Style Enhancements

In my last post, I focused on the end of the year updates to the addon's main engine and classes modules.  In this post, I'll explore the addon's displays, how it shows you its recommendations, and some upcoming customization options that will be available for testing soon.

The Old and Familiar

Style: Standard, 4-Icon Display (with Primary and AOE displays shown)

As shown above, the addon's standard display style has been to present you with one or two queues of recommendations.  The Primary display (bottom) is shown by default, with the AOE display hidden unless you've toggled the addon into Single-Target Mode.  

Why does the AOE display show up in Single-Target mode?

When the Mode setting is set to Single-Target, the Primary display will be forced to pretend you're in a single-target fight and make its recommendations accordingly.  Since you are no longer getting multi-target recommendations there, the AOE display wakes up and provides you with those recommendations.  

Why would you want to see both sets of information?

Imagine that you are an Enhancement Shaman fighting the Coven in Antorus.  Occasionally, two of the abusive demonesses will be within your melee, and the addon's target detection might recommend casting Crash Lightning.  However, it turns out that while both are within range, based on their positioning, you're not able to actually hit both with Crash Lightning at the same time.  In that case, use the Mode Switch key that you set up in /hekili > Toggles and turn on Single-Target mode so you can see both sets of recommendations and see both of your best options at once.

Other Styles

Regardless, for some folks, four icons (or eight) is a lot of information to track in the heat of combat.  Some folks have explored the /hekili > Displays section and changed the Icons Shown to a number they're more comfortable with.  You may have tried some of the existing Quick Style templates to adjust the layout of their displays.

Quick Style: Extended, 5-Icon Display with Smaller Queued Icons

Quick Style: Short, 2-Icon Display with Smaller Queued Icon

Note that the queue for this 2-icon display goes upward rather than to the right.

Quick Style: Single Icon

Historically, you've been able to set the size of the square icons, specify the number of icons to show, and the direction of the queue.  Often times, people use the addon, dropping the Single Icon style into a head's up display they've designed or imported from WAGO.  This has been effective enough, but there could be more options for styling.

New Style Options

In order to allow some additional flexibility with display layouts, I've added some settings and Quick Styles to make use of the new settings.  I'll start with examples, and then explain the settings used.

Quick Style: Newspaper

I call this layout "Newspaper" because it has its primary icon as a big headline with columns underneath for the next priorities.

This display style has 3 icons shown.  The first icon is larger, and has its width set larger than its height.  To prevent the icon texture from being distorted, the new Keep Aspect Ratio setting is checked, effectively cropping the icon instead of stretching or squishing it.

Instead of only specifying a Queue Direction, you can now specify where the queue will anchor to the first icon.  In this case, the Queue Direction is set to Right and the Queue Anchor is set to Bottom Left.

Overall, the largest icon is first, then the second icon is below it on the left, and the queue continues to the right.  This may be an effective way to fit a queue of multiple icons fit into a square hole in your UI.  However, this doesn't have to be square.  I've just set the icon sizes to have that effect.  If you set Icons Shown to 4, another recommendation would appear to the right of Tiger's Fury.

Quick Style: Agenda

Similar to the Newspaper style, the Agenda style has a larger first icon, with the queued icons anchored to the Right Top.  It looks like a day planner, vaguely, sort of.  The queue direction is set to Down.  This means the first ability recommended here is Rake, followed by Tiger's Fury, Ashamane's Frenzy, and Shred.

Quick Style: Deck

I call this style "Deck" as it makes the first recommendation (Rockbiter) look like a card based on having its width narrower than its height.  The queued icons are slightly narrower, vaguely like a slight overlap between the cards.  (Look, naming is not at the forefront of my skillset.  I can't just call everything "Hekili.")

Quick Style: Square, Tapered Right

This style is very similar to the "Deck" layout, but has a square primary icon, like classic displays, but the queued icons are narrower.

Quick Style: Square, Tapered Down

Again, the primary icon is square, this time with the queue anchored below the icon and continuing downward.  The height of the queued icons is set such that recommendations 2 and 3 take up the same amount of space as the first recommendation -- putting 3 icons in the same space that 2 would've taken before.

It's worth noting that as you get more extreme with the ratio of width to height, it can become more challenging to recognize the ability's icon.  Use good judgment as you build off of any of these templates.

Other Addons

As noted, a lot of folks use WeakAuras along with my addon so that they have ability recommendations along with trackers for buffs and debuffs and cooldowns.  That's great, and I definitely recommend WeakAuras.  In fact, it was WeakAuras' recent inclusion of a "Keep Aspect Ratio" feature that led me to add support for the same feature to this addon.  (On that note, if you're looking for another addon developer to support, check out their Patreon.)

Another commonly used addon is the complete UI replacement, ElvUI.  ElvUI's clean, simple style and customization has led it to be pretty popular, and it's also efficiently coded to not slow down your game when raiding.  I use ElvUI, and you may notice in the screenshots above that each icon has a narrow, black border.  This is provided by AddOnSkins, an addon to ElvUI (yo dawg) that skins other moderately popular addons like mine.  If you do use ElvUI, I recommend AddOnSkins to go with it.  

(I also recently fixed an issue to help AddOnSkins recognize when you've added more icons to a display and skin those without reloading.)

Should I add the borders to my addon directly instead of relying on AddOnSkins?  What are your thoughts?

Available for Testing...When?

The new style features will be posted in a beta build later today, January 14.  This beta build will have some additional minor class fixes, and will also turn off the addon's enemy "time to death" calculator.  These new features will not be added to a release build until I fix the death predictor to use less CPU time.  It's a mostly-trivial issue, but I didn't want to keep these other features waiting in the meantime.

What's Next?

The next post, unless something else comes up, will be about upcoming changes to some SimulationCraft-related features that have only been marginally supported up to this point.  These features have to do with target swapping, a feature that some specializations (Windwalker, for instance) may rely on for optimal damage output.  I'll leave it at that for now, so I don't trick myself into a longer ramble.

Thank You!

Thanks again to my patrons, donors, contributors, and other supporters.  As I mentioned last week on Twitter, your support helped at a critical time when my motherboard shorted out on New Year's Eve.  I ultimately had to replace the power supply, motherboard, CPU, and RAM -- basically a whole new system -- and I was able to do this more quickly thanks to your support.  I would not have been able to do any development over the past two weeks otherwise.

Mahalo nui loa!