up to the corner of my screen.
If you want to make it horizontal vs. vertical, use the Max Buffs per row slider.
You can change the look of the buff watch panel here. I left it as set by default. When there are players missing the buff it will display the number of players needing the buff in Red. If there are unbuffed players out of range it will state that not all players are in range rather than how many need it. If all players have the buff the number of players (and pets) with the buff will be displayed in green. If the buff is below a threshold time limit (set on the rebuff button pane) then it will display the number of players needing a rebuff soon in yellow.
The range check is great for saving your reagents. There have been a number of times when people ask me for Fortitude and I just reply... "sorry, just waiting for everyone to be in range before applying it".
On this panels you can help the buff watch be a little smarter. If you select "Smart" under group buffs, it will decide if it should cast the group or the personal buff depending on how many players are missing it. The default is 2. If at least 2 player are missing the buff it will use your larger group buff (which probably requires a reagent). I've changed this to 3 because I frequently group quest with my husband and don't want to be going through tons of reagents just for questing. I also calculated that only when you get to 3 players does it cost more mana to do the individual buffs. One thing to note is that it can NOT be smart during combat. So if you click the button after someone is battle rezed it will use the group buff not the individual buff.
Left click on unit frames will cast single variant of the buff while right click will cast whatever setting you choose here (always, smartcast, never) but if you are ever trying to force a raid buff, you can use a middle click or buttons 4 and 5 to cast it. You can also choose instead to buff via a mouse wheel while on a buffwatch frame.
This is also where you set the threshold for the yellow warning text that the buff is about to run out. If you are doing bosses that take 3min then you could set the limit to 3min... if you are doing bosses that take closer to 6min then you might want to set the limit a little higher to make sure all buffs that need to be reapplied are.
This is where you set most of your debuff settings (used to be under general tab). Keep in mind that you still can choose to show individual or groups of debuffs outside these general settings via bouquets or just typing in debuff names into HoT slots.
Vuhdo can automatically detect and show you if a player is under a debuff that is removable by you. (It doesn't seem to know about a dwarf's ability to cleanse poison from themselves though - I also don't know if it knows about the Body and Soul Talent that lets priest cleanse poisons from themselves) This is the tab that lets you control what it shows. I personally like to remove movement restriction debuffs, so I've unchecked that box. Warning if you can cleanse magic don't uncheck "un-harmful" or you will want to cleanse mages with arcane blast. (Learned that one the hard way).
Checking on Icon allows you to show all debuffs, including rends, bleeds, mob specific spells etc. This setting is great when doing heroics or simply leveling or questing. You do want to be aware of nasty dots as a healer, even if they do not necessarily fall into the basic categories of magic/poison/curse etc. It also means now you can see all the superfluous debuffs like exhaustion on entire raid or Bested Gnomeregan and so on. Ignore list is there to help you get rid of these pesky debuffs you do not want to be seeing. Don't forget to hit Save after entering each one and be careful of spelling.
For raids I keep Icons unchecked and let custom debuff list take care of the important raid debuffs as I find it easier to micromanage.
Debuff sounds will allow you to set a default sound for every debuff. On the next tab you can set it for individual debuffs which I personally find more useful since sound for every single debuff would drive me batty. To each his own though.
Here you can customize the custom debuffs display. These will be your raid debuffs basically. You can select to display them by icons or bar color, to display timers or stacks and even add the name of the buff on the bar if you're confused what each icon is. You can show up to 5 debuff icons on any single bar at the same time. I prefer to show the max but you can limit yourself to only one, grid style. Don't forget to hit apply all to apply the settings to all dots.
If you choose to use only custom debuffs in raid (uncheck Debuffs->Standard->Icon), you'll rarely see more than 2 icons anyway. Custom debuff list contains only important boss debuffs. If there are any that are missing, type them in and hit save.
Each debuff can be customized individually on the right. For example, on Blood Queen I like to show when people are bit and when they need to bite someone. I color the health bar for both debuffs with specific colors so it is very easy to see during the fight. To avoid clutter in the debuff icon display, you can choose not to show a debuff by icon if you're already showing it by custom color. You can also associate a sound with a debuff if you wish.
Bottom left corner allows you to set x/y position for debuff icon bar and direction of growth (4 positions indicated by circles). Their size can also be adjusted here.
This is where we will get into the nitty-gritty of setting up Vuhdo to look and act exactly as you want it to.
Vuhdo can have up to 10 different panels, so when you are adjusting a panel make sure that the panel selected is the one you want to be making adjustments to. The panel itself will have a white border and the panel # title will be in white instead of grayed out. Also the name of the panel will be displayed in the upper right corner of the Vuhdo Configuration pane. If you want all your panels to have the same configuration then click "Apply All".
Before you start really messing with this, I recommend you take a quick detour to the "Move" Tab and click the 25 button instead of the current, that way Vuhdo will fill the panel with duplicates of your self which will help you judge sizes and such.
This raid arrangement with duplicated health bars will be preserved if you then click on the panel tab in the options. This allows you to adjust all the panel options (position, size, width, textures, hots etc.) as you would like them to look in a full raid so you do not have to do this in the middle of the run, between the pulls.
In the ordering section, you can choose between grouped or loose. Some features only work if grouped, so I've always left it that way but loose can be useful in pvp setups where there is a lot of joining and leaving the raid during combat resulting in rearrangement of unitframes. Loose configuration can somewhat minimize (although not completely diminish) this effect.
For my Panel #1 I'm creating it to be just a small(ish) box off to the side of the raid members ordered by group. This will not be my main healing panel, but just used so I can easily see who is in which group at a glance. (I prefer to keep people organized by role, but sometimes it is necessary to see people organized by group.)
I want this panel to show a 5x5 listing of the players, so I set the max columns to 5. If I happen to join a 40man raid then it will just create 3 more columns below the first 5. I could set the max row to 5 as well, although since I'm organizing by group, it will always max out at 5 anyway.
For this panel I also want all the player to be organized by their unit ID. I'll also uncheck "You First" for this panel since I want everyone ordered exactly how they would be if you opened the blizzard raid frames.
The anchor point tells Vuhdo which way to have the panel grow as players are added to it. The most natural is for it to grow to the right. However you may find situations where growing from the left is useful. I do this for my pet panel as I have it sitting flush with my main healing panel. So when everyone gets into vehicles for Flame Leviathan I don't want the panel to grow over top of my main frame, but left and off the screen. One thing to note though is that when it needs to grow to a second column for one player the first full column will still be on the left side of the panel, with the new column on the right.
Properties of the background panel for the raidframes are also adjusted here so that you do not need to generate a separate background frame/border via kgpanels. I do not use this frame at all so I set both the panel border and background to 0 opacity.
Here you can adjust size of all the bars, their interspacing as well as spacing between the health bars and the border of the background panel if you have it on (X,Y-gap).
Here is where you can choose a texture for the bars, find one you like. You have the choice of choosing how the bar is colored. It can be the class color, a solid color (of your choice), or it can change color with the players health (Float). Green when healthy, Yellow when hurt, and Red when near death. This can make it easier to spot those that are in serious need of health. For this panel I'm choosing "float". By default as people loose health the bar will shrink left justified. Just like the default health frame for your own character. But if you prefer you can have the bar shrink vertically or even grow instead of shrink.
You also have the option of showing raid icons that are displayed on the player frame. I LOVE this feature, as we frequently mark kiters, so this helps me see easier who I need to keep a closer eye on. However for this panel it isn't really necessary.
You can also choose to show Mana and/or other Power type bars. I have this turned on although I'm not sure how often it really impacts any of my decisions.
This is where you can control what the headers look like. Headers in most cases are probably not really needed. I remove them here because I know that group on is the left most column with group 2 in the next column etc.
On this pane you can choose to show the targets of each player. I personally don't use this at all, but if you do the option is there. You can also have the raid icons displayed for the targets. I could see this as being useful if you are a tank to quickly see who isn't targeting the "skull" like they should be. (This may be a healer add-on but I think any class/role could use it as their raid frames)
If you didn't select "Standard" under tooltip on the General Tab - Misc Button then you can use this pane to dictate where the Vuhdo tool tip will be displayed. Since I plan on putting this panel nearly flush with the left side of my screen it only makes sense to have the tool tip display to the right of the panel. I like the tooltip that comes with Vuhdo, as it makes it really easy to quickly mouse over - scan all the players that are out of range to see which ones are not at the raid location and need a summons.
I would not recommend turning on the "In Fight" as I don't see why that information would be needed mid fight and I think the flash of the tooltip would probably be very distracting and possibly slow down your frame rate.
This along with the Bars button will be the most personal in the choices made and are really totally a matter of personal preference. You can display the name, class, and or the flag (dnd/afk/dc/dead/ghost). I see no need to display class since you can get that information from color, but some might like that. Because I'm showing the bars with the floating color, I'm choosing to display the names in the class color so I can still see the class info quickly. This also makes it easier to find a particular player in the list. If I'm looking for a dk I can skim all the names and only focus on the red ones. Also since this panel is not my main panel used for healing, I don't need the hit points displayed. A few letters of the player name colored by class is good enough. You can play around with the name placement which will probably depend on the size and shape of the bars you created.
I'll go into this pane in more detail for my second panel. For this panel again I don't really need any hot info since it is not my main healing panel, and the boxes are too small to adequately show this information. So I have disabled showing of HoTs for this panel.
This is a pane I'm don't use at all. I think it might be useful for druids but I have no use or need for HoT bars. So I can't help you with this pane.
Before I go into the details of creating another panel I'm going to cover the remaining tabs. So the next one is the Colors Tab. If you are color blind I could see this tab being very important for helping you see the important information you need. If not you might not need to touch this tab other than maybe to tweak a few things.
We discussed under the General Tab - Debuff Button that Vuhdo will automatically display any debuffs that you can cleanse. Here is where you tell Vuhdo how to display these debuffs. I choose to have it color the panel. The default is to color the panel and the text. I don't like that so I remove the check marks in the text column. Remember these choices effect all of your panels not just one of them. You can also have it display an icon that represents the debuff. I tried that but found that it was just too much info. The color bar was all I really needed. I've also tweaked the colors of the Poison, Magic and Disease debuffs to be a bolder more obvious (to me) color. You do that just by clicking on the bar and it will bring up a color picking tool.
I left this pane exactly as it is in default. But if you want to show incoming heals, or out of range indicators a little differently you have the option.
If you chose to display the Mana and/or Power bars here is where you can control the color that each type displays as. For most users I doubt this will be modified.
When I display HoTs I prefer to use the icon method, so this pane is not needed by me. So I just left this as default. But for those of you coming from Grid and want to use the corner box method this is where you can change which hot is displayed as which color.
I think this pane is really only useful for druids who can put multiple charges of the same hot on one player, and who use the corner box method instead of the icon method for displaying the hots. Since I don't do either I can't really say much about this pane.
Most people probably use the default Class colors if they even use the class colors for the Text or bar color, but if you need to change the default colors this is where you would do it. You can also change the brightness of these colors, which I can see being useful for those that like to get their UI just right.
This move tab really has a lot of the nuts and bolts of how to get the multi panels working for you, but it can be a little confusing at first. I know when I first downloaded Vuhdo, this tab got me confused and I deleted things then couldn't figure out why I couldn't get things back and such. Of course part of that was I was also trying to use the "Panel wizard". Really the "Panel Wizard" is there if you don't want to have the fine control over your panels that the Move tab allows. Now that I understand how the panel thing works better I won't touch the panel wizard.
For my main healing panel, I want to have all the players displayed in three columns depending on role. The first column will be the Ranged DPS. So I clicked on that "choose" button, then from the type drop down selected special, then from the value drop down selected "ranged dps". Now all my Warlocks, Mages, and Hunters will automatically go into that column. To create a second column I just click the green plus next to the panel. For my second column I want all the Healers. As a healer it is a good idea to keep an extra eye on the healers as they are your "team" members. In the third column I want all the Melee. I don't care if they are tanks or dps, just if they will be up close and personal with the bosses. I'll also add a 4th column, called "private tanks". This is a column that will only be used in particular situations. It won't display any players unless I assign them as private tanks. (I'll show you that later).
The pets I'll keep in their own panel. This is VERY important to do because of fights like Flame Leviathan, where each vehicle is considered a pet. If you put the pets in the same panel as your players the panel gets UGLY and impossible to manage during a fight like that.
If you want to remove a panel, it is as simple as clicking the red X next to the panel. Since I include the private tanks in the same panel as my main healing panel I don't need that extra panel.
When you delete a panel it will confirm that you really want to. But if you delete a panel or want more than the 4 originally displayed, all you need to do is click the big green plus. You can add up to 10 panels.
I don't want this panel to ever grow beyond 4 columns. If it does that it will start to cover my character since I keep my healing panel just to the left of my character. As long as I'm not in a 40 man raid allowing the columns to have as many rows as they need has never been a problem.
I also like keeping myself a the top of list. A dead healer can't heal, so I always want to be able to find my own health bar at a moments glance. I also like to organize all the players by class. It probably isn't 100% necessary but it does help me find a particular player much faster. During Kologarn, our healing team assigns 3 healers to heal the people in his grip. But we can't just say "you three heal the people griped" because then all three of us could end up healing the same player and the other two die. DBM announces who is in the grip. So we assign a healer to each player in the list. For example I'm assigned to heal who ever is first in the list of players. Vuhdo does a great job of showing who has been griped, but when I look up to see who was named first, I need to get my mouse to that players name ASAP. Since I raid with mostly the same people all the time, when I see the name I know generally where it will be in that list because the names are not displayed randomly. If I was organizing my panel by group and id, then it would take me considerably longer before locating that persons health bar.
I'm skipping the sizing button at this time because I need to get the bars looking the way I want before I decide on the final sizing.
I like showing the class by the bar color. I can see just fine how hurt a player is by how small the bar is, I don't feel the green->red coloring is as useful. With the bars colored by class I know quickly if that was a squishy mage that just pulled aggro and needs a quick shield, or a lock that just life tapped and could use a renew. I suppose I could see the same if I colored the name instead of the bar, but I'm used to this now.
For my main healing panel I do like showing the headers. It probably really isn't needed because I only have one column for each role type, but I still like it. I do like to keep it a small as possible though. And I'm partial to purple so I changed the color.
Because I "took over" the panel that was defaulted for the Main Tank, it had the Targets turned on. As I mentioned earlier, I don't use this feature, so I turned it off. Showing targets will take up a lot more screen real estate.
I plan to put the left corner of this panel right below the cool down timer you can see in the screen shot, so I want the tooltip to show to the left of the frame and not over top of my character in the center. Right now it shows it going of the screen but once everything it set up as I want it, it will be fine.
Now I like to have the text left justified, and to only show the health values if they are missing some, and only show what is missing. I like to see the actual amount missing so I know what type of heal is best. If I just see a percentage that can me a very different thing for a warlock vs a warrior. Besides I can visually get a rough percentage idea just from how much of the bar is missing.
Here I removed and put back on all my gear so you can see what it looks like when someone is not at full health.
Now that I have the look I want, it is time to start working on the sizing. I tweaked this again once I was actually in a raid and had a full listing of players, but it was close to what I wanted just from this set up. I want to make sure it is wide enough to have room for the 5 hot icon slots to not be overlapping on to other players bars, but not so wide that I have to move my mouse a lot to get from a melee bar to a ranged dps bar. I also want it tall enough to show both the lower level hots and the upper level custom de/buffs, while still allowing me to see how much of the bar is missing. Adjusting the scale of the icons (seen later) will also help with this. Of course again I don't want the bars so tall that they take up too much room to keep all of the ranged dps in one column.
I prefer to show the icon of my hots rather than a square representing the hot on the bar. For those of you coming from Healbot you'll probably be the same, for those of you coming from Grid/Clique you will probably prefer the box method. This guide will only show the icon method since that is what I do.
First I like my icons to be at the bottom of the bar. They will be slightly on and slightly off the bar. So there will always be a slight space between each bar. This is why I have a 0 size gap between bars. The way the hots work is that there are 5 slots for hot icons to be displayed in. You must choose which hot will be in which slot.
When I first started using Vuhdo "Abolish Disease" was not an option, so I added it to my Custom de/buff list. I still prefer it there since I really don't care if I cast the buff on the player or if someone else did. As long as I know if it is on the player or not. I've also added the Prayer of Mending to my Custom de/buff list so I can see if other priest have cast it already, then I won't cast it too. But if I only had it as a custom de/buff I wouldn't know which of the multiple PoM's bouncing around is mine. So assigning it to one of these slots is necessary. I do the same for Guardian Spirit, since I want to know if someone else cast it. And the double icons let me know if it is mine or not. (probably not strictly necessary).
The 'other people's hots' will show you the icon of the last hot cast on the player and the number of hots currently on the player.
There is one thing to note about these hot icons. They are applied to the bar as soon as you click the button, even if the hot isn't actually applied because the player is out of sight, or some such thing. It takes a few moments (based on the scanner rate set earlier) for Vuhdo to realize that it didn't 'take'.
To test the size of the icons I cast Guardian Spirit on myself. You can see that it is showing in the 4th slot as well as on the top of the bar as a custom de/buff. Now I have all 5 slots fill and this is showing that the 4th slot is at the edge of the bar. Clearly I need to scale down these icons if I'm going to fit all 5 icons with in the width of the bar.
I also need to adjust the scaling of the Custom de/buffs. I do this on the General Tab on the Custom Button pane. This icon will flash a little bigger and then shrink to the size set and land on the bar. Kind a hard to show in a still shot. But it is very useful for spotting players with 'frost blast' very quickly.
Vuhdo lets you save a number of settings for easy (and automatic) switching depending on your needs.
You can save the Color/Fonts as a Skin. This can then be easily changed either from the General Tab - Skin Button Pane or from the vuhdo minimap button, or even in a macro via slash commands.
You can also save the groups/sizes as an Arrangement. I use this because I like the arrange by role for raids, but it is quite impractical for a small 5 man group. So I saved the above arrangement as "Healing Raid" and check the 10, 25, and 40 buttons. So anytime I join a raid Vuhdo will automatically switch to this arrangement.
I then went to the Move tab and changed my second panel to contain just group 1 instead of the 3 different roles.
Then went back and saved it as "Healing Solo/Group" and checked the 1 and 5 button. Now any time I join a raid Vuhdo will automatically switch to my Raiding arrangement, and when I leave the raid it will switch back to my solo arrangement.
You can also save two different sets of spell assignments based on your current spec. I found that getting it to work correctly at first was a little tricky. Then I noticed that Vuhdo prints to the chat log when it saves a spell spec. So you can verify that it is doing what you intended for it to do.
It also shows when you change specs that the saved spell set up has changed. I don't really need a change of spells for Holy to Shadow since I don't have access to any new spells, and any of the Holy only spells just won't work if I try to click them. However I did switch it so that my Power Word: Shield is my main button since when I'm questing I frequently cast that on myself.
When you right click on the minimap button you will get the Vuhdo menu. You can easily change to any saved Skin, Arrangement, or Spell setup.
You can also lock the panels from this menu. I highly recommend you do that so you don't accidentally click drag the panel in the middle of a fight when you are frantically healing as it could really screw you up.
Remember when I told you to assign "menu" to one of the spell assignments. This is why. If you are the raid leader (or assistant) you can assign Main Tanks, Mater looter and other things from this menu. If you are not you can assign private tanks. This is how I move people over to that private tank column when needed. Also, Vuhdo attempts to figure out everyone's spec and therefore which role they are. I've found this doesn't always work 100% effectively. So this is where you can manually assign them the correct role. If you choose to use Vuhdo's buff bar to cast your Fear Ward, this is where you can also quickly assign who it will be applied to.
Here you can see what my set up looks like with a full 25 players. We actually have a few more melee in this run than we typically do, so the columns are nearly even.
When we do Flame Leviathan I'm the healer that is shot onto the beast. So it helps me to find the others being shot if I set them up as private tanks before the run starts. Otherwise I would be looking through a mess of vehicles trying to find the few actual players to click on. You can also see here why I have pets in a separate panel that fills from the right. So as we each enter a vehicle our bar says 'vehicle' but it also creates a pet bar, overwhelming the raid frame.
Here you can see me in just a 5 man group. It is much simpler to have them all in the same column rather than spread out over 3 columns with 3 in the ranged dps column, me in the healer column, and the tank in the melee column. I did that for a while and it really hindered my healing ability.
Forty mans aren't done too much anymore... but we were doing it for the "For the Alliance" achievement. So I thought I would show you a screenshot just so you could see how Vuhdo handled that many players. Again I used the private tank feature to pull the players I was primarily responsible for to an easier to find/see location.
I hope this walkthrough has been useful and helpful. If you have any questions feel free to contact me either from this site or from the plusheal forum
. Vuhdo support forum maintained by the author can be found here http://www.plusheal.com/viewforum.php?f=32
Also if you see any errors or typos please fix them, so others wont be confused.
Tags:
walkthrough
screenshots
Setup Walkthrough
This is a detailed walkthrough covering almost every option listed in vuhdo options window. It is broken up into sections that correspond to each options tab in the addon.As such it may be a little overwhelming if you're opening up vuhdo for the very first time. In this case I highly recommend to follow this guide first:
Afterwards, if you have questions about specific options and where to find them, you can come back to this guide and use it as a reference. I will try to make it as complete as I can. If you have suggestions/comments/want to see further information included, please drop a line at plusheal vuhdo support forums.
The guide was created using version 2.11, so things my look slightly different if you have a newer version, but overall things should be similar. See the vuhdo release notes for any changes.
Table of contents
Initial Install
When you first install the add on, it might look a little strange but really it is just trying to show off some of its powerful features.
You can see the vuhdo buff bar is overlapping my unit frame, and there are 4 panels auto loaded that are also overlapping each other. All you need to do is click-drag them to a better location.
Opening the Options Pane
At this point you will need to start configuring vuhdo to fit your needs, not the default. Open the option panel by left clicking the minimap icon - it looks like a Draenei.
The option pane does have a different look and feel than most WoW add-ons, but you'll get used to it quickly.
If you want to keep things simple and don't feel like configuring things yourself, you can use the Tools → Panel Wizard menu to change how the main panel is organized, and which of the secondary panels is showing. I'm not going to look at that in this walk through because I'm assuming you want to be a power user and tweak everything to exactly what you want.
General Tab
This is where you will be setting lots of little features that effect all panels.
General Button
You'll probably want to start customizing the settings on this very first pane. Operation mode is by default neutral. This allows for health bar coloring by class, solid color or gradient (green to red usually) depending on health remaining. Additional operation modes in essence fade out (or color a different color) most of the bars except a few that are showing the lowest HP, allowing to isolate more effectively those in most need of healing.
The bars can be selected based on a few similar criteria: most HP lost, least HP left, or health % left. You can set both the irrelevancy limit above which the bars are faded out as well as max number of players that are to be considered relevant at any given time.
Filter allows you to filter out various units out of the main raid panel if you're showing them in separate panels like main tanks or private tanks panels, to avoid redundancy. Your target bar is not filtered by default and is shown together with your focus and private tanks in private tanks panel. If you want to filter it out, check off target. Same applies for focus.
Hide panels and lock panels are pretty self explanatory from the mouseover explanations provided in the options section.
Note that if the whole options window is too small for you to read, there is now an a toggle in the upper right portion of the window that allows options scaling.
Scanners Button
The scanners button is very important. In most cases you can probably leave it as the default, but for performance issues it is important to know about these options. Range is very useful, for making it obvious when a player is out of range for a heal. Pick one of your spells with your typical spell range (probably 40yrds) and put that. Then when players are out of range their frames will be faded and you know you can't heal them. Also depending on your performance you can adjust how often vuhdo checks if the players are in range. I've never had a problem with the default 250ms.
Global Scanners option covers update frequency and range for HoTs, cyclic updated bouquets, custom debuff timers etc.
Threat Button
I left this tab as set up by default, but it lets you adjust aggro display by text on the frames. For me it is enough to see that a mage has pulled aggro (>> and << in red around their name) and then I pop a shield on them, and either a renew or flash heal depending how much damage they took before the tank could reclaim the aggro.
Tank mode is a built in feature for those who use vuhdo for tanking. It allows to ignore aggro from caster mobs that randomly target raid members. When you're tanking, you don't want to be seeing raid members getting aggro from this and wasting time trying to taunt the mob off of them when they can't be tanked. As a healer though, you want the tank mode off, as you still want to see who is going to get hit in the face by a spell and need a heal.
Indicators Button
Due to more flexible customization requests, indicators were introduced. They allow modification of almost every aspect of the raidframes. The set of instructions on how each indicator is to behave is called a bouquet and is explained in the greater detailed in the bouquet section.
One indicator that also displays bouquets and isn't listed in this section is under Hot Icon slots so keep that in mind when you're deciding how to display your information.
For a quick setup, what you should pay attention to here is Health Bar coloring. Choose among the various Health Bar bouquets on the drop down menu next to it as desired. These include Health bar (generic), Health bar (generic, solid), Health bar (generic, class colored) and Health bar (generic, gradient). The last 3 are in essence just like Health Bar (generic) but with the option of solid, gradient or class colored already selected for you instead of having to click on edit, % health flag and choose the coloring yourself.
This is your default health bar coloring for all panels.
However, you can have different health bar coloring in different panels. For example I keep my Main Tanks panel class colored and my main raid panel solid (green) color. To do this, there is another health bar color selection under Panels->Bars->Custom Setting->Custom Health Bar Bouquet. It will override the General->Indicator->Health Bar one for whatever panel you have currently selected. If you want to have same coloring on all the panels, make sure that Panels->Bars one is on off/empty or the same color as General->Indicators. If health bar isn't colored the way you selected under Indicators, again check that it doesn't conflict with Panels->Bars one.
Make sure you check Mana bar indicator. The default bouquet is mana bar display but you can change it to all power display, threat, specific HoT or debuff display etc.
Finally, check your display for outer border is to your taste as by default it is Multi+Aggro and shows different colors as you mouseover, target a target or gain aggro.
For a more advanced use of Indicators, check the Bouquets section of the guide.
Misc Button
This has some interesting options that don't really fit under any other categories. Mouse over each option to get an explanation of what it does and if it sounds like something you would like. I use it to hide default blizz party display and show the global cooldown directly on the hp bar I'm currently mousing over. This is great when I'm doing PoM/CoH/Renew spam. I don't even need to flick my eyes to the castbars in these situations.
You can turn on and change the message that is posted to raid/party chat when rezing someone. You need to put "vuhdo" as the placeholder for the name of the toon you are rezzing.
Clique support can also be find here should you want to stick with it instead of built in click heal support.
Reaction on key press is built into vuhdo by default. Should you choose to go back to reaction on key release, it's under Mouse Up.
Incoming Button
This section is pretty self explanatory. Incoming heals are very useful to see as a healer, so unless you have serious performance issues you should have those turned on. You can choose which type of heals you want monitored and how to display them.
Life text shows incoming heals/overheals with numbers. By default, this is on. Event horizon sliders affect the window of time the addon uses to check for incoming heals. 3 secs works for most situations.
Clusters Button
This section is relatively new and is an extremely useful aid in AoE healing. There are two display methods that allow you to decide how to cast heal.
One will show how clustered raid members are to each other hence allowing you to choose where to cast your heal so that it hits maximum amount of raid members. Nothing worse when you cast your aoe heal just to realize that the person you cast it on is far off and it healed nobody else but him.
Second display shows you exactly who your aoe heal will hit if you cast it on current mouseover.
Neither of displays is actually configured here but their base numbers and the way they operate are.
Things to watch for here are range and health level sliders. Range will change depending on your talents or glyphs. For example I set it to 18 yards for CoH as that's what it is with two points in Holy Reach. Health level sliders adjusts when you want to see clustering. I like to almost always show it but it can be distracting for some and you may choose to watch for it only when there is serious raid damage going on.
Source/destination offers options depending on the mechanics of your aoe spell. You need to adjust this to your type of aoe heal. For example CoH is cast on any target (not myself only) and it affects entire raid.
Counter affects the first type of display I mentioned. It is by default shown under Panels->Hot Icons->choose Cluster from the dropdown menu for placement of any of the hots. It will show how many players are clustered to each other by number and color. The threshold definition for what you consider fair or good clustering is changed here. If you don't want to show this as a hot and instead want to show it in one of the other indicators, you can do that by making a custom bouquet. The example of clustering bouquet to mimic this function is shown in Bouquets section.
The second type of aoe heals display where you monitor who exactly gets the aoe heal can be selected for any of the indicators (used to be outer border by default) by choosing the bouquet Cluster Mouse Hover.
Bouquets Button
Bouquets were made in response to user requests for more flexibility in the way in which various hots, cooldowns and statuses are shown. They give access to almost all the things you can change within vuhdo like health bar foreground color, background color, frame color (frame outside and inside), mouseover opacity, hot positions, hot bars etc. as shown below:
Most of these indicators can be found under General → Indicators. Bars within the hp bar and square/icon positions around the frame can be found under Panels → Hots and Panels → Hot Bars.
For each of those elements now you can specify how they're going to behave.
There is a number of bouquet presets included as defaults that regulates the basic operation of the raidframes:
Aggro Indicator
Background: ClassColor
Background: Solid
Border: Multi
Border: Multi+Aggro
Border: Simple
Cluster: Mouse Mover
Health Bar: (generic)
Health Bar: (generic, class colored)
Health Bar: (generic, solid)
Health Bar: (generic, gradient)
Manabars: All Powers
Manabars: Mana Only
Mouseover: Multi
Mouseover: Single
Swiftmendable
Tank Cooldowns
Threat: Marks
Threat: Status Bar
Bouquet itself is an arrangement of various flags, each flag separately customized and ordered by priority. Some of these bouquets are self-explanatory.
Border: Simple is set in the indicator position for the outer frame. It has only one flag customized by default to be black. In essence it’s a simple black frame around the hp bar.
Border: Multi on the other hand has 3 flags included. First one is color for frame if the player is targeted (by default white. You can change color and width of any of these flags). Next one is color if the player is moused over which by default is yellow. Last flag is default black frame color. What this means is that all hp bars have a simple black border around them unless moused over (yellow) or targeted (white) if you have this bouquet set in the frame indicator position.
Border: Multi+Aggro simply has the aggro flag added to the above three, and placed as first in priority with red color so that red frame takes priority over all the above conditions (target, mouseover, default black).
Possible flags that you can use are listed below:
Color: Emergency
Color: Overheal Highlight
Flag: AFK
Flag: Aggro
Flag: Always Class Color
Flag: Always Solid
Flag: Charmed
Flag: Cluster>#players
Flag: Cluster, Mouseover
Flag: Dead
Flag: Debuff Curse
Flag: Debuff Disease
Flag: Debuff Magic
Flag: Debuff Poison
Flag: Debuff bar color
Flag: Debuff, Dispellable
Flag: Disconnected
Flag: Distance < yards
Flag: Health < %
Flag: Health > %
Flag: Mana < %
Flag: Mouseover Group
Flag: Mouseover Single
Flag: Other Player's Hots
Flag: Player Target
Flag: Raid Target Color
Flag: Range, in
Flag: Range, out of
Flag: Swiftmend position
Flag: Threat > %
Flag: Threat, High
Flag: Threat, Overnuke
Statusbar: Health%
Statusbar: Inc. Heals %
Statusbar: Mana %
Statusbar: Threat %
Statusbar: non-Mana %
Most of these you will recognize as previous or currently available options, just presented differently. For example,
Statusbar: Mana% used to be available as a checkbox to turn the mana bar on or not, with a width adjustment slider. Now you can place this mana bar above or below the frame or within the frame etc. and color it however you like, as well as adjust the width.
In addition to these preset flags, you can type in the flag box any hot, buff or debuff by name.
Keep in mind that for the most part, setting up various options on other tabs within options pane will create/alter some of these bouquets for you so you do not have to panic if you don’t pick this up right away. For example, I show my player names by class color under Panels→Text.
It in response automatically ads a flag (Flag: Always Class Color) in a bouquet that controls hp display (Health Bar: (generic)) which is by default on the bar foreground color indicator and applies it to text and not to background, and places it in priority at the bottom, just above the health %:
Lets now say you want a bouquet for healer cooldowns on the target. Start by typing in a new bouquet name under General → Bouquets.
Some of the important healer cooldowns include Divine/Hand of sacrifice, Pain Suppression and Guardian Spirit. Enter each into debuff/hot/buff name box and adjust properties for each. You can order them by importance (ie. if more than one are present on the target, DS will show up first in this arrangement (red →), color them however you like (blue →), or show them as icons (if you’re putting them in hot icon positions) or simple colored squares (green →). You can also show only your cooldowns or those coming form other healers or both (yellow →). You can then choose to show this bouquet wherever you like. I like using hot bars for these, but you can use any of the indicator slots listed at the start.
Properties of each flag will differ somewhat but will reflect the options that were there prior to version 2.0. For example,
Flag: health<% will allow you to set the percentage above which you consider health to be significant and therefore displayed in whatever color you pick.
Statusbar: Non mana % will allow you to pick solid color for display of runic/energy/rage, color them by class, color them by amount remaining etc. You still have to pick individual colors for each of the powers under Colors tab if you choose solid colors.
Other things like Debuff: Curse you will not be able to change from bouquet menu since this option is already under Colors tab.
Another common bouquet is clustering bouquet normally found under Panels->Hot Icons->Clusters. This is a built in option, but should you wish to display it somewhere else you can create your own bouquet like this:
The bouquet uses Flag: Cluster>#players flags and sets first one to green and number of players to 5 (you can change this to whatever you like. For example 6 if you have a glyph of CoH). Second one is set to yellow and number of players to 3. You can of course set as many colors and number cutoffs as you like. This will in essence place the little star icon display for clustering into frame borders instead (or whatever other indicator you choose) and notify you of how clustered the raid members are, and which targets are best to hit with aoe heals.
Spell Tab
This is the tab that is most important, because once you set these, changing them will be very hard on your muscle memory. (I set greater heal to my left click and now hardly use it and wish I could change it to Flash heal, but changing my muscle memory will make me a fail healer for a while if I try that.)
The choice between using "Mouse" or "Keys" - or I guess both, will be totally personal and based on what you prefer. I like to click the frame with a mouse button and a modifier key held down, to cast my spells ("mouse") my husband prefers to mouse over the frame and hit a key that has been keybound to a spell ("keys").
Mouse Button
Vuhdo comes with all your classes spells pre-assigned for using the mouse-click method. I personally recommend going through and clicking through all the options deleting everything that has been pre-assigned, and then go back and assign each of your spells as you see fit. (If you are migrating from healbot or grid/clique, you will probably assign them the same as you did there.)
You can assign any spell or item that is targetable. I have levitate mapped so I can quickly levitate the players that have trouble making the jump over to Thaddius. You can also assign your Heavy Frostweave Bandages (now if I could just remember to use them when I'm OOM) I've never done it but I may assign "Baby Spice" as I have lots of fun with that while waiting for raids to start. You can also assign personal macro's to any of these slots. (A note about macro's if you have any that are named the same as the spell Vuhdo will use the macro not the spell so it could cause problems if you are not expecting that.)
Don't forget to put in special key words too
- target - so you can target any player
- menu - so you can access the vuhodo player menu (shown later)
- tell - so you can easily start a whisper with any party/raid member.
- dropdown - so you can see the default blizz dropdown menu when you right click on yourself.
You'll want to put in those key words even if you plan on using the "keys" for mouse over action instead of click action.
Keys Button
To use mouseover with keybinding macros you will assign each slot to a spell (can't be a macro) and then go into the WoW Key Binding interface and set up the key bindings for each of the 16 Vuhdo slots.
In short, if you type in the spell in any of the key slots here, it will make a mini mouseover macro for you that you can then bind to a specific key through the key binding interface (make sure you scroll to the very bottom to see vuhdo bindings).
If however, like me, you like your macros to do very specific things, you like modifiers and spell combos etc., you will want to make the macros yourself and not rely on the addon to do it for you.
The macros you make yourself in the default macro blizz menu, you either bind to the mouse buttons or drag to the action bars and use as any regular mouseover macros.
However if you feel like you don't want to spend the time and all you want is a simple "cast on mouseover" heal macro, this is the section for you.
Misc Button
This pane contains some spell options that don't fit on either of the other pages. One feature that Disc/Holy priest (and any other class really) will LOVE is the ability for Vuhdo to save two sets of Spell bindings and then automatically switch depending on which spec is your current spec. (I'll show this in action later in this walkthrough).
You can also choose to save your hot setup with this profile. That way, you can track different sets of hots with different specs (eg. Pain Suppression instead of GS)
Another feature that I like is that it can auto-trigger any trinket or spell (that doesn't trigger the global cooldown) to be used every time it is off cool down. If you are like me and ALWAYS forget to use your "On use" trinkets, this is a GREAT feature. I also use it for "Inner Focus" It may not be the most efficient use of that talent/spell but if I didn't do this I never remembered to use it and that is a much less efficient use of the talent point.
You can also set it so that you will "keep your stance". I thought this would be useful for when I'm in Shadow form, to keep me from casting a heal and going out of form, but I found that it wouldn't let me cast my Power Word: Shield either, so I didn't like that.
Here, you can set vuhdo to auto target whoever you are healing at the same time ("target"). It comes in handy for me in pvp when I'm frantically mousing over toons in wintergrasp, trying to heal them.
Hostile Tab
This section is the same as the one under Mouse but this applies to hostile targets. I assume you have chosen to show player target or target of target in one of your raidframes. Clicking on these bars will follow this mouse assignment.
Keep in mind this is a frequent source of conflict with healing spells assignment. If you just enter the spell names into a key assignment (eg. left click) for friendly targets (under mouse) and for hostile targets (under hostile) you're fine. However, if either one of these positions contains a macro instead of just a spell name, then you have to make a macro for a hostile spell that includes both the heal and the hostile action like this:
/cast [harm,@mouseover] NukeSpellName /cast [noharm,@mouseover] HealSpellName
Otherwise, you may experience issues with your healing spells not firing on certain targets, particularly focus. This is a common source of trouble as people forget that at some point they've made macros for their common spells and they've named them the same as the spell. Vuhdo will always search for macro names first and pick them if you have any over the actual spell. So your old and dusty macro for renew, that you may not remember you actually have will get picked over the spell. When you're entering a spell name into the box, watch carefully in the right bottom corner what is says (eg. spell, macro, command).
Smart Cast Tab
Here you can set a number of spells to smartcast while out of combat when clicking on the player bar. Some of these may be on by default so if you ever wonder why all of a sudden you're cleansing or buffing without intent to do so, check this section.
On the other hand, smartcast buffing paired with showing missing buffs by color can be a very powerful tool for all your buffing needs.
Battle Rez (druid only) alone can be set to smart cast in combat when clicking on the dead player's bar.
Set the modifier keys you would like this to work with here (eg. smartcast only when shift pressed as well) so that you still have the functionality but do not have to use it if you simply want to target someone or heal.
Buffs Tab
This is the tab for managing the buffs your class has available. I'm only familiar with how this works for Priest and Druids.
Config Button
As you can see the default set up is for all your buffs to be displayed in a column. You can choose in this pane which of your buffs you want to have shown. I don't use this for Fear Ward or my Shadow Fiend so I've unchecked those. But if you did use it for fear ward you can use the "menu" click to assign it to a particular player (yourself or the tank probably).
Checking the boxes where it says missing will color your health bar with whatever color you set for a missing buff. The top missing color shown will be the one at the very top in your Buffs->Config settings (in this case fort, which I have set to white). You can use buttons up and down to change this priority coloring and click on the missing color picker to change the color.
General Button
On this pane you can adjust how exactly the buff watch is displayed. I prefer it horizontal and shrunk down a little bit. I also moved it up to the corner of my screen.
If you want to make it horizontal vs. vertical, use the Max Buffs per row slider.
Colors Button
You can change the look of the buff watch panel here. I left it as set by default. When there are players missing the buff it will display the number of players needing the buff in Red. If there are unbuffed players out of range it will state that not all players are in range rather than how many need it. If all players have the buff the number of players (and pets) with the buff will be displayed in green. If the buff is below a threshold time limit (set on the rebuff button pane) then it will display the number of players needing a rebuff soon in yellow.
The range check is great for saving your reagents. There have been a number of times when people ask me for Fortitude and I just reply... "sorry, just waiting for everyone to be in range before applying it".
Rebuff Button
On this panels you can help the buff watch be a little smarter. If you select "Smart" under group buffs, it will decide if it should cast the group or the personal buff depending on how many players are missing it. The default is 2. If at least 2 player are missing the buff it will use your larger group buff (which probably requires a reagent). I've changed this to 3 because I frequently group quest with my husband and don't want to be going through tons of reagents just for questing. I also calculated that only when you get to 3 players does it cost more mana to do the individual buffs. One thing to note is that it can NOT be smart during combat. So if you click the button after someone is battle rezed it will use the group buff not the individual buff.
Left click on unit frames will cast single variant of the buff while right click will cast whatever setting you choose here (always, smartcast, never) but if you are ever trying to force a raid buff, you can use a middle click or buttons 4 and 5 to cast it. You can also choose instead to buff via a mouse wheel while on a buffwatch frame.
This is also where you set the threshold for the yellow warning text that the buff is about to run out. If you are doing bosses that take 3min then you could set the limit to 3min... if you are doing bosses that take closer to 6min then you might want to set the limit a little higher to make sure all buffs that need to be reapplied are.
Debuffs Tab
This is where you set most of your debuff settings (used to be under general tab). Keep in mind that you still can choose to show individual or groups of debuffs outside these general settings via bouquets or just typing in debuff names into HoT slots.
Standard Button
Vuhdo can automatically detect and show you if a player is under a debuff that is removable by you. (It doesn't seem to know about a dwarf's ability to cleanse poison from themselves though - I also don't know if it knows about the Body and Soul Talent that lets priest cleanse poisons from themselves) This is the tab that lets you control what it shows. I personally like to remove movement restriction debuffs, so I've unchecked that box. Warning if you can cleanse magic don't uncheck "un-harmful" or you will want to cleanse mages with arcane blast. (Learned that one the hard way).
Checking on Icon allows you to show all debuffs, including rends, bleeds, mob specific spells etc. This setting is great when doing heroics or simply leveling or questing. You do want to be aware of nasty dots as a healer, even if they do not necessarily fall into the basic categories of magic/poison/curse etc. It also means now you can see all the superfluous debuffs like exhaustion on entire raid or Bested Gnomeregan and so on. Ignore list is there to help you get rid of these pesky debuffs you do not want to be seeing. Don't forget to hit Save after entering each one and be careful of spelling.
For raids I keep Icons unchecked and let custom debuff list take care of the important raid debuffs as I find it easier to micromanage.
Debuff sounds will allow you to set a default sound for every debuff. On the next tab you can set it for individual debuffs which I personally find more useful since sound for every single debuff would drive me batty. To each his own though.
Custom Button
Here you can customize the custom debuffs display. These will be your raid debuffs basically. You can select to display them by icons or bar color, to display timers or stacks and even add the name of the buff on the bar if you're confused what each icon is. You can show up to 5 debuff icons on any single bar at the same time. I prefer to show the max but you can limit yourself to only one, grid style. Don't forget to hit apply all to apply the settings to all dots.
If you choose to use only custom debuffs in raid (uncheck Debuffs->Standard->Icon), you'll rarely see more than 2 icons anyway. Custom debuff list contains only important boss debuffs. If there are any that are missing, type them in and hit save.
Each debuff can be customized individually on the right. For example, on Blood Queen I like to show when people are bit and when they need to bite someone. I color the health bar for both debuffs with specific colors so it is very easy to see during the fight. To avoid clutter in the debuff icon display, you can choose not to show a debuff by icon if you're already showing it by custom color. You can also associate a sound with a debuff if you wish.
Bottom left corner allows you to set x/y position for debuff icon bar and direction of growth (4 positions indicated by circles). Their size can also be adjusted here.
Panel Tab
This is where we will get into the nitty-gritty of setting up Vuhdo to look and act exactly as you want it to.
General Button
Vuhdo can have up to 10 different panels, so when you are adjusting a panel make sure that the panel selected is the one you want to be making adjustments to. The panel itself will have a white border and the panel # title will be in white instead of grayed out. Also the name of the panel will be displayed in the upper right corner of the Vuhdo Configuration pane. If you want all your panels to have the same configuration then click "Apply All".
Before you start really messing with this, I recommend you take a quick detour to the "Move" Tab and click the 25 button instead of the current, that way Vuhdo will fill the panel with duplicates of your self which will help you judge sizes and such.
This raid arrangement with duplicated health bars will be preserved if you then click on the panel tab in the options. This allows you to adjust all the panel options (position, size, width, textures, hots etc.) as you would like them to look in a full raid so you do not have to do this in the middle of the run, between the pulls.
In the ordering section, you can choose between grouped or loose. Some features only work if grouped, so I've always left it that way but loose can be useful in pvp setups where there is a lot of joining and leaving the raid during combat resulting in rearrangement of unitframes. Loose configuration can somewhat minimize (although not completely diminish) this effect.
For my Panel #1 I'm creating it to be just a small(ish) box off to the side of the raid members ordered by group. This will not be my main healing panel, but just used so I can easily see who is in which group at a glance. (I prefer to keep people organized by role, but sometimes it is necessary to see people organized by group.)
I want this panel to show a 5x5 listing of the players, so I set the max columns to 5. If I happen to join a 40man raid then it will just create 3 more columns below the first 5. I could set the max row to 5 as well, although since I'm organizing by group, it will always max out at 5 anyway.
For this panel I also want all the player to be organized by their unit ID. I'll also uncheck "You First" for this panel since I want everyone ordered exactly how they would be if you opened the blizzard raid frames.
The anchor point tells Vuhdo which way to have the panel grow as players are added to it. The most natural is for it to grow to the right. However you may find situations where growing from the left is useful. I do this for my pet panel as I have it sitting flush with my main healing panel. So when everyone gets into vehicles for Flame Leviathan I don't want the panel to grow over top of my main frame, but left and off the screen. One thing to note though is that when it needs to grow to a second column for one player the first full column will still be on the left side of the panel, with the new column on the right.
Properties of the background panel for the raidframes are also adjusted here so that you do not need to generate a separate background frame/border via kgpanels. I do not use this frame at all so I set both the panel border and background to 0 opacity.
Sizing Button
Here you can adjust size of all the bars, their interspacing as well as spacing between the health bars and the border of the background panel if you have it on (X,Y-gap).
Bars Button
Here is where you can choose a texture for the bars, find one you like. You have the choice of choosing how the bar is colored. It can be the class color, a solid color (of your choice), or it can change color with the players health (Float). Green when healthy, Yellow when hurt, and Red when near death. This can make it easier to spot those that are in serious need of health. For this panel I'm choosing "float". By default as people loose health the bar will shrink left justified. Just like the default health frame for your own character. But if you prefer you can have the bar shrink vertically or even grow instead of shrink.
You also have the option of showing raid icons that are displayed on the player frame. I LOVE this feature, as we frequently mark kiters, so this helps me see easier who I need to keep a closer eye on. However for this panel it isn't really necessary.
You can also choose to show Mana and/or other Power type bars. I have this turned on although I'm not sure how often it really impacts any of my decisions.
Headers Button
This is where you can control what the headers look like. Headers in most cases are probably not really needed. I remove them here because I know that group on is the left most column with group 2 in the next column etc.
Targets Button
On this pane you can choose to show the targets of each player. I personally don't use this at all, but if you do the option is there. You can also have the raid icons displayed for the targets. I could see this as being useful if you are a tank to quickly see who isn't targeting the "skull" like they should be. (This may be a healer add-on but I think any class/role could use it as their raid frames)
Tooltips Button
If you didn't select "Standard" under tooltip on the General Tab - Misc Button then you can use this pane to dictate where the Vuhdo tool tip will be displayed. Since I plan on putting this panel nearly flush with the left side of my screen it only makes sense to have the tool tip display to the right of the panel. I like the tooltip that comes with Vuhdo, as it makes it really easy to quickly mouse over - scan all the players that are out of range to see which ones are not at the raid location and need a summons.
I would not recommend turning on the "In Fight" as I don't see why that information would be needed mid fight and I think the flash of the tooltip would probably be very distracting and possibly slow down your frame rate.
Text Button
This along with the Bars button will be the most personal in the choices made and are really totally a matter of personal preference. You can display the name, class, and or the flag (dnd/afk/dc/dead/ghost). I see no need to display class since you can get that information from color, but some might like that. Because I'm showing the bars with the floating color, I'm choosing to display the names in the class color so I can still see the class info quickly. This also makes it easier to find a particular player in the list. If I'm looking for a dk I can skim all the names and only focus on the red ones. Also since this panel is not my main panel used for healing, I don't need the hit points displayed. A few letters of the player name colored by class is good enough. You can play around with the name placement which will probably depend on the size and shape of the bars you created.
HoT Icons Button
I'll go into this pane in more detail for my second panel. For this panel again I don't really need any hot info since it is not my main healing panel, and the boxes are too small to adequately show this information. So I have disabled showing of HoTs for this panel.
HoT Bars Button
This is a pane I'm don't use at all. I think it might be useful for druids but I have no use or need for HoT bars. So I can't help you with this pane.
Colors Tab
Before I go into the details of creating another panel I'm going to cover the remaining tabs. So the next one is the Colors Tab. If you are color blind I could see this tab being very important for helping you see the important information you need. If not you might not need to touch this tab other than maybe to tweak a few things.
States Button
We discussed under the General Tab - Debuff Button that Vuhdo will automatically display any debuffs that you can cleanse. Here is where you tell Vuhdo how to display these debuffs. I choose to have it color the panel. The default is to color the panel and the text. I don't like that so I remove the check marks in the text column. Remember these choices effect all of your panels not just one of them. You can also have it display an icon that represents the debuff. I tried that but found that it was just too much info. The color bar was all I really needed. I've also tweaked the colors of the Poison, Magic and Disease debuffs to be a bolder more obvious (to me) color. You do that just by clicking on the bar and it will bring up a color picking tool.
Modes Button
I left this pane exactly as it is in default. But if you want to show incoming heals, or out of range indicators a little differently you have the option.
Powers Button
If you chose to display the Mana and/or Power bars here is where you can control the color that each type displays as. For most users I doubt this will be modified.
HoTs Button
When I display HoTs I prefer to use the icon method, so this pane is not needed by me. So I just left this as default. But for those of you coming from Grid and want to use the corner box method this is where you can change which hot is displayed as which color.
HoTs #2 Button
I think this pane is really only useful for druids who can put multiple charges of the same hot on one player, and who use the corner box method instead of the icon method for displaying the hots. Since I don't do either I can't really say much about this pane.
Classes Button
Most people probably use the default Class colors if they even use the class colors for the Text or bar color, but if you need to change the default colors this is where you would do it. You can also change the brightness of these colors, which I can see being useful for those that like to get their UI just right.
Move Tab
This move tab really has a lot of the nuts and bolts of how to get the multi panels working for you, but it can be a little confusing at first. I know when I first downloaded Vuhdo, this tab got me confused and I deleted things then couldn't figure out why I couldn't get things back and such. Of course part of that was I was also trying to use the "Panel wizard". Really the "Panel Wizard" is there if you don't want to have the fine control over your panels that the Move tab allows. Now that I understand how the panel thing works better I won't touch the panel wizard.
For my main healing panel, I want to have all the players displayed in three columns depending on role. The first column will be the Ranged DPS. So I clicked on that "choose" button, then from the type drop down selected special, then from the value drop down selected "ranged dps". Now all my Warlocks, Mages, and Hunters will automatically go into that column. To create a second column I just click the green plus next to the panel. For my second column I want all the Healers. As a healer it is a good idea to keep an extra eye on the healers as they are your "team" members. In the third column I want all the Melee. I don't care if they are tanks or dps, just if they will be up close and personal with the bosses. I'll also add a 4th column, called "private tanks". This is a column that will only be used in particular situations. It won't display any players unless I assign them as private tanks. (I'll show you that later).
The pets I'll keep in their own panel. This is VERY important to do because of fights like Flame Leviathan, where each vehicle is considered a pet. If you put the pets in the same panel as your players the panel gets UGLY and impossible to manage during a fight like that.
If you want to remove a panel, it is as simple as clicking the red X next to the panel. Since I include the private tanks in the same panel as my main healing panel I don't need that extra panel.
When you delete a panel it will confirm that you really want to. But if you delete a panel or want more than the 4 originally displayed, all you need to do is click the big green plus. You can add up to 10 panels.
Modifiying a second Panel
I created the first panel to be just a simple small panel showing players by group. Bu it is not very useful for most of my healing needs. So now I'm going to create my main healing panel. This is the one I'll be looking at most of the time.General Button
I don't want this panel to ever grow beyond 4 columns. If it does that it will start to cover my character since I keep my healing panel just to the left of my character. As long as I'm not in a 40 man raid allowing the columns to have as many rows as they need has never been a problem.
I also like keeping myself a the top of list. A dead healer can't heal, so I always want to be able to find my own health bar at a moments glance. I also like to organize all the players by class. It probably isn't 100% necessary but it does help me find a particular player much faster. During Kologarn, our healing team assigns 3 healers to heal the people in his grip. But we can't just say "you three heal the people griped" because then all three of us could end up healing the same player and the other two die. DBM announces who is in the grip. So we assign a healer to each player in the list. For example I'm assigned to heal who ever is first in the list of players. Vuhdo does a great job of showing who has been griped, but when I look up to see who was named first, I need to get my mouse to that players name ASAP. Since I raid with mostly the same people all the time, when I see the name I know generally where it will be in that list because the names are not displayed randomly. If I was organizing my panel by group and id, then it would take me considerably longer before locating that persons health bar.
Bars Button
I'm skipping the sizing button at this time because I need to get the bars looking the way I want before I decide on the final sizing.
I like showing the class by the bar color. I can see just fine how hurt a player is by how small the bar is, I don't feel the green->red coloring is as useful. With the bars colored by class I know quickly if that was a squishy mage that just pulled aggro and needs a quick shield, or a lock that just life tapped and could use a renew. I suppose I could see the same if I colored the name instead of the bar, but I'm used to this now.
Headers Button
For my main healing panel I do like showing the headers. It probably really isn't needed because I only have one column for each role type, but I still like it. I do like to keep it a small as possible though. And I'm partial to purple so I changed the color.
Targets Button
Because I "took over" the panel that was defaulted for the Main Tank, it had the Targets turned on. As I mentioned earlier, I don't use this feature, so I turned it off. Showing targets will take up a lot more screen real estate.
Tooltip Button
I plan to put the left corner of this panel right below the cool down timer you can see in the screen shot, so I want the tooltip to show to the left of the frame and not over top of my character in the center. Right now it shows it going of the screen but once everything it set up as I want it, it will be fine.
Text Button
Now I like to have the text left justified, and to only show the health values if they are missing some, and only show what is missing. I like to see the actual amount missing so I know what type of heal is best. If I just see a percentage that can me a very different thing for a warlock vs a warrior. Besides I can visually get a rough percentage idea just from how much of the bar is missing.
Here I removed and put back on all my gear so you can see what it looks like when someone is not at full health.
Sizing Button
Now that I have the look I want, it is time to start working on the sizing. I tweaked this again once I was actually in a raid and had a full listing of players, but it was close to what I wanted just from this set up. I want to make sure it is wide enough to have room for the 5 hot icon slots to not be overlapping on to other players bars, but not so wide that I have to move my mouse a lot to get from a melee bar to a ranged dps bar. I also want it tall enough to show both the lower level hots and the upper level custom de/buffs, while still allowing me to see how much of the bar is missing. Adjusting the scale of the icons (seen later) will also help with this. Of course again I don't want the bars so tall that they take up too much room to keep all of the ranged dps in one column.
HoT Icons Button
I prefer to show the icon of my hots rather than a square representing the hot on the bar. For those of you coming from Healbot you'll probably be the same, for those of you coming from Grid/Clique you will probably prefer the box method. This guide will only show the icon method since that is what I do.
First I like my icons to be at the bottom of the bar. They will be slightly on and slightly off the bar. So there will always be a slight space between each bar. This is why I have a 0 size gap between bars. The way the hots work is that there are 5 slots for hot icons to be displayed in. You must choose which hot will be in which slot.
When I first started using Vuhdo "Abolish Disease" was not an option, so I added it to my Custom de/buff list. I still prefer it there since I really don't care if I cast the buff on the player or if someone else did. As long as I know if it is on the player or not. I've also added the Prayer of Mending to my Custom de/buff list so I can see if other priest have cast it already, then I won't cast it too. But if I only had it as a custom de/buff I wouldn't know which of the multiple PoM's bouncing around is mine. So assigning it to one of these slots is necessary. I do the same for Guardian Spirit, since I want to know if someone else cast it. And the double icons let me know if it is mine or not. (probably not strictly necessary).
The 'other people's hots' will show you the icon of the last hot cast on the player and the number of hots currently on the player.
There is one thing to note about these hot icons. They are applied to the bar as soon as you click the button, even if the hot isn't actually applied because the player is out of sight, or some such thing. It takes a few moments (based on the scanner rate set earlier) for Vuhdo to realize that it didn't 'take'.
To test the size of the icons I cast Guardian Spirit on myself. You can see that it is showing in the 4th slot as well as on the top of the bar as a custom de/buff. Now I have all 5 slots fill and this is showing that the 4th slot is at the edge of the bar. Clearly I need to scale down these icons if I'm going to fit all 5 icons with in the width of the bar.
I also need to adjust the scaling of the Custom de/buffs. I do this on the General Tab on the Custom Button pane. This icon will flash a little bigger and then shrink to the size set and land on the bar. Kind a hard to show in a still shot. But it is very useful for spotting players with 'frost blast' very quickly.
Saving Profiles
Vuhdo lets you save a number of settings for easy (and automatic) switching depending on your needs.
Skins
You can save the Color/Fonts as a Skin. This can then be easily changed either from the General Tab - Skin Button Pane or from the vuhdo minimap button, or even in a macro via slash commands.
Arrangements
You can also save the groups/sizes as an Arrangement. I use this because I like the arrange by role for raids, but it is quite impractical for a small 5 man group. So I saved the above arrangement as "Healing Raid" and check the 10, 25, and 40 buttons. So anytime I join a raid Vuhdo will automatically switch to this arrangement.
I then went to the Move tab and changed my second panel to contain just group 1 instead of the 3 different roles.
Then went back and saved it as "Healing Solo/Group" and checked the 1 and 5 button. Now any time I join a raid Vuhdo will automatically switch to my Raiding arrangement, and when I leave the raid it will switch back to my solo arrangement.
Dual Spec
You can also save two different sets of spell assignments based on your current spec. I found that getting it to work correctly at first was a little tricky. Then I noticed that Vuhdo prints to the chat log when it saves a spell spec. So you can verify that it is doing what you intended for it to do.
It also shows when you change specs that the saved spell set up has changed. I don't really need a change of spells for Holy to Shadow since I don't have access to any new spells, and any of the Holy only spells just won't work if I try to click them. However I did switch it so that my Power Word: Shield is my main button since when I'm questing I frequently cast that on myself.
Menu Bars
There are two different menu type bars available depending on what you are trying to do.Minimap Button
When you right click on the minimap button you will get the Vuhdo menu. You can easily change to any saved Skin, Arrangement, or Spell setup.
You can also lock the panels from this menu. I highly recommend you do that so you don't accidentally click drag the panel in the middle of a fight when you are frantically healing as it could really screw you up.
Player Bar Menu
Remember when I told you to assign "menu" to one of the spell assignments. This is why. If you are the raid leader (or assistant) you can assign Main Tanks, Mater looter and other things from this menu. If you are not you can assign private tanks. This is how I move people over to that private tank column when needed. Also, Vuhdo attempts to figure out everyone's spec and therefore which role they are. I've found this doesn't always work 100% effectively. So this is where you can manually assign them the correct role. If you choose to use Vuhdo's buff bar to cast your Fear Ward, this is where you can also quickly assign who it will be applied to.
Screenshots
Here are a few screenshots of different aspects of Vuhdo in action. These were all taken before I cleared all my settings in memory to create this walkthrough so some of the things might look a little different than what I showed in the walkthrough.Raid
Here you can see what my set up looks like with a full 25 players. We actually have a few more melee in this run than we typically do, so the columns are nearly even.
Private Tanks
When we do Flame Leviathan I'm the healer that is shot onto the beast. So it helps me to find the others being shot if I set them up as private tanks before the run starts. Otherwise I would be looking through a mess of vehicles trying to find the few actual players to click on. You can also see here why I have pets in a separate panel that fills from the right. So as we each enter a vehicle our bar says 'vehicle' but it also creates a pet bar, overwhelming the raid frame.
Group
Here you can see me in just a 5 man group. It is much simpler to have them all in the same column rather than spread out over 3 columns with 3 in the ranged dps column, me in the healer column, and the tank in the melee column. I did that for a while and it really hindered my healing ability.
40 Man - Just for fun
Forty mans aren't done too much anymore... but we were doing it for the "For the Alliance" achievement. So I thought I would show you a screenshot just so you could see how Vuhdo handled that many players. Again I used the private tank feature to pull the players I was primarily responsible for to an easier to find/see location.
Conclusion
I hope this walkthrough has been useful and helpful. If you have any questions feel free to contact me either from this site or from the plusheal forum
. Vuhdo support forum maintained by the author can be found here http://www.plusheal.com/viewforum.php?f=32Also if you see any errors or typos please fix them, so others wont be confused.
Created by Melsana
.
Last Modification: Friday 16 of July, 2010 18:20:31 EDT by zohar101
.
Sidebar
Wiki
| Theme: The News