Hello. I am a healer player that has more than 400 days /played on classic wow since it was released. There have been lots of UI changes to classic wow over the years but unfortunately we still dont have working heal prediction in the game. People have to rely on different addons to coordinate their heals better in raid groups. Doing so is not only complicated, but also many of these addons suffer different problems.
In the past, most people used the healcomm addon for heal prediction, but unfortunately the addon was discontiniued. Now people have to download a working version of LibHealComm4.0 in order to coordinate heals, and then to configure their raid frames to use the healcomm API afterwards. Which is complicated and not entirely brings a solution at all. Because now people who use the healcomm API wont be able to see anybody elses heals that doesnt use the healcomm API. Healcomm API also sometimes bugs out and doesnt recognize if a heal is cancelled, resulting in stuck visuals. Not to mention not all frame addons support healcomm.
But it gets worse. God forbid if people are using the default frames. Because not only you have to download the libhealcomm4.0 to communicate heals, but you also have to download a seperate addon to create the heal prediction visuals due to the default UI doesnt have a built in visuals for incoming heals. People used HealBarsClassic addon to create visuals for some time, but it was also abandoned. Recently someone created a “hotfix” version of healbarsclassic to resurrect the addon. Now you have to download the hotfix version on top of the abandoned version, on top of the uptodate healcomm library and also to make other members of your raid to do the same steps to make the heal prediction work… And even then, the hotfix version of addon is very buggy and often creates massive fps drops for many players.
Some frame addons created an option to predict incoming healing based on the Blizzard API as a solution. However, Blizzard API calculate the heals very wrongly. It simply cannot view the current stats of players. For example, it predicts Rank 1 FoL to heal around 60, while it should be predicting 700 incoming healing due to the caster having 1.3k+ healing power. That is 10x times different and very inaccurate. But that is far from the main problem. Blizzard API cannot communicate with the players that are using the healcomm API and vice versa.
So the healers in an average raid in classic wow (especially in pugs) encounters a situation like this:
1- Some healers are using default frames, dont have healcomm or any prediction addon so they cannot see other players heals
2- Some healers are using default frames, have healcomm but dont see the incoming heals because the heal prediction visuals from HealBarsClassic arent working for them
3- Some healers are using default frames, have healcomm and using healbarsclassic heal prediction visuals on their dafult raid frames, but having massive fps drops due to the poorly working addon, not to mention not being able to communicate heals with no healcomm users
4- Some healers are not using healcomm but using a raid frame addon that can see heal prediction on Blizzard API, however they cannot truely play around it due to the wrong calculations and cannot see any player that are using healcomm
5- Some healers are using healcomm and a proper raid frame addon, therefore is only able to see players that are using healcomm but cannot see the healing of players that are not using healcomm
The situation is even more terrible in SoD, simply because there is no heal prediction library to predict the healing of all those new abilities.
All these situations create very frustrating experience for healers. It is such a shame because it is very easy on the blizzard side to fix this. We already had a ton of UI changes in classic, why not add a default healing prediction also?