Its that Voodoo that You (un)Do.

Today's topic will be quick and simple.  It's about my addon i call voodoo, but the maker spells it Vuhdo.  but its pronounced the same.  in any case, its a "healing" addon +decurse. now i put healing in quotes because, although its marketed specifically as a healing addon, it does way more than that.

1. it works with mouseover macros as if you were pointing your mouse over the raid/party member's portrait.
2. it works with more than just healing spells.
3. it alerts you with dispellable debuffs (curses, magic, slows, snares, poison, etc) and with mouseover macros or clickcasting, you can decurse with ease.
4. it works like clique, where you can bind mousekeys to actions (rightclick=heal, leftclick=renew) when mouseover.
5. it works with your scrollwheel!!!!!!!!!!!
6. its highly customizable and works with your macros.
7. there's more.  i just cant think of it right now.


What it does is this, it gives you a bunch of health bars in any configuration you want.  but it works fine right out of the box.

Snapshot 1          Snapshot 2         Snapshot 3

Here are three screenshots i've taken on my paladin in a 5man group.



Let me explain the image above a little.  i was in a 5man group and decided to take snapshots of my Vuhdo health bars during one single fight. 

Snapshot 1:

The first health bar shows Meatdept and Zagak with a magic debuff.  The blue color tells me i can cast Purify.  I also have it so that any curses on my team will change their healthbars to purple.

You can also see in the first party frame snapshot is that Zagak (who's a rogue) grabbed aggro too early. I have it set so that i can see a red box around his healthbar plus red arrows around his name.  This lets me know instantly who has aggro.

Snapshot 2:
The middle snapshot shows Zagak at full health and Meatdept taking aggro back. not much to see here except that Zagak has his health back and things are as they should be, with the tank having aggro. Note that their healthbars are still blue.  In this case, i think they were slowed by some frost spell, but it could mean any kind of magic debuff, including polymorph, etc.

Snapshot 3:
I decide to purify the two suckers.  so i put my mouse pointer over their names and scrolled up on my mousewheel.  you dont see it happening, but that's exactly what i did.  and bam! their debuff is gone. you can see Zagak has taken damage but he does not have aggro.  this usually means a mob has some kind of AoE spell thats tearing up the melee.  but i let the healers deal with that.

As a paladin (DPS no less), i have Purify on MouseScrollWheel UP. I have Cleanse on MouseScrollWheel DOWN.  its that simple.  If you're used to Decursive addon, you can set the Purify/Cleans to Left and right mouse clicks if you want.  yep, that easy.

My other DPS/RET paladin commands are as such:
Left Click:  Flash of Light (especially useful when i have Art of War up)
Right Click:  Righteous Defense (yes i use this sometimes to save the healer.  better me dead than him/her... always.  though this does piss the tank off sometimes.)
Mouse Button 4: Hand of Freedom
Mouse Button 5: Hand of Salvation
Alt+Left Click: Targets the player.
Alt+Right Click: Hand of Protection (I use this often but usually never on the tank)

Although i can customize the mouseclicks with the shift key and control key, its already pretty complicated.  add to that the fact that i dont use my "Hand of" spells all that often, i may accidentally give someone hand of something they dont want.  and no one wants a hand of something bad.

So my Vuhdo, it does more than just help me with click-healing.  it helps me with decursing, dispelling, removing disease, taunt, casts my hands spells, casts some healing spells, and and and.... add to that some mouseover macros, and you have yourself an awesome healing tool.


Holy PVP. Yes i went ahead and made Devynity a holy PVP spec solely for BG's and WG (Battlegrounds and Wintergrasp).   And i made it so that Vuhdo can distinguish between Spec 1 (ret) and Spec 2 (holy). Awesome, aint it?

Now in doing this, i try to keep things pretty similar.  Meaning, my Purify is on mousescrollwheelup. and my Cleanse is on mousescrollwheeldown.

But i've changed my buttons a little.  I no longer need Righteous Defense, as it will not work on other players.  Instead, my Right Click is now Holy Light. The hands spells are the same. but i've added several mouseover macros to help assist in healing.

As a pvp paladin, i also expect myself to attack at times.  so some of my usual DPS spells are still there like Judgements, Hammer of Justice, Consecrate, Exorcism and Hammer of Wrath.

What i've added was a mouseover button for Holy Shield, Holy Shock and Beacon of Light.
The macro's looks like this:

#showtooltip
/cast [@mouseover, help] [] Holy Shield

#showtooltip
/cast [@mouseover, help] [@mouseover, harm] [] Holy Shock

#showtooltip
/cast [@mouseover, help] [] Beacon of Light

Note that my Holy Shock macro has a condition for "harm" as well as "help".  this is because holy shock will do damage to enemies as well as heal friendlies. 
the empty brackets "[]" is coding for a failsafe feature.  it means, if all conditions arent met, then it tells computer to "just cast Holy Shock as you would normally do it if it wasnt in a macro."
This [] will also allow me to use holy shock on myself if i press ALT.  as well, it will cast holy shock on whoever i have targetted manually. 

So with those few macros, and Vuhdo, i am able to run out into the battlefield of WG and cause some holy hell, or holy healing, or whatevers, for a while.  Now i could have added holy shield and holy shock to my Vuhdo instead of making mouseover macros.  but i find that it would totally confuse me when i switch back to ret for those moments of Hand of Protection, or Hand of Freedoms. 

The itching doesn't stop

*This post was written a day ago**

Last night was pretty interesting. I queued up on my pala to dps at level 46. We went got Orange Mara. I found myself in a group with four friends from the same server, two in the same guild and two in different guilds. I was the fifth, their third dps. So we started off pulling this fighting plants one by one, which kept my dps at around 100. That was fine. Mara is a little more difficult and the beginning was mainly single target pulls. Some two-target pulls (the patrolling Satyr chicks), and packs of slimes and worms. The slimes needed to be kited, and the worms die really quick. The plant mobs have this knockdown attack that stops all attacks for a few seconds. its basically a stun. The pala tank was randomly using Judgement of Wisdom and Light, so I got a bit fed up and just used Justice. There, no overriding judgements. lol

In any case, the instance was super short with the water elemental boss and the big plant boss. I'm not sure if we can venture into the rest of the instance since after the plant boss, we requeued and got Zul Farrak. Now this one's fun, and I can actually justify using judgement of justice. Not only are there no knockdowns, knockbacks, silences, etc (ok well there's some silences and some hexing going on), it is, for the most part, a stress-free instance and I was able to get my dps up past 300 dps at times. overall it was roughly 250dps, which was ahead of the tank at 200 and the warlock at 170. I'm loving my top position as dps, even though its still AoE dps. but im not looking down on AoE. its still awesome to look at. im still killing things and contributing to the group. on boss fights, im second, sometimes third. I don’t mind. I actually have no problems being second, or third on the dps charts so long as we get our job done.

And getting the job done is what I like to do. So oftentimes, I sacrifice dps (lol really? its not bleeding edge progressing my a longshot) for some "fun" and utility. who has fun anymore in instances? but fun I have. and fun I'll continue to get. see the warlock pulling aggro from DoTs+Rain of Fire? I use my Righteous Defense on the lock. same with the healer. since everyone basically defaults to their AoE attacks, when a clothie pulls aggro, they're gonna pull more than one mob. so i wait about two seconds for the tank to react. then I taunt them off the poor dps/heals on to me. better they attack me than the clothie… always.

So there, that's my itch… my itch to bi… er… switch. to switch to prot. or tank. or something. I almost made it a song! it would have been featured on yo gaba gaba! but yea. the itching doesn’t stop, and I find that it makes dps way more fun than just, well, dps. im going to turn my vuhdo oh and add a rightclick to taunt, and a scrollwheel up to purify, and a scrollwheel down to cleanse, and maybe a leftclick to FoL should I get a AoW proc in which I don’t need to Exo or FoL on myself. Usually in groups, I never need to FoL myself and exo is almost always on cooldown.

So there I go again, always wanting to do more than just dps. but I find that fun. can you blame me? and what's more fun thank saving the day by tanking some mobs? im sure the healer didn’t mind that I pulled all the mobs off of him. maybe it wasn’t that necessary to pull the mobs off of the warlock, since death to warlock meant the mobs go back to the tank automatically. but we're not all here for by-the-book playing. we're here for for-the-fun playing. I enjoy all the times where I am able to use purify on someone. im glad for the comments address to the healer, "nice dispells" and I interrupt any question as to who that comment was directed to by saying, "thanks!" its gonna be even more fun once I get my vuhdo working. think of it as a healbot+decursive+clique all in one. in any case, im a tank at heart, and if a healer is getting hit by some mobs and the tank isnt taunting them off, then its up to me, the tank-in-disguise, to peel those mobs off the healer and save the day.