Hermes - a new cooldown addon

[Bloodcloud]

I can't get over 10 man raids run by one person.........:P You guys impress the hell out of me.

Bloodcloud, glad things are working out ok for you. I opted not to add the hiding of the tooltip because it's such an integral feature for the intended use of Hermes that it seems self defeating. BUT, that doesn't mean I don't understand why you want the behavior changed.

here is a screeny of my current setup



as you can see I have overlay-ed the hermes panels over my buttons (which is actually just a background i made and display in kgpanels, one row of 8 buttons for Priest, shammy, mage, lock. Same for the 6Heal background next to the character name)

I have specified the areas as mouse-over areas, for which if I press a right mouse on that area sends a specific key to the other toon windows.
This works as if I have their action bars on my main. Hermes makes it possible to also see the cool-down for those abilities.

Also to have the cool-down displays directly close to my I-WIN button (the eye) is very handy.

(you said you don't understand) Since I have in my team exactly one Priest, shammy, lock, mage, I know which char has a cooldown and so I don't require the mouseover to see which one is on cooldown. (or even use tic tacs.) BUT this is a very specific case.
I currently didn't remove the mouseover, since It was not really impairing anything and everything works as intended.

I am very happy with the hermes addon. It has so much added value for my setup!! Thanks again Paperplate.

Cheers and keep up the good work
Bloodcloud

[Paperplate]

On a completely off topic note here, I'm very curious how you dual box with your paladins. I think you are using 4 in your screenshot. I see a 4 next to Righteous Defense so I assume you have 4. For something like Crusader Strike, do you just wait until Hermes shows "4" and then hit one button that's mapped to all 4 paladins using the ability? Or do you more or less mash buttons and use the cooldown indicator to know when you can mash it again (and you don't really know who has it available you just know the toom that does will use it). I'm just curious of your general approach and how Hermes helps.

Thank you.

[Alge]

On a completely off topic note here, I'm very curious how you dual box with your paladins. I think you are using 4 in your screenshot. I see a 4 next to Righteous Defense so I assume you have 4. For something like Crusader Strike, do you just wait until Hermes shows "4" and then hit one button that's mapped to all 4 paladins using the ability? Or do you more or less mash buttons and use the cooldown indicator to know when you can mash it again (and you don't really know who has it available you just know the toom that does will use it). I'm just curious of your general approach and how Hermes helps.

DISCLAIMER: There are different approaches to multi-boxing from my method. Some people (like me) prefer/use individual buttons for all abilities and manage the process of selecting abilities manually while others prefer/use /castsequence macros (and /click macros previously) which allows them to press a smaller number of keys/buttons to perform a rotation. From my reading, the latter approach becomes more useful/required for mixed/caster teams and the former is easier to manage for teams with a low number of classes/specs or melee teams. There are other threads on these forums discussing the merits of the various approaches.

The team I currently run is 1 Protection Paladin and 4 Enhancement Shamans. I drive the tank and the shamans are slaves, with windows visible on my other monitor. I have previously run DK tank + Holy Pally + 3 Ret Pallies but haven't gone back to them since the introduction of Holy Power. I prefer all-melee teams for some reason.

I bought a G13 about two weeks ago (and a G700 mouse for the extra buttons) . I am still training myself to use them effectively but they have been excellent purchases so far. I steer and DPS with my left hand on the G13 and heal/target with the mouse making a lot of use of Clique and repeater regions (for mouse broadcasting).

When I press a G13 key ISBoxer generally (with a couple of exceptions) justs broadcasts the same keypress to all clients. I have my action bars (with keybinds) set up in the same layout as the G13 keys. I try to match up similar abilities (especially cooldown length and range) as much as possible and the aim is to press 1 or 2 keys each GCD. Before Hermes I either just pressed 1 key per GCD and missed a lot of cooldowns on slaves or just mashed multiple buttons in the hope of hitting something not on cooldown.

These days a typical 3-4 mob instance pull would look like:
Avenger's Shield + 4 x Chain Lightning (I can now see the AS cooldown)
Consecration + 4 x Call of Elements (I can now see the Cons cooldown)
Judgements + 4 x various shocks (I can now see both the judgement and shock cooldowns, and they differ by 2 secs I think) Note: as shocks all share a cooldown I can do this with one Hermes button.
Mobs are now in range
Crusader Strike + 4 x Stormstrike (which often doesn't hit because the shamans aren't in melee range at that point but Hermes tells me if they have or not)
Shield of the Righteous + 4 x Lava Lash (I can now see the Lava Lash cooldowns)
Crusader Strike + 4 x Stormstrike again (this time Stormstrike will go on to cooldown)
Avenger's Shield + 4 x Chain Lightning (if Grand Crusader hasn't procced and AS is still on cooldown I will press another ability before the GCD is up which will only affect the pally)

From there it is mostly about pressing abilities as their cooldowns expire, sometimes pressing two keys per GCD if either the master or slaves has one key on cooldown. Eventually in long fights the shorter cooldowns on slaves will get out of sync (but using Hermes I know if this is the case! ) but movement and heavy healing tend to correct that a bit. Hermes is also great for knowing that one of my Earth Elemental totems failed to trigger, etc.

With the way I have Hermes and Bartender set up it is easy to monitor cooldowns for master and slaves together. I have no objective numbers but since containers were introduced to Hermes it feels like my DPS has increased significanly because I can monitor cooldowns on my slaves much more effectively with the result that I spend less time just doing white damage. My slaves now regularly out-DPS my tank. This was rarely the case before Hermes because I was wasting cooldowns on the slaves. I may even dual-spec my shamans into elemental. Being able to monitor cooldowns on Hermes will mean less time that my caster slaves stand around not casting because the key I pressed was on cooldown for them.

I would need to rethink my UI for a mixed team. I would still use Hermes but a bit differently. In such a case I would probably move more towards a macro-based approach and so the macro would handle cooldowns to some extent but I would still want to know what was happening.

Alge

[Paperplate]

Also, I'm guessing that being able to have a Sender filter out spell requests would be useful to you. For example, if one one of your paladins is healing you wouldn't want to broadcast DPS or Tank related cooldowns.

I've wondered when someone would ask for some sort of blacklist/filering options on the senders end but no one has brought it up yet

[Alge]

Also, I'm guessing that being able to have a Sender filter out spell requests would be useful to you. For example, if one one of your paladins is healing you wouldn't want to broadcast DPS or Tank related cooldowns.

I've wondered when someone would ask for some sort of blacklist/filering options on the senders end but no one has brought it up yet

The ability to filter out spell requests is not an issue for me at all. I would just use the count on the Hermes button to know I still had one of those cooldowns available, which is exactly how Hermes is designed and a sensible behaviour. Also, I invariably DPS on my healers as well and just use stopcasting in macros if I need to ensure healing comes quickly when needed.

I am having trouble coming up with a scenario in which I would need sender filtering. Stupid faulty imagination!

Alge

[Paperplate]

That's great! If there are small tweaks here and there that would make a big impact for you please don't hesitate to continue suggesting them. I may not agree with them all but I'm happy to consider them.

Mostly thing I'm trying to avoid are complex changes, fundamental changes, or changes that put more options in the users face that they won't care about. But I could easily allow it to be set manually in a profile for example.

Hey, btw, I ran some tests with Hermes in a 9 man raid over 1 hour and 45 minutes. Here is what the bandwidth looked like:

[Paperplate]

I recently made a few changes and one feature was added which *might* be useful to the community here. Hermes now integrates with combat text addons including Parrot, SCT, and MikScrollingBattleText.

All this really means is that when a sender has a spell become available or go on cooldown then it'll show up in the notification area of any of those addons (if enabled). This is enabled on the general config page. Probably not too useful considering it's setup globally and not at the container or spell level. But thought I'd mention it anyway.

Also, if you're running tight on CPU with your multiboxing machines this build will perform even better (not that it ever performed badly)

I was forced to change the tooltip a bit due to some LibQTip bugs but I don't know if it'll negatively impact you. The spell name header just looks different and doesn't span columns now. I hope to change it back if LibQTip gets things figured out.

Home page link

[Paperplate]

It's been ages since I've posted here, but thought I'd point out that I've added user specified ordering to containers now. You drag and drop the buttons to change the order. This was requested here a long time ago.

Also, I'm not sure how relevent it is to the community here, but Hermes now includes a Plugin and Event API which can potentially be used to extend what Hermes does. I think that could be a great opportunity for those of you looking to change how it works or perhaps even integrate it with other addons used for dual-boxing.

Release 1.1a
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-a...ls/hermes.aspx

Do note however that you will lose your saved variables (there were simply too many changes to try and support keeping the old settings)

I'll let you decide whether it's worth upgrading to, but probably a good idea to backup your old saved variables in case there's something about the new Hermes that you don't like.

Cheers!

[Jafula]

Also, I'm not sure how relevent it is to the community here, but Hermes now includes a Plugin and Event API which can potentially be used to extend what Hermes does. I think that could be a great opportunity for those of you looking to change how it works or perhaps even integrate it with other addons used for dual-boxing.

Sweet, I'm keen to have a look at this and see if I can integrate it into Jamba by using your API; it will save me having to write similar functionality!

/aside
I tried the same thing as you regarding parrot / MSBT notification areas in Jamba, but it never seemed to get any momentum.

[Paperplate]

Sweet, I'm keen to have a look at this and see if I can integrate it into Jamba by using your API; it will save me having to write similar functionality!

/aside
I tried the same thing as you regarding parrot / MSBT notification areas in Jamba, but it never seemed to get any momentum.

Yes, if you can get people to actually use Hermes (which you can!!!) then the API should work perfectly for you.

I have not documented the Event API, and it's a first draft so likely a bit rough around the edges. But you can take a look at EventAPI.lua and the very top function Hermes:InitializeHermesEvents(). It lists all of the current events. I'll have to describe them soon and the parameters they pass. Still working on a few more features which includes another plugin. I'll do it a few weeks from now.

The new UI does it's thing using only the events listed. Well, I cheated here and there but I'm 99% truthful.

Send me a PM if you're serious about it, I'd be happy to work with you in meeting your goals.