Healers Have To Die ( H.H.T.D. )

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Current features:

• HHTD automatically adds healer symbols on top of players nameplate indicating their class and healing rank. Unlike other add-ons it only takes into account actively healing players. (It uses different symbols for friends and foes).

• HHTD lets you apply custom marks on top of any unit’s nameplate. These are the same marks as the default raid markers but you can set as many as you want and customize their look. These marks persist across game sessions. (They are only visible to you)

IMPORTANT NOTE: You have to enable nameplates, else you won’t see any healer symbol!

HHTD lets you announce through a customizable message who the enemy and friendly healers are (using the Raid Warning channel if possible).

It will also help you protect the healers who are on your side alerting you when they are being attacked (check the option panel for details).

Helps you target healers easily when they are in a pack.

All of this applies to PVP and PVE.

NOTE: Type /HHTDG to open the configuration panel. There are many settings to check!

HHTD’s options are not directly available in the “Interface” panel due to ongoing tainting issues Blizzard is not willing to fix.

That player is not a healer?
If you see a player marked as healer that should not be:

• If their mark’s background is grey then enable the ‘Healer specialization detection’ option so as to only report specialized healers ignoring others.

• If their mark’s background is grey then enable the ‘Healer specialization detection’ option so as to only report specialized healers ignoring others.

Also note that the healer’s rank is displayed as a number in the center of the displayed mark so you can judge the importance of that player in the healing currently being done (the lower the number, the better the healer).

How it works
HHTD uses the combat log events to detect friendly and enemy healers who are currently healing other players (during the last 60s). HHTD detects specialized healers spells (for human players only) and differentiates specialized healers from hybrid ones.

HHTD also lets you choose a specified amount of healing healers have to reach before being marked as such (50% of your own health by default). This threshold is the only criterion used for NPCs.

When a healer is identified it will be marked with a healer symbol above their nameplate. If the healer is specialized, the symbol’s background will be colored according to their class. In other cases the background will be grey.

In all cases a number in the center of the symbol indicates the rank of the healer, the lowest the number the better the healer (ie: ‘1’ represents the most effective healer while ‘9’ is the least effective).

You can force HHTD to only report specialized healers through HHTD’s options (/hhtdg).

Needless to say that self-heals and heals to pets are filtered out.

Commands

• /HHTDP (or /hhtdp) posts healers name to the raid channel ordered by effectiveness for all to see (Will use the Raid Warning channel if possible).

You need to configure the messages in the announce module options first.

You can bind the above command to a key (WoW key-bindings interface)

/HHTDG opens option panel

/HHTD gives you access to the command line configuration interface (useful for changing settings through macros…)

Compatibility
HHTD is only compatible with nameplate add-ons which have been coded responsibly and do not modify internal parts of Blizzard nameplates (a very selfish behaviour as it prevents any other add-on from re-using them).

HHTD will detect these incompatibilities and report to you so that you can ask the culprit add-on authors to fix their code and make it compatible with ALL nameplate add-ons.

Guidelines for other add-on authors:
Do not call :Hide() or :Show() on nameplates’ base frame. This breaks nameplate tracking for other add-ons by unduly firing OnHide/OnShow hooks…
Instead, make its sub-frames invisible by changing their size and/or setting them to the empty (not nil) texture. (check out how TidyPlates does)

Do not call :SetParent() on nameplates’ subframes, this would prevent other add-ons from finding and hooking nameplate elements.

Do not use SetScript() EVER. You don’t need it. :SetScript() shall only be used on frames YOU create. You can simply replace all your SetScript() calls by HookScript().

Interview
Curse.com interviewed me for an ‘Add-on Spotlight’ article focused on the controversy around this add-on, you can find this interview here.

Articles
Here are two excellent articles about HHTD by Cynwise (A must read if you have some doubts about the fairness of this add-on!) :

HHTD and the PvP Addons Arms Race

Using HHTD to Protect Friendly Healers

Here is another article written by Gevlon (a PVP healer).

Debates
An ‘interesting’ debate about this add-on is also happening on Blizzard’s official forum:

Break the HHTD mod already. (UI and Macro forum) (full),

HHTD, part I (UI and Macro forum) (full),

HHTD, part III (General discussion) (full),

Sadly, as a European I cannot participate but I’m reading those threads with great interest.

The funniest part about all those 26 pages discussions is that only about 16,000 people were actually using HHTD at the time (from the Curse Client popularity statistics)… Now over 180,000 players have it installed!

In those discussions it’s also rarely noted that HHTD is also very helpful to protect healers on your side. This debate is leading nowhere though… I won’t post any additional links to those endless threads.

type /hhtdg to open the configuration interface, or /hhtd for command-line access