Hello!
As much as I would like to have no addon requirements to join pugs and to play generally I still think some things still need improvement before they are substantive enough for replacing the addons we’ve been using them for.
My greatest gripe with addons going away is related to how my health bar functions currently with WA’s that will no longer be possible without it and the built in is just not functional enough to know exactly how safe I am on survival at any given moment.
I will be going into great detail but please bare with me:
I write this from a Blood Death Knight perspective where knowing your current absorb values is not a nice to have but a necessity for your continued survival in tricky situations.
How the general health bar works is you either have
- Full Health
→ Your full HP bar is filled. - Not Full Health:
→ Your HP bar is filled to the % in length to your HP total. - Full Health with Absorb Shield:
→ Your HP bar is full and you have a blue glow at the end. - Not Full Health with Absorb Shield not exceeding your missing health:
→ Your HP bar is filled to the % in length to your HP total and after that is your shield with a blue glowing bar where the length is relevant to visibly see how much shield you have compared to your hp. - Not Full Health with Absorb Shield exceeding your missing health:
→ Your HP bar is filled to the % in length to your HP total and after that is your shield with a blue glowing bar up until the bar is full and the end is glowing. In this case you can see that you have more shield than health you are missing but absolutely no indication of exactly how big of a shield it is.
What I have with WA’s is fully dynamic how it works.
- Full Health
→ Your full HP bar is filled. - Not Full Health:
→ Your HP bar is filled to the % in length to your HP total. - Full Health with Absorb Shield:
→ Your full Health Bar is filled but not with your health, it trunkates the length of the health bar starting from the left and filles the rest with the shield color bar. -
- For example: if I have 20mil hp and an absorb shield of 20 mil from various sources my health bar would look like half of it is HP color other half is Shield color.
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- Or another example: if I have 20 mil HP and the tank cloak procs for 20% of my hp it would look like 5/6th of the health bar is hp colored and 1/6th of the bar is shield colored.
- Not Full Health with Absorb Shield doesn’t matter how much it’s acting the same:
→ The amount of health you are missing in % is blacked out on the right side of your health bar at all cases, even if you have absorbs shield exceeding your missing health, it always shows if your actual health is below 100% clearly. Then treats the rest of the bar identical as I explained it in the previous case what the length of the absorb shield bar is. -
- For example: If you have 20 mil max hp but you’ve lost 5 mil your health is at 75%. That means the rightmost 1/4th of your health bar is black just like the not at full health case. Then if you add absorb shield to this for 15 mil so the same health you have would result in 37.5% of your bar being HP color, 37.5% of your bar being Shield color and 25% of your bar being black.
- This clearly shows that
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- A: You are NOT at full health even if your HP and Shield total is higher than your full health which is important for cases like Purgatory or when incoming damage is dealt below your shield.
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- and B: Exactly how much absorb shield you have in relation to your current HP
Also an option in the WA pack I have is having the absorbs color coded but you can just say to treat them all the same, it’s up to the user.
- Absorbs Any kind of damage is gray.
- Absorbs Magic damage is purple.
- Absorbs Physical damage is brown.
Then we just need to be able to choose the text that is written to
- always show pure health in % and or total values.
- health and shield % related to health in % and or total values.
- combined % related to your max health in % and or total values.
→ That can result showing that you have over a 100% health which is fine because that indicates your survivability.