Emulating Party frames in WoW?

[Kyte]

Well, I hope this is not too OT, but here goes...

I've played around with triple-boxing in WoW on and off for some time now, and I just recently decided to start leveling a pair of mages again (each about 40, with a 70 shaman for support). Obviously, grouping with a 70 is horribly inefficient in terms of xp gains, so I'd prefer to have only the mages grouped with one another while the shaman hangs around to toss out heals when needed. However, I find that it is not nearly as easy to monitor the health of each mage when they're ungrouped, as I end up having to divide my attention between 3 screens. So, I was wondering if there would be any way to mimic the functionality of party frames without actually being grouped with the players they're representing.

I figured it might be possible to write a simple mod for each of the mage systems that uses the addon channel to relay health updates to a 'server' addon on the shaman system, which would construct facsimiles of the party frames for each character. As far as I can tell, this should be possible. However, it seems that Blizz has severely limited the targetting functions available to addons, so while I might be able to display the health of each character on a single screen, it seems as though there would be no simple way to target them as I would if they were grouped. I suppose macros would work, but that just adds another level of complexity that I would prefer to avoid.

Is there any way around this? Could there be a more elegant solution than resorting to targetting macros?

Thanks for any info.

[Steph]

/focus gives you only one bar.
I would suggest going for the health bars ove the heads of your chars.
Just like CTRL-V enables the health bars for hostile mobs, there is another key combo for the same thing for friendly mobs.

[Shogun]

Target mage 1 and type /focus, this puts his Unit Frame on your screen, then just target the other mage all the time, you now have 3 Unit Frames on screen, the Shamans, Mage 1 and Mage 2. Make a macro to target Mage 1, and another to /focus on Mage 2 (so you can set it up fast when you log in)

Have 2 bars using Trinity Bars adon. You can specify a target to a bar, so anything you click on that bar will always cast on that target so:

Bar 1: 6 buttons, all auto-directed at Mage 1, Keybinds 1-6
Bar 2: 6 buttons, all auto-directed at Mage 2, Keybinds 7-=

(you can have as many bars and buttons as you like per target)

Job done, only 1 macro at start up that casts /focus then /target Mage 2. And an adon that does the targetting by bar for you